Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 242: The Simple Life

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Why do stories of people moving to the country to dedicate their lives to simple living resonate so strongly with us overworked knowledge workers? Cal explores lessons we can extract from these instincts that can improve our lives right now, even without the need to become a homesteader.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: What do we (really) seek when we seek the Simple Life? [7:39]- Are daly deep life habits too frequent? [32:35]- How do I juggle more projects? [36:44]- Can I quit my job to reach online full time? [41:53]- How do I convince my husband that the “deep life” isn’t an excuse to ignore me? [55:36]CASE STUDY: A Writing Shed For Slow Productivity [1:01:37]SOMETHING INTERESTING:- Utah limits teens’ ability to use social media [1:12:38]https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/utah-1st-state-limiting-teens-access-social-media-98089159https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/simple-living-zmaz03onzgoe/Thanks to our Sponsors:https://www.mybodytutor.comhttps://www.expressvpn.com/deephttps://www.grammarly.com/tonehttps://www.blinkist.com/deep Thanks 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 am here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, as of today, you are now officially much older than me. Isn't that true? Yeah. Jesse and I have very close together birthdays. We're separated by a few months. So there's a window of, let's see, what's in March, April, what, three months each year where Jesse is, year older than me. So while I remain only 26 years old, Jesse is now 27. Yeah. So you can

chime in with your wisdom that is born only of age and experience Jesse throughout the show. Sounds good. As you see fit. I assume you're going to celebrate by reading quietly and deeply for hours in the woods. That would be a pretty good celebration. I wouldn't mind that. Honestly, that's all I I want these days. Yeah. That would be a great gift for me. Just go into the woods with a book you like I have a plane ride coming up and I have several New Yorkers and wired and something else and the Sports Illustrated

so it's like that's going to take a while. It's nice. You start working your way through them. Yeah. Yeah. I have a plane ride coming up as well but it involves also a 10 year old and 8 year old and a 4 year old. It will not be as deep.

Let's put it that way. A lot of walking back to the bathrooms with toddlers though so that'll be fun. All right. Well anyways. Exciting. Happy birthday. Let's get rolling with what I have in mind for today's show. Today's show is actually motivated by a book I read a couple weeks ago.

The book was called Living the Good Life, How to Live Sainly and Simply, in a troubled world. This is an old book. It was written by Helen and Scott Nearing in the 50s. It came out in 1954. It was then reissued in 1973. And actually, I think this reissue ended up being influential, especially in the back-to-land movement, which picked up speed in the 70s going on into the 80s. So I went back and found a used version of this book, as I like to do. I don't want to be on Kindle.

I don't want to be in a new paperback version. If there's a book that actually existed in a time period is of that time period, intertwined with that time period. So I have the 1973 edition. I read it. And it was interesting. It was about this couple who, during the Depression, decided they wanted to remove themselves from being so intermeshed into the capitalist economy because they were seeing, of course, during the Depression, that these major changes could happen, that they had no control over, and that weren't their fault. They could really affect their livelihood, really affect the quality of their life. So they said, you know what, enough of this.

Let's leave New York City where we're living, and we'll go to Vermont. on. And we're going to live simply and deliberately, in part, to free ourselves from all these forces that are out of our control, in part because of a thorough style wanting to not have taxes being paid towards efforts like wars, and in part to be a demonstration to others about the ability to live in different ways or more intentional ways. So they did this, started in the 30s, wrote a book about it in the 50s. I have some photos here. I'm going to bring them up on the screen. So if you're watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media or at the deeplife.com, just look for episode 242. The pictures I have on the screen are actually not from

their property in Vermont, but their later property in Maine. So basically, they lived in this homestead in Vermont for a long time, including when they published this book. And then at some point, they moved to Maine and did the same thing. They built up a new homestead there. So these pictures give you an idea of what their life is. Here is Scott. nearing, tending his organic garden. Here they are in 1931, Helen and Scott, so that's what they look like when they moved to this homestead. They weren't young when they did this, by the way.

I mean, they were well into their middle-aged when they made this switch. Right, here they are building a wall. They were really into doing masonry with this very particular type called slip-form masonry, which is something that could build really durable, really useful structures without having to have a lot of materials or a lot of expert builders. So they built their house in Vermont with this. They built walls with this.

They ate simply. They're a vegetarian. They ate with a simple wooden bowl and spoon. I put that on here. Here's some of their stone buildings. So they built a house like this in Vermont as well. So he built out a stone. They built it from scratch.

They've got these cool gardens. All very scenic. All very bucolic. Anyways, I'm reading this. I'm reading this book because I needed it for research for the deep life, the book I'm writing on the deep life. And there was an interesting dynamic that arose. So at first glance, at first encounter, when you read the story of the nearings, what you think about is these are people escaping complexity. These are people escaping busyness.

So what appeals at first when you read these stories is the perceived simplicity of their life. There is no running errands or traffic or whatever the 1930s equivalent was of answering email when you're building your slip form masonry walls up in the wilds of Vermont. But when you read this book farther and pay attention, you see this assumption that they're living a very simple life is actually challenged. They were quite busy, as reported in this book, when they were in Vermont. They had a lot of projects going on. And in order to do these projects, they were having to experiment with and make it. master all sorts of new technology. So they learned how, for example, to do this masonry. They experimented and worked with greenhouse growing. They built complex terrorist irrigated garden projects. They figured

out how to do wide-scale composting. They built a sugarhouse and built a complex maple syrup production center. This is actually what generated the cash they needed to survive. They built it off of maple syrup. Constantly projects going on. Long days. working throughout the days to the point where they would have visitors come and they report in the book this became an issue

because the visitors expected we're going to be hanging out with the nearings. You know, we're going to set out in their cabin and smoke a corn cob pipe and talk about simple living and the nearings would say,

look, if you're here you've got to work, we're going to be working all day long. We can't just sit around and entertain you. In addition to what they were doing on their homesteads, the nearings also wrote books. This was not the only book

they wrote. They traveled. they lectured. After a while, they began to host interns and other types of visitors at their properties to sort of teach them about this way of living to disseminate the word throughout the culture. So they weren't living a simple life in the sense of they didn't have much to do. They weren't living a simple life in the sense that there's no busyness that they were just sort of going through their day and most of their time was free. So the things that we imagine when we first conjure moving to the wilds of Vermont were not actually

the things that the nearings were enjoying. So this brings us to today's deep question. What do we really seek when we seek the simple life? And so what I want to do is start with a deep dive and deconstruct more carefully. What is it about this story, stories like the nearing is going to Vermont that attracts our attention? Because I think if we really deconstruct this appeal, we find a more complicated set of answers, but also a set of answers that we can more easily act on in the near future, even without a round. change to our life. I then have a collection of five questions from you, my listeners.

They will all roughly orbit this general topic of engineering a life that's less busy, engineering a life that's simple. I might have actually said that wrong. I think I did today four questions and one case study. We'll get four questions and we will get one case study. And then we'll shift gears as we normally do at the end and talk about something interesting. All right. So let's look deeper here at this question of what is it exactly about the Nearing's moving to Vermont that attracts us if it's not just they have plenty of free time now, that their life is less crowded. And I think the right way to think about this is to divide our investigation into two categories.

Category number one is the things we want to escape when we head towards the simple life. And category number two is the things we want to pursue when we head towards the simple life. So let's start with what we want to escape when we think about stories like the Neerians. I would say number one on that list is going to be overload. It's not, do you always have something to do? That's not an issue. The Nearing's always had something to do. It's, do you have too many things that you need to do, more things than you have time to actually implement.

That is what overload is, and it's different than busyness. It's different than constant activity. It's not about how much of your day you're working. It's about how much stuff is on the list that you're trying to get through. And when that list gets larger than you actually have the time resources or capacity to execute problems arise, and these problems are psychological in nature. So one of the arguments I make I've made on this podcast before, it's also an argument that I'm elaborating in my new book on slow productivity is that there is a tax, a psychological tax, on every obligation that you've committed to. You know it's there, you know you have to get it done. That psychological tax then expands beyond just being on your mind into actual taxes on your time.

