Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 272: The Essential Tools (w/ David Epstein)

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

In this episode, Cal reviews what he believes to be the four essential tools for feeling on top of everything you need to do. If you’re missing one of these, you might struggle. If you use all four, you’re probably safe never thinking about “productivity” again. Cal is then joined by friend of the show, New York Times bestselling author David Epstein, to answer listener questions about their personal struggles to take control of their lives.  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  Deep Dive: The Productivity Toolkit [2:30]  - What is the most underrated productivity superpower? [35:05] - Should I journal? [43:59] - How do I build a system to help me remember things? [48:23] - Can I use a split-day strategy to time block a reactive job? [52:01] - Help! I’m stuck at age 30. How do I get unstuck? [54:42]  CAL REACTS: How can we make learning as addictive as social media? [1:16:06]  Links:  youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo  Thanks to our Sponsors:  rhone.com/cal grammarly.com/podcast policygenius.com/deepquestions mybodytutor.com  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. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse, it's the day before Halloween that this comes out. Yeah, baby. Which is exciting. People are wondering, I'm assuming, where is Jesse Skeleton? As is the tradition. I have to tell you my audience, my loyal audience.

the reason why Jesse Skelton is not here is that he is in the doghouse with me. What happened, and Jesse you know about this is I asked, I delegated, I will say, to Jesse Skelton, what I thought was an important interview, right, with an author friend of mine, the number one New York Times bestselling author, David Epstein. I asked Jesse Skelton to interview him. It did not go well. And if you're interested, we have posted this. We'll post this video so you can see what happened.

happen. Just go to the deeplife.com slash listen. This is episode 272. It'll be one of the video clips at the bottom. If you want to see how that went awry. And if you don't want to go watch that clip, as I always say, congratulations, because you've avoided wasting five minutes of your life. But anyways, that's what's going on with Jesse Skeleton. So go check out that clip at episode 272 if you want to see the disaster that was

Jesse Skeleton trying to do a famous author interview. If we do actually have a productive show here, my notes say, don't worry, we have a productive show that won't make you question humanity. So if you've watched a Jesse Skeleton clip, you may be questioning the value of humanity. But trust us, we do have a good show here, good deep dive, some questions and a segment to follow after that. A little bit of housekeeping before we get into it. Again, if you want to watch what you're hearing, you just go to the deeplife.com slash listen. this is episode 272. The videos are at the bottom of the episode page.

You can watch the full thing or watch clips on that page. As always, if you like the show, leave a review that helps or subscribe, etc. All right, so let's just get into it with our deep dive. So if you find yourself obsessively buying new productivity tools or productivity software, if you find yourself watching endless YouTube videos about advanced notion tips or trying to get your zapier automations working, and yet you still feel stressed. You still feel like you don't have control over everything going on in your life. I want to help you. The goal for today's deep dive is to go through four essential tools that you need to build your productivity toolkit.

What I mean by this is tools that if you omit any one of these, there will probably be a notable issue in your attempts to organize your life. But if you have all four of these, you probably don't have to think another minute about productivity. That's what I mean by essential. So I will go through those. Stick with me here because after I go through these four tools, I have a special guest who knows what he's talking about, who is going to join me. And he's going to help me with the questions. And we'll get into this a little bit deeper.

All right. But let's roll four tools, I think, are essential for being organized. Number one, this is not exciting, but it is absolutely necessary, your calendar. Now, this seems obvious, but actually, you'd be surprised how often when I'm talking to someone is having a hard time getting their arms around everything they have to do that I discover that they are not taking their calendar seriously. They use it sometimes. Not everything is on there. They don't check it every day. So it doesn't sound sexy, but it's absolutely fundamental to being organized.

is having a calendar that you trust. It needs to be digital, especially if you're in knowledge work. You have too many things happening in your life to try to keep track of just on paper. Digital also allows you to attach information to your appointments. Here is the details about where this meeting is. Here's the notes I need to keep in mind

before I go on and do this interview. You can set up notifications to remind you of appointments that are coming up. You can, as I do, have a separate calendar. that is just for reminders, so it's not for actual appointments that are scheduled, but for reminders for that day. Don't forget this is due soon. Don't forget there's an event later at night. So you need to take your calendar seriously. There's no way to avoid that. I'll only give you an advance tip if you already use a calendar, a tool such as calendar to

control access to this calendar. Now, this is more important than you might imagine because there is a tension that occurs in most people's relationship with their calendar. There is a tension between their time and what is reasonable for their time and their social instincts. So what happens is often someone lets you know they want to meet with you. Hey, when can we get a call on the calendar? Your social instincts kick in. This is someone I know. I want to be personable and helpful to someone I know. And it becomes a game of when can I find a spot anywhere on my calendar that works for this person. And if I can find that spot, we win the game.

And what happens is this doesn't scale well. And soon you find your days are fragmented with appointments here and there. And there's never any room left for you to actually get other things done. This is where having an access tool like Callend Lee works because it allows you in advance to specify to the tool. These are the times on these days that I want to be open to meetings. And when it comes time, then, that the person you know or you care about or you work with says, hey, we should talk. We should get a call, whatever. When you point them towards this tool, you are saving yourself from having to transition into that social interaction mode.

The tool is saving you from yourself. It is showing you times that you predetermined at a more sober moment are good times for meetings. The person on the other side just appreciates the clarity of great, I can select something and be done with this. That's my advance tip there. Separate scheduling from your deepest social instincts. All right, tool number two out of the four, an obligation slash status list. Now, I'm purposefully being careful with my language here. Typically, you would say for this thing I'm describing, you would say, oh, yes, you're talking about a task list or a to-do list, but I don't want to use that terminology.

I want to be more specific about this. So when I say an obligation status list, I'm capturing two things. One, what are the things that should be on this list? Well, I'm going to say obligations. Anything that you have committed to do, you want that written down somewhere where you don't have to keep it in your head. Now, why is this different than a task list? Not everything that is on your list of commitments is an actual task yet or something that's just waiting for you to execute. It could be, for example, that you are waiting to hear back from someone else about the next step of a project.

And this is a project that's on your mind because you've committed to do this project. but there's no actual task that you're writing down here for you to do. You're putting a stake in the ground to use David Allen terminology so that you don't have to, you won't forget about this and you don't want to have to just keep track of it in your head. This is why I add on the other side of that slash status. So in this list, you have all the obligations you've committed to, and you have a clear indication of their status. Again, this is something I think task list often miss.

The status could be do this as soon as possible, or the status could be back burner. We're not looking for time to do this right now, but we don't want to forget about it because there might be a better time in the future when we are going to do this. This status might be waiting to hear back from someone about this. So I think obligation slash status list captures better the goal of this tool,

which is to make sure that all the things you would otherwise be trying to keep track of in your head have a place where they can be. And these things are more expansive than simply, here's a task that I need to do. All right, let's get advanced here. I want to give an advanced tweak on each of these four tools I talk about. So for the obligation status list, I'm going to give you two ideas. One, separate these lists by roles.

We talk about this often on the show, but instead of having just one master list for everything on your plate, have a separate one for the different roles in your life. And I don't just mean professional and non-professional, though that is an important distinction. But within, for example, your professional life, if you have multiple roles, separate lists for each. As I've talked about again, again and again on this show, I separate out my role as a teacher. So the professor teaching part from the research role in my life, from the writing role of my life. Those are all professional obligations, but I separate the roles. You might do something similar with your personal related obligation status list.

