Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 24: Habit Tune-Up: Slaying the Productivity Hydra, Upgrading Careers, and Mastering a Difficult Job

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Coping with surprise shallow tasks (aka., "slaying the productivity hydra") [2:09]* Reading strategies for PhD students [12:37]* Switching to a more fulfilling career [16:33]* Improve or quit in response to a challenging new job [24:32]As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing or leaving a rating/review.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I came across the idea of reading within your field to reach the cutting edge in one of your earlier podcasts. However, my question is, how do you create a system whereby which you can organize your talks, summaries of those papers on what you've read? I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, habit tune-up mini-episode. The format, of course, is one in which I take voice questions from readers asking about how they can tune up their productivity habits in this moment where their professional lives are increasingly disrupted. Thank you everyone who has subscribed to the podcast.

That does help the rankings. And the rankings help other people discover the podcast. And thank you to everyone who has left a rating or a review that helps convince people who come across the podcast that it might be worth listening to. What I'm trying to do a little bit more of is actually read some of these reviews on air as a way of thinking. Reviewer. So here is a recent five-star review

from Colton. Colton says, I love Cal Newport. I've read his books, his blog, but deep questions may be my favorite yet. I dwell in a lot of the productivity hack optimization world, for better or for worse. And Cal is head and shoulders above anything else. His advice is practical, easy to

implement, and most important for me, effective. Colton goes on, but I do appreciate it. That type of review does make a big difference. So Colton, my hat is tip to you. Now remember, if you want to submit your own voice questions for the Habit Tuned Up mini episode, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. It's easy to do. You can record straight out of your browser and then I review those to decide what to put into the show. All right, so let's get rolling. Our first question is from Dean, who attempts to one up my frequent reference

the productivity dragon by introducing a new mythological creature, the productivity hydra. Hey Cal, I'm Dean. I run a couple of creative businesses and also work freelance. When I sit down to do deep work, I often instead encounter a hydra of surprise, shallow tasks that need to get completed first, but end up devouring all my time and morale. For example, today, I sat down to improve my website, but found a corrupt plugin had erased my work, and my entire time block was spent with tech support. Later, I received a letter from the bank and telling me that a time-saving automatic payment

would instead require a trip to the branch and my bi-clock broke. Maybe today was unlucky, but I found it's true that despite planning, as my deep work and life develops, this disrupted, shallow hydro grows more and more heads too. Please help if you can. Well, Dean, I appreciate the hydro reference.

I often think of my email inbox that way. We all know that experience of you're trying to slay the scary head of the hydrant, which is all of these unread messages in your email inbox, only to discover that as you were doing that, another head representing 20 new messages, has already arrived. It really does feel Sisyphian, if we're going to mix various Greek mythologies here, which I am always, as my listeners know, happy to do. So what can we do about your situation where surprise shallow work seems to be taking a toll?

Well, I'm going to give you three suggestions that you can mix and match. Number one, going a little bit easier on yourself. Now, if you're time block planning, and it sounds like from your question, you are, that is 90% of the battle. So it can be frustrating when you have a certain time block schedule set up and it changes because, let's say, something unexpected happens. You find a corrupted plug-in, there's an issue with your finances that you have to handle. time block planning says that's not a failure. If you have to handle something, you have to handle something, and then the next time you have a moment,

you create a new plan, a revised plan for the time that's left in the day, because the goal with time block planning is not perfection. It's not trying to hit the schedule you created in the morning. You don't get a gold star for hitting the schedule you made in the morning. No balloons fall from the ceiling, no confetti fires from the cannons. The key with time block planning is instead intentionality. If you're intentional about what's the best I can do, given my circumstances, given my time,

this is my productivity dragon reference here. You're facing the productivity dragon for better or for worse. You're not running from it. You're not hiding from it. You will end up better off. Even if for certain periods of time, the dragon you're confronting is one in which you're fixing corrupted plugins and having to go to the bank. But at least you're being intentional. And here's what I have found, Dean.

You stick with this discipline of being very intentional about how you spend your time given the current circumstances. you are going to aggregate a lot more of the needle-moving deep efforts than most people. Even if it feels like during moments it's not happening, even if it feels like you're going on a streak this week where your deep blocks are interrupted at a really high rate, you are still going to aggregate way more hours doing these type of deep needle-moving efforts if you are continuing the discipline of being intentional, facing a productivity dragon, always saying what's the best I can do with what remains.

