Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 240: Disciplined Laziness

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

You can’t just turn a “work harder” or “relax” knob. Once you realize that productivity ideas can offer you great autonomy in shaping your life - however you decide to do that - your relationship with it becomes more nuanced and fruitful. Productivity can be understood as applying organization tools and deliberate processes to take back control of your obligations.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: Is productivity about optimization or autonomy? [6:06] - Should I start a blog to prepare to write a book? [23:18]- How do I recover from burn out? [30:11]- How do I prioritize when I have too many interests? [35:15]- Should I ditch my side hustle? [39:25]- How do I convince my self-focused colleagues to participate in more efficient group systems? [43:24]Something Interesting: - The five books I read in February 2023 [53:24]Links:vice.com/en/article/akdyje/the-relentless-rise-of-the-productivity-influenceyoutube.com/watch?v=YctcDlPixb8Thanks to our Sponsors:This episode is sponsored by Better Help: betterhelp.com/deepquestionsblinkist.com/deepexpressvpn.com/deepladderlife.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in the Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. You know, Jesse, last week we talked about Ginny O'Dell and her new book that was taking a nuanced look at time and the treatment of time in our lives. And one of the things that we brought up during that episode, one of the things that caught my attention was there's typically this, I don't want to say bad guy, but antagonist, I would say, in these sort of new treatments of time, these antagonists that are often go by the names of productivity bros. Now, I feel out of touch because I don't use the internet that much. I'm not on social media. I don't browse on YouTube. So I didn't really know.

I mean, I remember the old school productivity bros from, you know, when I was coming up, when Tim Ferriss was very focused, when there's 43 folders, was very focused on optimizing time. But I didn't really know what has productivity bro culture evolved into. So I did a little searching to try to understand what was going on. And I found an article that I think was useful in enlightening us. I'm going to put it on the screen here for people who are watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. This is episode 240. You can also find it at the deeplife.com.

So I found this article from Vice titled The Relentless Rewport. rise of the quote, productivity influencer in quote. This is an article from Claire Hubble from last year,

last winter. So I was looking through here. There's our friend Ali Abdul. I did a show. I did his podcast. I like him a lot. All right.

So here's some quote. I just want to read a couple quotes from this because it helped bring me up to speed with the way people are thinking about this online culture. So here's one quote. I have it on the screen right now.

In recent years, the popularity of heavily staged, managed self-optimization has diversified beyond the tech bros of Silicon Valley, spotting the rise of a new influencer niche, the productivity guru. These content creators have gained thousands of followers by posting time-saving tips, life hacks, and productivity advice online. Here's another quote. This comes from a critic of these. of this new culture, I suppose. This is someone named, what is her name here?

I don't know who, this, but she's on the screen right now. Anyways, this was her critique. I have no desire to grind 24-7 and exhaust myself. I've suffered from burnout many times before, so I've really tried to actively remove those toxic hustle culture ideas from my mind. My focus was just to get through each day, sometimes at a bare minimum. All right, so here's what I'm concluding from this piece. the new world of online influencer, which is more based on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok,

this new visual social media world, has bred a new generation of what seems to be relatively young, productivity influencers. You know, kids these days, I like the idea that this reporter for Vice thinks that's new. I'm old enough to remember when Stephen Covey sold 14 million copies of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Hint, there had been people talking about productivity for a while now. Though I see this a lot often where something is rediscovered by TikTok culture and then is thought by that generation to be brand new. It's like when time blocking took off on TikTok. And I went on the Today Show to talk about it.

I was like, well, we've been talking about this for a while, but TikTok is its own world. They sort of rediscovered time blocking. I was like the old man on that Today Show clip. I'm like, well, let's have the old man come on and talk about. TikTok because our viewership is older and we need someone that our old audience relates to who doesn't understand the TikToks. So this seems to be happening is that productivity obviously as a topic has been a popular topic for a long time, but it's now being picked up in this online world. And as based off this quote here, it seems like this online productivity culture seems to be focused on grinding, hustling, producing more. or some of the other videos I watched stimming off of this article here seemed to focus on making

money on the side. How do you make $500,000 extra dollars a year? Here's how I'm going to make a million extra dollars a year. Here's how I'm going to fit that all in. So I wanted today to dive a little bit deeper into this because I think if we blinker our understanding of productivity to be what we see in these online videos of here's how to hustle. to make an extra $500,000, extra $500,000 a year by being very careful with your time management and low friction systems, we lose a lot. We push people to take more of the philosophical route towards, I want to wash my hands of all of this.

Productivity is this weird hustle culture stuff. I am with weary resignation going to just say that's not for me. And I don't know that walking away from any sort of systematic intent to control and organize the obligations of your life is really actually a good solution. So what we need is a more nuanced understanding of technology. That's what I want to, or not technology, productivity. That's what I want to tackle today. I have a take on nuanced productivity that I think will be useful. And I'm capturing that take in today's deep question, which is, is productivity about optimization,

or autonomy. And in answering that question, I think we're going to get a more nuanced take of how to think about productivity and its potential roles in our lives. So I want to do a deep dive on that. I've then pulled five questions that all loosely orbit around this topic.

So it's five questions from you, my listeners, that I'm going to come at each of these from the perspective of a productivity perspective based on what we're just about to talk about. And then for the third segment of the show, we'll shift to something different Today, what I want to talk about later in the show is the books I read in February. So every month I like to talk about the books I read.

So we'll shift gears later in the show. All right. So let's start with this question. It's productivity about optimization or autonomy. Well, what do I mean about that? Well, what I mean by this is there's two frames through which you can think about and engage with productivity. The first frame is optimization. Now, optimization is on my mind.