There could be family household stuff might be different than the softball league that you're very serious about and you're the commissioner of and you keep that all separate. Why do we do that? Because cognitive context switching is expensive. You don't want to be encountering obligations from completely unrelated cognitive context at the same time. Your brain is a hard time trying to switch back and forth between those contexts. It's better to be immersed in a single context and work on that until you're ready to switch completely to a number. another context. The other advanced tip I would give here is go digital. I like to use Trello because I can have columns be my statuses and the cards can take on them lots of other digital

information. So if there's files related to this obligation, I can attach it to the card. If there's email correspondence that is relevant to this particular obligation, I can copy and paste it onto the back of the card. If there's a checklist of things related to this obligation, I can put it on the virtual card related to the obligation. So take advantage of that flexibility, use columns for statuses, and you can use distinct boards for roles. You can use advanced tools here to do your obligation status list correctly. All right, tool number three, multi-scale planning documents. Long-time listeners of this show know that I'm a big advocate of multi-scale planning. What is my plan for the quarter? What is my plan for? What is my plan

for the week. What is my plan for today? That is sort of an optimal division of scales for trying to keep yourself moving towards the things you need to get done without getting too far off track. So one of the essential for tools is to actually just have those documents. Here's my quarterly plan. Here's my weekly plan. Here's my plan for what I am doing today. I mean, again, I am repetitive about pushing multi-scale planning, but it's one of the most important things that most people don't do. So if we're going to talk about essential tools for feeling like you're in control of everything you have to do, something to keep track of your plan on those three scales is necessary.

My advanced suggestion here is that when it comes to the daily plan, have a separate analog notebook or other type of capture device for that plan. I mean, obviously, you could use my time block planner or you could use another notebook of your choice, but having an analog notebook. for your daily plan is an advanced tip because what does this allow you to do? Execute and reference your daily plan without having to necessarily be on a computer. There's a lot of times during your day where you probably are on a computer anyways. It's convenient, but there might be other times when you're not.

Your plan says go for a walk to think through this idea, followed by go do this errand and then come back and, you know, work on reading this book. And you might not want to have anything to do with a glowing screen during that period. If your daily plan is analog, you have it with you. For your weekly and quarterly plan, who cares? You're looking at the weekly plan once a day. You're going to look at your computer once a day anyways. Your quarterly plan, you look at once a week.

I don't care where that is, but your daily plan being analog is an advanced tip there. Our fourth and final tool here, a core systems document. This is psychology hacking at this point. Have a piece of paper somewhere where you write down, These are the actual systems I'm implementing. So we talked about having multi-scale planning documents, but somewhere you want to write down, I do multi-scale planning. You might have a really good obligation status list, but somewhere you want to write down, I keep an obligation status list that I look at each day when I make my daily plan and I look at at the end of the day before I shut down. Somewhere have written down, these are the actual systems I follow to organize my life.

The reason why this is important is because otherwise your mind interprets these as fluid. I experiment with this. I experiment with that. Why don't I set up some other sort of software here? Knowing instead, no, this is my configuration right now. These are what I'm doing. Let me remind myself of what I'm doing. Just knowing that there is a root or core to the different organizational ideas or systems you have helps your mind commit to it.

Now my advanced tip here is to laminate it and put it where it is easily visible. You don't need a lamination machine. It's fine to buy a clear plastic sheeting. I used to do this. So it feels more protected than a sheet of paper. And just have it where you'll see it. Now, this is not really about remembering because it takes, what, three days before you say, I know exactly what's on there.

It's more about that psychological boost. Yes, these are my systems. This is what I've committed to. I have systems. and it really does keep you on those systems. It also allows experimentation to be much more clear and deliberate, because when you want to experiment with something different, you can go to that core system document.

This is the experiment I'm running. I'm going to try using this new approach, this new tool. Maybe after a month, then I'll go back and check and see how it's doing. It adds structure to this part of our professional lives that we often make implicit. That it's just a haphazard collection of things that we fall into the habit of doing. It can fall right back out of the habit of doing just as, easily. So, of course, systems document, a little thing, but it helps add a internal structure

to your whole setup to try to keep control over what you have going on. Right, two things I want to note about this. First of all, a common thread that unites all four of these tools is that they're relatively technology agnostic. Unlike a lot of YouTube productivity content, for example, or productivity, hardcore productivity podcast, I am not that interested. interested in hypertuning your custom software setup. I don't care about you having some hacked Microsoft connect that allows you to do

hand gestures that will then be interpreted through chat GPT and then fed through a Zapier script to make sure that your notion database of tasks for next week is automatically color-coded. That's a hobby. That's like being into knitting or fixing up your bicycle. And it's fine if you're into it, but it really is not necessary to be organized. So I don't care what technologies you use. Most of what I just described here, you could probably do with a stack of legal pads and a 10-cent pin that you stole from the bank. I mean, I don't really care how you implement this.

It's the systems that matter, not the technology or the details of the technology. Of course, the one exception is if you don't have my time block planner, you'll go blind. But we all know that. So that's a thread that goes through this. I'm relatively technology agnostic. The second thing I want to argue here is that I do think this is in some sense a complete, set. And what I mean by a complete set is that if you neglect one of these four things, you will probably feel the effects of that. If you don't have a calendar in your life, there's a lot of

stress that comes from that. There's a lot of lack of control or awareness of your time that comes with that. If you have no obligation status list, you're going to be trying to keep track of things in your head is very stressful. Go read David Allen. That whole book is a psychology book. People say it's a productivity book. Getting things done is a psychology book. It's about reducing the stress of having too many things to do. So if you're missing one of these four, you're going to see a problem. On the other hand, the reason why I say it's a complete set, the other

reason is if you do these four things and never again think about the word productivity or organization, never again consume any content on this topic, you'll probably be fine. That's enough. And then you can move on with the stuff that really matters, you know, having a vision, executing,

structuring out your life towards depth and away from shallows and distractions. It's not to say there's not other things you can do that could be helpful or interesting, and some people are more into this than others, but this is the essential. It'd be a new Portonian. I know Jesse and I always argue about the right turn. A new Portonian, you want those four things.

You want those four things going on. All right, so let me bring in someone now. I want to bring in a guest to help us talk about these topics and then answer some questions about them. It's my friend and the author, David Epstein. David's the number one, New York Times best selling. author of range. David, let me see if I get the subtitle right from memory.

Why generalist. So far so good. Why generalist are the downfall of America. Did I get that right? That's not right. That was the working title. That was working title. That was working title.

I decided to replace it before it came out. Why generalist something something specialist? Triumph in a specialized world. Triumph. I was going to say Trump. I was like you probably didn't say Trump. Triumph in a specialized world. Okay.

Also the author of the sports gene. Yep. One of my favorite. books, both New York Times bestsellers. Friend of the show, he's been on the show before, a past episode. Anyways, I was hanging out, so I said, why don't you, why don't you come on, why don't you come on, Mike? All right. So, David, let me get your take on this because, A, you are a productive person in the sense that you produce really good books.