Most things that are on your list that you need to do have this regular background demand of your time and attention. And you've got to follow up with this person. You need to set up a meeting. There's some emails that have to go back and forth. You have to do a little bit of research. Where is that new pharmacy and the place that we're going that I can get my subscription sending there? So these things don't just sit. Most things don't just sit idly on your task list.

They have these little demands of your time and attention, and I call that an overhead tax. So if your task list gets too big, the sum of this overhead tax itself becomes larger, until after a while you find yourself spending most of your time tending and worrying about all the things waiting on your list, which greatly reduces the time you have to actually make progress on things, which means you fall even farther behind. Your list gets bigger, and the overhead tax grows even more intense. window to actually accomplish things gets even smaller. This is a terrible spiral. It's incredibly stressful. It's also an incredibly inefficient way to try to do important things in the world. So one of the things we want to escape when we think about moving to the wilds of Vermont

like the nearings is overload. Not having things to do all the time, but having more things to do than we have time to actually accomplish. The other thing I would say we want to escape when we think of these scenarios is struggle. So the simple life, let's say, that the nearings are living up there, reduced financial worries. They lived very cheaply. They were largely dependent on growing or producing their own food or bartering. The cash that they did need, they generated from their maple sugaring operation.

And they just figured out exactly how many dollars they needed to handle the things or acquire the things that they couldn't barter for or grow themselves. So they had freedom from the struggle of financial worries. They had freedom from the struggle of stressful work. They worked all the time, but they weren't on tight deadlines. There was no boss who was bothering them about when is your slip form measuring wall going to be finished. There wasn't the stress of, oh my God, what if we lose this client? How are we going to be able to pay the lease on our office building? So the struggle of stressful work, they were escaping.

They're escaping the stressful environment of the city. It's crowded. There's noise. There's crime. You're being jostled on the street. Your senses are being overwhelmed. so there's a simplicity to the quiet of the forest. They're also avoiding the struggles that you get with things like long commutes or other types of parts of your life that are not that subjectively nice.

So there's this escape from struggle that's also part of the appeal of the simple life. There's a lot of things that are unpleasant that if you go to this quote unquote simple life, you can reduce. All right. So those are things you escape. But part of the appeal of these type of lifestyles is also what we want to pursue. What are you trying to gain by shifting to these simpler lives? Three things here. Number one is autonomy.

The nearings had complete autonomy over what they decided to do and how they spent their time. So again, they always had work to do. They worked hard, but it was on their own terms on projects that they thought were important. They were also looking for meaning. So not only were they escaping a sort of, sort of lifestyle that they were critiquing. Not only were they escaping being intermeshed into an economic system where they thought they had lack of control and could be pushed around because of world events, they were also trying to proactively demonstrate to the broader

world alternative ways of living. This is why they wrote books. It's why they did lectures. It's why they brought visitors and interns out to their homestead in Vermont and later in Maine. They were trying to spread the word. And they were successful at this. The 1973 edition of this book really did play a big role in driving a lot of people from the baby. boom generation, attracted to the counterculture, as demonstrated in the most distilled form by the hippie movement, to embrace back to land-style movements.

And for a while, this was quite a powerful social movement. The other things we try to pursue when we're thinking about the simple life is slowness. This is a property that I don't think we talk about enough, but it's a property that's of particular importance to me. And it's not the idea that you don't do things. It's the idea that no one day, no one hour is critical.

So I, if I'm Scott nearing, if I'm Helen nearing, most days, most hours I am doing something. But I know if I didn't feel well, or if the weather was bad, or if a relative came to visit, if I didn't do my normal work tomorrow, it's okay. Nothing bad would happen. If I skipped working on this wall for the next hour, nothing bad would happen. There's no one who's going to yell at me. There's no client who is going to complain that their email didn't get responded to. So I'm going to call that slowness. And I actually think this is a fundamental property that is well suited for the human condition.

And it's something that we didn't even know we need until now we find ourselves missing it. I in particular am very wired for this type of slowness. I will do a ton of work if left to my own devices. If you tell me go write books and articles, I will write a lot of books. I will write a lot of articles and be happy about it. What makes me unhappy is if you say tomorrow you need to come do this radio appearance and then you need to go to this meeting and then you need to go get this done in one hour. It's the notion of this has to get done on this day.

This thing has to happen on this time so that if you get sick, if you get tired, if your kids are sick for the hundredth time, this is going to be a problem. That causes me stress. Work is fine. but work in which I don't have to worry about any particular day being critical is even better. So this is the other type of thing that you are pursuing when you think about these visions of the slow life. All right, so we had two things you want to escape, overload and struggle. We had three things you want to get closer to, autonomy, meaning, and slowness.

So what's my goal here in talking about those? Well, when we can get this discerning about what it is actually deep down that's attracting us to stories like the nearinges, we can isolate these components. We can begin to ask, well, is there anything I can do right now? Or in the next couple of months or the next year or so, is there anything I can do right now that will help me get away from those things I want to escape? Help me get towards those things I want to pursue, even if I'm not able to in the near future, leave everything and go move to Vermont.

When we get past just the instinctual attraction to a big grand gesture and deconstruct it, we can identify these underlying components that we can. can do something with right now, even without that same degree of radicalness. So let's go through this experiment with these particular properties that I just delineated. What are the types of things that someone who reads this book and finds it really appealing? What are some things they could do in the next couple of weeks that would move them closer to these properties that they are attracted to? Well, financial simplifications.

You could do this next week. Overhaul your finances, reduce your expenses, get control. of your spending. Find yourself feeling like you have a buffer. Okay, we have way more money than we actually the need. So there's some flexibility here because of the way that we're living. We're living below our means and so that we can take that stress off right away. Think about new work quota systems. Okay, in my job, I'm going to start to establish specific quotas on how many of projects of different types I actually do at any one time. And when someone tries to add another one to my plate, I say, I'm happy to help. But look, I've got this quota that I don't do more

than three committees at the same time. And so I have three right now, so I can't do that right now. So you put in these quota systems, that right away could also help with something like overload, right? So financial simplification could help with struggle. Quota system at work could help with overload. Simplifying your extracurricular personal activities could help with struggle. You could put more seasonality into your work to help with overload. You know what? I'm going to pull back in the summers. I'm not going to make a big declaration about it, but I'm just going to be pretty clever about how I take on projects to make sure that during these two months, I'm doing less. I have a phantom part-time job.

I'm ending my work technically at like two and no one really notices it. That type of thing can help. You can rebuild your leisure time around a smaller number of much more meaningful activities to really get into. These are all things you could do right away. It's not as radical as moving to Vermont, but you're actually working with escaping the things that we really want to escape in those stories and pursuing the things we really want to pursue when we're attracted to those stories. Now let's move up to a broader time frame.

Let's say we're thinking about the next two years. And again, you want to approximate as much of the benefits of a radical change like this as possible. Well, now we can start thinking about things like redesigning your career. Maybe not quitting your job to become a full-time homesteader, but maybe you're able to over the next year or two make the shift to say, okay, I'm going to become fully remote. And the way I'm going to justify that is by trading accountability for accessibility. And you set up a situation where you say, look at how many units I ship, how much code I produce, how many clients I bring on. But in exchange, I want this relationship to be one where we have a meeting on Monday to check in on everything. And you don't necessarily expect a lot of

accessibility outside of it. You might imagine a pragmatic move on the one to two year timeframe. Maybe not, again, to a homestead in Vermont, but maybe you leave a crowded suburb to go an hour outside of the city to a acquired or rural area where the schools are fine. You can still commute back in once a week. We need to see people. But now you can have a different rhythm to your life. You're away from the stress of, say, Northern Virginia or Montgomery County, Maryland. But you're not moving all the way up the coast.

You're not moving into the deep countryside. That could all make sense in a short-term one-to-two-year time frame. As could, for example, radical scheduling to work. maybe you over a one to two year time period talk to your boss about, okay, I'm going to go to reduced hours, say 20% less hours, and we'll take a reduction in pay.

