Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 255: The Failure of Cybernetic Productivity

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Over the past twenty years, “productivity” has come to be synonymous with using digital tools to speed up non-essential parts of knowledge work. As cal argues in this episode, this “cybernetic�� approach has proven to be a complete failure. He explores why speeding up isn’t working and what this teaches us about what we need to do instead.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Today’s Deep Question: Why doesn’t cybernetic productivity work? [8:40]  - What should I ask a potential hire about their time management habits? [31:55] - How do I teach leaders how to work more deeply? [38:17] - How did Cal become good at breaking things down into systems and processes? [48:06] - How do I build task boards if I have many roles? [51:05] - How do I find time to think in my busy job? [54:20]  Something Interesting: Taylor Sheridan’s “writing bunker” [1:02:48]  Links:  hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/taylor-sheridan-yellowstone-interview-1235519261/  Thanks to our Sponsors:  shopify.com/deep grammarly.com/go expressvpn.com/deep 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 a distracted world. All right. Once again, I am joining the show from Deep Work H.Q. North up in Hanover, New Hampshire. My producer, Jesse, is joining us from the original Deep Work HQ in Tacoma Park. Jesse, hopefully Tacoma Park is doing okay without me around. I don't know if you see people wearing black armbands. mourners, mourners in the streets. It's doing great. We're doing okay.

Jesse went to the coffee shop I, I will say frequent earlier today. And I asked him, did they have to lay some people off? Because with me being gone for two weeks, that's roughly, and I'm just doing the math here, $700 worth of income that they're not getting per day. So, you know, it's a big deal when I'm not there. I drink a lot of coffee. So hopefully, hopefully it's okay. What's your coffee shop up there? It's a carrick machine in my kitchen.

That's a, I do. Oh, really? I do. There's a carg machine in my kitchen. I've been making a lot of coffee. The other coffee, the actual coffee shop around here that I like is called the Dirt Cowboy, which was around when I was here going the college at Dartmouth. I like flavored coffee because I started drinking coffee in high school.

It's a long story, but the short version of the story was I was taking computer science courses at Princeton during my senior year of high school because I ran out of courses to take at my high school and they had an agreement with Princeton. And somehow that worked out. And I would stop on the way to Princeton and take these courses at the Tiger Mart at the Exxon on Route 31 in Pettington, New Jersey. And I would get in a styrofoam cup their most flavorful coffee because it was terrible coffee. And so I developed this habit of associated bad flavored coffee with thinking. I wonder as dirt cowboy here in Dartmouth is the only place I've ever found that does

fancy flavored coffee. They roast their own beans on site. They flavor their own beans. If you order a ridiculous flavor like chocolate mint, they will grind a fresh batch right there and do a pourover for just that cup of coffee and yet still has a crazy flavor. So it's the only place I know that has fancy flavored coffee. So that's great. But it's closed on Sunday and Mondays, which is crazy. So I've been drinking some carrot recently.

That's the way. Otherwise, things are going well. And here's the good news. If my plans hold up as we suspect, I will be back briefly in the D.C. area. So next week's episode, Jesse, might have us both temporarily back in the original Deep Work HQ. So everyone can look forward to seeing that. Sounds good. One advantage of being up here, I have been getting a lot of reading done.

It is conducive to reading up here. and I want to talk about a particular book. I'm going to hold it up to the camera here. For those who are watching, I guess I should specify this is episode 255. So if you're watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media or on the deeplife.com, look for episode 255. I've been making my way through this beast, Jesse. This is Power and Progress by Darren Esamoglu and Simon Johnson from MIT. It's one of these tech impact on economics and society.

sort of pseudo-academic book. I'm really enjoying it. I'm almost done. I'm really enjoying it. But there was one piece I came across this morning that I partially disagreed with. And I realized in understanding my disagreement, there's actually an interesting point to be made about the type of topics we talk about on the show. So I'm actually going to read something here, Jesse. This comes from power and progress.

It's a chapter about artificial intelligence. And they're talking about, they're referencing the... this famous conference that happened at Dartmouth back in the 1950s, so where I am right now, which was a conference organized by Marvin Minsky, where the term artificial intelligence was coined. In this section I'm about to read, they're referencing that conference. And here's what the authors say. Even before the Dartmouth conference, MIT polymath, Norbert Wiener, had articulated a different vision, one that positioned machines as compliments to humans, although Wiener did not use

the term MU, which they used to mean machine usefulness, machine usefulness is inspired by his ideas. What we want for machines is not some amorphous notion of intelligence or high-level capabilities, but they're used for human objectives. Focusing on MU rather than AI is more likely to get us there. So what they're referencing here, if you read this whole chapter, what they're referencing is a pushback on what they say is the dominant current model for thinking about artificial intelligence, which, according to them, it's being seen as

something to automate or replace flawed humans, that computers can be more perfect or logical than humans, and we can use computers to replace flawed humans to automate human activity. And they go back and say, we have a different idea, which is instead of AI, M.U. Machine usefulness. We should use tools like artificial intelligence. to make individuals more useful to expend their capabilities. And the reason why they're referencing Norbert Wiener is that in the 1940s, he wrote this book on the term cybernetics, which was his term for a symbiosis between humans and machines. He had this argument that machines can help humans but can't replace humans.

What we should be thinking as engineers is how to integrate humans and machines into a cybernetic relationship. I actually own a vintage copy of this book back of my house in Tacoma, Tacoma Park. Weiner was inspired a lot, if you read that book, working in the war efforts for, among other things, anti-aircraft guns, where they are trying to build these systems where the human is aiming the anti-aircraft gun. And there's a feedback loop where the anti-aircraft gun is giving feedback to the human to help them be more accurate as they aim it to extend their capabilities to lead these planes to predict where they're going. and that symbiosis between the person and the aircraft gun was an early example of cybernetics. And so these authors are saying, that's what we need. Not replacing people with technology, but using technology to extend their capabilities.