I'm actually reading a pretty interesting book right now about optimization and its influence on our culture. I'm not going to talk too much about the details of that book yet because I want to wait until I finish it and it's closer to it actually coming out. But I will say it has been giving me some interesting food for thought. So one of the things that's clear is optimization, if we're going to be technical about it, focuses on maximizing an objective function all subject to constraints. So you have some thing you're trying to maximize, the amount of money you make per year from your side hustle, for example, the number of pages you write in your book, you have some constraints about what's available to you, what time, etc. And given those constraints, you want to come up with models or approaches that's going to maximize that output, maximize the benefit that is captured by that objective function. So it's about getting the most of something that is valuable to you. Now, I think the YouTube types that are being referenced in that Vice article,

the YouTube types that maybe Ginny O'Dell is thinking about in her critiques, look at productivity through this optimization frame. Here, let me pull one up. I've been watching a lot of productivity YouTube recently, which has been interesting. So here's an example of one of the videos I've been watching recently. this is from a productivity YouTuber named Amy Landino. This video is called

Secrets of a Super Productive Boss Lady. If you're watching along online, you'll see this up on the screen. It's very meta. On the YouTube video of this podcast, we're showing someone else's YouTube video, so there you go.

I watch this video. And it's, you know, it's a bunch of advice about how to fit more into your day. Amy has a clear definition of high achiever that means juggling lots of things. So her whole goal with this video is,

how can you be a high achiever without completely burning out? So it's about juggling lots of different obligations. I think this is probably a pretty common theme among these types of productivity YouTubers. So this is all about optimization. You have some thing that's valuable, like the number of things you get done. You're trying to optimize it.

How do I get the highest value of this function? So how do I get in this case the most things done? And you say, well, let me use color-coded planners and I can use my Google Calendar. She talks about this in that video. She lives by her Google calendar. Even her sleep is on there. Let me use very careful systems that can low friction,

capture notes and keep things at bay. Often there's a lot of work in these about hiring, lots of different virtual assistants to help manage things. So it's all about maximizing an optimization function. There is, however, another frame through which to think about productivity, and that is autonomy. Now, to understand the connection between productivity and autonomy, it's important to think first about what the antonym of productivity is. So instead of trying to define productivity, let's define what it is to not have any organized thinking about productivity in your professional life.

And what you're going to end up with is what I call haphazard busyness. So if your life subcomes to haphazard busyness, which is where you will almost certainly end up if you, you know, like Ginny O'Dell, you say I just want. want to enjoy the birds, right? Like if you're saying I'm rejecting this idea that I want to think in an organized fashion about how I manage my obligations in time, you will probably end up with haphazer busyness where you have a uncontrolled influx of various obligations, of various urgency that you have a hard timekeeping track of and tend to pull out your attention suddenly in an emergency-type situations.

Hap hazard busyness reduces your options. It makes you feel stressed. it's almost certainly going to lead to overload too much to do. And it tends to push people towards extreme solutions, such as this is what work is. So I need to find a way to leave the workforce, for example. Productivity can be understood as applying organizational tool and deliberate processes that take back control of your obligations in such a way that you avoid haphazard busyness.

This is where, for example, you might deploy the types of approaches I talk about often on this show. One of the big productivity frameworks I've often preached is capture, configure, control. I have my video, my deep ideas video, what do we call them? Core ideas, Jesse? Core ideas. My core ideas video and time management goes deep into this. Actually, that video was also, Tim Ferriss played that whole video on his podcast feed, not that long ago. So I don't want to go in too much detail now.

You can dive into it there. but at a high level, capture, configure control is about capture things, obligations that enter your life, potential obligations to enter your life get captured. They move out of your mind and in the trusted systems where they can later be dealt with. You're not keeping track of what's on your plate just in your mind. You have well-tinted task lists and calendars so that your mind is not responsible on its own to remember everything that's going on. That alone is a huge stress reliever. Then comes configure. Configure is the glue of the caption configure control framework.

It's where you make sense of all these obligations. You figure out what they mean. Critically, it's where you implement your specific intentional workload management systems. How much of this different type of work can I reasonably do? What are my quotas here? What, once it's captured, do I keep going on with? What do I push out? If something has to happen later, when am I going to do it?

It's where you actually make sense of all of your obligations in an intentional way. Not doing configure is what creates haphazard busyness. You're just in this world of there's more than I can do and I'm just running around like a chicken with my head cut off. And then control. You control how you actually use your time. Weekly planning, daily planning, strategic planning. What am I doing today? When am I working?

When am I not working? When is this project going to unfold? Maybe I'm going to put this one here, start this project here. It's where you actually assess the time resources available and come on. with a plan for it. So when you have something like a capture, configure control framework in action, you move away from haphazard busyness. Now here's where the autonomy frame takes its critical turn. I think it is too often assumed that the only destination of taking control of your obligations with something like capture configure control, that the only destination you can

then go to is optimization. I control everything. I configure everything. I've captured everything. Great. Now I can get more done. I can be like the boss lady video. What I want to argue today is that is selling short the potential of productivity.

Productivity gives you autonomy over what you want your work life to be like. And this autonomy does not just mean optimization. So let me give you four different options for what you can do, how you can aim your work life once you have your arms around it with some sort of reasonable productivity framework. Number one, you could say my goal is a state in which, like the boss lady video, I'm juggling lots of hard but important things successfully. And I think this is, again, this is reasonable. Let's say you've just started a new business.