You produce your newsletter, which is fantastic. Once every six years, though, I should add, so. Slow productivity, my friend. Give us your newsletter name. I really like your newsletter. Range widely. Range widely, yeah. And you have studied, especially in that newsletter and in your book,

book range, a lot of people who have done a lot of interesting things. These generalists that have done really interesting things. So you've seen productivity from the standpoint of results. People who do cool things, not from fiddling or whatever. So what's your reaction here? What am I missing? I don't know that I'd say you're missing anything, but I think to emphasize a few of your points, I mean, you mentioned having a document for your systems, right, so that you can do much more deliberate experimentation. Yeah. And I think that is absolutely a theme with a lot of people that I researched. is that they have one way or another, their experimentation is very deliberate, right?

So, like, when I was writing about generalists, like, you can become someone who just pinballs around and is kind of trying things intuitively at all times. Sure. But I think the people who became productive through those experiments had some system where it was like, here's the thing I'm going to try. Yes.

I'm going to come back and reflect on, did that meet my expectations or not, and where do I pivot next from that? So there's a whole literature about what's called self-regulatory learning that has to do with this, where, you know, you say, It basically, if I had to boil down this massive body of literature, it comes down to reflection, like having a deliberate system for reflection.

So, like, when I was trying to write my first book, I'd never written a piece of anything longer than like 7,000 words and suddenly I have to do 90,000 or 100,000. And I actually talked to a researcher. This woman named Mariah L. Frank Gemzer, who does self-regulatory learning research. And she said, start your journal, say, you know, what do I need to learn next? Why do I need to learn it? Am I sure I need to learn it? Yeah. Who do I need to help me learn it?

Yeah. Then you make a hypothesis about how you're going to learn about it. Run an experiment. Come back, reflect on what worked, what didn't, and then make your next experiment. And that sort of system of deliberate experimentation, I think, is like ubiquitous. Interesting. So that's what, if we're thinking about generalist, which your book talks about the advantage of that approach. What makes generalism, if I can invent a term, successful is it has to be coupled a structure.

Yeah. Otherwise, it could just become a, I'm sure people use it as an excuse for like, let me just bounce to what's interesting to me. That's right. And if you don't have a structure to actually capture the feedback, what's working, what's not working. You know, in my old days when I would do student advice, used to have this phrase we would use, which was study like Darwin. And particularly just looking at studying, we would say, like, the number one thing you can do for getting a particular system is after you try away for studying for a test, after you try a particular method for writing a paper, etc. Go back and say, how did this work?

Did this work well? Could something work better? And I guess I used the word Darwin because you could evolve. Totally. Yeah, you pick up what's working. So we're applying this out of productivity systems in some sense. But it makes sense. Don't just buy something because you want to have software.

Be really specific about what did this work, what could work better. Where is there inefficiency? aspect of it might have worked. I mean, this was like a trend in research I saw, whether it was people looking at how their own skills fit with certain lines of work or a project to invent some new kind of technology. It was, here's what I think. I'm going to find a way to test that. Maybe this aspect of it worked and that didn't. And then how do I use that to do the next experiment, basically? So that kind of process of smart experiments and pivoting. Yes, we could call it Darwinian productivity or something like this. You know what you're put out your systems into that competitive

landscape and then let the things that work survive and the things that don't, don't. So knowing what you're doing is very important. Absolutely. That's an interesting twist to it. What about you? Do you have sophisticated, complicated, connected, connect-driven productivity systems? I mean, I do keep like a self-regulatory notebook. So I have something I call my book of small experiments also where like at least every other

month I force myself to come up with some hypothesis about something I think I'm interested in that usually has to do with expanding my own skill or knowledge base and can then come up with a way to test that. That can be as simple as interviewing. somebody in a certain area or as complicated as like taking a class or something. So even if it's not connected to a particular project you're working on. It's almost always growing out of something I'm interested in where I'm saying I need to know more about this or I need some skill that I don't have. Right. So for range, I felt the structural challenges of the writing work getting

complicated enough where I ended up taking like fiction writing classes because I wanted to understand more different types of structural work. Yes. So it was related. You know, it was related to what I was doing. One other thing I do have though. that might be a little different. I have something I call a master thought list. So obviously one of the themes of what you were talking about was like getting stuff out of your head, right? Because you don't want to be taking up brain space with trying to remember things. And this master thought list that initially developed kind of organically for me in my first book and now I'm much more systematic about is basically when I'm in sort of the wide net phase of a project, I start bringing stuff into this like, you know, you can use Rome or whatever. But again, I think it's technology agnostic.

Like I just use some simple text document. and it can be a figure, a statistic, a quote, whatever. I put it on the list, keep track of where it's from, and as like things accumulate, I move them physically toward one another, and then I put a tag over them that's like the name of, you know, whatever, cognitive bias tag, like whatever the theme is. And I type in a bunch of words I think I would come to my mind if I were looking for this topic. Sure.

And then I start in a bunch of words as tags or descriptors. Exactly, exactly. And I move sort of like topics near one another. and this, it becomes like sort of a wiki of my brain, right? Like where I can find stuff that's associative. And so not only do I keep track of things. So I, because I used to have this, oh, I came across something interesting, like, where the hell is it? Yep.

And I would spend a lot of time re-finding stuff that I knew I had found before. Yep. So I can put in a lot less time to like keeping track of that on the front end. But also I find that I come across stuff constantly that I think is really interesting. I need to read this. And it sticks in my head unless I put it somewhere. Yeah. And I found this is a place where I can actually put stuff that I probably will never look at again. Yeah.

But it's like out of my mind because it was, your mind lets it go. It was too interesting to get rid of. Yeah. But I filed it somewhere. Maybe I'll see it again sometime. Like maybe I put a few words next to it in case I want to find it again. But it's like not burdening.

It's not leaving like a residue in my brain anymore because I've put it somewhere. I hear that. And I like the idea we're being technology agnostic. Yeah. In fact, I don't even want to jump to what particular software. We hear there's tags or this stuff. But you could be doing this with, you know, index cards. Unless it's one of your sponsors.

I think people should use whoever sponsors you that that's the tech that I think. I think must be used by all people. Does Grammarly have a, because I'm looking at my sponsor's here. Do they have a knowledge management system? Because if so, does Roan have a knowledge management system? Other than that, we're technology agnostic, but all those things. Except for my sponsors. Yeah.

We agree with that. Yeah. So you could do this with folders. You could do this. I think Ryan Holiday does this with index cards. Oh, yeah, literally. Oh, my gosh. I visited a bookstore and I accidentally elbowed a stack of the cards, the famous cards.

And they like spilled over and I'm like, oh my God, I just like. This is why. But they, fortunately, they kind of stayed in order. I was going to say because honest to God, I think he delayed his most recent book. Look, I don't want to blame me for that, but I'm just saying it's possible. That seems kind of near. I mean, I do this with writing projects Scrivener. Oh, yeah, you're Scribner.

But even, okay, here's articles I may or may not write for the New Yorker. Here's a book that's like two books in the future. I will create the Scrivener project in advance. So I have a place where there's a research place where I can start creating folders and putting things. Because, again, my same type of situation, I'm thinking, you know, I have this book idea that I haven't even sold. yet. I just came across an interview and man, that would be really useful for that book. Go to the Scribner project. Go to the research tab. Find a relevant folder. You know, throw it in there. This is not an advanced technology for doing this. I'm only

mentioning a technology here because all of the Zettelcastin heads out there like, no, my God, you should be doing, you know, some customized whatever. This is not a technology set up to do that, but it solves the problem. Yeah, yeah. It goes to a place. I know where it is. I know at some point years in the future even. I'm like, oh, what did I think about this topic? I thought about writing a book. It's a bunch of links and articles and they're all in there. They're all in folders. And it's kind of crazy how many, like, tons of writers I admire. If I get to know them, they have something like this. Yeah. Something like this, right? Whether they call it like a spark list or like some idea receptacle, whatever it is to move things that maybe they'll never look at again or

maybe it's associated with a project they're kind of thinking about it. It's sort of gestating, but like we all seem to have something like this. All right. So then here's what I'm going to give a take. Okay. Tell me if we like this thing. Make it a hot take. Yeah. Here's my take on Spark list. Okay.