So that's why me might give yourself a break. You're probably doing a lot better in your project management. You said you ran creative companies, right? So in running creative companies in your freelance work, you're probably doing a lot better than you think, at least as compared to your peers, because you're trying to be intentional, even if what actually unfolds in some given days

is not what you would think is ideal. All right, my second piece of advice that might help you here. separate setup from execution when it comes to deep work blocks. So part of what's happening here is that it seems like you're doing a bit of deep work, but there's a setup phase involved with that that forces you to be, in essence, interacting with the outside world. And it's in that interactions with the outside world that the surprise shallow tasks fall onto your plate.

So one piece of advice that helps that is, okay, I see the setup for, doing a deep work block as just a shallow task I do among other shallow tasks. And then later I schedule actually working on the material I gathered in the setup. But that block is disconnected. That block is in a location where the productivity hydra can't find me. So for example, you said you wanted to work on your website. Well, to separate those two, you might have as a shallow task you do at some point as you actually go through and look at your website and here's the new content I need to figure out and here's the copy I need to write and you put that in a word document somewhere. This is what I need.

Then you later schedule a deep work block for the website. Well, you're not looking at your website. You're not logging in the WordPress. You're not looking at your email during that deep work block. You're at the coffee shop at a table outside just writing. So the extent to which you can set up deep work blocks so that there is no actual interaction with the world. There is no actual incoming channel in which you can be confronted with a disruptive shallow task. I think that's good.

Now you might want to do these blocks early in the day or towards the end of the day where it's not going to cause too much trouble for you to be disconnected, but separating connectivity-related setup tasks from the execution, I think you'll find that not only will you get deeper, but you'll have less interruption. The third thing I'm going to suggest, and I think this is particularly irrelevant for someone like you, Dean, who has a lot of balls in the air. You mentioned that you essentially manage or run several organizations and freelance. In that situation, just the complexity, the administrative complexity of your professional life might be amplifying the number of unavoidable, shallow work, interruptions, and urgent distractions. So what you can do is say, I want to prioritize systems and simplicity. Systems and simplicity, right? Like, do I have, where can I have systems for handling certain things, automate,

certain things, make things no-brainers, outsource certain things so that it requires a lot less of my input. Where can I get rid of things? You know, these type of freelancing contracts are causing more headache than they are providing benefits. So maybe I'll stop doing these type of freelancer contracts. I'll focus on just these two businesses and this one in particular is going to get a lot of my attention. And then I'm going to simplify as many of the back-in systems as possible. So there's less surprises, less back and forth, less me emailing vendors, less me having to go to the the bank to figure out what's going on. Investing energy up front for systematic approaches to your work and simplicity in your work so that unavoidable interruptions become more scarce.

A couple of books I can recommend here. There's an underground classic when it comes to building systems for your business, to make things in your business just run without all these interruptive interventions from you as the business owner. Look at this underground book called work the system. It's really interesting. It's about a guy who was being overwhelmed by his call center business and how he discovered how to essentially automate everything in the business. And not just automate in the sense of like a computer system did it.

He has employees and a lot of this was actually just working with them to get processes that they all agreed on, that they followed step by step. But he went from basically being buried in work from his business to I think he spends two hours a week or something. Anyways, a lot of great mindset in there and specific tactics for what it looks like to really systematize everything you can in a business. Now, as for simplicity, a book recommendation I would give is Paul Jarvis' book, Company of One. It's a book that's actually blurbed by yours truly, so you know you can trust it to be a good read. But Paul Jarvis's book is about simplicity in business growth.

And what he argues for is that you don't necessarily want to just keep growing your business as much as possible or following every opportunity that could create money, that you actually want to work backwards from what's the lifestyle I want and then work backwards to shape your business. Like one of his big points, for example, is that as you get better at something, you have two options, especially if you have a freelancer-style solo entrepreneur-style business. you have two options. You can grow that business because you're good at it and there's demand.