This is going to be the reality, right? You're going to have a lot of different things that have to happen. Productivity framework is going to help you do that in a way that doesn't overwhelm you. So that optimization mindset, what I'm trying to say here, is not. in itself malformed, but it's also not totalizing. It's not going to be the only option we have here. A second place you could aim your professional life once you have a productivity system is perhaps a state in which you're able to focus on a single thing

that is hard but really important to you. So it's another, this is John Grisham, for example, controlling his obligation so he can just work on writing one book a year. Without a productivity system, it is very very. very difficult to focus on a single hard thing that's important. Another writer example here, of course, is Neil Stevenson with his famous essay, Why I'm a bad correspondent. He had to go through a lot of trouble to make sure that he could just focus on writing

and not ending up in a more Brandon Sanderson-esque situation in which it's just constant work and projects and busyness. The third place, by the way, speaking to Brandon Sanderson. Not to go on a tangent here, Jesse, but one of our esteemed listeners sent me a photo of a bookstore. They had a whole table of name of the wind that was labeled as Patrick Rufius. And he was like, the gaslighting continues. They keep trying to trick us into thinking Patrick Rufus wrote the name of the wind. Again, if you're not a longtime listener, you don't know what we're talking about.

And to which I say congratulations, it's all nonsense. A third goal you might aim for, right, with a productivity system in place, is a state in which you are trying to minimize work while maintaining financial stability. Doing less things is actually ironically hard work. If you want to set up a situation in which you say, you know what, I'm super flexible. I work like 10 hours a week, but I have good benefits, make a good salary. Productivity systems can get you there. Simply deciding, I want to work less probably won't get you there.

If you're in a state of haphazard busyness, it's immediately notable when you try to pull back and it caused all sorts of problems. If you're capture, configure controlling, if you're Calnupriding, especially in this age of sort of knowledge workers working remotely, you can get away with a lot if you know what you're doing. So yes, being super relaxed is another outcome of productivity systems. And then finally,

and this is probably, I would say, the most common goal for those who listen to my show, is trying to achieve a state of reasonable balance. Hey, look, I like my job. I want it to be within normal work hours and not expand beyond that, and I want to have some slack in there. So, you know, if once or twice a month, I kind of need to pull back for a day or two, the doctor's appointment, some stuff going with my kids, I can do that without it being a problem.

I want to enjoy my job, go to my office, enjoy my coworkers, but feel like it has a reasonable footprint and have some slack or I can, you know, be sick for a couple days and not have it be a big deal. That, again, is a state that you can achieve if you have some sort of reasonable productivity system in place. So this is what I'm trying to argue for, is we need a more expansive idea of productivity and its goals. Yes, it could be used for sheer optimization. And yes, there are times where that is appropriate. If you just took on the $7 million series A for your startup as a 27-year-old tech entrepreneur, then optimization is probably what you should focus on.

How do I get all these different things that need to happen for my business to succeed done without a completely overwhelming me? But I can enable all of these other things as well. enables the the I've severely pulled back because I have young kids and I just am done with work but need the financial. It enables like I've got this nice balance. It enables the Neil Stevenson, John Grisham, you know, I want to do this one thing. My art, my craft really well. I have a major non-professional interest. I really want to devote time to but still need to have some sort of, you know, not let distractions come in and rip me away from it. It could enable so much. That is the autonomy. be framed for productivity. A good productivity system allows you to take control. Once you've taken control of the obligations in your professional life, you have options. It's up to you what you do with those options, but the message I want you to know is that those options are much more broad than the productivity bros nomenclature, I think, would

typically reveal. All right, so that's my thought on that. Now, I want to apply this frame of a collection of questions from you about various issues in which I want to apply this autonomy, productivity frame to help answer. First, however, I want to talk about one of our sponsors. This show is, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Now, one of the things we talk about often on this show when discussing the deep life is this idea that you have these different buckets in your life in which you're trying to

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If you need life insurance and you don't have it, just go right now and do it. Go to ladderlife.com slash deep today and you will see if you're instantly approved. That's L-A-D-D-R-Life.com slash deep. Ladderlife.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, I want to apply our new productivity frames, this idea of productivity as being a foundation for autonomy. I don't apply it to some real life, real life issues. So I think we've got a good collection of questions here

where I can try that out. Who is first on our docket of queries? Yeah, sounds good. First questions from Andrew, a 33-year-old teacher from London. I'm a full-time teacher, but previously worked in journalism. I'd like to develop a side hustle

writing about using walking to explore the history in London. My long-term goal is to write a short book or walking guide. and whether I should start a blog as I want to be writing more frequently to sharpen my skills. Well, Andrew, I'm going to use this whole desire of a side interest in producing a book about walking histories of London to test out our productivity perspective. If you are haphazardly busy in your teaching job, it is going to be very unlikely you are going to succeed with this endeavor. You'll have moments of inspiration, other times where you feel like you have. have no leeway to work on it. The project will make some progress, and then because of haphazardly busy periods will

disappear for months. You might sour on the idea. You might lose your momentum. On the other hand, if you have a productivity framework in place, if you feel like you really do have control over the various obligations and your time and when you work on it, you're capture configuring controlling your teaching responsibilities, now you have a shot at succeeding with one of these projects. you can figure out, do I have time for this?

Where is that time best placed and then actually place that time in those locations? And there's all sorts of different options for how you might do this, but you're not going to be able to know what options are available or what is best until you really do have a framework in place in your professional life that is helping you control everything. Now, I'm going to give a particular suggestion. So assuming you do this, you get a control, productivity system in place, you feel in control of your time and obligations. I was thinking about your specific project here,

writing this book, walking history, and your question in particular about should you start a blog, is that going to be the right way to sharpen your skills and build this out? Well, my instinct is this project is probably a quality over quantity play. I think you want to be producing specific walking tours. Let's put the digital channel aside for now. but producing particular walking tours at a very high level. So well researched, either well videoed or photographed.