Now, here's my critique. When it comes to the specific slice of the economy that we so often talk about on this show, which is knowledge work, a term I actually learned from Derek Thompson the other day was laptop workers, so people who you're on a computer screen and you're doing email and all sorts of back and forth. For knowledge workers, I would say the fundamental thrust of these new technologies like artificial intelligence is exactly a cybernetic vision. I have been studying and thinking a lot about the intersection of artificial intelligence and work recently, because I'm working on an article on this topic. And I can tell you most of

the visions out there right now when it comes to these tools and knowledge work. is not how do we replace these workers. It is instead, how do we give them new capabilities, simplify things, allow them to do things they weren't able to do before. So actually, that mentality is already out there, at least when it comes to knowledge work. And if we really look deeper, we say most of the discussion of productivity, so that the common public discussions of productivity, as it relates to knowledge workers in particular, has this cybernetic flavor to it. How do we use tools to speed up or simplify or expand what humans can do? So I'm going to even introduce a term and say,

let's call this cybernetic productivity. This is a huge topic of the last 20 years. This intersection of digital technology and productivity has led to this notion of cybernetic productivity, which is all about how do we use tools to make certain tasks easier to extend. or speed up the capabilities of human workers. And the thing that I was realizing, as I was thinking about today, is that cybernetic productivity has failed to live up to its promise. And I think if we understand why it has failed to live up to its promise, we're going to

learn something about how we might better organize work. So that's the deep question I want to tackle today. Why doesn't cybernetic productivity work? All right. So to tackle this question, let's get some good definitions going here. what exactly is meant by cybernetic productivity? I would define it by four principles, three that have been around for the last 20 years

and one that's become more popular in recent years. So the first principle of cybernetic productivity is that you should attempt to automate or speed up shallow tasks as much as possible. So anything that's overhead or logistical or administrative that you can make faster, make faster. If you can automate it all together, automate it all together. Have this software tool be able to speak to that software tool so you can directly send your data from your browser over to your Excel spreadsheet without having to waste a bunch of clicks.

If there is a more advanced command that can do a few steps for you, let's try to introduce that so that you don't have to keep doing multiple work on its own. If you can, for example, fill in while I'm writing in Gmail, guess what I'm trying to say. then I can just press tab and not have to write the whole thing, do that. So any place you can speed up or automate work does not directly just thinking deeply or producing value. Cybernetic productivity says you should. The second principle of cybernics productivity is to try to keep needed information at your fingertips. So it's all about making it easy for you to organize and get access to the information you need. this particular paradigm of effectiveness

sees humans in part as information processing machines. So it says, hey, the more we can have the right information there when you need it, the more effective knowledge workers are going to be. So certainly tools like Google, for example, live out this principle. I can search for a lot of different types of information. This is why Gmail has sort of advanced search built right into its email. you can go back and find information that you needed before. There's all other sorts of information and knowledge management tools that all implement

this cybernet productivity principle of let's make sure information is never too far. Never too far from the person who needs it. We need to get away from this 1970s era style of knowledge work where you're walking down to the central library and your building and making a request for information that comes back on clippings, you know, two hours later, information at your fingertips. All right, the third principle of cybernics productivity is removing friction from communication. So again, this view of humans as individuals doing work is one that is inherently collaborative. And so cybernactic productivity says, we need to make this communication easy.

If we take friction out of the process, I can just reach you as quickly and easily as possible. A higher velocity of collaboration is then enabled. This is why we were able to use digital tools to move past, for example, the slowness of inner office memos or having to type a code into a telephone. Let's see what voicemail messages we had. Now, with email, we could just type in it. It would immediately be sent to you. I would have a copy. I can attach files to it.

Slack brought this to a new tempo of speed. Now we can just be going back and forth. Now I'd have to wait for messages themselves to arrive and be seen. and then we get things like the advent of smartphones and ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet. So now not only is it low friction to message you, I can do it anywhere. I don't even have to wait until I'm back at an office or at a phone to talk to you. So that's a key cyberdeck productivity. Get rid of that friction.

Communication should be as easy as possible. This fourth newer principle I alluded to was to simplify the extraction of actionable wisdom from data. So that's another newish aspect of cybernetic productivity. it thinks the data, the information we need to do things is often hidden in data. So we need tools that can find trends. We need tools that can extract wisdom from data. So we also have that on our fingertips to act. All right.

So that is a cybernetic productivity vision. It's one where the human is in the center of this network of all of this different information and communication and data. Meanwhile, all of the literal steps and actions needed to access this information. to find it, to analyze it, is automated or sped up as much as possible. That is the cybernetic productivity vision. It has been dominant since I would say the early 2000s, and it also, in my opinion, has proven to be a failure. Cybernetact productivity does not make us feel more productive.

Cybernet productivity has not been moving the needle on actual measurable productivity metrics. We are not getting more important work done. And there's a key reason for this. It's what I call the infinite buffer effect. In many knowledge work jobs, the supply of work is essentially infinite. There's always more things you could be doing. And this is because there is a key implicit decision made in many knowledge work organizations, which is that potential tasks should be stored at individuals.

You just push things towards people to hold on to until they're ready to work. work on it. So you have this buffer of work that's always growing. There's always more work in there than you can do. Having a infinite buffer connected to cybernack productivity does not work. Because what cybernack productivity does is it speeds up all the shallow, the visible shallow tasks, the overhead surrounding deeper work. It makes that go faster. That frees up time. New work comes in from the buffer to fill it. So the faster you're able to do this overhead surrounding your projects, the more projects are going to just fall in from your buffer onto your plate at the same time.

And that's because the deep efforts are less visible and those are more autonomous, so we don't imagine those of actually taking up or requiring time. The thing that's very visible is the actual interactive elements to talking to people, the finding the data, the jumping onto the meeting. So as that gets faster, more work falls out of this buffer to fill in the voids this creates. And so we just actually end up more and more busy. And if we push this to an extreme, we get to a place where we're spending all of our time incredibly efficiently, jumping from project to project, barely hitting keystrokes.

Google is finding this information, or maybe if we're more advanced, chat GPT is grabbing the information for us. We're automatically sending it over between different types of tools, and this data automatically goes over there, and it's the cloud, and it sinks on my thing. We're moving faster and faster and faster, and more and more work comes in to fill that void, and in the end, there's no time left to actually do the important stuff all this overhead's trying to support in the first place. and so we feel tired, we feel exhausted,

the context switches are making us dumber, and we're spending less time actually doing the underlying work that creates value, the actual work that is valued in the marketplace. I think a great example of this is to compare me to my grandfather. We were both professors. He was a notable professor. He did not own his first computer until after he retired.