Or you can increase your rate. I can do the same amount of work, but as I get better and better, more in demand, I'm going to charge more for it. And, you know, he makes the argument that that latter option is actually for a lot of people, the better one. Because it means you retain a lot more autonomy over your time. The workload remains constrained even while the money you make goes up. It does take off the table, sort of giant growth towards making a $20 million company,

but it does leave on the table potentially a very great lifestyle. And I say, it's a great book. It gives you a great meditation on simplicity and businesses. Maybe I want to cut back this, focus on this, become more elite in this. And that may actually be the better path. Now, again, I don't know your circumstances are what you're trying to do. And maybe you're trying to build a giant agency. Maybe you're trying to have a really large exit.

But I think both these ideas might be useful to you. And I'm glad I have an opportunity to talk about them more generally. If you're completely overwhelmed by hard-to-avoid distractions, instead of just trying to manage or curse those distractions, you can go to the underlying source. Instead of swinging your sword at the heads of the Hydra, you might realize that you could just block off the Hydra's cave in the first place and not have to deal with her.

This is why, when I talk about systems and simplicity, what I have in mind. So keep those two books in mind. They're high level. They don't exactly apply to your situation, but I think for everyone listening, that's something good to keep in the back of your mind. addition to actually attacking these mythological productivity beasts, you need to make sure

you're spending some time thinking about why are we facing these beasts so frequently in the first place. So thanks for that question, Dean. Okay, as is our habit here on the Habit Tunup podcast. Why don't we take a question now from the world of academia? Hi, Cal. My name is Bakiza, and I am a PhD student doing clinical research in Canada. I came across the idea of reading within your field to reach the cutting edge in one of your earlier podcasts. However, my question is, how do you create a system whereby which you can organize your talks, the summaries of those papers, on what you've read, and actively incorporated in your work? This is a scenario where you read around three to five papers per week perhaps.

Thank you. So, Paquiza, I think the thing you want to try to avoid here, is having an abstract system for organizing your reading. And by abstract, I mean just having some general thought of I should read five papers a week and they should be in my field and I'm going to take notes and I'm going to put the notes into this type of system. Academics and PhD students in particular have a hard time sticking with that type of plan because it's very time consuming.

And it does seem very abstract. Like you're just reading these papers. Like you've given yourself a class that's not being graded, that you get, that you get no credit for that no one knows you're taking. And so that discipline seems or often tends to slip. So I think what works better instead for a PhD student is to let your current research drive your reading that's trying to push you to the cutting edge. So have a particular, whatever particular project you're working on, you should be reading in that that particular area. You want to understand, well, who else has worked on this? How well, if they worked on it?

I want to be a real expert on the literature of exactly what I'm working on here, because it's going to push your experimental design. It's going to push how you put your work into the context of the existing field. It's going to open up new methodologies, new frameworks, new theories to actually apply to help qualify, to help extrapolate, to help explain the data that you're getting. And because it's tied to like, this is directly helping my work and it's going to directly help the quality of the finished product and the quality of the journal in which it's published, your motivation is much stronger than if you are instead just sort of abstractly trying to hit a mark of this many papers read per week. I mean, this is something I think I discover time and

again during my time as a PhD student is that abstract self-discipline systems, you know, the academic equivalent of I want to do this many pull-ups a day, I want to run this many miles, these abstract systems are like, I just want to read, I just want to, you know, spend this many hours in deep work were not nearly as successful as more concrete productivity initiatives that were tied to the work I was doing. I want to get this proof done, you know, in a week. All right, how do I work backwards from that and get enough deep work for it? That's more successful than my goal is five hours a day of deep work. I want to really get this paper in. And get this paper in, I really have to understand. It needs to build on existing work.

I have to cite the existing work in a smart way. I got to make sure there's no, there might be some tool that already exists in the field that's going to help me push this result forward. So that's why I'm reading papers. That was a much more motivating force for reading academic papers than just, here's my plan, four papers a week will eventually add up to something good. So harness that competitive drive, that competitive drive that all PhD students should have, publish, publish, the best possible papers in the best possible places, stuff that's going to get cited.

Harness that drive to actually drive these behaviors like paper reading. or deep work that is going to be successful. All right, so that would be my recommendation. Read to get a direct result that will put you in the habit of reading. If you keep doing that again and again, you're going to notice the quality of your work is going to increase at a quite accelerated rate. All right, so thanks for that question. I thought it might be useful to do some questions now about career satisfaction.