You have a map that you can follow it. Not that often. Maybe this is once every month or once every couple months. But when you release one of these things, it's really, really high quality, really easy for people to follow and use. It seems really professional. This is the like Mr. Beasts or Tim Urban frequency of content production where it's not every three days, but the stuff they put out, they've made excellent. I think that's what you're looking for here. Be so good, this stuff should be so good, it can't be ignored. I think that's going to be the

most fulfilling for you and be the best foundation for eventually then collecting these into a book. The channel question, I'm not sure. I think if you just had a blog, sort of Web 2.0 style, you had a domain and a WordPress blog, that might be not enough. Given the way that digital media has evolved, You probably need some other sort of media involved here. I mean, YouTube could be a big player here. You could have very well-produced videos where you're actually doing this walking tour, maybe substack as opposed to just so people could subscribe and you get sent these walking tours. So it would be a narrow band of people subscribing, but you would have a good band of followers.

You could carefully put your toes into professional social media. Obviously, I'm not a big believer in spending people using. using social media as a source of personal distractions, something people are on on their own time just to sort of keep up with the world to be distracted. But an Instagram account, a professional Instagram account where it's just for you, whatever, posting the photos from your latest tours that you're working on as it builds up to you, then launching your latest tour on a website, connected to a substack. I don't know the right mix there. You probably need a more heterogeneous mix than just a blog. But that would be my guess is that once you get control over your teaching life, you have that productivity framework in place. You'll be able to build a rhythm where you build up to once every couple of months a great tour.

And I could imagine you put aside a Saturday to really explore and scout things out. And then you have some sessions to do your background research and writing. And then you have another session a few weeks later where you actually go to do the video or photographs for the very nice actual tour put together. I would also say don't hesitate. I wouldn't hesitate too much about spending some money on this as well because you're getting, you will get great satisfaction out of producing these really good tour. So if you gather all this information and then you're hiring, you're paying 200 bucks to an online contractor to then put it all together digitally in the right format so that you don't have to spend 30 hours trying to figure out how to do that.

I think that's a very good investment of money, those type of strategic investments. So that would be my guess. Quality over quantity is the way to build not only towards a book, but just to enjoy this as you go along. But none of this is possible unless you leave haphazard business and really feel like. You have your arms around your day job. You have that productivity framework in place. I don't know what other channels that people use, Jesse. If you were, I mean, there's sort of people who've been grandfathered in to just having their own blogs, like marginalia, which used to be brain pickings.

I think Tim Urban with Wait But Why. Mr. Money Mustache. Mr. Money Mustache. I don't know. Starting from scratch, though, it's difficult, I think. I agree with you. I think you need multiple mediums. Yeah.

I think the key is just don't, don't let your professional use of a medium be your excuse to have your personal life devolve into consuming that medium. It's like you can do the Ryan Holiday thing and have stoic quotes on Twitter, Instagram photos of these sort of like cool places you are, these videos that you've made without actually being on Twitter yourself and reading what other people said, without actually being on Instagram and, you know, scrolling it all the time. So there's definitely a professional mindset that I think helps there. You can also, I mean, he was saying how he wanted to work on his writing. can also do that with both mediums for sure. Yeah, and I'm not as worried as he seems to be in sharpening his writing skills because he's a full-time teacher with a background in journalism. And the type of writing he's doing is describing history for a walking tour.

I'm sure he's perfectly capable of doing that. His craft is where it needs to be. If he was a 22-year-old college student who has never really written professional before, okay, you got to get some training to get above that amateur bar. He's already well about that amateur bar. and the writing he's doing is not, the value in what he's doing is not in the quality of the writing.

It just has to be non-amature writing. I bet he can already do that. Yeah, good point. All right, what do we got next? All right, next question is from Ruby, a 35-year-old banker from London. I'm taking a few weeks off to recover from burnout due to a period where my responsibilities kept increasing.

What would you recommend to do to make the most of my time away from work? So, Ruby, the productivity perspective here is that if all you do during your time off is recharge, and then just go back into this environment where you were before, give it six months you'll be back in the same place. What is important here, this is what I would do with my time off, is figure out what is the productivity framework I'm going to put in place

so that I have clarity into all of the obligations entering my world. None of it is being held only in my mind. I am configuring. I can see what it is. What type of work do I have at different parts? This is the traditional facing the productivity dragon. And then I control my time on different timescales. Here's what I'm doing today.

Here's what I do this week. Here's how these projects fit. Now, here's the goal here. Not that with this productivity framework, you can optimize your time enough that the workload that burnt you out before you can now handle. That's not the goal. The goal instead is clarity. Clarity about what's on your plate. Clarity about what is reasonable to be on your plate.

Clarity about proposing this, this, and this makes sense. This, this, and this is too much. The productivity system, a good productivity system, can give you the confidence you need to advocate for yourself. Now, again, this I think is one of the insiduous side effects. of rejecting productivity because you associate it with this optimization over our culture is that ironically, it is exactly what your employer wants you to do. We think about it, oh no, the productivity is somehow part of this base superstructure sort of early 20th century Marxist approach of trying to exploit more labor from the proletariat or something like this, right? So we have this sort of grad school, blah, blah, blah, approach to it.

actually knowing what you're doing, knowing what's on your plate, having an extreme clarity about exactly your workplace, seeing the matrix of the obligations being thrown at you with clarity, that's actually what in a lot of these overwhelmed situations, your employer won at one. Because it means you can come back and say, I know this is crazy. We need to cut this in half. Let me tell you why. You know I have my arms around everything and I'm very careful. I run my schedule very careful and I do very good work.

This is 50% too much. And I have confidence in that conviction. If you instead fall back into haphazard busyness because you're trying to reject the hustle culture, etc., you are at the mercy of these employers. It's just all stuff. We're all busy. You've got a bunch of stuff.

Why aren't you doing work? Why are you complaining? You're either going to burn yourself out again and again or give them an excuse to fire you. So productivity can actually be what you need to prevent and push back against overload. Right? So this is, again, the whole autonomy frame for productivity is having your arms around your

obligations is what allows you do so many different things. And this is one of the things you can do is it allows you to stand up. It allows you to stand up and say with a clear voice and conviction, enough, this is too much. I know it's too much. You know that I know that now. This is my, this is what's reasonable and this is what I'm going to do. And when people know that you have your. act together when it comes to these sort of productivity systems, it's much harder for them to push back against that.