And like, okay, that makes sense. You say, but here's how I'm going to do it. And it'll work normally, nine months out of the year, 10 months out of the year, and the other two months I'm not going to work at all. So it's not, oh, I'm working less hours, but because of email and meetings,

I end up working 40-hour weeks anyways, it's more radical reconfigurations about when you work or when you don't work. These type of things are all pragmatically proximate to where you are now. These are changes that you could imagine making in the next year or two. And even though it doesn't seem as radical as first as making a complete overhaul of where you live and how you work, they are useful. And they're useful, again, because we know what really appeals to us about these stories is not just I want to build a composting heap in Vermont. It's the escaping overload, escaping struggle, pursuing autonomy, assuming.

meaning pursuing slowness. And this is the general approach I want to keep in mind when we think about the deep life writ large. When you encounter a story or a case study that appeals to you at a deep level, you pick up the nearing's book, you watch a documentary about Laird Hamilton in Hawaii, something about Simon Winchester's farm in Sanford, Central Massachusetts just captures your attention. When something captures your attention resonates, don't stop there. If you stop there, all you're going to get is a short burst

of aspiration, plus a sobering reality that I can't move to Hawaii and be layered Hamilton. I'm not a full-time writer who can live on a farm in central Massachusetts, and then you just fall back into whatever you're doing before. The right approach here is to do what I just did with the Scott and Helen nearing story.

Deconstruct that aspiration. What are the specific elements of these stories that are really touching you in a deep place. And once you have isolated those things, you can say, okay, even if I don't make that big move, what little moves put me in a better position with respect to these components? Sometimes the deep life is about changing everything, but sometimes the deep life is about learning from people who have changed everything to make a bunch of small changes that

add up to make your situation much better than it was before. So those are my thoughts on the simple life. I like it. We have a lot of different blank life terminology on this show. The deep life, the simple life, the good life. So have you started writing the book? I, yeah, yeah. For so, well, oh, wait, which book we talk about?

Okay, deep life. The deep life. Because you said you were researching in. No, I'm not writing it yet. Where I am now is with slow productivity. I've written that whole book. And now I'm revising it. Yeah.

And I just finished the revised version of the first half of the book. earlier today actually. And over the next few weeks, I'll be finishing my revisions of the second half of the book. I have it all mapped out as I haven't done the writing yet. So by the end of April,

we have a really pretty good version of that manuscript submitted. And then we're going to go back and forth, but by June of this year is when it's locked. It has to go on in the production. So by June of this year, slow productivity will be locked in

on route to a winter 2024 publication. And then at that point, I can start thinking about the deep life. But I'm already, you know, I just read, right now I'm just reading and thinking. And I'm not trying to, I'm not just to give a little bit of an insight into the process of writing these books. If I was to at this point start to actually translate ideas like I just read from the nearings into outlines or potential chapters for the deep life book, that would create a cognitive issue because it's overlapping too much with the slow productivity, right? So alchemizing ideas into structured chapters begins to capture your mind around that project. So I'm not, right now all I'm doing is just

exposed to myself to a lot of interesting stuff. And it'll be the summer when I'm up in New Hampshire and do my fellowship at Dartmouth, that I'll probably then be able to just go walk in the woods and begin massaging the ideas and the chapters to really begin thinking about how the book's going to come together. So while we start writing it back in the fall of, I'm not sure. It's a good question. I got to figure it out. I mean, part of my issues, I'm a little burned out right now. Because like last summer you were writing every single day all through the summer, but you were on leave technically, right? Yeah, so I'm not going to be writing this summer. I mean, I'm, I've been working on a lot

of things, riding Georgetown related, personal life related. I'm a little burnt out. So I'm not going to write this summer. I am going to think, which is my favorite thing. I'm going to read and think, but I am not, I am going to need some breathing room before I'm riding every day. When you potentially write the deep life, you'll probably be teaching that. So you're not going to have as much free time as you did when you read the soap practice. Yeah, I'm a little worried about it. Yeah. So I'm only teaching too. You just have to give yourself more time, right? Because before you like, you banged it out. I think that's what I'll do. Well, yeah. And also like I don't have the summer off this summer.

I'm doing this fellowship at Dartmouth. So I'm going to be teaching a course and, you know, etc. So I don't have the time I had. Now, I'm only teaching two courses next year, which is good, but they're not combined, like I was able to do when I was writing slow productivity. So each semester has a course. So it's going to be not until the summer of 2024 did I get any sort of notable break from where I'm not teaching. So we'll figure it out. I think I'm just going to go slower.

I think I'm just going to slow productivity this thing. I don't have as much time as I per day. So I'll write less. and just relentless. A little bit, little bit, little bit. I'm telling you, a lot of little bits add up to a lot. But anyways, I know I need at least this summer as a breather because, man, my brain. I'm exhausted.

I am exhausted. I mean, it didn't help that anyone who has kids knows that this year, because of the immunity debt that built up over the COVID years has been just like a disease artillery barrage. It's just sickness after sickness after sickness. They're all bigger sicknesses and they would have been three years ago. and it's just relentless. And so you have that and all the extra work. And yeah, get my brain a bit of a breather, I suppose. All right, so we got some questions.

Before we get to the questions, I want to briefly mention one of our longtime sponsors here on the show, and that is our friends at Grammerly. What I want to talk about in particular is their new advanced tone suggestion feature, which is integrated into Grammarly's premium service. So Grammarly Premium can sit on the devices where you do your writing, working with the applications in which you do this writing to help that writing be better. The new advanced tone suggestions is a great example of how sophisticated this tool has become.

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And as long as we're talking about ideas, which again, I really think in our current culture, ideas really are the best currency. Where do you find these ideas? well, books. And who is going to help you figure out which books you showed or shouldn't read? Blinkist. Blinkist is another long-time sponsor of this show and for good reason

because they offer a service that is right in the sweet spot of what deep questions listeners are looking for. So the way it works is if you subscribe to Blinkist, you get access to short summaries of over 5,500 non-fiction books and podcasts. These summaries typically take around 15 minutes to read. They also have audio versions of these summaries that you can listen to in 15 minutes or less.

Now, the reason why this is so useful is it lets you very quickly triage potential next things to add to your reading list. If there's a topic you're interested in or a book you've heard about, you jump on the blinkus, you read or listen to the blink. This is incredibly effective in helping you decide, do I need to buy this book or is it not exactly what I thought? And if it's not exactly what you thought, you still just got all the main ideas. You could work that into your vocabulary. You can work that into your existing cognitive schema for understanding the world. I know, for example, Jesse, you keep a list of books you want to read.

You just keep that in Blinkist, right? Is that what your strategy is? Well, I keep the list in Evernaut, but then I go through it and look at all the blanks for those potential books. That's your triage process. You grow this list. And then when you want to buy a new book, you blink. You read the blinks of what, like the first whatever until you come across a blink that makes you want to buy it. What's your hit rate, you think?

Like what percentage, like how effective is this triaging? Is it like 10% of books you say, I should read or is it 10% of books you take off the list? For you, what's it like? Well, I also have scribbed so I can just grab those books. If they're on there, I can just get them essentially with my membership. So pretty high, like 30% probably. 30% get cut or 30% you read? I read.

Yeah. See? I mean, so think about it. that though. So even with that high percentage, if you didn't have Blinkist, you would just be seven out of ten books you started reading you'd be disappointed with. Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah. Well, so there you go. So if you're serious about the reading life, you do need Blinkist. They also have a special offer going on right now called Blinkist Connect that allows you to essentially get a free membership for the cost of one that you can then give to a friend

who you think would like this. So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. go to blinkus.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial and get 45% off a Blinkist premium membership. 45% is good. It's been lower than that historically, so that's pretty good. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 45% off in a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. This particularly good discount offer is only good to April 30.