I helped him set it up. I remember that. So his overhead, the shallow work that Cyberdeck productivity deals with, he was incredibly slow with that as compared to someone like me working 30 years later than him. No computer, no email. He didn't even have a word processor. He would write his books and articles longhand on legal pads. And then someone else, his secretary would take it and a typist would type it up and he would bring it back and he would mark it up. He would write letters by hand and memos. He would make a lot of phone calls. All of this stuff was way slower than what we would. we could do today. And yet he wrote something like 15 books. Endowed chair, eventually a provost of a university. He was an incredibly successful professor. We had the same job. He didn't have any of these high-speed cybernetic productivity tools. And yet at the core things that matter, mentoring students, teaching, and research, he did this much at a much higher level than the average

professor at a much higher level than even I am able to do today. Because actually speeding up that overhead probably would have just brought more overhead into his life. And as you bring more overheads your life, you don't write books faster. You don't mentor you don't mentor better. You don't teach better. So this is where I think cybernetic productivity failed. This is this infinite buffer effect. You speed up the overhead of work. We just put more work on our plate. We put more work on our plate. Everything gets worse. This is why I think it's a key explanation for some of the antipathy knowledge workers feel towards notions like productivity because when they hear that term,

they think about cybernetic productivity and they associate this with exhaustion. All right. So now that we've named this a philosophy, we've seen why it's not working well, we can ask what we can do about it. What are some solutions to the shortcomings of cybernetic productivity? I have three quick ideas to mention.

Number one would be managing workloads centrally. So cyberdict productivity failed because of the infinite buffer effect. The infinite buffer effect is created because individuals typically are in charge of managing the organization's work. Everything that exists that needs to be done is on somebody's plate existing in a message in their inbox or a comment that was made after a meeting where someone said, hey, can you handle this? If you want to get rid of the infinite buffers, have an alternative system in which the potential work is not stored by individuals, but is stored. centrally. And that the individuals only work on a small number of things at a time. And when they're done, they can then pull new work from this central system.

Now, some people who have an optimization mindset say, well, what's the difference if it's on my plate or a central system? You know, you work on what you work on. But it's not how things work. When you have five projects on your plate, you're going to start working on them if you have the time to do it. If on the other hand, there's four projects in a central system that you'll go back to and get a new one when you're done, you're just going to be stuck with the one. Cyberdetic productivity is actually quite useful if you're only working on a small number of things. If you have nothing else to fill the time, speeding up the shallow work and the overhead really does just give you more time to work on the main deep meat of the project.

So actually, having a small buffer works well if you have cyberdetic productivity implemented. All these tools we're investing in, all these tools that people talk about and talk endlessly about YouTube, actually are pretty useful if your work buffer is not too big. So manage it centrally. This is hard to do in big organizations. It requires a central reord. But if you work for yourself, you can simulate this. Have a clear distinction. These are things I'm going to work on. I can store information about them. If I have ideas about them, I can update them in this system. If someone sends a message relevant to a pending project, I can put them on there. But there's a firewall between those and what I'm working on now. And the things I'm actually working on is limited. You can make that clear distinction. And psychologically, it's going to make a difference because it will get rid of the infinite buffer effect. All right, the second solution here, reintroduce some friction. Sometimes this is what you have to do if you can't get around the infinite buffers to say, actually, I don't want all of this overhead and shallow work to be faster.

I want it to be enough of a pain that I'm not going to bring more projects into my active purview because my mental association about what they take up is going to be differing. It's a pain to work on projects. I can't move through things very quickly. This might mean, for example, I don't know, you can't email me. You know, here's my office hours. We have a weekly meeting. This is how we talk.

You have to wait to that to talk to me. I'm a pain to work with that slows down how many projects can be going on at the same time. Maybe you use on purpose all tools. You might not go back as far as my grandfather did it and write on yellow legal pads, but maybe you're not trying to get the very latest information organizational tools. You print things and put them in. files and it takes time and you might have to spend a whole morning to significantly upgrade your research files. You can't just clip things with plugins that you browser extensions,

you click in Chrome that automatically put a copy over an Evernode and syncs it up with your obsidian setup. Maybe you want it to be older and more creaky. So that when you think about doing research for something, you're thinking about spending hours and hours or putting days aside to do it. This might seem like you're losing time, but that might stop you from starting another project. It might help keep you focused. So you keep these type of things in mind. Don't necessarily make yourself faster.

Being too fast might make you work on too much. And of course, the final solution, which is the big solution we talk about a lot on this show, is to stop caring so much about cybernetic productivity and spend more time caring about the type of attention-centric productivity that we talk about here. So attention-citric productivity. which we also call multi-scale productivity has nothing to do with how fast you execute things and everything to do with how you allocate your limited time and attention. There's different scales this can execute on.

So in the short term, attention-centric productivity might mean you're being careful about how do I decide what to work on next? How do I set things up? So once I choose to do something, I've made my environment such that I have a made conditions well to actually accomplish it at a high level. I'm not distracted on the deep things, the shallow things are batched, etc. On the medium term, a centric attention-centric productivity is about, well, how do you organize, control the things through on your plate to make sure you're not forgetting about things, that it's simplified for you to make decisions about what should be

worked on when, and at the long-term attention-structivity is about how do you decide what comes onto your plate in the first place. Here you might even change your job or how your organization runs or makes major changes to make sure that what you're expected to do is reasonable. Attention-centric productivity doesn't particularly care about speed. It's not against it. If you have particular tools that speed up certain things or eliminate certain annoying activities you don't like, great. But it sees that as a personal preference and not critical to actually produce an important work in a sustainable way. Attention-stetric productivity says, what really matters is how you figure out what to do with your time.

What's a reasonable load, how to succeed with what you're doing, how to keep tabs on what you're doing, how to make smart decisions about what to work on when. This is typically what I think about when I think about productivity, and it's why there's often a gap between me and, say, YouTube productivity people who love cyberneck productivity. It's why there's often a gap between me and the anti-productivity crowd, desperately trying to get you to subscribe to their substack while they're writing substack articles about why capitalism is bad and you shouldn't try to make money, but give me my money. because I need money and talk about my capitalism is bad. Because this crowd is thinking about cybernetic productivity. I'm thinking about attention-centric productivity. So we get down to the bottom here a core distinction between productivity based on using tools to speed us up and productivity based on using our own minds and intuition to be intentional about how we approach our work.

This latter is not as interesting or as sexy. AI is not going to have a big impact here. There's no note-taking software that's going to have a big impact here. There's no particular app that's going to have a big impact here. A lot of it's going to be Google Docs and Trello and just careful reflection on the different elements of your jobs. But it tends to work a lot better. So anyways, this is just a riff.

Jesse, I just was reading about Norbert Weiner and artificial intelligence. I just had this riff of like, wait a second. This, whatever they call it here, machine usefulness. That's all we do in knowledge work. And it's still not working. It's because we don't know what's useful. And speed itself is not useful. So there we go. Cybernaq productivity. I shrug my shoulders. I think there's better ways to organize what we need to get done. That's good stuff. I never heard of your grandfather wrote 15 books.