So that's what I would say, rest and recharge, but also get your systems fired up so that when you come back, you're no longer at the mercy of like whatever junk your employer is just throwing at you and hoping you won't notice that is completely unreasonable. Yeah, I like what you said at the end of the deep dive too about having options. Yeah. Yeah. Productivity is about, that's the autonomy frame. Yeah. If you don't have control over all the different obligations orbiting you in your professional life, you are at the the mercy of whim, your boss's mood, your personality, what you can get away with, and basically will probably just be stressed out.

I mean, or you could be okay. Like maybe you just, whatever, become kind of misanthropic and resentful and people that want to deal with it. And you kind of find a way to make it work. But it's all just you're drifting towards some sort of steady state that's probably going to be a non-optimal equilibrium. But when you know everything that's going on, you can stand back and say this, this and this is the problem.

And if I move this, I can't do those. I got to take this off my plate. And no, no, no, no, of course, no, of course no, yes, I'll do this. And it just makes all the difference. You can do so much if you have a good productivity system. And you can't do almost anything without it. I mean, you're just left with like, I'm burnt out or, you know, quitting the workforce. Yeah.

And hoping that people subscribe to my substack. There's got to be something in between those two. All right. Let's keep rolling. What do we have next? All right. Next question is from Rito. 23-year-old from India.

I have too many interests in my life. I have so many choices. It's crippling and I end up doing nothing. My question is, how do I learn to prioritize? So, Rito, I included this question because it helps show that the productivity perspective is also relevant to your life outside of work. It's also relevant to your leisure life. So haphazard busyness can cripple you like it's happening here in your leisure life in the same way that it can in your professional life,

especially like Rita, you're young, you're 23 years old, you have all this time and all this potential, and there's so many different things you can do that you bounce from one thing to another and nothing's making progress. Your brain will eventually stop trying to generate motivation. I've written about this before, Rita, what's really happening here, if you want my opinion, is that our brain is very good at evaluating potential plans. Is this objective worth it? And do I have reason to believe this plan is going to work?

Our brain asks and answers those two questions all the time. We're very good at that. This is something that is bred into our Paleolithic path. Those mechanisms, when it doesn't trust you really know what you're doing, when it doesn't trust that there's a plan here that makes sense that's going to lead to some sort of mastery or highly fulfilling outcome, it says nope. And what does it feel like when your plan evaluation apparatus and your brain says no, it feels like procrastination? You can't summon motivation. Because there is a system in our brain that generates the feelings of motivation towards action and has to believe what you're doing. So if your leisure life is crippled with or ridden with haphazard busyness, it's like, I'm not going to just start this whatever by a video camera to become the next part.

Because you don't know what you're doing here. There's no plan here. There's one of like 15 different things you have. That is why you have this feeling of I can't do anything. I feel crippled. It's because it's too haphazard. It's too busy. So you can bring a productivity framework into your leisure life to get your arms around this,

to start to be selective, to start to be intentional about what you spend your time on. And in doing so, you're going to end up in a much better place. So I'll give you a particular suggestion here, Rita, just to plant a seed. So one way you might structure more intentionally your life outside of work would be a four-part focus. I've talked about this before. three routines and one projecting one time. So the three routines that just figure out how to have going in the background would probably be some sort of fitness health routine. This is eating and exercise.

This is foundational. Let's get that going. Background. Some sort of reading routine. I'm reading on a regular basis. I'm moving away from just distraction. My mind is learning how to actually remain focused on complex thoughts. You're going to develop as a human being.

You're going to develop as a thinker. We did a podcast episode a few weeks ago on how to become a reader. It was called The Joys of the Reading Life. It's probably like 238. Yeah. Yeah. Episode 238. So go back and watch that.

Your third routine, I would say, to put in place foundationally is some sort of community routine. These things you do on a regular basis that keep you connected and serving your friends, your family, other people in the communities that you're involved with. Get background routines for those three things going. That's just foundational. You can tweak those, but you should always on a regular basis, those things are just woven into the fabric of your life, okay? And then one major project. And then do that major project until you get to a great milestone and you can swap in another major project. So just one major project at a time.

Spend six months on it, spend a year on it. I don't really care. You're young, you're 23. You have more time than you think. So this is just one particular suggestions of how you might establish a more intentional approach to your leisure life. but having routines for the things that are foundational to a life well lived, and then pursuing one thing at a time until a good point, giving that your full attention, that, for example, works really well.

And it's the type of thing that you're not going to get to until you get more intentional about your time. All right, making progress here. What do we got next, Jesse? I like this question. Next question is from Jonas, a 32-year-old research analyst. I'm trying to decide whether to ditch postpone a side hustle idea in order not to over one. myself versus adopting a slow productivity mindset and see how progress compounds over time. So Jonas, what you need is extreme clarity, and this is where the productivity perspective is going to

help you. You have to get your arms around the job that's making you feel busy right now, capture, configure control, see where you can get that. You reduce distress, take control of your time, begin with the configure step to be more aggressive about workload management, see where you can get that line in a place that's allowing you to do what you need to do without feeling overwhelmed. And then step back and say, where would the side hustle fit? And answer that question honestly. And now, Jonas, knowing what I know about you, because in your elaboration, you talked a little bit more about your

busyness and you have a lot of things going on with your family and young kids, when you step back, you might say, there is not time for me to execute a reasonable plan for the side hustle. And you know what, that's fine. Don't do the side hustle. But you're going to get that answer with clarity. Or after you capture configure control, you might really tame your job. And so, you know what? I could work on this two days a week, three hours in the morning.