So you've got to get on this. And remember for a limited time now, you can use Blinkus Connect to share your premium account So you'll get essentially two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions from our listeners that are relevant to this general topic of pursuing a simpler, deeper life. Sounds good. First question is from David, a 40-year-old from Australia. Is a weekly time horizon and deep life habits more effective than daily habits? For example, if I try to exercise every day, I might end up with 70 or 7 30-minute sessions.

but lack those 90-minute sessions that might be better physically during the week. So I think what David's talking about here is when I talk about the Deep Life, one of the concepts I talk about is these keystone habits where in each of the big areas of your life, what we call the buckets, you have some habit you do every day.

And you track every day, did I do that habit? It's why my time block planner has a metric tracking space on every weekday. So he's saying, hey, some things aren't best done every day. Maybe they're best done twice a week. And this was his example, if I'm reading this right,

is he's saying maybe it's better to work out 90 minutes twice a week than to work out 30 minutes every day. Now, Jesse, when it comes to this specific example, you know more about this than me. Working out twice for 90 minutes does not sound like the right way to exercise, right? That's a pretty long workout session, isn't it? Or is that... I think it depends on what you're doing.

Like, if you're playing tennis, that's going to take at least, 90 minutes to two hours. That's true. So sports, yeah. But if you're doing weights or something, I'm assuming more, you probably want more than two sessions a week. Probably. Yeah. Yeah.

that you take that area of your life seriously, and it builds a foundation of discipline bespoke to that area of life. So if you're doing a fitness something every day, then it helps indicate to yourself you take your health seriously. So if that constitution bucket of the deep life is important to you, now you have a foundation of discipline on which you can then build other types of pursuits or rituals or habits. So not everything has to be every day,

but every bucket should have at least one thing that is every day. Now, there's two ways we can nuance that. One way we can nuance that is a daily habit doesn't actually have to require the exact same activities every day. What's important here is that you're checking off every day that you did something. So you can imagine, for example, I have this daily exercise habit. And every day I want to write in the metric tracking space of my time block planner, EX, that's the notation I use, to indicate that I did my exercise today.

However, what that means can depend on the day. Maybe every other day, X means you walked for an hour, and on other days it means that you did a 30-minute weight workout. And so every day is not the same, but you're not going any day without doing something. So daily accountability doesn't necessarily mean daily similarity. You can have a habit that looks different from day to day. Now when we move outside, however, of these keystone habits, then certainly you can have other types of things you do in your life that are not at all daily. And maybe, for example, you do have like twice a week you play tennis like Jesse was talking about. That's fine.

It's not your keystone habit. It doesn't happen every day. This is not something you're using just to lay a foundation and discipline. What does help in those cases, however, is if you can autopilot that schedule. So if there's something you only do twice a week, if you know you always do that Tuesday and Thursday at five at the club, you're more likely to be consistent with it. So you can use autopilot philosophy to make non-daily habits still regular. So non-daily habits are fine and you're more likely to keep them consistent if you're doing autopilot scheduling.

But when we look specifically at Keystone habits, you do want something to happen every day, even if the activity can vary from day to day. Because there's that not breaking the chain power and just knowing every day I do something towards this bucket I care about. All right, Jesse, what do we got next? All right, next question is from Overwhelmed from Toronto. I'm very thankful for your advice that podcast should focus on research. Postdocs. Postdocs.

It changes the tenor of this question quite a bit. However, I find I am in the middle of too many non-primary author projects, leave me to work on my primary projects in the evenings and on weekends. I tried setting up autopilot, fixed schedule, but I have no time to do it all. How do prolific professors, you included, balance so many projects when I find I can't even handle four at a time? Well, four times too many projects, and we don't do that many projects at a time. So I think what's going on here overwhelmed is that you might be suffering from what I like to call the time compression fallacy, which is typical when you're surveying from a distance the resumes of someone who's very accomplished.

What we tend to do when we do this is we see all in one place this list of all these different things that they have done. And then in our mind, when we imagine that person doing this work, we compress the time in which this work unfolded. So that in our mind's eye, we imagine this person working on lots of these things all at the same time. This used to come up so common when I used to write about very successful students that I had a phrase I used to say. I call it the paradox of the relaxed road scholar. I did a study once where I interviewed a bunch of road scholars. And a lot of this got integrated into my first book, How to Win at College, which came out back in 2005.

And what I learned from these road scholars is that from the perspective of other students, they had all these different things they had done. And so you assume they'd be very, very busy. But when you interviewed them, they weren't. And the secret to this was, yeah, I did these six things, which look incredibly impressive when you see the press release about me winning a road scholarship, but I didn't do them at the same time. This is over four years.

It added up to a lot. But at any one point, I wasn't doing all of these things. So that's the time compression fallacy in action. And we see it through all sorts of different stages of people's careers, all sorts of different career fields. So if you look at my own academic life, for example, I have published a lot of peer-reviewed computer science papers. I had to do all this math yet recently because I'm submitting my application for full

professor. I published something like 80, 80 peer-reviewed computer science. papers. They've been cited, something like 4,500 times for those who know the lingo, it's generated an H index of 31. You read that all it wants, and you think, my God, you must be just writing all sorts of papers all the time. But if you actually go back through my timeline, through the now almost 20 years that

I've been a professional academic, what you see is that, no, no, what I learned, this is the method I learned at MIT, was just constant practical progress. always be working on a paper or two. When you finish one, work on another, just make that the background. That's the background hum of your life. It's like you're always working on a paper. You're not working on five at once.

You're working on one or two at once. But if you always are working on things, it adds up. This comes out, that comes out. This one comes out. And over time, it adds up to the 80 or 90 papers or whatever it is that seems really impressive.

But if you zoom in on, you know, Cal in 2007, as a grad student in MIT, I didn't have that much else going on. Like, I worked on this one paper for a couple hours today. Now, what am I going to do? You just repeat that over enough years, though, and a lot of things add up. So overwhelmed, people don't do as much work at the same time as you think. In fact, the paradox here is if you try to do too much at the same time, you sabotage those projects.

They sabotage each other because you're pulling from too scarce of a cognitive resource, and you end up producing less overall. Working on less things at a time can actually help you produce more. So you need to do less. You have too many projects. Your issue here is not that you haven't properly autopilot scheduled, that you haven't properly fixed-scheduled all of this work so that it works. Your issue is you have too much work to schedule. As a postdoc, you can't be doing four papers at once.

You want to cut that down to two, maybe one primary paper and one non-primary paper. You don't work on any more than one on a given day, and you stick with a paper until it's done or at a milestone where there's going to be a long period of time until you can return from it. So whatever. We have to now wait two months to get back results from a lab. And then you can switch to something else. The key here is not going to be quantity at any one time, but just making sure that you're continually working on something. And as soon as something is done, you start working on something else.

That's how real piles of impressive accomplishment build up. Very impressive people are actually less overloaded than you might imagine, unless like me they, for some reason, have seven jobs. But that's a different problem. don't do that. All right. What do we got? We got a lot of fake names here.

I'm looking at this next one. Wendell B. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably not, unless Wendell Berry is writing us a message. I think we got another pseudonym coming in. Maybe it's this topic. You think it's B for Barry or just?

It's Wendell Berry. It is? I think so. Okay. I didn't even think of that. Well, anyway, next question from Wendell B. I currently serve as a minister in a full-time position,

but want to make the transition to teaching full-time in an online capacity. I believe this move would better suit my desires to stay in the academy, work from home, and farm. What steps do I need to take in order to know when I can step away from my position and focus on teaching full-time online? Well, the key here with anything like this, where you get a vision for an alternative career around you build your life. Whenever you get a vision like this, the key thing to do is to ground it in reality. And grounded in reality means you have to find people who are doing the thing you're doing. want to do. And you have to find out what is it really like? Like, does it generate enough income that they can live off of it? And then you have to find out how did they make this happen?