Well, it's something like that. I mean, I might be making up that particular number, but it's something like that. He is a very productive scholar. He wrote a lot of books. He wrote a lot of articles, you know, multiple doctorates, spent time with a lot of cool people. He spent time, because there's a biography of him, but he spent time, so I learned some of this more recently. But he spent time at Union Seminary, and he would walk Central Park with Heschel. He spent a little bit of time out in Switzerland and got to know Carl Jung later in his life, was a big admirer of a Niebuhr when he spent some time at Harvard. He spent a lot of time at a lot of universities,

a lot of sort of sabbaticals and off years. But I just remember that notepads. You read everything on notepads. Yeah. It had a lot of books. He didn't really understand the internet. He had a lot of books, which is slower than being able to look something up.

But I don't know that slow was bad. Slow was not bad. He produced a lot of things and was pretty successful. So anyways, what I've done is I've gathered a collection of questions to do next. It all roughly sort of touch on cybernetic productivity or the alternative to cybernetic productivity. And so I want to get to those in a second. But before we do, I want to talk about a sponsor of this show, Shopify.

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So go to Grammarly.com slash go to download and learn more. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash go. All right, Jesse, speaking of go, let us go on to the next segment of the show and answer some questions. Who do we have first?

All right, first questions from Jeff from Toronto. Every interview I've ever been and has some question about time management or prioritization. What's the right way for me to ask about this when I'm trying to hire somebody? Should I ask the potential hire about their systems? Well, Jeff, it's an interesting question.

As someone who hasn't really done a lot of job interviews, at least not since I interviewed from Microsoft in college. That might have been the last job interview. Well, I guess I interviewed for it to be a professor. So that's like a job interview. But that's different because it takes a whole day and it's a stylized thing where you're giving talks and you have this CV.

But the last sort of corporate job interview I ever did was Microsoft. And Jesse, I don't know if I've told you this story, but the way they did it back then, this would have been 2004, was kind of brutal, right? So if you made it to the stage where they were going to fly you out to Redmond to interview for this position, you started in a conference room with all of the other people they flew out. There would be 10 people in the conference room.

And you knew you were all interviewing for the same position. In this case, it was this project manager program that Steve Balmer had created, where they took computer scientists and they sent you to business school and it was a competitive position. As the day goes on, you would interview with more and more people. As the day goes on, they'd move you to more and more senior people. But here was the catch. They started sending people home as the day progressed. Really?

Yeah. So as the day progressed, you would come back to the conference room, there'd be less people. And you get the lunch, there'd be less people. You get to the afternoon. So they were weeding people out, right, because they didn't want to waste a time of the higher up people. Because they're engineers, they're being very optimal. And engineers don't always understand things, for example, like how the human emotions work. So in the engineer's mind, they were thinking, well, we don't want, when we get up to a senior vice president, we don't want them talking to people.

So they just started, so you come back. And I guess they were just telling people like, okay, you're done, you can go home. And so there was less and less of us until, and, you know, spoiler alert and not the humble brag, but I was the last one left and got the job. offer. By the end of the day, it was like me and one other guy that were left. And then the final people we were interviewing with, the final guy, I don't know who it was, but I remember him talking about, oh, I was just over at Bill's house last night and we were blah, blah, blah. He was going on about how he was like close with Bill Gates. So this must have been someone who was really high up. Anyways, that was my experience with corporate job interviews. It was basically Survivor.

If you got rid of all the attractive people and replaced them with nerds and then put them in a context where no one understood like basic human emotions. So it was like that was it. It was like unattractive nerd survivor, basically. But I don't remember them talking about time management. So that's why I was interested in this question is Jeff is saying this is common now, which I kind of like. They'll ask you in a job interview about time management.

So Jeff's asking, what should he ask his potential interviewers? I have some ideas, but let me just preface this with the my core answer here is I don't care. Almost no one is good at this. And it's not too hard to create a culture or teach people how to have attention-centric productivity. If people don't listen to my show or I've read like two or three other similar books, they're going to be terrible at this. And I don't think that should be disqualifying to hire them because you're never going to find someone. Or if you do find someone, it's someone who spends too much time listening to productivity podcast. You don't want to hire them in the first place. So I definitely have a mindset of

it is your job as an employer to create a culture in which good time management, and by that, I really do mean this sort of multi-scale or attention-centric productivity is taught. Here's how we do it here. We respect this is what we want you to do. Let me tell you about how I do it. So I think this is more easily taught than it is sought out. That being said, if I was going to ask someone for a high-level position, let's say, and I cared how much do they think about productivity and time management, I would probably get

the key question. On a typical day, how do you decide what to work on next? Because that's really going to sort of cut to the quick a little bit. If they don't think at all about organization or time management, then they'll say, well, they'll just think about, they'll give some answer about, I'll think about in the moment my priorities and try to choose something important. If they're a cybernetic productivity type geek, they'll go on and on about different tech systems, which is also a warning, like, oh, man, this guy's going to be one of those guys who puts complex little code words in their email subject line to try to simplify the time. So you don't have to click on the email to read.

They have these acronyms and brackets in there. You're like, oh, my God, it's going to be annoying. So that's a warning sign too. But if they're actually sort of a Cal Newport type, they might talk about, well, you know, here's how I decide how to spend my time. You know, I time block my day. And the time block for my day is really, you know, when doing so, I keep task over here. And I have a weekly plan. And here's how I keep on track for the vision and how to make.

sure I have enough time. You'll hear about this sort of attention allocation type decisions. You'll hear them talking about if I schedule a meeting, I make sure to schedule other time, the process, the meeting, I want to give myself time to think. So if they're using the lingo of attention as a commodity to be deployed carefully and to be used with respect, if they have some awareness of human psychology and human neurology about how slow the mind is to shift context and how it burns out, that would be a really good sign. There would be really one to try to find that, you know, someone. I guess you could ask them that. Or

just make a veiled Cal Newport reference, like one of the geeky things we talk about. And if they know what that is, then they're good. Then they definitely know this stuff. I would say, Jesse, I'm trying to think what the code word would be.

I think here's the question. Here's the question. You say, well, let me just one more question. Let me ask you before we complete this interview. Do you agree that name of the wind is Brandon Sanderson's best book. And if they say yes, that is Sanderson's best book, then you know, they know us, and they've listened to us way too long, and they're on the ball.