It's my remote work days. Nothing really gets going until noon or whatever. And this would allow me and here's my plan. And I could actually make pretty good progress on this. And then you might find like, okay, now I see exactly where I'm going to work on this. And I'm looking at exactly where I'm going to work on this. And this is enough time. And this is worth it enough to me.

Let's do it. you cannot get to these answers with confidence unless you really know what's going on with your current work obligations. And so that's what I want you to do. Full out, capture, configure, control until you are a master of your job, then work through what are the reasonable scenarios for me to make progress on the side hustle and evaluate those? Will it work? And is it worth it? Is where the achievement the side hustle would generate, is it worth it for what I would have to do? And be very honest with you answer it, and especially at this stage of life you have young kids at home, it's completely fine for your answer there to just be, no, it's not worth it. I've controlled my

job. I like having this flexibility. I want to just use this to do more things in my family or a hobby. I think that's a completely reasonable solution as well. But you don't get those options until you know what's going on. If you're just haphazardly busy, good luck. You're just going to start doing the side hustle in a way that you don't have time for that's going to cause stress and you're going to let it peter out. So again, the productivity perspective here says once you have control you get autonomy autonomy gives you options i actually thought when i first read the question i thought that he had already started the side hustle and you know i was working on it for a while and then you know it's a little hard to tell i read the longer one he talked a lot about the various

things that were he was worried about like his busyness and there definitely was a sense of haphazard busyness yeah but it was a little unclear if he had started and it was feeling overwhelmed by it already or if he was pretty sure that if i just started this i'd feel overwhelmed i mean the Slow productivity approach, it can work with a side hustle, but you really got to evaluate it. So you could say, like, at some point, it's too slow. If it's, I'm going to work once a month, I'm going to have an hour session. Like, that's too slow. Yeah.

I mean, to me, slow productivity also involves obsessing over quality. It also involves the reduction of things. You can give more attention to something. It's not just about you can fit another thing into your schedule because if you stretch it out long enough, you can find little pockets of time to make progress. I mean, slow productivity is a lot of it's about. simplification. So it can take more of your attention. Obsession over quality so that you can really come at it again and again. I think just trying

to spread something out so you touch it here and there is not really a slow productive approach. I think it's just a fragmented approach. Yep. Yep. All right, let's try to fit in one more question here. All right. Next question is from Andrew, 51-year-old biology professor. I'm a professor. Because research production is not a shared goal, I have difficult at getting my colleagues to think creatively about system changes, even if we might benefit from it all. It's always easier to do what is easiest in the immediate moment. Other folks, productivity, be damned. What should I do? Well, I include this question in part just because I like professor questions. But it's another good example for us to apply the productivity perspective. So what

Andrew's talking about is the type of collaboration systems. I detail and motivate in my book a world without email. Where I talk about in the knowledge work context, there's many informal collaboration styles that are built mainly around haphazard back and forth messaging that are actually really unproductive for everyone involved in the long term, even though in the moment it's easier just to shoot off a quick email than it is to actually implement some sort of collaboration system like whatever. There's a shared document where the thoughts go and on Monday night I review that.

and then I put the notes using track changes and you have till Wednesday close a business to react to them and then we have a standing meeting on Thursday morning. Those type of systems get you away from constant back and forth messaging, but they're a little bit more work in the moment. Andrew is saying, I can't get fellow professors to do this because we're not all working towards the shared same goal. It's not everyone in my department is working on getting this new product out.

We're each working on our own thing. And so we're not that interested in being collectively focused on improving how we collaborate. So Andrew, my productivity perspective here is you have to shift the scope that you're thinking about productivity. If you are a professor at a research institution, you need to think about yourself as a stand-alone business. And the other professors in your department and other professors that you interact with and other departments, you know, the HR department, the whatever, like other, whatever you would call them, groups within university, like their own businesses with which you have various professional relationships.

You're Ford and you work with Firestone tires. They're two separate businesses, but you know, you guys have a contract and a relationship that get the tires for your car manufacturing plant, but you're not the same companies. You have to think of yourself almost as like a standalone silo. So when you're thinking about systems internally is where you're really trying to get a handle on, what is my work? What do I work on? What are my quotas?

What do I not do? When do I get this work done? How much time do I have available? How do I want to use this time? And you're keeping track of all that and have all your complex systems. Then when you're interacting with the rest of the world, it's, well, you have sort of interfaces with interacting with these other standalone entities. And I don't know. They're bothering you with emails.

You could just do what you need to do with that. Just process-centric emailing might work there where you never formally develop a new collaboration system. with someone else. You just sort of tell them in your response, yeah, great, we should think about this. Put any thoughts you have in this Google Doc that I started. I will review it. If I have any questions because you're a professor, I know you have clearly posted office hours. I will actually just come to your office hours next week and we'll talk about it. You just sort of put a process into the communication and there it is. You're not calling it a process. You're not negotiate about it. You're just saying it. Certain types of work, you're like, this is very disruptive.

this person just constantly wants to email things. Okay, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to work on that person. I'm going to leave that committee. You have all this autonomy. This is like a company saying we're going to get out of selling etsles because there's not a lot of profit there. We're going to focus more on selling forward focuses or whatever.

You think of yourself like a standalone business that interfaces with other organizations and you do your best to keep those interfaces as non-disruptive as possible. So you need to be more ruthless, Andrew. That's, I guess, what I would say. Your department is not your team members. They're your colleagues. You're collegial to them. You enjoy them.

But you're all your own standalone entities trying to figure out how to exist in the same academic sphere while still accomplishing your internal objectives. So I don't know. Maybe I'm being a little bit Darwinian there. But I think it's the best. Academia really is. It's entrepreneurial. Yeah. You're trying to produce original research.

That's the whole game. If you don't, you get fired. That's the whole game. And you work with other people. There's other things you have to do and service you have to do. But it's just like Ford has these other things they have to do. But ultimately, if they're not selling cars, they're out of business. You kind of have to keep that in mind.