Hi, Cal. My name is Jonathan and I live in Northern Ireland in the UK. I just want to say, first of all, thank you very much for the great work you're doing on your new podcast. I've been really enjoying it, as well as the books that you've previously published. I'm a project manager and manufacturing engineer, and in graduating in 2000, I've spent around the last 20 years of my life working across three different industry sectors in a variety of roles. So I've taken quite a generalistic approach to my career so far. however now entering into the second half of my career, I want to try and focus and specialize in some of the areas which I'm currently working within the pharmaceutical industry. And I would be interested in hearing your advice about making that switch from a more general approach to a career to focusing more in-depthly and becoming more specialized. Thank you again for all your great work.

So Jonathan has figured out one of the two secrets for increasing. the probability that your question makes it into the episode saying nice things about me. I am a sucker for flattery. Of course, the other secret way to increase your probability of getting your question read on the show is to make superfluous references to Greek mythological figures or monsters. So, well done, Jonathan. I do like this question, though. This is a classic sort of career capital type question inspired by the type of things I wrote in my book, So Good, They Can't Ignore You. Here's what I would say.

If you are already halfway through your career, you want to shift towards specialization. You want to make a bit of a change. There's something that you feel like you're lacking in your generalist approach. You're hoping to solve this with some more specialization. The key here is going to be concreteness. You need to find a specific example. specific example, I mean like a specific person who is in your general area, who is doing something

in their career right now that resonates with you. A concrete encapsulation of what you have in mind when you say a little bit more amorphously that you just have the sense you want to move towards more specialization that you want to train what you're doing. Make it concrete. You know, Sally, who works in this pharmaceutical company that I've done some project managing for, there's something about her setup that resonates with me. Something about her more specialized setup. That's what I want. So work backwards from specific individuals that resonate with you. Understand what is it about them or their position or their lifestyle that resonates with you. You might want to extract that because it might be something actually unrelated to the specifics of their job.

You know, if what resonates with you is like, well, actually really it's sort of where she lives or something, that's going to lead you down a very different path. And if what resonates is the particular workflows or types of obligations or types of projects she works on, which would be much more professional-specific. Now, once you have this specific example of someone whose career resonates with you, then you need to figure out, like a business journalist, how did they get there? And what would I have to do to replicate that? Now, I've talked about this before. You don't want to ask someone like this, hey, what's your advice? Because, as I say often, people are very bad when you put

them on the spot and say, give me advice from your life. That's a very hard question. There's a social pressure to give an answer. You get a bit of desperation of I have to have something to say. And what people tend to do is quickly and frantically, rifle through their mental rollad decks of stuff they do, grab the first thing that seems internally consistent and then just say it. This is what, you know, and Scott Young and I had this top performer course. We used to have this ID in there called the colored folder effect. And that was the idea that if you ask a straight-A student, okay, how do you get straight A's? They'll panic when you put them on the spot and they'll try to come up with the first thing they do that seems coherent or clear and they might

say, well, I use colored folders to keep my notes. It's true, but probably has nothing to do with why they are successful as a student. So you never want to try to ask someone just what's your advice. You want to ask them or study from afar, what's your story? How did you get from here to here, from here to here? What were the particular skills that unlocked this position and have allowed you to thrive. Now, if this is someone in your own organization or someone you know, you can actually just talk to them. Deconstruct their story, what mattered, how did they make that shift, what skills were most important. If there's someone who is not accessible to you, like a public figure, then you can look at their CV, you can look at their resume. If they're famous enough,

you can look at articles written about them to try to do this same detective work. While you're trying to identify, great, here's what I would have to do to get to a position like that. I would have to get my sales numbers to this, I would have to master this type of IT system, I would have to have experience over in this subsector, whatever it is. But now you have your attack plan. Okay, this is what resonates. This is exactly what matters. How am I going to get those things that matter? And that's when you lay out your attack plan. Look, you're a time block planner, I assume. You do weekly and quarterly plans. So you can start to put some of these objectives into your quarterly plans. That tells you what weeks you should be working on them and what

steps you should be working on. And then when you're doing your daily time block plans, you're finding specific time to make that progress. When you're making that progress, where necessary, you'll try to be as deep as possible. You're willing to do the deliberate practice when needed. When you're learning something hard, you're willing to concentrate without distraction and stress yourself pass where you're comfortable. Suppressing the unrelated neural circuits, amplifying the relevant neural circuits, inducing myelination, inducing permanent growth in your facility with that particular concept or skill, etc.