If you don't have one, start with the simplest possible implementation and make your frustrations with the current implementation be what drive you to a new implementation. So don't work backwards from what is the most fully featured advanced possible implementation because you're going to fall into the vortex of fiddly. Yeah. Like this, I'm out of this. And if I just do this, it's going to add me, whatever. Start with paper. I don't care. Start the simplest possible thing

And then when you get to a scale of ideas and use You're like, you know what? Here's my main problem is that I have to print it or this or that. All right, so let me just switch from this to like almost doing this but with PDFs. And okay, now, you know, it would be really nice if I could tag it. Well, let me just go from this to something that just lets me. So start as simple as possible and let particular frustrations drive you to new tools because those tools specifically solve those problems.

You're much more likely to have a workable system and much more likely, less likely to fall into the fiddling vortex. Yeah, totally. think that goes to your Darwinian approach, right? You're like, what's working here? Let's keep that part. Yeah. And what's not working, we need to change that. All right. So, so Dave's addition to the essential staying organized toolkits are, we're going to say the self-regulatory notebook. Yeah. Which we can kind of integrate with the course systems idea. But like have a place where you keep track of this is what I am doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And learning. And by the way,

sorry, this, this self-regulatory, like everyone should be doing this and everything. Like, it doesn't, spending a little more time reflecting on the stuff they're doing. There's like, whether you're looking at athletes or like, I was just reading a paper about surgical teams that one team spends 100% of its time doing procedures, the other 80% of its time doing procedures, 20% doing this kind of reflection. What went well? What didn't? What can we try next time? Yeah. And that, the 80-20 team, their complication rate goes down much faster, the 100% team by taking this time to say, what worked, what's a smart experiment we can try to improve on the things that didn't work as well as they should. What about stuff in your personal life?

Exercise, eating. Oh, yeah. Like you're saying everything. I think, I mean, and again, I think everything, yes, because I think, I think this, this, again, this body of literature on self-regulatory learning suggests that we don't get all of the learning signal out of the things we do purely just by living through them and intuiting, right? The reflection adds like a whole other layer to that. Right. So as a parent, if you don't have coherently written down, like these are the things I'm working on right now. This is my working framework for how I deal with X, Y, and Z. If you don't have it written down, then A, you're not directing your energy, but B, you're not getting a feedback signal that allows you to figure out like, oh, this strategy for dealing with picky eating really does not work. That's right.

I mean, it's like stealing a mindset from the scientific method a little bit. Yeah, right? Yeah. And I don't want to sound like it has to be a burdensome thing. Yeah. Because I actually think it can take less time because you'll actually learn from the things that you're trying. Yes. Yeah.

And it'll get better. I like this. Okay. So the self-regulatory notebook is all the different things you're doing on a regular basis in your life. life that matter to you, that you're doing with some intention. Have it written down. This is what I'm doing. And this is personal life, professional life also as you're talking about, even just learning

goals. I'm trying to read these books. I'm trying to learn about this thing. And then our second idea we're adding is the notion of sparkless, some sort of place where it's not tasks. It's not obligations, but it's ideas that might be relevant to whatever aspects of your life you have ideas in. If you're a writer, it's books.

But, you know, there's a lot of other areas. And I think it should feel fine to put stuff that you're planning not to come back to on that list, right? Because it's super interesting. The headline grabbed you. You feel like you need to read it. Don't read it. Put it on that list. And probably you won't feel like you need to read it. But if you do, it's there. But you know it's there and you know like you look at it. Yeah. Okay, good. I like that. Two good additions. All right. So we have a bunch of questions I want to get to you from our listeners. Before I do want to mention one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That is our friends at Rohn, R-H-O-N-N-E. I said that weirdly. R-H-O-A-E. R-H-O-A-E. Rone. I know. I don't know. I think about Sparklist.

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That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com. slash podcast. All right, let's do some questions. David's going to help me here as long as we have them in studio. All right, so David, these questions all come from podcast listeners. Let's see what we got here. Here we go. All right.

Our first question is from Ben. Ben says, what is one of the most underrated productivity superpowers people hear about, but don't actually use enough or recognize its true effect? I asked Dave about this before the show and he said cocaine. So, I mean, it- Not wrong. It helps you focus. It also makes you awesome.

People hear a lot about it. They don't implement. Makes you awesome. I mean, have you ever seen like a 1980s action film? Yeah. All produced or written by people on cocaine. You don't get commando. You wouldn't be saying that unless cocaine were one of your sponsors.

Well, that's true. But that's for the second half of the show. Brought to you by cocaine. Have more thoughts and be awesome. Cocaine. Promote code, Cal. All right, productivity superpower. I'm going to give two.

You think, so I guess the idea here is here's something that people don't do. But it's something that they do hear about. I guess it has to be something to hear about. It could be obscure. And let's, well, yeah, maybe they should hear about it. And let's use productivity real generally. It's just like something that helps you do the stuff you want to do the important stuff better. or it could mean be better organized.

We'll use one of those definitions. I'm going to say shut down ritual, right? Good one. That's contrary in it because a shutdown ritual doesn't in the moment help you organize or execute work, but it does help you clear the mechanism of your brain when your work day is done so that it can actually rest and recharge so that you're not burnt out and so you can reattack your work the next day with freshness, but more importantly, also not have to have this insistent background, drip of stress in your time outside of work.

So I'm going to, in a contrarian twist, I'm going to throw having a good shutdown routine as a very underrated productivity strategy. Right. Can you think of one? Yeah. I'm thinking of a couple. I'm trying to decide. I think I'm going to go with one that people I think have really heard of but don't

actually do is saying no to things that you want to do. Like it's very easy. Everyone here is like you have to say no to more. It's almost like fetishized. Yeah. You have to say no to stuff. Yeah. But I think people primarily say no to stuff that they don't really want to do anyway.

You have to say no to some things that you do want to do and take note of that. Oh, interesting. You say no a lot, right? I have a Henry Miller, the author, like a handwritten postcard of his that I bought. That is him rejecting a writing assignment and his excuses. I have a lot of stuff to do and I'm going to have to just go to Europe. I'm sorry, I can't do it. So it's sort of he's like not actually giving, because I'm always thinking like,

do I have an excuse? And I have to remind you don't need one. Don't give one. You don't need. And so I'm better at it than I used to be. Yep. Still aspiring to be better. I like a note of things that you should say yes to.

Because that does trap people, right? It's that there's the element of the thing that there's a cool element. Yeah. I mean, for you and I who do speaking and stuff like this, that's usually going to be like either a location or an audience that in the abstract is like, oh, that would be really cool. I mean, there's so many interesting people out there. I would love to meet all of them. Yes.

But like. and like cool places to go. Yeah. And the better you do it stuff, the more of those opportunities to meet incredibly interesting people and go cool places. Yeah. You know, they happen. But then can prevent you from doing the things that gave those opportunities in the

first place. Yeah, this was a Ryan holiday line. The better you get at writing, the more the universe conspires to stop you from writing. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's a good one.