What was the path or credentials or opportunities that were required for them to end up in this space? Real people, real case studies, real information. The reason why this is important is because human beings, especially dealing with this particular issue that were sort of privileged to have this grapple with in the modern era of what do I want to do with my life. We have a tendency of falling into the trap of writing a story about what we want to be true. And we get really into this story because it has the elements that we hope actually exist a little bit of challenge, but we overcome it. And we get pretty excited about this story.

And it can be hard to let go of a story that's really appealing. But if that story doesn't actually match the reality of what you have in mind, it's only going to lead you probably into a worse situation. So that's why I always say ground in reality. And you might not like what you find. You might find, you know what, this online teaching full-time position in the subject matter where you're an expert doesn't really exist, at least not in a way that it could support you full-time. You're going to need another plan. That might be what you discover. You might also discover that, okay, this does exist because, and then you heard of someone who did it.

But when you actually learn more, you discover, oh, they were able to do it because they were already a famous academic that had this big reputation and they were able to sort of create their own online thing. But that really required them being really well-known. and you're not in that situation, you weren't going to be able to do the same thing. You might discover something like that as well. And you've got to be ready for that and say, okay, I need a new plan.

But if you are working backwards, like I talked about in the deep dive at the beginning of this episode, if you're working backwards from the elements of this vision that inspire you, you can pivot. If you're working backwards,

not from all that matters is I'm a full-time online teacher who farms, but instead you have these underlying elements of that lifestyle that really drawl to you. If this doesn't work out when you ground it in reality, you have other options to look into. Well,

how else could I use a career capital I have already acquired to make a lateral move into a situation in which I get more of these properties? This is why property-centric thinking, this value-based lifestyle design thinking, is so powerful

is because it gives you the freedom to experiment with ideas and approaches to find one that will actually work. It doesn't require you to latch on to one particular story and hope it works. So I don't know what you're going to find, Wendell.

You might find it's impossible. You might find it's easy or you might find as possible, but you have to do more work than you thought to make it possible. But whatever you find, knowing why you like this story in the first place is going to be helpful. Now, I've been having this discussion with someone recently reminds me of this, Jesse. As a student I met,

it was like a cool idea for a book. and I was like, this is great. I love encouraging people have cool ideas for books. And it was like, what do you want to do with this book? I want to publish it, like have an impact on the conversation,

publish it with a real publisher. Like, that's great. And so I said, let me send you, he's like, can I talk to you about like how to do this? Like, yeah,

it's like, you know, I've written up an article about this because I get asked this question a lot. And there's this article I wrote in 2008 after I published my first two books. It was like, here is how you write and sell a nonfiction book to a major publisher.

And I put everything I learned in that article. There's five points in it. That's what I send people when they're interested in becoming a nonfiction writer. I was like, let's ground your idea in reality because nonfiction writing is a place where you might otherwise write your own story. Well, he didn't like that. He had written his own story about how he wanted the world to exist. It was a story in which, and I hear this, especially from entrepreneurial people, they often write these own stories. But, well, if I'm particularly clever about how I go about it.

like writing this book and hiring this firm to help me and doing this and that, I can sort of make an in run around the normal process to get my book published without having to do the standard thing, just starting with an agent, convincing the agent, writing a proposal, selling a proposal to a publisher, working with a publisher to write the book. And I said, look, that's not really a great path. Like, I'm telling you, I've done this eight times. Yeah. Like, this is how, like, nonfiction writing works if you want to publish with a big publisher. And I haven't heard back. because I think it's very tempting. And writing, I hear this all the time.

Writing is definitely a place where people write their own stories about how they're going to become a writer. And usually their own stories involves if you're diligent and clever and, you know, take advantage of new services that people might not know about yet. You can kind of greatly increase your chance to being published and sort of get around having to be judged by a gatekeeper early on. The stories are very enticing, but they're not true. Yeah. I mean, maybe if he had like an end with some agent that was going to pick up his call and read the transcript, but I mean, the chances of that are probably really slim. Yeah, I mean, I want to get too much of the details. But he, it was what he was proposing, well, there's, let's just say there's, there's companies and services out there that are happy to take your money. Yeah, exactly.

On route to helping you get your book published. Yeah. Yeah. Spoiler alert. If that was like a backroad into getting your book published, you know, other people would do it. book publishing actually has a pretty good model. I mean, basically the model is there's agents. So for nonfiction writing, you sell your idea to an agent. By sell your idea, I mean this metaphorically. You sign with an agent because they're convinced that you've got a great idea and you're the right person to write it.

The agents then turn around and help you sell the idea to a publisher. And the agents are very well suited to do this because they have relationships with the relevant editors at the relevant publishers. There's not this over the transom type model of a pile of submissions arrive at the publisher, and they look through them to decide what the publish. Most books are actually sold over lunch. My agent knows these editors. Like, hey, I have this new author. Are you interested?

You think there's another editor might be interested. And they sort of match. There's this informal matching that goes on. Editors who have that same sensibility. And they say, yeah, let me see it. I'm interested in. And then the agent helps you write a proposal that covers the things. things the publishers need to know. I mean, the purpose, I don't want to go on a rant here,

but even when I know people who get signed with agents, they follow the process, they, especially the entrepreneurial ones, all want to in run around the proposal process. Like, okay, I'm an agent, but I shouldn't have to do this. But no, there's a reason why you write these lumbering big proposals is because the agents are all former editors. And they know exactly what the editor needs to be able to sell their own acquisition editor on paying for this book. So when you're writing these proposals, what you're really doing is doing the homework for the editor so that if they love your idea, they can turn around and have a better chance of convincing their boss, let's pay for this. Yeah. Right. So again, you can't, there's no, you don't need to do it. There's

not an in run here. You're like, I don't need to do this. Like, I've got a big audience. I've, you know, whatever. You got to just do the proposal and it's a pain, but that's how it works. And then they can use this to try to sell it internally. Then you get your advanced and you write your book. It's actually a pretty good process because the agents are desperate for sellable books. The editors are desperate for books that can be published. They don't need every book to be a Malcolm Gladwell bestseller. They need a pipeline full of books that are coming out. Their whole model, especially as publishers consolidate,

is you need a huge pipeline of books coming out. Everyone wants you to succeed. They want you to be good. They want your book to be sellable. They want to be able to publish your book because everyone along the way needs more books. It's how the whole system works. So the only thing that trips you up along these ways is not that you are being unfilable. unfairly cast out because of an ossified system, it's that there's something that's not

right yet. You're not the right person to write this book. The idea is not as sharp as you think it is. Your writing's not where it needs to be yet. You have to get up to a new level. I mean, the reasons you get kicked out of this system are typically there is something that's not quite right yet for you to actually produce the book. And I think it's the avoiding of that feedback.

People think, I could just avoid that feedback. if I hired the service and did this and did all this. And then like the publisher at some point, like, oh, look at this thing over here. I got, we got to publish that book. And it happens occasionally. I mean, the Martian was, that's what happened with the Martian.

Okay. Right. And why am I forgetting the name, Andy Watt, Andy Weir? So he was actually writing the Martian in installments on the web. Yeah, you wrote an article about that, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I was just publishing installments. He was just thinking, he just thought, you know, he's an engineer. He's like, I want to think through, like, how would you survive if you were left alone on Mars? Like, let's get the science right. And so it was like a fun project. He was writing about it on the web. But then that got really popular. And a publisher came in and was like, this is great.

Like, this could be a really good novel. That does happen. But it happens like twice. You know what I mean? It's not a, it's not a consistent route to follow. It's happened like twice in the last, you know, five years or something like that. Yeah, you've talked about like the need of how these agents and these publishers like just want to keep on putting out books and you've said this for a couple of years now and it like really dawns on me

because then I noticed all the books and then same with TV shows. Yep. You know, programming on, you know, Netflix and stuff like that. There's just always stuff. And books is that times 10 because it's way less money to produce. They can, their pipelines are bigger. Yeah. It's way less risk.