Right? So now you know applying the type of things I write about, how to go after the concrete things that matter. And then that'll get you there. Now, I think this is a lot different than what a lot of people do in this circumstance, which is why I am glad that you ask this question, Jonathan. I think what a lot of people do

is they have a vague sense they want something better. they vaguely know what it means they transform that vague urge into a set of things that they want to matter because they seem kind of fun they seem kind of hard but not too hard they convince themselves that like well what they really need to do is like national novel writing month or something

and become a thriller writer or whatever right they're not working from specifics they're not working from concrete examples they're not identifying what really matters which often is not what you want to matter they're just saying this is what you know I'm going to start doing this. Every morning I can spend an hour doing X because that seems like a fun challenge I can handle. I'm going to quit my job and start my own business because at least it seems like the

change itself is going to be motivating. Just thinking about making the change makes me excited. That's dangerous. This type of ungrounded, emotion-driven, wistful thinking style career manipulations often leads to bad places. I mean, my book's so good they can't ignore you is riddled with these types of case studies. When you just make a swing off of, I want to have a change, it feels good, I hope this matters, you often end up one or two years later, highly regretful. So that's what I want to recommend, Jonathan, especially someone who is established as you are, get specific, here's the concrete person, they resonate, here's why they resonate, here's how they got there. Now I have a concrete plan to follow to get there myself. You'll be surprised by how

quick you can actually make progress in career transformations when you actually know the exact path you want to go down and you're marching with purpose. Okay, so I'm liking these career capital, career strategy, career satisfaction style questions. So let's keep this momentum going and do one more. This one is from Colin. Hi, Cal, thank you so much for all the wisdom you passed on over the years. I've been a reader and now a listener for about a year now and I've gained more than you'll ever know from your writing. I know you've talked a great deal about needing to build up career capital as a method of exchanging for mastery, autonomy, and mission. Two years ago, I was hired as a director of admissions at a private Catholic high school, which my secondary language arts degree

didn't really prepare me for. I had no background experience in school recruitment, was provided very little training, and as you can imagine, the job comes with a great deal of pressure to perform well. I don't feel good in my job, and as a result have not enjoyed it for the past two years. At risk of sounding despairing, I do believe in the mission of my school and want to perform well and be a better worker. I can see all the ways this job to prop me up for a terrific future career journey. But it seems like I don't have many of the talent,

skills, or background knowledge to work well in this job, and I often wonder if I should quit for the good of my school. What are some ways you would suggest to build up career capital in a field in which one feels similarly lost? Thanks. I look forward to your response. So see, Colin learned a same lesson as Jonathan.

Nice things get you on the air. So good work, Colin. So here's what I would say. First of all, yes, your secondary liberal arts degree did not prepare you to be a director of admissions, but guess what? There is no liberal arts degree that's going to directly prepare you to be a director of admissions. That's a highly specific job that has demands that are highly specific to exactly that position. So this notion of are you qualified or not qualified might not be that relevant here.

The question is, are you willing to get after it in terms of what? it's necessary to get good at that job. And I think you can. You know, and I'm not going to tell you what to do. And as Dave Ramsey says, I'll still be your friend if you decide this seems hard and I want to do something that's maybe less hard. But I do think there's something to be said for a challenge that this is a job that I don't know how to do. No one knows how to do it until they've done it. And I'm going to become good at it.

Because becoming good at something valuable is the foundational. That's the foundational activity in building up impactful, meaningful, and satisfying career, so I think you can do it. Again, I'm not going to be, stop being your friend if you don't, but I think you can. So how would you actually pull this off? Well, you got two steps here. First, it's going to be foundational. You got to make sure you have your house in order. You've got to be organized. You have to be someone in this position where two things are true. And again, I emphasize this all the time on this podcast. You have to be someone where nothing falls through the cracks, right? If something comes on your plate, it is not going to get lost.