The other no technique is always, you have to imagine yourself doing the thing tomorrow. So how would you feel if this thing you're about to say yes to was going to happen tomorrow? And would you be psyched about it? you know like oh that'd be fun like i'm gonna hang out with so and so or do whatever or you're like oh my god i got a fly to buy tomorrow it's gonna be like such like a giant like schedule footprint and i'm kind of that's interesting that's a good sort of technique yeah like imagine yourself having said like yes to it and it's right away yeah and i feel good yeah you're excited about like

like i'm glad it's right now or yeah yeah that's an interesting one yeah um now i'm thinking of others while we're yeah okay so what else do we got i mean you know teresa mobiel's like progress principle where it's like you get something done write it down because it builds momentum. Yeah. I kind of like that. Yeah. Because you do realize you're actually doing stuff and you start to feel good and

positive emotions lead you to get more stuff done. But I think it, I think of that and also planning palsy, right? Like people think they can get way more stuff done than they actually can. Yep. So for me, when I write down things that are core things I need, I want to get done today. Yeah. I frankly just list half as many things as I used to some years ago. Yep.

And that's way better because then I don't end the list. You know, otherwise you have a list, then you carry things over to the next day. It gets worse. list gets so stupid that you just throw the whole thing out. Yeah. So I just take my intuition of how many things I'm going to get done that day and cut it in half. I've talked about that before. Well, okay, so then I will pile on to that.

Okay, pile on. And say, scheduling every minute of your work day, which is like at the core of time blocking. And, of course, I talk about time blocking all the time. But I do think it is underrated, right? Because people don't do it in large part because they think it's going to be restrictive. But one of the big advantages of it. Like, here's my plan for the day is you see how it. it went. And that's a very strong feedback signal, right? This is going back to our like

deliberate experimentation. Exactly. This is just like with your self-regulatory notebook. This is a scheduling experiment you run every day. And it doesn't take long for you to realize like, okay, this idea that A, checking my email is going to take 10 minutes. Folly, right? This idea, B, that I was going to write this type of report. I have to write once a week. I wanted it to take a half hour. Yeah. Because it would be great if it took a half hour. It could fit into all these other things. I feel that it should take a half hour. It should. But it doesn't. I mean, people fall in love with the schedule that they create where they say, wouldn't this be great? Yeah.

Like all these things I'm getting done. Then you get the feedback. If this takes 90 minutes, this trashes my mind. And so I can't jump from this straight into this. And no, I can't spend an hour on my inbox at the end of the day because I'm exhausted and there's too much context shifting. It's a feedback signal. I mean, and that's another big point too, right?

When people do that, they don't budget in the transition time from like switching cognitive tasks, right? Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to add that. We're going to pile on here. Who is this a bin? right Ben, we're piling on here in our answer.

Here's, it's not superpower. Now I'm going to talk about productivity, sort of small tactics that have a punch above their weight class in terms of their positive impact. Okay. All right. So not cocaine because that's a big tactic. Cocaine is above all weight classes. Promocodecal.

Yeah. Cocaine.com. Brought to you by our sponsor cocaine. Yeah, that just lives up to its well-deserved reputation as being important. All right. Here's something as small that I think punches above its weight class is the meeting buffer. It's just the rule. If I schedule a meeting on my calendar, I add a 15-minute meeting immediately after it when I schedule it.

And it's just a context shift, take care of all the stuff that came up in the meeting, get that written down, clear it out of your head, like read some baseball trade rumors for 10 minutes. Just like let that all clear before you go on to the next thing. And if you just schedule that immediately, okay, how long we're doing an hour for the Zoom call? Great. I'm going to hour 15 minutes on my calendar. And then that's just protect. So like nothing else can, you're not taking up that much of your time. It makes just the cognitive experience of the day becomes significantly less frenetic and significantly less exhausting because you're not trying to shift from one cognitive context full of open loops.

Yeah. Oh my God. Like I'm supposed to do this and that and this gave me all these ideas. And I'm jumping from this immediately on to another call. All of that is open in my head as I'm trying to deal with this new thing. That's exhausting. Totally. I mean, I call this like used buffer.

I call it's transition time, right? And I think this is making me think of we're both a fan of Gloria Mark and her work, right? And she talked about the big and little mind. I think she might have taken that language from Maya Angelou who talked about like when she was really engaged in writing, then she'd have to sort of break and do something kind of mindless like little puzzles or whatever it was. And so yeah, I think that's a big one. Yeah. And Maya Angelou also, Sherry was an important part of her writing process, which I think is cool. She would bring Sherry to the hotel room.

Okay. It's not as cool as cocaine. Yeah. But I think they would like at the end of the writing. she would have a little bit of sherry and she would go to hotel rooms and take the pictures off the wall. So there's like no distractions except for the ones that she had planned herself. Exactly. And she wrote on the bed propped up on one arm and she had calluses because like that's just how she wrote propped up.

And it had to be like a, she had to have the stuff off the wall. So there's no like cognitive cues and she got used to it and she would write on legal pads on the bed and then have some sherry and they like go home. I wonder how much like Darwinian productivity went into that because I doubt she one day was like, I'm going to a hotel taking the picture. off the wall laying on one arm and having some sherry and some crossword puzzles. I bet she was traveling at some point for something. And it was in some terrible hotel or motel somewhere. And she had an incredibly productive riding experience. And it was like this.

This is it. Yeah. Yeah. This is it. I like that plan. Just drink more sherry. All right. Another question.

This one comes from Gabe. What are the benefits of journaling? And how would you suggest go about trying to do so? I mean, this really goes back to both of the things you added, I suppose. You have self-regulatory journal. Yeah. Which is about tracking things you're doing and how it went. It's about journal as a feedback mechanism.

Then there's this sort of spark book type journaling, which is about capture, getting ideas out of your head so that you don't have to hold on to them. Both of them have a cognitive advantage. So what are the type of journal E on there? So where we put people normally think about self-reflection, not in the terms of a more experimental sense, but just where am I? Getting your emotions out. How is my life unfolding? We put that in a third category, I suppose. I think so.

And there's the, I don't know to what degree that dovetails with like the morning words. Do you know that the routine that a lot of writers have? Yeah, you do, uh, 15 minutes. Yeah. And without like thinking at all. And I think part of the idea there is it sort of gets you out of perfectionism. Like you're just going and letting your, letting your thoughts flow up, flow out. So there's also this course sort of warming up aspect to it.