So that would be my suggestion. So good. All right. What do we got next? All right. Next question is from Marie from New York City. I work in leadership development for a large health care institution. I think your ideas on work processes are potentially gaining.

changing for many of the leaders I work with, but I'm struggling with how to share it with them. This is difficult. It is difficult. I have done some of these events before. I have worked with C-suite types. I've worked with boards of directors. I've worked with the executive cores of Fortune 50 companies. It's not always my favorite thing because the corporate world is complicated.

It's more complicated than I understand is often. and more complicated than my ideas fully appreciate because in addition to just producing work, there's all these other constraints, these social and political constraints of, you know, disdivision traditionally has had this power and they gave it up and this executive EP. And it is a really complicated, it is a complicated world. But I will say what seems to help, Mary, more so than particular examples, more so than particular tactics, which might seem at first what you need. Can I be more specific? Can you give me more specifics? You don't really want to be specific when talking with leaders because leaders will hear specifics.

Oh, I use office hours plus shared documents plus whatever, docket clearing meetings. You give specifics and what they hear is where is there a problem with this? Where is there a potential danger with this? Where might this ruffle someone's feathers or get me in trouble? It is always easier not to do something new. Something new introduces the possibility of problems. So I always say with leaders, we're very aware of I don't want to do something that's going to create new problems. You want to get the core principles. And I think the core principles you want to get to when you're talking to a leader is to push them away from a cybernetic definition of productivity, get them away from what IT system can we buy that's going to generate more analytic insights from our data and ensure that we get data sharing at a higher velocity of information, accessibility. get them away from that.

They love that world because there's vendors and you spend money and they have slick slideshows and you feel like you're doing something. You've got to say that doesn't really matter. Yeah, you can speed stuff up, have more information. Great. But who cares? What matters is the brain. The human brain can only focus on one thing at a time

and needs relatively long refactory periods to switch from one target to another. This is what we should care about. We have a bunch of human brains. we want to think about things and produce value, they need time to do it. They need the ability to do things one at a time. And once we realize that, I would say, we then realize that context shifts are like productivity poison.

That's the thing we're trying to minimize. We don't need IT systems that makes the velocity of information transfer higher or the depth of analytical insights sharper. We need less context shifts. You want these leaders to be going through their day after talking to you, mentally in their mind, keeping a counter of, well, how many times they have to switch my attention to something else and back to something else? You want them to slowly become sort of disgusted with the reality that they discover. My God, every time I'm doing this, I can feel it now. I can almost feel the cerebral sludge that's building up as I keep switching back and forth.

I can see my concentration fading. I can see my energy dissipating. And then they start to think, okay, so when we think about productivity, what we think about is minimizing doses of this poison. Even if this slows us down, even if it introduces friction, even if that executive VP over there that has bad blood with me is going to get mad about it, even if it is a pain in the moment, now I realize this is what we have to do is stop the context shift. So we have to rethink everything.

How do we allocate work? How do we talk about work? How do we collaborate? what are our processes for moving information around? We are ready to go through the pain of building an attention-centric productivity environment, a workplace that actually respects how the human brain functions. And then they can come up with the very specific things that make sense for their work, for their tools, for the people they work with.

Then they can figure that out. So anyways, Murray, that's what I've increasingly come to realize. Forget examples and get the principles. Because if they're a leader at a big company or a large healthcare institution, they're smart. They're very smart. They notice the issues. They know what's not working. They can understand deep principles.

They can generate tactics out of it. So anyways, I've been big about that recently. The weeds are too messy in corporate America. It's why I don't go around and try to consult for companies and say, let me help you rebuild your communication protocols or something like this. Because the weeds are so thick and bespoke. And every company has their own very specific issues. and it's very difficult for an outsider to move through. And an outsider can only do so much anyways.

You need the people right there that are stuck in these weeds to recognize that a better plant needs to grow there. You need them to realize what the problem is. And then they can generate the solutions. They know more about their company than I do. They know more about their group than a leadership development executive does. So the best thing we can do is teach them what the issue is and then let them actually come up with problems.

That was a good analogy with the plant. Plants and weeds. Yeah. You know, I could do that, Jesse. I could be. This is my problem is, you know, I'll write about all the stuff I write about since 2015, basically. Everything I write about it in some ways about technology intersecting with different parts of our life. So technology intersecting with work, of course, is a big thing.

All this productivity talk is about work in an age of digital distraction and high velocity, cybernetic productivity notions. It's all about technology intersecting work. Digital minimalism is about technology intersecting our personal lives. This is what I care about, right? But the issue is I'll deal with a particular topic and I'll think about it deeply and produce some big ideas. And then I move on. But the problem is the ideas are still out there. So deep work had a bunch of ideas that I thought were very important.

But then I went on and wrote a bunch of other books. And yet there's a lot of people who are saying, well, can't you just come and help us do deep work? That's the issue. It's not my instinct. of let me just stick with a topic and really keep pushing it and promoting it. I like the idea. I want to understand. I get the pleasure out of understanding something new.

And by the time people are catching on with something, a lot of times I've moved on to sort of the next topic I'm trying to understand. So this is why I don't travel the world, you know, running workshops. This is probably pretty lucrative, actually, but running workshops about, you know, how to make your team deeper, building processes. I don't know. Actually, we could probably make a lot of money. Maybe you and I should just fly around the world and have people cancel their slack accounts and do office hours and do docket cleaning the jeans. We can wear suits. Then you wouldn't be able to read books in the woods like you're doing right now.

That's the problem. That wouldn't be as fun. Yeah, it's the problem. Yeah. Well, here's what we'll do like in Goodwill hunting when Ben Affleck went to the meeting with the NSA instead of Matt Damon. I'm going to send you and you're going to give like very bombastic speeches on my behalf that like involved for, for, whatever reason, like a lot of sort of onstage flexing and weightlifting. I don't know why.

I just think this would be great. Just to mystify people. Just have you run out and be like, focus is like... Correct form to deadlift is this. Exactly. Now, I don't know why I would want you having doing deadlifts. I just have this vision of you in like gym pants and like a muscle shirt. Like, okay, deep work is like lifting heavy weights.

Every rep. I can't even lift that heavy weights. No, I know. And it's not like this is something you do. I just thought it would be funny. I'm just thinking like what the opposite would be. And then to flip it around, then you should have me take over some of your

sports coaching responsibilities. And then I would just be terrible at that. Yeah. Well, the lacrosse ball, we have to think about it like an idea that is evolving through a network of competing ideas. And so is it really, are you catching the ball? or is it an idea for formulating? And so that's what we'll do.