It's not going to get lost in the frenzy of all the other demands. It's not going to get lost because, hey, your inbox is so full and what could you do? It's not going to get lost because it got buried under other messages. Things get handled, things get tracked, things get in the systems. You know it. And if you're not able to get to it, you know you're not able to get to it. You know what you're not getting to. But nothing gets dropped.

People trust that if they mention something to Colin, they drop something on Colin's plate. Something comes up in a meeting. he's not just going to forget about it because he's busy. Two, you've got to be someone who gets the things done. They say they're going to get done. And if you say you're going to get it done at this time, you get it done at that time. And if you're unable to do it,

then people are given that notification with plenty of advance warning. I know I said we would have this done by the beginning of Q1. We're going to need two more weeks. So just having your house in order. This is not going to make you good at the job yet, but you're not going to be able to do this job well. You're not going to be able to improve if you don't have your handle, your hands around,

the chaotic mess. So you have to go back and all the type of advice I talk about, it's relevant right here. My productivity philosophy, the capture, configure, control, you've got to be doing that. You probably are going to need lots of task boards, virtual taskboards, be it Trello, be it flow, be it Asana. Things need to be on virtual cards. They need to be in columns that capture their status. All the relevant information needs to be on the back of these cards. You need to spend a lot of time, not just capturing stuff, but configuring it. Where is it? what's the status, what's over here, what are we working on this week? What's the whole visual gestalt of everything on the plate of this department of admissions?

If all of this just exists in your inbox, if you're spending each day just trying to keep up with emails, letting emails drive what's urgent, what needs to get done, if you're doing emails and calendar meetings and occasionally looking at a to-do list, that is not nearly a sophisticated enough productivity system for the level of management you're in. So you want to have organization, you want to have capture control, figure control. Now you're going to have to generalize this to work for teams. I'm sure you have people under you. I would recommend shared task boards. I would recommend probably the use of a ticketing system. If you have a lot of issues coming in, a lot of questions coming in,

I would use a ticketing system even just internally so that everyone in your team can see, here's all the issues that people have asked about that demand responses. Here's their status. Here's who's currently working on it. Here's a thread of notes below about everything we know about it. You probably need synchronous meetings with your team on a regular schedule. Okay, what's going on today? Let's look at the board in which we share all of our tasks. Who's working on what? What's the priority? What do you need? All of this type of organizational know-how that I've been talking about, you know, you got to do this. So you got to have your act together. You know everything that's on your plate. You know everything that's on your team's plate. Things aren't

being driven by inboxes. Things aren't being dropped. Things get done when you say they're going to get done. Once you've set this foundation, now you can actually get better. Now you can do the reflection slash improvement necessary to become good at your job. Because once you have your arms around everything on your plate, this is where you can see the areas where there's too much. We're spending way too much time doing X. It's taking up way too much of my time. I now know this because I'm so organized. So we need a better process there. We need something else. Someone else needs to handle that. We need support staff. We need a process that cuts down the time required to handle that by a lot.

You look over here and say, look, we're really having a hard time in this area over here. We're not getting enough of these recruitment visits. Maybe we didn't pivot temporarily to virtual. You know, effectively, because of the pandemic, maybe we can't travel. And we just have been so busy. Look, we're not doing that. But look, that's really important. Now we know it because we can control everything.

It's not just chaos. It's not just I'm buried in my inbox. All right, we need to make a plan to attack this. We need to make a plan to get after it. Who's going to do it? How are we going to do it? What are we going to put on podcast? that can get done, right? Once you're organized, once you know what's going on and its status,

once you're making intentional decisions synchronized with your team, you can see where the problems are. Where you're overwhelmed, where you're not doing things, where you need to be better, where maybe you don't understand something. Like I just don't even know what our strategy, this aspect of a recruiting strategy, I don't even know what to do here. It allows you to see that. It allows you to reflect and see where the shortcomings are. Now you can start putting it together processes just like like I talked about with Jonathan, you can start putting together processes for improving. You know, I need to set up weekly coffees with this director over here, and I need to learn about how to do X. That's how I'm going to do it. I need to read these books. I need to bring in a

specialist. We're going to hire someone part-time. It's going to get this CMS system up and running because that's a shortcoming. Now I can see it's a shortcoming. That's my general philosophy. This is how you get better in a hard position. First of all, you get your arms around the position, and nothing gets dropped. You know what's going on. It's organized. You're making intentional, consistent decisions. Then it becomes crystal clear.