So yeah, I guess that is a different kind. I mean, yeah. So here's my contrarian take, Gabe, because this is what I'm doing today. just as important as journaling is boredom. I'm going to connect this all. This doesn't seem like it makes sense, but I'm going to connect this all. I talk about this in digital minimalism. I book digital minimalism that one of the interesting scourges of our current moment that we're underappreciating

is that smartphones with ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet has created this incredibly novel environment in the history of the human species in which you can banish every single moment. being alone with your own thoughts. No matter where you are, there's this thing that can algorithmically select highly salient distraction. That's a very new thing. Everywhere you are, you have this, which means we get no time if we don't want it. We can get no time alone with our own thoughts. And I go through this research in the book about why time alone with your own thoughts

is incredibly important. It's how you make sense of yourself. It's how you make sense of the things you've encountered or experienced and you integrate them into your self perception. It's where you confront the things you're not happy about and influence. the things you are, it's how you evolve as a human being. It's the cognitive structure of your awareness of the world. So it's really a problem if you're not working on this structure. To work on this structure, you have to spend time alone with your own thoughts. So my contrarian take is

if you want the benefits of self-reflective journaling, like one of the simplest things you could do has nothing to do with a physical journal. It would be just making sure that on regular points of time, you don't have your phone with you. And so you're in line and you're forced to be alone with your own thoughts. You do that on a regular basis. Human instinct is wired to basically self-reflect and try to make sense of the world. So it's almost like getting rid of the thing that prevents self-reflection could be just as important as having the right tool to actually direct your self-reflection. I call out my catch your name was solitude deprivation. Solitude deprivation. I like that. And I think that has an important sort of conceptual premise,

which is that we often think about what things we can add to be better. stuff, but I think in many cases, the quicker way to get better certain things is to take something away that's just in the way, like obstacle removal instead of like building block addition. Yeah, it takes more time to get a journal and they try to put aside the time and we're not going to do the words. Well, really, it's like, don't take your phone when you walk your dog. Yeah, yeah.

You don't have to do anything new, but that could lead to a much better place. My story in the book about this, I got really into Lincoln and Rest Home that's here and I guess it's near like Petworth or Shaw here in the D.C. Where he would leave the White House to go to to just walk and think and how he grappled with ideas up there. He just needed time alone with his own thoughts to make sense of what was going on with the Civil War and his role and his moral development. Yeah. Time alone with his own thoughts. Yeah.

So if he had had a phone, I don't know what would have happened. America probably wouldn't be here. Yeah. Or they would think he's a wizard. Electricity hadn't been invented. So he would have been an amazing, like, Twitter troll if you think about it, though. He was like, he's really funny. Yeah, he was really funny.

Yeah, yeah. He might have been a different character. All right, let's keep rolling here. Next question, anonymous, no name. I find myself very forgetful. What system could I set up to help me remember things when I need it? That's interesting. I mean, probably the best thing to do here, and Dave, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is, like, in Chris Nolan's movie, Momento, tattoos.

Tattoes. Tattoes are good. Yeah, then you can just reference, if there's like an amnesia situation, like, you know, it's not going anywhere. Tattoes are good. You got a lot of space. If you don't have a lot already, then you've got a lot of space to work with. You got a lot of space to work with, yeah, and you just sort of like get the things on there and remind yourself about. Recommend getting them while on cocaine. Yeah, sponsored by cocaine. Run them through grammarly before you get them to them. They're going to let you get like a really cool, really cool grammatically correct.

Exactly. Praise. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. I don't know. Systems can help me remember things when I need it. I mean, if you're using that type of systems we talked about earlier in the show, I mean, you have some sort of full capture on your obligations. And you're doing some sort of multi-scale planning.

So you look at this, you know, you're like, okay, I have my big ideas, my big initiatives or my quarterly plan. And when I do my weekly plan, I'm looking at my obligation list and my strategic, my larger quarterly plan. and that all, I look at that weekly plan then when I make my daily plan. And I look at my daily plan and I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing. And on my calendar to backstop me on things that are tied to a particular time. I mean, you remember things. And when it comes to big ideas, you have the type of systems that Dave talked about. You sort of Spark List.

I mean, I think if you are organized what's going on in your life, you don't need a specific system different than all those things we talked about for trying not to forget things that might be. be important. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I also think it depends what are you trying, like, if you're forgetting your car keys a lot or something, then having a hook where you put them every time makes a big difference. Same place every time, right? If there's something that you need to encounter every day, like put it in your path. So when you walk past it, you see it. I think, so I think it depends what we're talking about remembering. In terms of information I consume,

I really try hard to work it into my semantic network, you know, the spider web of connected ideas in my brains. When I read something, I think it's important, I stop and think about how does this connect to all this other stuff I know? Because that turns out to make it like much easier to If there's an idea you want to hold on to. Totally. I was, I remember I was interviewing this neuroscientist named Ogi Ogis who had done some research on memory. And he was on who wants to be a millionaire. And because he had studied semantic network and memory, he knew that like if you picture a spider web, if memories are sort of attached by different threads of the web, if you can bring up one that's related, it'll shake the web and it might

bring up the others that are connected. So he said when you go on who wants to be a millionaire, what they don't show you is that you can talk to the host as long as you want before you have to guess and they just edit that out. So he would just keep talking, talking, talking, in the hope that the conversation would trigger some semantic association, you remember it. And he won the half million dollars, then he got the million dollar

question correct, but it already decided to walk with the half million. But his whole strategy was to talk about as much different crap as he could and hope that it would trigger his own semantic network. So you learn new information, try to connect it to stuff you already know to build that, that spider web in your head. I like it. It's better than my millionaire strategy, which is just the hope that every question is related to a traumatic event for my past, as in slumdog millionaire. Like, I watched me like, this is it. I'm just going to hope that like everything is going to be related to like something

to happen to me. Yeah, it didn't go well. I got a couple of questions here that are more case state type questions. So these are people giving a detailed scenario about their lives and then it has a question about it. First one comes from Sam. Sam says, I'm a solicitor, lawyer, practicing the UK. My practice is very busy, and I oftentimes struggled with time management. In the last three months, I've adopted time blocking, and I purchased your second edition time block planner. I'm finding that I'm achieving the results you promise, but my job requires me to be reactionary. My question is, do you think there is any merit in time blocking the first half of the day, ending with a time block for planning the second half of the day,

at which point it may be clear as to what the demands of the rest of the day are. It was a technical question. I love technical time block questions. I mean, Sam, my first instinct is yes, because of the principle when it comes to planning at any scale. The point of planning is to help to make sure that your energy has some intentional direction. Planning, however, is not a game show where you get a higher and higher prize, the closer you're able to happen to stick to the plan. you made in advance. We talk about this.

It's very clear with daily time block planning where people get in the mindset of, my goal here is to figure out a plan that I hit exactly. And if I don't, I've lost. And I get really upset if my plan has to change. Where the reality is, depending on the nature of your job, there's probably quite a bit of changes that will happen your plan. So what you're doing in the morning is like your best bet. Okay, knowing what I know now, what's my plan for directing my energy?

And then when your day changes in ways you didn't anticipate, you update the plan next time you get a chance, then saying knowing what I know now, what's the best way to do with my time this left? So it's the intentionality. At any one point, I want to have some intention on what I do with my time going forward.

That's the win, not, hey, I was able to hit my plan, you know, exactly without having the change it. So I think this is a great plan. You know, plan the morning, step back, make a plan for the next part of the day based on what you know then. The goal is like, you want to attack each thing that's coming up with some intention to it, not that you want to try to actually, not you actually want to try to win the day. I mean, I wish I had a job that never

changed my plan. Yeah, right. I mean, this sounds like a great experiment. I'd say run this experiment exactly as it was articulated for a week and keep track of it in your self-regulatory notebook. Yeah. And if it doesn't work, then adjust something. Maybe it should be half a day or maybe the other thing Sam I've heard people do is they have protected block time. Hey, these three hours, it's all very intentionally used. And the rest of the day, if you have an incredibly reaction job, reactive job,

it's probably a better term, the reactionary. You have a very reactive job. Then you're like, okay, then I'm just rock and rolling with what comes in. All right, we got one more here.