I'm actually going to an event right after this. This is why I'm wearing a nicer shirt is right after we get off the air here, I'm going over to the Rockefeller Center, which is the school of public policy and social sciences here at Dartmouth and I'm doing a fireside chat. I'm going to sit in a chair and be interviewed by another professor in theory for an audience. we'll see but so i got it that's cool you had the fireside chats in your uh courses back in the day

i took those before i even knew you didn't i know exactly you're talking about scott and i scott young and i had fireside chats and um i don't was this in you could hear the fire crackling yeah so the bat put in the fire crackling sound that's great i love it i love it yeah yeah we did these fireside chat so this would have been for was it life of focus or was it it was focus yeah yeah yeah so we did these five fire site chats, where we would talk about what had happened in that week of the course. And then, yeah, shout out to VAT, Scott's longtime producer, I think added fire sounds. I'm actually talking to Scott, I think, tomorrow.

So how much that. All right. Anyway, speaking of I have to do an event, let's keep rolling here because I'm about to go on stage. All right. So let's get to another question. All right. Next question is from Ben. You seem to have a strong ability to break down phenomena around you into systems and

processes. How much of this is a systematic approach on your part versus intuition? Well, Ben, that's all training. You know, I have been thinking about things in terms of systems. So breaking down behaviors or goals or hidden processes, breaking down and clarifying them and then using that clarification to either better understand or direct your decisions in life. I was doing this at a very unusually young age. I mean, I guess college is when I I did my first sort of early in college, my first paid writing. There's a piece I did. God, I don't know where this is.

But I remember including this piece as a writing sample for my agent. At the time, I was trying to convince her to represent me for my first book, How to Win at College. And, you know, I was 20. She's like, okay, I need writing samples. Like, I don't know if you can even write. And I remember one of the articles I had written when I was 19 or 18. I forgot where I published it.

But I just, I remember the title was the ABC's, of something productivity. And I've broken it down at the ABC or whatever. I always thought that way because as a teenager, I read a lot of self-help, I read a lot of time management,

I read a lot of pragmatic nonfiction and business advice books. I read all these books because I had my dot-com company back then. And so during that formative part of my brain's development, it developed listening to David Allen recordings, listening to business books,

listening to the 1990s, of New York-based big idea writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Johnson and Clive Thompson. And so I just, I grew up. My brain developed around that and I spent my entire life doing it. So that also comes easier for me. I like to think of myself as the, uh, the Bryce Harper of coming up with systems in the sense that, you know, Bryce Harper was a precociously young hitter. He spent his entire childhood hitting.

I spent my entire childhood doing something that turned out to be multiple orders of magnitude less lucrative, which was coming up with ideas. And there's no $330 million contract for idea writing. But anyway, so bend, that's practice. If you do more of it, you get better. But it's sort of a parlor trick. And it's good to recognize this type of writing when you see it. I don't know how important it is for other people that develop it, though.

It's, I don't know. It's its own thing, Jesse. I can, in any situation, I can come up with a theory or system about what's happening, about some sort of dynamic that's kind of interesting. And 90% of the time it's empty underneath. But I can come up with something in the moment that sounds good. Yeah, you give everything really good names still. I know.

It's what I do. Again, it's like Bryce Harper, but a lot less lucrative. All right. Let's do one more question. All right. Next question is from Clemens from Vancouver. I'm a big fan of the philosophy, behind your productivity system, especially time blocking.

Where I'm struggling is to incorporate your role-based task boards into my approach. As a manager, what's important to me is often time-sensitive of something. How should I build my task boards? All right. So, I mean, Clemens, I know that time sensitivity is this urgent or is it not urgent. I know that that is important, and you can capture that in your taskboards, but you can tackle that at a smaller scope. So my argument with my various attention-centric productivity ideas, one of the ideas about tasks

are that you should organize like tasks in the same place. And I think role is the right way to organize it, not sensitivity. So you have a task board for different roles or major projects, for example. And what this means can be different depending on your job. But it's content-specific. The content is similar of the task. tasks of the same board. The reason why that's similar is because when we think about a particular role of this type,

where all the tasks you're seeing are involving the same type of activities or information or the same type of project, that means everything you're looking at is pulling from the same semantic context inside your brain. And that is much more easy to work with. It's much easier to work with. So if I confront, okay, here's a board of all the stuff related to my teaching. I can now have my mind load up the teaching networks, thinking about courses and my students and what needs to be done. And once it's loaded up that network, I can now work with all the stuff on this board and think about it and organize it and work on it and tackle some things.

That's all going to come relatively easily because I have the right, I mean, the same cognitive context as I move from task to task. If I instead tried to organize my task by, let's say, time sensitivity, so now I have a board of here's everything that is due in a week versus doing a month. month, the content of these tasks could vary wildly. So now it's much harder for my brain to deal with because here is a task about teaching, here's a task about research, here's a task about an upcoming trip. Those are all completely semantically separate context, and it's going to be much harder for my brain to make use of that. So what I suggest is organizing your task by similar content.

Then within each of these boards, you can organize by time sensitivity. And you can say, this is due this week, what I'm working on this week, what I need to think about coming up for the next week, is. You can organize them that way. And so when you're trying to figure out, then, you're doing weekly planning and you're looking at your task boards. What do I need to make time on? Okay, so you're going to have multiple boards that maybe each have urgent stuff on it. That's fine.

All right. You have multiple boards with urgent stuff on. You can look at them all and figure out. Here's the things I'm working on this week. That's not that big of a deal. But anyways, that's why I organize my main level of organization is content. And then I organize within the content. It's all about setting up a context that your brain can.

work with more easily. You know, Jesse, we have one more question here. I'm going to answer fast. Let's just do it. Let's answer. Let's do the last question. I'm going to, I'm feeling, I'm feeling fast. I'm going to give a fast answer. Yeah, I'm actually excited because I wanted to hear your riff on this. It's from Jeremy. I'm a legislative consultant. So deep work and distractions are both key elements of my job. My time is consumed by entertaining, attending, attending, and preparing for meetings, tracking legislation and current events, and conducting borderline

admin tasks. I currently am finding it difficult to find time for deep work, such as learning and writing about policy ideas, studying legislative history. How would you go about balancing distractions and deep work? Well, Jeremy, I would say you're a consultant. I think you're probably a solo entrepreneur here based on the context of this question. It's just you run your own consultancy. You don't work for a big firm. First two hours of everyday deep work. That's it. work backwards from that. Not that hard to work backwards from. It means, okay, I don't schedule meetings before noon because I want to make sure that I have at least an hour to prep for a meeting or travel to a meeting if needed.