I like it. All right. So I like at least once a month to talk about the books I've read the month before. So we're going to do that in our final segment, the books I read in February, 2023. Before we do, let me just quickly mention another one of our longtime sponsors. that is our friends at Blinkist. As I've said before, if you enjoy a reading life, so if, like I recommend you make reading books an important part of your development as a human being, Blinkist is a great assistant,

a great whatever you want to call it, sidecar to this pursuit. Here's how it works. It's a subscription service that gives you short 15-minute summaries of thousands, over five, thousand different non-fiction books and podcast. These 15-minute summaries you can listen to or you can read. They're called Blinks. Now, the way I recommend using Blinkets to support the reading life is to use it to help triage which of the tens of thousands of books that are out there do you actually want

to invest your time in the reading. So if you're interested in a particular book, read the blink. Listen to the blink. You will know. Trust me, I've done this a lot. Jesse's a big user of Blinkis. He's done this a lot. the 15-minute summary teaches you really clearly, oh, yes, I need to get this book, or I kind of got the gist.

I'm glad I didn't actually start reading this book and aborted on it. So it's like your sidekick for trying to figure out what books you want to read. And the advantage is all of the books you read the blinks of that you decide not to actually buy and read, you still learn domain ideas and the terminologies and the frameworks. and you can file that away and use it when you then encounter a book that you're reading in its full details. You know these five of the books I decided not to buy. I know the main idea is in Framework, so when I'm reading this book, I have this foundation.

So it really is a great accelerant to the reading life. I also want to mention they have a new feature called Blinkist Connect right now, which is a two for the price of one feature in which you can, with your subscription to Blinkist, get an extra subscription that you can give to a friend. So if you have a friend who's also trying to engage in the reading life and you're joining Blinkist, you can pass on a subscription to them as well. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash Deep to start your seven-day free trial and you will get 45% off a Blinkist premium membership.

That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-N-K-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 45% off and a seven-day free trial. Blinkus.com slash deep. This offer is good to April 30th only. And now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkus Connect to share your premium account. You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one.

I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. If you don't use a VPN, you should. Trust me, I'm a computer scientist. If you're not using a VPN, people can see what you're doing. doing on the internet, what sites and services you can talk to. People who are just nearby when you're connected to a Wi-Fi access point can sniff your packets. And even if you've

encrypted the content of the packets, they see what website or what service you're talking to. Your internet service provider at home can and probably does also harvest this information to figure out what type of sites or services does the subscriber use. And they can sell that information. And they do. I don't think people realize that degree to which the sites and services you use are being monitored and collected, packaged up, and sold. A VPN avoids that. The way it works is when you have a VPN, you connect to the VPN itself. You send them an encrypted message saying, here's who I really want to talk to.

I want to go to Netflix. I want to go to Calnewport.com. And the VPN talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response and send it back to you. So what is the person sniffing your Wi-Fi package or your internet service provider find out about you? Only that you're talking to a VPN. So they have no idea what you're actually doing on the internet.

If you're going to use a VPN, I suggest the one I use, which is ExpressVPN. I like them for a lot of reasons. One, they have servers in over 100 different locations around the world. So wherever you are in your travels, there's probably a nearby ExpressVPN server you can connect to. Nearby is good because that means a faster connection. They have a lot of bandwidth. You get very high bandwidth connections with these servers. and their software is very easy to use.

You can put it on any of the devices you use to connect to the internet. You click a button. Now you're going through a VPN. And you just use everything like normal. Use everything like normal, but now it's going automatically through the VPN. So you need a VPN. ExpressVPN is the one that I recommend. So be smart.

Protect your data and gain more privacy at expressvPN.com slash deep. Don't forget to use my link at expressvpn.com slash deep. If you include that slash deep, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. All right. Final segment. The five books I read in February 2020. As long-time listeners know, I try to read five books a month. And I report on what those books are here on the podcast.

All right. So what did I read in February? Number one, the Clockwork Universe by Edward Dahln this was roughly speaking a popular history of the Royal Society in London. More generally speaking, it was a book about the rise of the Enlightenment scientific mindset. Dolnick makes this point, but a lot of other authors to make this point as well. Isaac Newton was at a turning point. Isaac Newton was born and came up in a world that was connected more to Greek thought and mythological thought.

and by a time he died, we were in a world that had a more empirical mathematical approach to understand the world. I love these type of histories. It's a very readable book, short chapters, it moves pretty quick. Not as deep as some other histories I've read on this, but had a lot of good information. A lot of London in this episode. Yeah. Two questions from London.

Two questions from London. A book about London. Yeah. You know why? It's because I am, that article we talked to. about last week in the Financial Times. Obviously, that's a London-based publication. So, like, last week I was killing it in the UK.

So this podcast, number one technology podcast in the UK, like number 30 overall podcast, you know, in the UK. Deep Work at Amazon UK was ranked like 60. That's so good. Right? So, like, we've been killing it in the UK. So as you can see, we're pushing all of our content to be UK-centric. There's a lot of good golf courses around London.

That's true. We need a podcast out of there. All right. I also read Wandering Home by Bill McKibbin. I read that years and years ago, but I had a copy of my library, so I went back and read it and loved it. Really nostalgic. I really remember reading that book in grad school. Bill McKibben, who I really like, I interviewed him for a New Yorker piece a couple years ago.