I mean, the way I think about the book publishing sales pipeline, the whole key, if you want to go into that world is not to be disqualified. It's less than you might think than really trying to convince. someone to like pay attention to something that they'll love once they see it. It's more about how do you avoid the things that could disqualify you around the way? And I don't know. I really preach this. I was like just knowing the process, the little professionalism details that come out of

knowing the process makes such a big difference as you go through it. Yeah. It just shows through it at every stage. And so it's, here's what I've learned because I do recommend a lot of people. Like, you should write a book. You should write a book. What I have found is like, okay, a lot of them don't end up. being able to write the books. It's hard to avoid all those disqualifiers. And I maybe,

earlier in my career made it seem simpler than it was, like my own entrance into the publishing world. The hard thing is if you're not a professional journalist, you really have to have this hard to find combination of a topic that people are going to feel like they have to read about, plus you being the right person to write about the topic. So if you're a professional journalist, what makes you the right person to talk about a topic is typically I'm a professional writer. So it really opens up what you can write about. But if you're not a professional journalist or a historian, your personal experience has to make complete sense that you're the person writing this book. And then you have to combine that with having enough writing experience

that they don't have to worry about amateurism. I mean, you don't have to be gay tellees, but you can't have amateur tells in your writing because they can't publish that. Random House can't put out a book that has non-professional writing in it. So you have to be past some threshold, which is not hard to do, but you do have to have some experience. It's really hard to get those three things right. And what I've found when people have, I know, have had trouble in this process, it's just they usually have two out of three. So they'll have an idea, maybe that's kind of killer, but it's why are you the person to write about this other than just you think it's interesting? Or they're the right person to write about a topic, but it can't, it's not killer yet. It's still a little bit

vague and I don't I don't know if people realize like in a nonfiction book proposal often like how razor sharp the idea is pitched in those proposals even if they maybe balloon out a little bit anyways I'm ranting about the publishing industry well writing the proposal too must help sharpen those ideas it does help sharpen it yeah and you have to do a lot of stuff that's annoying but it's actually kind of good you have to go find competitive titles here's similar books that aren't quite what I'm doing because if there's something out there is exactly what you're doing they don't want to publish it so here's similar books that are similar to what I'm doing. Here's exactly how many copies they sold. You have to

make the case. You actually have to make the case. This book, this book, this book. They all did really well for these reasons. My book sits at the intersection of them. So this is why we think we could do something similar. You have to like exhaustively talk about here's how I'm going to publicize this book. You see, I know these people. I'm in this world. I'm going to be on this podcast. I mean, all of this stuff seems annoying. But it's really, really important for them to try to conceive internally at the publisher, how many copies realistically are we going to, is this book going to end up selling? With this type of publicity, looking at what comparable books do. Anyways, so when there'll be, I know you didn't ask about publishing, but it all comes back to just grounding what you want to do in

reality, though a big source of friction in the moment is really what's going to open up a much smoother path in the long term. All right, let's do another question here. Hi. Jenny, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom from Chicago, how can I convince my husband that the deep life doesn't mean he gets to ignore his spouse most of the time? He insists that he's unavailable during work hours to minimize distractions. Well, as Jesse knows, one of my best purposes on this podcast is being a marriage counselor. I think it actually was before your time, Jesse. I used to get a lot more of these questions. And it was like an ongoing joke. I don't know if you remember from the old days of the show, but it used to come up a lot. where I was like, yeah, I'm glad you're asking me for relationship advice. Yeah. Like, this is going to go really well for you. This is going to go really well for me.

We're all going to end up better. I listen to them all, yeah, for sure. Used to come up more often. Well, okay, I have two things. I have a general thing to say, Jenny, a specific thing. The general thing is, if that's what he's saying, he's using the term deep life incorrectly. The deep life is not just about avoiding distraction and work. I mean, there's a craft bucket to the deep life where you're trying to.

trying to envision what's important to you in the world of work. And maybe under there at some point you have when working on things important, trying to avoid context switching is vital. But that's a subpoint relevant to just one bucket of many different buckets that are relevant to living the deep life. And if you're married, as I've long said, these visions need to be collaborative and synchronized. It does not work if you have your own vision separate from your spouses and you don't really talk about it, or if you do talk about it, it's just to tell them, here's what I'm doing,

get out of my way. Competing visions of the deep life is incredibly corrosive to a long-term committed relationship. Married couples need to have a collaborative vision of this life that involves both of them. What do we care about as a family, as a unit in all of these areas? How are we collectively going to build our lives? So now when you're talking about craft, for example, It's not just about how can we each be as successful as possible in our jobs. It instead becomes, especially if you have kids, what configuration of work is going to, you know, best satisfy the various constraints we have? We want financial security. We want to keep our stress under control.

We want to be able to be able to deal with, let's say, like the issues of our kids that arise in a way that doesn't make it a constant source of anxiety and make sure we have enough time there. Like, how do we find this balance? and you're making a collective decision. What are our different jobs? What's our available flexibility? Should someone pull back and someone push forward? Should we both pull back? Should we do this for two years?

It should be decided together. Same thing for Constitution. Same thing for community. Certainly same thing for contemplation. Are you going to have a religion? What's that going to be? All of this has to be collaborative. So that's my general response here.

Your husband having some vision of the quote unquote deep life that he's essentially just imposing on you and it annoys you is not the right way to do this in a married couple. All right. Now I'm going to take your husband's side and say, let's talk about this very specific issue of just how accessible does he need to be during work. And I think you can work together and come up for this very narrow thing, a set of rules that's very reasonable that everyone agrees to. So for example, here's a common thing I've heard in these situations. Anything that's an emergency, like you actually have to have a quick response or like, you know, a kid is going to. the pediatrician, and so you need to come home to pick up the other kid from work. Hint, I'm speaking from experience here. Something like that, it's very time sensitive. Okay, you can always call my cell phone.

And even if I have my cell phone and do not disturb, I just have it set up so that obviously your number is whitelisted to come through. That's very easy to do. All spouses should have their spouse's number set up to calls to come through no matter what focus mode they're in. All right, that's easy. Then you could have a simple rule about text messaging. And I think a completely reasonable rule about text messaging is I will check text messages at least two or three times throughout the day.

But on the other hand, if I'm in the middle of a blocked, a deep work block, I'm not going to check text messages because if I do, it completely ruins the, and this is where I'm taking your husband's side, this idea that, hey, it would be very useful for me if you always just responded to my text messages right away. It could ruin a whole deep work block if you have to do that context switching throughout. So I think this notion of there's going to be a two-hour stretch here, an hour stretch here, where I'm not checking text messages. But a couple times a day I am. So non-urgent things I'll see. Urgent things you call me. And if we find we have to be doing a lot of coordinating throughout the day, then we probably need to work on our household admin system in general. It's probably too chaotic.

I, in this case, I'm playing the role of your husband and probably not involved enough and actually sitting down and working out with you what needs to be done this week, who's working on what. We probably need a better weekly planning setup, a better shared calendar, better share tasks set up. There's a whole household of man admin solution here that probably would reduce the need that just have hyperactive hive mind back and forth throughout the day. But it's completely reasonable to say, I'm accessible, but not always accessible unless it's emergency. Now, you can make your own rules here.

I don't know what's going to work. I don't know your situation. I don't know what your, like, your husband does. I mean, maybe he's a Navy SEAL or something. And this, you know, he can't answer his phone because he's saving someone from pirates or something like that. But my point here being for this very narrow issue of accessibility, between, you know, partners, you need rules.

You need to agree on them. There's a lot of reasonable options there. And then everyone's on the same page. Don't just wing it. And if you can't come up with a set of rules that works, then you have to fix something else until you have a set of rules to do. My bigger picture point here, however,

is the deep life in general for couples is a collaborative effort. It does not work if you each have your own vision. You're going to buy that or they both now just mad at me. It's usually safer just to take entirely one person's side because you know at least one person won't be mad at you. Yeah. Yeah, the husband's going to show up at my door.