I might have to move a meeting or an opportunity to the next week because I only have so many slots when the morning is not free and whatever. That'll take you a month to get used to. You'll have maybe 10% of the people you deal with will have some friction because of this and then they'll get over it. and you only have to think about again, two hours every morning, focused on learning new skills developing your business. It's that simple. I think sometimes what happens is

we get worried about some of the small issues that will arise, most of those being temporary, and we let the fear of those small issues keep us in a state that is incredibly worse. We're willing to trade. This client might be annoyed and I might not be able to work with that person

because they only like to work in the meetings. That might happen in the next three weeks. you're willing to trade that for over the next few years, my business stagnates. My ability to, like, master this new piece of legislation, which could bring in hundreds of thousands of new business goes away. And when you actually see those tradeoffs, like, this is crazy. I annoy this person. I don't work with that person anymore.

Of course, I'll make that trade for all these benefits to be able to systematically work deeply on what matters. But in the moment, we just see the short-term pain. So I'm going to suggest something like that. It doesn't have to be exactly that, but honestly, that's the easiest thing. Start your workday a little early. You know, do 830 to 10-30. deep work with a ritual, you get the right coffee, you go to a place, there's no email until

that's done. And I'm telling you, it'll take about a month for you to adjust your habits to make that tractable, tractable. It'll take about a month before your clients get used to that, and then everyone will be fine with it. And your trajectory, the compound interest of what you're going to be able to grow to and accomplish is just going to exponentially turn upwards. Two hours every morning. All right. All right. So that's it for questions. I want to move on to the final segment of the show. It's where we talk about something interesting that you and my listener sent in

to my interesting at calnewport.com email address. Before we do, let me briefly talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That's our good friends at Blinkist. The Blinkist app allows you to understand the most important points from over 5,500 nonfiction books and podcast. It offers you these short summaries called Blinks

that you can either read or listen to while you do other things, they take about 15 minutes. So in about 15 minutes, you can get the main points from thousands of popular nonfiction books. Now, the way that I recommend using this the way I use it, the way Jesse uses it, is as a triad service for your reading habit. You hear about a book, you're thinking, should I buy this and add it to my list? go listen to read the blink first. That almost always will tell you, oh, yes, yes, yes, this will be great. I really want to learn more about these points. Or this isn't what I thought it was.

Or it is what I thought it was, but honestly, the blink was all I needed to know. I don't think I want to spend 250 pages with this. So it's a triage service to make sure that the books you actually buy and try to read are books that you know you're really going to like. This in turn, not only makes the most of your reading time, but helps you become a more serious reader because your experience with these books is positive. You're able to figure out ahead what you want to read. The side benefit of this is as you're reading blinks for books that you don't end up buying,

you are still getting useful information. So let's say your hit rate is one book out of every four, one book out of every four that you read or listen to the blink to you buy that book. You're still getting four books worth of ideas. And one of those books are getting a really deep understanding, but you can draw from the summaries of those other. three books to help add context your understanding. So it really also helps your grasp of complex ideas. It's, again, like an accelerant for how quickly you can master fields because you're

not only reading good books, but you're at an even higher rate getting key summaries of related books. So if you're a serious reader and most of my listeners are or aspire to be, Blinkist is a great sidekick for that endeavor. We also want to mention that there is a temporary service going on right now, a temporary, I guess we'd call it offer called Blinkets Connect, that will allow you to share your premium accounts. In a sense, to get two premium accounts for the price of one. You can share one with a friend, so I think that's cool. So anyways, right now Blinkus has a special offer just for our audience.

Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial and get 25% off a Blinkist Premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. And for a limited time, you can use Blinkus Connect to share your premium account

and you will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. You need to be using a VPN. And if you're going to use a VPN, it should be Express VPN. Let me explain what I mean by this. What does a VPN do? Well, typically, if you connect to the internet, people can see what websites or services you're talking to. So if you're connected to a wireless access point, you know, let's say at a Starbucks, anyone nearby with the right

software can read your packets out of the air and say, oh, I see what website Cal is talking to. Even if you're at home connected to the internet through your home, your internet service provider sees which websites you're talking to, and they can sell that data. And guess what? They often do. They use it to profile you and say what types of products that should be served in your direction. A VPN allows you to avoid that. Here's the way a VPN works.

If I want to access a website or a service, I don't directly talk to that website or service. I instead talk to a VPN server. and I tell that VPN server with an encrypted message that no one listening to me at Starbucks, no one at my internet service provider can read, I tell it with an encrypted message, here's who I really want to talk to. And the VPN server talks to that site or service on my behalf,

encrypts the response and sends it back to me. Right? So now all anyone can see, whether they're sniffing your packets or that your internet service providers, that you're talking to a VPN. They don't know who that VPN is helping you talk to. Now, ExpressVPN is an industry leader in this technology.

You install it on your devices. You turn it on with a click. And then you use your web browser, your apps, just like you normally would. All of this stuff with the encryption and talking to the server, all of that happens in the background. You don't even have to worry about it. I like ExpressVPN because the software works well. It's seamless. I like ExpressVPN because they have servers all around the world.

So wherever you are in the country or the world, there's probably a VPN server nearby you can select to connect to, which means you have a very fast connection. They have good bandwidth for these servers as well. So you're really going to, you're not even going to know you're using a VPN, but you get all those privacy advantages. So stop allowing anyone who wants to to monitor your internet use. Secure your internet today with the VPN I trust for online protection,

which is ExpressVPN. So visit ExpressVPN.com slash Deep, and they will give you three extra months free. So that's ExpressVPN.com slash Deep. expressvpn.com slash deep. Don't forget to slash deep to get that three extra months free. All right. Let us,

let's do something interesting, Jesse. Now, typically in the studio, I'd be able to pull this up on a screen. I can't do that from here. Though I'll figure out how to do that going forward. We're tricking out the HQ North for the rest of the summer. So don't worry.

Soon I'll be able to pull up an article. But for now, I'm just going to read the article. I have it here in front of me. I will say I was telling Jesse about this earlier. offline. There is some studios at Dartmouth that I can rent. Now, they're not really, the one I have in mind is not for podcasting. It's really for doing like book on tape

audio recording. It's a room where every surface of sound baffles. But what I'm thinking about doing is bringing in a ring light and a nice camera and just setting it up on there and using that for podcast, completely soundproof darkened room. Could be really cool. So I'm going to check that out I'm going to check that out soon. It'd be great. That's so good. They also have a podcast studio, but it's not for video podcast.