This is from Agent 30. Oh, I see where that. I see the 300 reference here in the very first line of your question here. I recently turned 30. And like many people, I experienced some stressed associated with that milestone. Dave and I haven't turned 30.

yet. Not yet. But I assume it'll be stressful. I'm worried. I mean, clearly we're not there yet, but it will be stressful. Very concerned. I graduated with a Masters of Arts degree about five years ago, but despite some good interviews, I wasn't able to land a job in my field after school and have spent the

last five years consistently underemployed. I'm also passionate about art and creative writing, but my attempts at these have only resulted in a small amount of local success. I'm worried that I'm running out of time to experience professional success as well as being able to start a family with my partner. Since discovering the ideas associated with the deep life, I've been trying to pursue my goal in a more disciplined way, focusing on methodical progress and skill building. However, I feel like my mind doesn't fully trust the approach based on slow productivity, because in the back of my mind, I feel like it's going to come too little

too late, and I should have adopted these strategies five to ten years ago. I still have high ambitions for my professional and creative life, but deep down, I worry that I'm still not good enough at what I do to realize my ambitions and that I'll be in the same place where I am now in five to ten years. All right, big question here. I got those to you, Dave, in the following way, because you're a professional writer. This sort of is in the same realm. You know, this is someone who's talking about being passionate about art and creative writing and having only a small amount of local success.

So writing is in that world. Your whole career has been professional writing, basically post-grad school, right? So you know what it's like to build a life around one of these, I guess we could call it idealized occupations. It's idealized, very specific. I mean, my first stable job in writing was as an overnight crime reporter in New York tabloid. So perhaps not ideal, but your point is taking. The profession is idealized, right? Oh, I mean, it's romantic.

Let's say it's a romantic, it's a romantic profession. No, don't know. So what do you tell to someone who's like, yeah, I think I want to be an artist or a creative writer? and they feel like they're doing a little bit of stuff and things aren't really clicking. It's a fair question. I don't feel like things are going to change. So how do you,

what's the right way to approach from your experience, the pursuit of a romantic profession? Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of stuff in that question, by the way, personal, professional,

lots of things. And also the, I feel like I should have started. Right. For that, it's like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

So don't, don't worry that you didn't start at the right time. Yeah. And let that get in the way of starting things that you should be doing now. 30 seems very young to us. is what we're saying. Yeah, totally. I mean, I like, yeah, so just, just to share with this person, I like to share this research that MIT and Northwestern the Census Bureau did a few years ago

that showed that the average age of a founder of fast-growing tech startup on the day of fast-growing was top 0.01%. On the day of founding was 45, right? And people don't, like, they just think of Mark Zuckerberg when he said, yeah, young people are smarter. He was 22 when he said that, right? You don't hear him saying that anymore. Yeah. But anyway, I don't think people's intuition is always right about the time scale at which development and success occurs. But I think when you're going into these kinds of fields, the good thing about them are you get like a lot of signal quickly about how difficult it is and how competitive it is.

But that's also the challenge, right? And I think it's, I think it behooves people to sort of try to work on one piece at a time instead of like trying to get their arms around the whole thing. Right. Like most people that want to go into writing, view writing as a form of self-expression, which is why it's like so romantic. I kind of don't. I viewed as a very compelling thing to do. Yeah.

But not self-expression. An interesting job. An interesting job. But not about I want to make my artistic self-whole or some such. Correct. And so if that's your take on it, I think you look at, well, how does this thing work as a job? What are like the skills and tools that I need? So especially early in my career, but I mean, early in my career, but again, I was five, six.

When I left the track where I was training to be an environmental scientist and I was at Sports Illustrated as a temp fact checker like five years older than the people I was doing like remedial kind of work for. Yeah. You know? But looking at what are, what's the toolbox that I need? Yeah. And instead of just like trying to do another project and assuming I would get different results, it was like, what skill set do I need and how do I get around those people so that I can start getting it? So you, you had kind of done some research on this.

Yeah. I said, okay, a fact checking, you know, at Sports Illustrated, like this is an actual known path. this is what it would look like to be taking the next step. Like within a couple of years, I should be able to get here. And here's what I should be working on to get here. And being around the people. What was the step after fact checking? Well, so I had gotten, I mean, there were some other winding steps.

Like, again, my first job in journalism was overnight crime reporter at the New York Daily News, right? Like nothing happy that's going in New York Daily News happens to be midnight and 10 a.m., as you can imagine. But that gave me this great ability to do street reporting, right? No phone, no computer. You're going and finding people in the street. Yeah. Then I went to a startup where there was covering. higher education that was no street reporting all phone and email.

So now I'm getting that skill. Yeah. Right. Then I leave that just to get my foot in the door at Sports Illustrated. Now I'm around people who do long form writing who are way better than me. Every day I'm around people who are way, way better than me. So now I'm getting these skills of even though I'm not doing the writing. Yeah.

I'm having to go through their writing in fine detail and sort of understanding how that works. How did you figure out that's the way in? I had wanted to get into Sports Illustrated. I had this specific interest in writing about sudden cardiac death and athletes, basically. And whenever I did something good, I would send it over to them, basically. And say like, hey, just, you know, and keep in touch. And it took me like two years of doing that before they said, somebody's going on maternity leave. We have a temp opening for a fact checker.

Would you like to leave your real job and come do this? So you were saying, great, I'm just looking for a way to get in that door. Absolutely. Because I was looking for a way to get around the people that were doing the kind of things that I wanted to learn how to do. Yeah. Yeah. And then once I got that skill set, and I felt like my. learning curve was tapering off.

I left to become an in, I had like an office in the 32nd floor of a building above 6th Avenue, big window door and everything at Sports Illustrated when I became a senior writer. And then I left to be an intern at then start up ProPublica doing investigative stuff because I said,

how do I learn how do I get around people who know how to do this thing that I don't know how to do. So I just looked at it as what are, instead of this whole big insurmountable, how do I just get to that place? Yeah. What are like the tools I need to put in the toolbox and how do I start going about that?

What was to jump from fact checking to, writing within sports. I mean, I guess I'm assuming once you're, once you're there and you know people and your fact check and you've been sending them stuff for years, it's a much smaller leap to say, hey, can I pitch this or pitch that? I mean, you're in the building, but I got, when I started pitching stuff, I was getting shot down. I mean, I was like, you know, just a temp. But then, but they would hear it. They would hear it. And it turned out I had this oddball background, right? I came in with a science background. I had a crime reporting background. And so all of a sudden, I realized that those were huge assets because I was different than the other people I was around. Yeah. So whereas I was like shaping up to be, I would say like a pretty normal scientist. You take those like typical science skills and you put them in a sports magazine. It's like now you're like a Nobel laureate. Okay. So you have to figure out. Also, how can I fit in what I can do to what they're looking for? Yeah. And that's where they're like, oh, okay. Yeah. You can try this article. What was the first article that they accepted for me to go right?

The first article I ever wrote was and really I was just sent out to report on it, give that reporting to someone else for the matter. magazine, but I then wrote my own version on the website. And it was where the backup kicker at the University of Northern Colorado had stabbed the starter in his kicking leg to try to take his job, being driven crazy by his like football obsessed mom. And they're like, don't you have some crime reporting experience? Get out there. And so I'm like, it was very New York scene. I give like a cabby a hundred bucks like take me to the airport, you know, right away. And so I was just supposed to give that reporting to one of the more senior writers so he could write his like essay on it. But then I did like sort of the more normal version online. And they were like,

huh, like, I guess if crime stuff comes up, like, you're pretty useful, huh? Yeah, because you've been doing it. So they're like, oh, we'll just post the facts thing. Yeah, yeah. And the reason why they were saying, we need that research for our senior writer to do a long form piece. But as long as you're doing that, let's get just an article online. Well, that's what I said. I said, let me do.