He is going to be a Navy SEAL. He's like, I have come to get my revenge. All right, I want to do a case study before we move on to something interesting. I like to do these occasionally where someone sends in an example of the type of ideas we write about on the show playing out in the real world. So this particular case study was sent to me from Julie, a 51st1. year old writer from Maine. So I'm already on board. I love the idea of a writer in Maine. All right. So here's what Julie says. Last year, I took your advice and converted the utility shed in my backyard into an office space. I have worked in every corner of my house and it was finally time for a dedicated space

for me to write in. I knew it helped me with focus and uninterrupted time, but I was not prepared for the mindset shift that went along with it. Once the writing shed was up, with everything just like I wanted it, I felt a lot more like a professional writer. And if I'm a professional writer with this really cool writing shed, shouldn't I spend my time in here writing? What would be the point of doing all of this work of building this thing if I just sit out there and scroll Twitter?

I've gotten so much more writing done just being in the space we built specifically for this purpose. Also, I've never had a space for a place near my desk to sit and read. When we renovated the shed, we built in a storage bench and put a cushion and pillows on top to make a couch. When I feel my focus shifting, I get up from my desk and move to the couch away from my computer and either read or write in a notebook. I'm less likely to want to check for an important email if I'm working comfortably on the couch

with my dog snoring next to me. There is definitely a slow productivity aspect of building a dedicated writing space as well. Since I'm not in the house facing laundry and dishes and interruptions from my family, I don't feel nearly as frantic about the work I'm doing. and because it's easier for me to take control of my deep work sessions, I'm getting more writing done and embracing the time it takes to get the books done. It may not be a Sanderson layer, but it's pretty great. Julie, I love that.

And of course, I talked about all the time on the show. I wrote that New Yorker piece where I introduced the acronym, work from near home to capture this concept. But it all comes down to the degree to which we ignore the cognitive aspects or the psychological aspects of doing cognitively demand. working. Having a dedicated space just for that work doesn't necessarily make sense on paper. It doesn't necessarily make sense when you're sitting there trying to make a plan. It doesn't make sense when you say, look, we just bought this house that has a home office,

so why in the world would I go build a shed in the backyard? But it makes all the sense in the world when you realize the psychological demands of trying to actually concentrate on something complicated. This is hard for humans to do, and your brain needs every ounce of help you can give it. So if you have the capability of doing something like this, and it doesn't. doesn't have to be fancy. But getting some sort of dedicated space where you just do some type of work, as you learn from Julie's case study, there is a cascade of advantages in terms of productivity, in terms of

sustainability, in terms of your happiness, in terms of clarity, there is a cascade of advantages that follow. So, Julie, I do appreciate that case study. Yeah, that's a good case study. I'm always trying to encourage people to build, who have yards of sufficient size, build a deep work should. I always encouraging people. How's your library working out? That's working well. Have you been?

So I've been writing in there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the key to the, and I've been writing here as well, so I've been coming to HQ to write as well. But writing the library has worked well. There's no permanent screens in there. You bring it a laptop to write. You bring it out when you're done. So if you're reading in there, there's no screens, which I appreciate. How often do you go in there and read? I mean, that's the main place I read if I'm reading at home. I mean, now that's getting warmer, I like to read outside, but in the winter, that's where I've been reading because we have the fireplace. You know, like turn on the gas fireplace.

So writing in there has been good. And again, it's like an unnecessary thing to build this whole library out and build the bookcases and get these library lights and do all this stuff. It's like there's probably better uses for that money. But on the hand, is there because I make a living thinking. Yeah. And so I see that library the same way that Chris Hemsworth sees the, the big expansive gym he built in his house in Australia. He plays Thor.

It's like really important that he's able to as easily as possible lift heavy things. And so like, okay, if I'm going to be an intellectual Thor, I need a library. Yeah. So that's been nice. I've been liking the library. And I've been liking coming here too. It's good there's spaces. Big believer in spaces.

We don't give ourselves a big enough break when it comes to doing hard work with our brains. It's all these knowledge work jobs where it's like, a big deal just like be on email all day and jump in zoom and just work from your kitchen while your kids are in the background like what's the big deal just turn on your brain and execute and no one ever thinks about like it's really really hard yeah your dedicated space advice for like doing different works is like been really helpful to me over the years what's your favorite space of the moment well they're just like they're i have different spaces for different works you know like even just within your apartment or like around town uh both yeah like i have two places in my condo I

I can come here. I can go to like, there's like a coaching area, like at Gonzaga. What about, does the club, does the club have any interesting spaces? It doesn't have,

it doesn't, outdoors have got some great spots. Yeah, like if you're reading, like you could probably, yeah, outdoors, like real good,

but that's obviously weather dependent. Yeah. Like sometimes I take my Spanish class out there. And then indoor, there's, I wish there was a little bit more.

You know what the coolest space I ever sort of was in proximity of? When I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston, when I was a postdoc, right there is a private library. It's a subscription library. This is Boston, so it's probably been around since, you know, 1694 or something like that. And they had, it was cheap if you were a student, like a grad student or whatever. It was so cool.

I, you know, I just discovered it right before we moved to came to Georgetown. So I never was able to actually make that a big part of my life. But I was thinking, like, that thing was so cool. They had this reading room or they would bring in all of the papers from all around the country or whatever. And you go in there and there would just be like a bunch of upper middle age dudes, you know, like reading their newspaper and drinking their coffee. And then they just had these long tables and these statues. And I was like, that's cool. Yeah.

That's cool. If you're going to have like a superfluous sort of elitist space, why not dedicated to like thinking? Yeah. As opposed to, I don't know. TikTok videos. Duck hunting. I don't know what rich people do. I don't think this place was that expensive.

I think it had like a big historical pedigree. I can't remember what's called though. It started with the anathium, I think. Anathium. Yeah, I just thought that was always cool. All right, I want to do something interesting, but first, I'll briefly mention

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I'm a fan of those guys. No to Adam Gilbert for a long time. He runs a tight shop there. They've been doing that thing forever. Yeah. It's great company. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. If you use the internet, which I assume you probably do, you need to have a VPN or virtual

private network. So here's the problem with the way that most people use the internet is that people can see what you're doing. So if you're connecting through a public Wi-Fi access point, people can sniff your packets off of the wire and see what site or service are you talking to. Even if the contents of your message maybe are encrypted, the destination is not. So people can see which site or service you're talking to. Let's say you're at home. You're like, no one's sniffing my packets. Your internet service provider sees who you're talking to. And you know what? They can collect that data. And you know what? They can sell that data. And you know what? They probably do.

This is where a virtual private network comes into play. It works as follows. Instead of connecting to the site or service you want to talk to you, you instead connect to a virtual private network server, a VPN server. And you send an encrypted message to that server saying, here's who I really want to talk to. The server talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response, and sends it back to you. What does this mean? This means your internet service provider or people sitting next to you in Starbucks, all they know is that you're talking to a VPN server. They gain no information about the actual site or the actual service that you're using. So this is internet, privacy, and security 101. So if you're going to use a VPN, the one I recommend is ExpressVPN.

They have servers all over the world. They have a lot of bandwidth for these servers. So you can have a fast, high bandwidth connection. So you'll notice no lag in your internet connection. and their software is very easy to use. You click a button once it's installed to turn it on, and you just use all of your apps and browsers like you normally would, and in the background, it's shunting all of your information through a local server. So you need a VPN, and I think ExpressVPN is the one you need. It's also rated number one by CNETWired, Tech Radar, and countless others.

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Don't forget that. Dot com slash deep. So expressv-v-n.com slash deep. Don't forget that slash deep to get your extra three months free. Go there now to learn more. All right. So what I want to do with our last segment is

as I often do talk about something interesting. So as you know, I maintain this address interesting at Calnewport.com in which anyone can send me any article or link or video they think I might like. And even though I can't respond to most of these messages, I do read most of them. And it's a real cool source of interesting material. So today I want to talk about something that you sent me in this address. This is an article. the version I have here is from ABC, though this was widely covered, that is discussing a interesting piece of recent news. Here's the headline of this article.