Here's where I don't know what I'm doing. Here's where we're falling short. Here's where we need improvement. And you can begin systematically addressing those one by one. You can't do it all at once. Systematically address those things one by one. That is the actual granular experience of getting really good at a hard job. You reflect and you improve.

You reflect and you improve. Then five years from now, the new director of admission at the nearby school who comes to meet you is very impressed. Oh yeah, Colin really has their act together. Colin really knows what he's doing. Man, Colin seems qualified. Maybe I shouldn't have this job, right? They'll be in the same place where you are now. So that's what I recommend.

I mean, this is the challenge. Again, I'm still going to be your friend if you move on to something else. But I think if you're a deep questions podcast list there, you have the tools. Lay the foundation, face the productivity dragon, slay the productivity. activity, Hydra, whatever mythology we're going to use here, see where you're falling short, see where you don't have a good system, see where you don't understand, and then go on the attack. Piece by piece, ground by ground, hill by hill, you make progress. It's hard work, but it's, you know, it's interesting.

I think any time you're systematically improving, that matters. Anytime you can see the direct results of that improvement, actually improve an organization you care about, that matters. this is the fundamental activity, as I said before, building a meaningful and satisfying career. Now, the only other word of, I would say, pushback I would give you, Colin, is that you have this notion of like, look, if I just left this position, someone who's much better than me would come in

and the school would be better off. Don't be so sure. Don't be so sure. Here's one of the big realities of hiring, especially for non-trivial management-style positions that require strategy. It is really, really hard to hire good people. Really, really hard. I mean, hiring good people is the obsession of every sort of famous major company.

They're really large consulting firms like McKinsey, for example. Their entire business model is built on years and years of effort of figuring out how do we get the very smartest people out of the best schools to come work for us. Finding people is everything. So I want to be so sure that there's all these really well-trained director of admission types that are going to come in and do a really good job. I mean, here's the reality of the market. Like most people are not good.

And even that person you think is going to be really good. Oh, they have experience doing this before at a much larger school and they're willing to relocate. You know, you hire them and it turns out that they're burnt out. Or there's a reason they left the old school. Maybe they're lazy. Don't really get things done. And they're just going to coast and bluster and things, aren't great, you know? I mean, the grass is always greener, but I think what your organization

has now, which is a driven and smart young man who is equipped with the type of tools I talk about here for how do you understand your professional landscape and terraform it into what you're looking for. That may actually be a best case scenario for the organization. Someone who can come into there is driven, is motivated, is disciplined, is deep, and is going to systematically and aggressively become very good at that job and become a director of admissions that can actually shape that school going forward, someone who cares about the school and who is able to and willing to actually act on that concern, you may actually be calling the best case scenario for that school. There may not be a magic other option that can come in and just do it much better.

So that's the only other pushback I would give there. It's not necessarily saving this organization that you care about for you to step down if you think what I'm talking about is it all possible, okay? Anyway, so that's my advice. I like their question because obviously this is in a general sense, an important topic to talk about. How do you improve at a job that's really hard? And that's my advice. You got to get your arms around everything.

You've got to get your troops under control before you can figure out how to deploy them into an effective attack. So what have I used here? I've used Greek mythology metaphor. I've used terraforming metaphor. I've used the military strategy metaphor. I'm sort of running out of, I'm kind of running out of metaphors here. So what else do I have here? Let your productivity be the green chute of life emerging from the soil of professional complexity.

Okay, I'm running out of metaphors here, Colin, which is a good sign that I should probably wrap up this question. But thank you for that. And everyone, keep those ideas in mind. Organize. Once you organize, then improve. That works in almost any position from the entry level to the big director. type position, so keep that in mind.

And with that, let's call this episode to a close. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to submit your own question, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. Remember, superfluous compliments and superfluous references to Greek mythology always helps your chances of getting selected. I'll be back on Monday with the whole length, next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast, and until next time, as always, stay deep.