He wrote this cool book where he walked from his house in Ripton, Vermont, which is sort of one valley over from Lake Champlain in Western Vermont. to his house in the Adirondacks. So the MacKibin's story is that he quit the New Yorker and moved to a cabin. It was really like a rundown house, him and his wife, Susan Halpern, who's an excellent journalist, they moved to this house in the Adirondacks. And then once they had their kid, they realized like kids need a school to go to. So they moved across Lake Champlain to Ripton, Vermont, which I actually visited there last summer. is these cool It's one south of Lincoln

It's these cool green mountain towns That are up at elevation And really quaint Anyways he walked from Ripton To the old house He had a Rondacks He had someone to row him across Lake Champagne Champlain

And in doing so he got to He visited all these places And talked a lot about You know The type of things he writes about In deep Deep economy That the book

In Deep Economy sustainable commercial endeavor, etc. It was a really cool book, really nostalgic, makes you want to just move to Vermont and drink Otter Creek beer and hang out at Middlebury. I know the book I read, you'd appreciate this one, Jesse.

America's Game by Michael McCambridge, the history of the NFL. It's a long book. I read it for, I'm in a dad book group that only reads sports books. It's a lot of journalists and stuff that we just don't want to, We don't want to read anything that's too close to our work.

Anything is too close to home, so we read sports books. I like that. Yeah. I know a lot about the history of the NFL now, at least up until 2005. That's when this book came out. In the early days, like back during Lombardi, the Canadian Football League was a big, you know, like it was a definitely competitor. Like people would go over there.

That's not mentioned at all in this book. Really? Yeah. That's an interesting oversight. He had his historian on early in the week, and they were actually talking about that because somebody died. Michael McAambridge, man, you missed. You missed a big storyline here.

I also read The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. The philosopher, mathematician Bertrand Russell, wrote this book. This would have been in like 19, I think it's like 1919 or something like that, maybe 1930. Somewhere in that period, maybe a little later than that. I might be messing it up. I mean, he died in this. He died remarkably late. He lived a long time.

I'm going to say the 1930s. Anyways, there's a really nice new edition of this book that I found at Barnes & Noble. And so I was like, okay, I got to read this. It's kind of like a self-help book, but written before people wrote self-help books and written by an imminent philosopher and mathematician. And it's him trying to deconstruct and understand the sources of human happiness as well of the things that pull away from human happiness and trying to lay out some sort of program for how you can. maximize it in your life. This is what philosophers used to do. This is why I really dislike this tendency we have for especially the very online types to be very dismissive about, well, their self-help. They're a guru where you have to like throw this disclaimer at the front of

everything you write. We're like, ah, I'm no guru. In fact, I'm, I'm terrible. And I'm, I can barely walk. And I'm not given any advice. And you really think people are going to applaud. Like, there's all these gurus who are, you know, praying on people. But look, It used to be professional thinkers and philosophers. We're like, this is one of the things I want to do is try to think through big questions from life and take my swing. So good for Russell for doing it. Very readable. There's some anachronisms in it, but actually otherwise reads as a pretty modern book.

A lot of similar concepts to the deep life stuff that you talk about. There's some, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like getting outside. There's that stuff, but also a lot of psychological stuff, like jealousy and pride and trying to understand. It's interesting. So it's kind of mental healthy. A lot of it.

The habits of mind that can really pull you down. I mean, it actually reads pretty relevant. But it is an issue of mine. It's this like, I'm not impressed by people who have to put these long disclaimers about like, I'm not a guru who's going to tell you exactly how to live your life. I mean, where are these gurus who are trying to tell people exactly how to live their life? I think smart people should take swings at, here's a big question. Let me take a swing at like how you might answer it.

People are smart. they will adapt it to their own circumstances. They will discount the obvious caveats, you know, this weird, whatever it is, negative reaction that sort of very online lead types have to trying to be instructive or like to tackle big questions. I don't think it's, I don't think it's healthy. It's similar in sports how they always say, oh, the naysayers say, X, Y, Z. I think in the online culture, it's very safe to be a naysayer because you can be applauded. for your world weary critiques. People are like, oh, that's a good.

I didn't see that angle of critique. And there's no real risk. Yeah, being a little bit too critical. They're like, well, you know, sophisticated people are critical. But you're really opening yourself up if you say, this is my thoughts about this or like, this is my philosophy for how you should do something. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's why I've sold a lot of books is because I'm not online, so I don't care.

It's like, look, I think this is interesting. I loved reading this stuff. I love books like Bertrand Russell's Conquest of Happiness. Like, let's just get out. after it and I don't care. So I guess more books for me if everyone else is afraid of it. A lot of smart people who could be writing really interesting, cool, reflective books aren't because they don't want to get yelled out on Twitter.

So, hey, more books for us. Final book I read part of a kind of a holdover from Thriller December. Rising Sun by Michael Crichton. I'm sure I read that at some point when I was a kid, but I found the paperback and used paperback. And so I read it. well-constructed sort of murder mystery thriller. It's two detectives.

They made a movie about this with Sean Connery and, God, who was the other person? Was it Wesley Snipes? I think it was. I saw that movie like 30 years ago. Yeah. I have to go back and watch the movie. I mean, essentially, it's a detective thriller, right? These are detectives and they're trying to figure out a murder, and then there's some like

like Crichton high-tech stuff. The thing I didn't really realize this about Crichton until more recently, he got really reactionary. This is like a pretty like reactionary kind of anti-Japanese book. Oh, really? Yeah. Like you're very worried, clearly very worried about the economic influence of at the, then I guess Japan had this massive like outsized economic influence.

Not very nice to Japanese people. I'm thinking about disclosure. I'm thinking about state of fear. I was like, oh, he kind of became crumudgeonly in his 90s. So it's, it is pretty reactionary. He just works this stuff into his book, but still a good murder, good murder mystery. But, you know, it's interesting layer. Any of these books audio?

I'm sure they're all. No, none of these were audio. So you read them all? I read them all. Yeah. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of audio books recently. All right. Well, anyways, that's what I've got, Jesse.

So thank you, everyone for watching or listing today's episode. We'll be back next week with another full episode of the show. And until then, as always, Stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

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