Oh, man, there is a, I don't know if this shows up on the screen, Jesse, but it's interesting. So I'm on the ABC News. Yeah, it's coming up. That's interesting, too. So what I want to talk about is this article from ABC News, and the headline is Utah social media law means kids need approval from parents. But if you're watching online at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media episode 242 or at the deeplife.com, you'll see that ABC is dominating the screen by a picture of an impossibly fit old lady next to a bear who I'm assuming she's married to. I mean, it's not exactly clear from this context, but that's what I'm going to assume. They seem like they know each other very well.

And what is the headline for this? intermittent fasting for seniors. I don't know, Jesse. Maybe this is what we should be reading. This like super jacked lady who's married to a bear. Is she going to eat the bear? This is about fasting. Well, all right.

So you got to see this. You got to go to YouTube.com slash channel for media to see this picture. Otherwise, I sound like a crazy person. But let's talk about this actual article. With great regret, I'm going to shut this ad. All right. Let's talk about this actual article. Utah is passing a new law.

to help restrict kids' social media usage. So there's a couple things this law includes. I'm reading here from the article. Children and teens in Utah would lose access to social media apps such as TikTok if they don't have parental consent. They face other restrictions as well, such as, for example, a prohibition on kids under 18 from using social media between the hours of 10.30 p.m. and 6.30 a. as well as age verification of anyone who wants to use social media and a few other things as well.

I think one of the more controversial parts of this bill is if you're a minor using social media, your parents have to have access to your account. There's a lot of these laws percolating up at the state level right now. The coverage and reaction to these laws is very complicated because they keep crossing back and fourth over our standard political partisan line. So it's a Republican governor, Governor Spencer Cox in Utah, who's suggesting this law. Blue State Massachusetts has a similar law. You look at people lining up to talk about these. You can see the confusion because most organizations know here's the way it works. We belong to one particular ideological team and we want to see something our teams

or the other team's thing. And if it's the other team's thing, our job is to make sure it looks bad. And if it's our team's thing, it's our job to make it look right. But for this particular issue, the teams are all scrambled. The Surgeon General of the Joe Biden administration is in favor of 16 as a minimum age for using social media. Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley, is also in favor of 16 being a minimum age for social media. You cannot have two people that were farther away on the political spectrum. So even in this article itself, you see this confusion. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is coming out strong.

We don't like this. This is no good. common sense media is coming in and see, but actually, wait, maybe this is good. Kids are getting pretty addicted to these things. No one really knows where to stand on this. So it's amusing the watch as well as a source of consternation because of the partisanship that especially dictates so much online discussion, self-referential discussion on how people should use online services are confused and complicated.

So I've got to cut through to what my emerging thoughts on this. I think simplicity is key here. There is an existing job, Copa, that is an abbreviation. I always get the actual acronym, the details of the acronym wrong. It's in this article, so I'm scrolling here. But there's an existing law on the books that's abbreviated as Copa. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. This is a law that's federal, and it implicitly establishes 13 as the minimum age to use social media.

I say implicitly because the way the law is actually worded is it's talking about the minimum age at which an individual can consent to give up their data or privacy to another company. Because social media by definition does this, it's implicitly a de facto age limit on social media. An interesting side note about this law, which I learned from social psychologist John Haidt, who's not a lot of good work on this issue, is that the original draft of COPA had this age at 16.

It got changed because of intense lobbying from the tech industry. they brought it back to 13. So I think we should simplify things. This Utah law, honestly, it's too complicated. A time limit on when people of certain ages can use different types of technologies. I don't even know if this is a legitimate proposal or it's just trying to motion towards you signal that you care about this issue. But this is way too complicated. If you want to do something legislatively here, take the law that already exist, go back to the original age.

It's 16, not 13. You don't have to invent new mechanisms. We don't have to do things at the state level. In general, I'm wary of legislative solutions to a lot of these issues because not that I don't think there are issues that need to be solved, but I've never seen progress made. They're very difficult issues to actually legislate. But this is a case where there's something simple that could be done. Change the age net law to 16. Now, one of the pushbacks about doing that, and it shows up in this article I have here, one of the pushbacks says, yeah, but you can't enforce that.

you know, kids under the age of 13 still sign up for social media accounts. My argument to that is that's not a problem right now. What do we want to do? Why would we want a law that says you need to be 16 to sign up for a social media account? Why would we want that law? To prevent anyone from under the age of 16 never get on that account? No, what we want to do is give some help and protection to these poor parents who had the misfortune of having kids in the 90s in such a way that these, or in the 2000s, such

that these kids are coming of age just as this new technology of social media smartphones just arose so they have full access to these technologies but we haven't had enough time yet to digest culturally how we actually want to deal with these and figure out how kids could use it so we have this 10-year gap,

this 10-year window where people are being subject to a giant public experiment of just good luck. Here's a phone, like 12-year-old, I hope you do okay. And of course I think in the future this is going to change. We're learning more about this.

But right now the parents of these kids need all the help they can get. It is very difficult to turn to your 14-year-old and say, I don't want you on a smartphone doing social media. And they say, oh, my friends have it. You are going to make me be socially outcast. These parents need support. And what better way to push back when your kid says,

but while my friends are doing it, then to say it's illegal. This is why you can't have TikTok 14-year-old daughter because it's illegal. And now the teens are in a place where they have to say, I know, but we should break to law. And they know that's not going to go over well. Now, here's what happens.

this allows a lot of parents to hold the line. If a lot of parents hold the line, and when you get to your middle school classroom, there is a large contention of kids who don't have phones to access to social media. No, it's not 100%. Forget 100%. What we need is just enough of those kids in the classroom,

not on social media, that if you are feeling particularly harmed by this, if seeing all the sort of mean performative demonstration of the things that you're missing out on, the things where the teenage girls you know, know that you weren't invited to this party, and find a nonsense reason to send you an Instagram story about it. And they have some nonsense reason.

Like, hey, look, there's that dress you were talking about. Someone is wearing it. But the real reason they're doing it so you can see that you weren't invited to this party. When you can opt out of that, you have covered up out of that because some people do. Not everyone, but there's a sizable contingent that does. And now you can join that contingent if you really need it. The people who are having the most trouble with this have social cover to walk away from these technologies. That makes a huge difference.

And so I think right now we need to give ammunition to parents to be able to enforce certain restrictions that they are seeing everyday evidence of what helped the mental well-being of their kids. And so if we made this official federal age 16, no, we're not going to eliminate all social media use from all kids. But that's okay. It's going to give cover to the parents you see this as a problem. It's going to give cover to the kids who are exhausted of this but can't be the only person who's not on the services. So I'm increasingly coming around to this idea of let's start with what's simple. There's a couple simple changes we can make right now that would probably go a long way into helping the mental health of teens. But I am glad that a lot of people are thinking about this.

And I do find it amusing that this issue crosses the partisan lines. I find it amusing to watch the online commentators have their heads start spinning around. And then the cartoon steam comes out of their ears because they're not sure who they're supposed to be mad at. So that's also entertaining. But there's a serious problem here. And I'm glad other people are finally starting to recognize that. So there you go, Jesse. kids in social media.

I have to give a whole talk about this at my kids' school soon. Yeah, you were saying that we'll do a video on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's coming up. It got postponed for various reasons. But after I give that talk, I'll record a video version. Unless it goes terribly. So I'll see how it goes first. If my kids are kicked out of that school due to, like, the general intellectual and moral degeneracy of their father as based on his talk, then I won't record a version of it. Maybe my idea of like the first 20 minutes of the talk is let me show you all the worst things I was able to find on social media. And I just show like picture after picture of just terrible things.

No, if the talk goes well, I'll record a version for everyone else. All right. Speaking of things going well, I think it's a good episode, but we got to wrap things up. Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions. If you want to submit your own questions, the link is right there in the show notes. You can also go to the deeplife.com slash listen. And the link is there as well. If you like what you heard, you'll like what you see, you can watch full videos of these podcasts at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media.

We'll be back next week. Actually, I'll be back next week, special vacation episode, so it'll probably just be me. So I'll be back next week with another 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 Cal. Newport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom

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