It has all the equipment you need for normal podcasting, but that might look okay in there. So I'm going to check that out too. So anyways, I have a lot of ideas for our tech is going to grow as I get increasingly bored. Up north. Anyways, this is all to say. I can't show you the article I'm reading today, but I will tell you about it. And there's a link in the show notes. This is an article from the Hollywood Report.

Porter from June. It's a recent article. The title is, Taylor Sheridan does whatever he wants. All right. So Taylor Sheridan, if you don't know, was the broke actor turned screenwriter,

turned television hitmaker. He is the showrunner and head writer behind a lot of hit shows, including most notably Yellowstone. He's also written, he has his great trilogy, Sicario, Wind River.

I forgot the other one. It's a good movie trilogy of these sort of modern, gritty westerns. Kings of Providence, 1923, a Yellowstone prequel, 1883, a Yellowstone prequel.

He's doing all these sorts of shows. And so there's this big profile about Taylor Sheridan that's in the Hollywood Reporter. Now, I'll tell you, an interesting thing, before I get to the quote I want to read, an interesting thing I learned in this profile

is this giant ranch in Texas came up for sale. So I saw how we understand Taylor Sheridan's work habits. A giant rat, the four-sixes ranch in Texas. As a native Texan myself, I have heard of the four-sixes. It's over kind of west near the panhandle. It's roughly the size of Los Angeles. It's 300,000 acres or something like that.

Some huge amount, some huge amount of land. Anyways, it came up for sale. Came up for sale. And Taylor, he lived on a ranch, a small, ranch of, you know, a thousand acres. It came for sale and Taylor really wanted to buy this ranch. So he said, it's famous, right? He's like, this would be great. It's the most famous ranch in Texas. Well, the king ranch is more famous. It was his famous old ranch. He said, how much is it going to be? And they said, $350 million. And so Taylor was like, I'm $330 million short. But hold on. Hold on.

Just like, don't sell it yet. And he goes around because his shows are very successful. And he signs a 200,000. million dollar deal with Paramount for like doing all these sorts of shows and basically between that deal and bringing in a couple of minority investors they bought this ranch so he's now writing out of his mind just writing out of his mind because he wanted this ranch so he's writing you know four shows or something crazy not not very slow productivity of him anyways how is he doing this so this brings us up to the quote i liked this is from the article Sheridan often writes in a one-room cabinet he built in Wyoming. He's always a fast writer, he says, but after building this script-generating isolation bunker,

he was suddenly able to grind out episodes of hit TV shows at a phenomenal speed. I've written many episodes in 8 to 10 hours, he claims. So I like this idea that, like, okay, now he has to write four shows or something so he can afford this ranch. And so he built the bunker and built his whole life around just writing. shows and it really worked. And so when we hear Taylor story, we say, well, that's exhausting, all the different, he's so busy that he has to do this to even keep up with the work. But the takeaway I had is, you know, imagine if you had the isolation bunker and you didn't have to pay off a $350 million ranch. And you were just doing a normal type of, you're writing a book

a year or like one television show. You spend two weeks and you'd be done. I mean, I'm just thinking about the degree to which we often let time scarcity and busyness push us into the way we work. But we never think about taking the things that really help us work, to help us deep, the sort of emergency measures. And if we made that sort of core, we could actually have a lot more time. So I just love this thought experiment of, you know, Taylor Sheridan without the $350 million ranch, but with the isolation riding bunker in Wyoming, could go up there for a month. and finish an episode of a show, and then spend the other 11 months on his much smaller, but still serviceable ranch.

So anyways, we see in extreme situations the ability to produce great work through extreme concentration. And I just wish we had more examples of that in non-extreme situations, more examples of that in a slow productivity context of, I just do this thing all out. And then when I'm done, I'm done, and I rest. And so there's some inspiration to pull out of there. there's a lot of stress coming out of this article, but there's some inspiration to pull out of there as well.

Jesse, I think we need a deep work ranch, by the way. This is my new conclusion. You're pretty much in one right now. Well, okay, this is a good point. So the house I'm in now is, you know, it's in town in Hanover. It's on the pond up here. But my brother-in-law, who's staying up in Vermont this summer,

sent me a link for a property nearby. It's in Vermont near here. I don't know. I don't know the geography well. 120 acres and a couple outbuildings, some barn, some agriculture land. And there's a creek and the whole thing kind of at the end of it, I think the property goes all the way down,

has frontage on fairly lake, fairly lake or whatever. And he was like, yeah, this could be like a pizza restaurant because there's this big pizza oven there. And like we could build a deep work cabin. It's like, yes, that's what we need. We need our, We need this deep work north.

I guess it's not a ranch in New England. I don't know what you would call it a ramble or something like that. That's what we need. 120 acres is a lot of upkeep. Well, you know, I didn't want to broach the topic now, but I was assuming you could take care of that. Run the tractor. I'd be more inclined to like rent, you know, rent something from somebody who has a 120 acre ranch.

See, this is smarter. This is smarter. Okay. So what we need is a deep work fan with 120 acres. he was like not often there. Okay, that's going to be, that's going to be the new idea. All right.

All right. But you pretty much have that scenario right now this summer. So you should, you know, that's going to be sweet. No, it's true. We do because down the road from here is the golf course, but they,

they canceled the golf team and closed the golf course at Dartmouth. But the golf course is still there. So they've just temporarily just call it a park. And they're still mowing it and everything. So there's, right down the street is 18 holes worth a golf course that you can just, it's just a giant park. And then it's surrounded by woods that have kilometers and kilometers of cross-country and running trails.

So, yeah, it kind of right. It's like I have the Deepark Ranch, but I don't have to upkeep it. And also, like, a lot of random people invest are walking their dogs on it. But that's okay. I think it's a fair trade. Yeah. It's like St. Andrews on a Sunday. Yep, exactly.

The old course, they all walk their dogs on that course. All right. Well, anyway, speaking of, I don't know, walking places, I'm about to be on a Sunday. I'm about to be on stage. I'm supposed to be on stage in like 10 minutes. So I got to go. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week, probably in the standard DeepWork HQ as I temporarily am coming back to visit D.C.

So hopefully, I will be seeing you all sort of in the old studio next week. 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. 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

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