Because he was, he was like an essay writer. Yeah. So he did this essay version. And I did like the feature story online. Yeah. Right. And then I would look for other things where there were whole. So I had fact checking.

So I had a job, like a day job. Yeah. So I could pay rent or whatever. but then I would use any of my extra time to look for things that I could pitch or other other things that people weren't covering. I think that can be really helpful. Like getting something that's kind of in the industry but is not nearly your dream job, but it gives you the flexibility to sort of broadens your network.

And so you can start to look for opportunities and not like be hinging everything on like one project where I'm like, did I get the dream or did I not? Like step, step, step forward. Yeah, right, right. So it's not just you sending like massive long form pieces of Sports Illustrated. Oh, I did try that. Yeah, but it doesn't work. Didn't work.

At some point, like, this is great. I mean, it's like, you know, the New Yorker gets a lot of this of like John McPhee to bees. Yeah. Like, we have a John McPhee. I totally tried that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Just didn't. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. So if I'm going to summarize this as it's like, it's an evidence-based concrete plan.

Yeah. Okay. It's evidence-based. I'm learning about this industry. And I want a concrete, let's say evidence-based concrete feasible plan. Like, this is pragmatic that I could maybe get a foot in the door. job. And then, you know, I'm going to find my, should take me a year or two, but I'm going to find my advantage. And here's why I'm going to try to like get my first things published. So it's,

it's very pragmatic. It's very evidence based. There's a flip to this though, too, right? Which is when the evidence based concrete plan doesn't work, then it's probably easier to ripcord. And it might not be ripcording on the entire dream, but it might be, okay, this is not working. I'm not getting the fact checking job or I have the fact checking job. And I just am not finding an angle to actually get something published, the clarity of the plan maybe gives you the clarity of this is not working. Yeah, totally. I mean, again, this has been like a theme, I think, in our conversation today, which is if you have a something, a plan, whatever it is, the plan doesn't have to be right. Yeah. The experiment doesn't have to be right. Yep. But it gives

you something to evaluate your learning and your model of the world against. Yeah. And to learn, to get the maximum of learning signal you can make your next move. And it can become clear, like this vision I had or this plan I had for breaking the magazine writing didn't work. Right. Like I did, I tried sending in the, I did this masterpiece, thousands of words. Yeah, that was the first plan. I'm like, yeah. Okay, that didn't.

And in retrospect, I'm like, well, obviously that plan wasn't going to work, but I had to learn that by trying it. Yeah. So then you get a more detailed plan. And yeah, so that's good. So the flip side then is that also teaches you like, okay, this is not working. So maybe I need to try something different. It may also teach you that that field is just not the dream that you thought it was in a lot

of ways. I think that's oftentimes what a lot of people learn that it's not what they thought. And maybe there's some aspect of it they like. And the dream can be transposed to some other. milieu that's like sort of more amenable to the life they want to lead. Yeah, and you end up, you know, doing a podcast instead or something and it's a better fit for what you're doing or something like that. I mean, don't do a podcast because that's kind of depressing. But you know what I mean as an example. I'm going to throw one other thing in there as well.

I love this advice. The other thing I'm going to throw in is so you can be aggressive about your vision and concrete about your action. So what I mean by this is that the phrase we use all the time on the show, lifestyle centric career planning. So Agent 30, you don't want everything to collapse onto just, you know, your work. Like this is what defines my life and am I happy or not is like I just have this vision that if I have this job in creative writing or whatever, I'm successful and if I don't, I don't and this is everything. You want to have this clear vision of your lifestyle.

What do I want my life to be like in five years? Not just professionally, but in all aspects. Like, where do I live? Who am I around? What's the rhythm of my day? What's my relationship to my community and the world of ideas? You build this really concrete, really aspirational vision. And then you can work backwards.

and say, okay, now let's get super practical and concrete. What are the things I can do starting where I am now to make the biggest possible steps towards this vision? And it's not all going to be professional things. And it's going to give you different possible configurations of steps that get you closer to that vision. And so maybe the vision in which your Norman Mailer, that's not really coming together. But there's other aspects of your ideal lifestyle you can get to you with a different type of job coupled with this over here. and it allows you to put your aspiration to work, but transmuted into very concrete type steps

so that you don't just get fixated on one particular thing. It's not always just jobs either, especially during the pandemic. I think a lot of people put a lot of energy onto location shifts as the savior. You know, like, okay, everything, all the things I'm unhappy about, all of it will be solved.

Yeah. When I, like, buy this farm. I mean, that's whatever. It's like right with work, with location, whatever it is. I think the thing that people often mistake is that wherever you go, whatever success you have, you're still there. You're still there. You're still to pay taxes.

Your car still breaks down. And so you yourself to work on sort of your stuff or the idea of, yeah, with regard to the arts, like that dream of that it's like the only thing you'll ever be doing. I mean, that wasn't really true for most breakthrough artists in any era until like after they did the things that made them successful, right? It's like they were cobbling together. Yeah. the space to do these kinds of things.

Yeah. And a lot of people were cobbling together stuff and nothing particularly interesting came out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I like it. I think we're making progress.

I will say I do think it's it. One thing I worry about for for people that want to get into these kind of fields is I learned so much from being physically around people. Like being in the office at Sports Illustrated, it was almost like I was getting coached without knowing it every hour of the day. Sure. And I do worry as people are sort of more remote. You're going to lose that.

Like thinking about. If I had to attempt to recreate that amount of learning on my own remotely, I just don't know how I would do it. It's hard. Yeah. And you can try to use YouTube to recreate it, but YouTube is so driven by algorithms that the content is more often about like what makes for a good video. Well, this was a big element in the writer strike. Like one of the arguments they were making is that the structure of streamers is set up such that you no longer have these long seasons where writers are just around. And they said, how is anyone,

that's one of the big arguments is, how is anyone going to learn to be a showrunner? The way this used to happen is writers are just, it's a long season, and they're on set, and they're seeing how things happen. And they go to set to help punch things up, and they learn.

And with the smaller season format for the streamers, one of the things they were worried about, you bring in contract writers, they like write for a few days and like they go away. How is anyone going to learn how the television industry works? Yeah. And so it's a similar sort of things. I think this is like a huge challenge.

It's a big thing in academia. I've written about this book. Before, it's, why do star young professors typically come from programs where they studied with star senior professors? The obvious answer is like, well, because they're the smarter professors or they're harder to get into, but most of these like really good grad students could, you know, there's a lot of really good grad students, right? They could get into these programs. I often said being around star professors exposes you to how star professors operate. And so outside of the intellectual content of just, oh, they have really smart ideas. It's like, what's it like if you run a biology lab that wants to be on the cover of nature?

Right. There's a lot of really specific things that goes into, like, how you run that lab, how you think about your problems, how you like evaluate and report. And it looks very different than if you're at a non-R-1 university and it's just, look, I need to have this minimal level of NIH funding to sort of get tenure or something. You're going to learn something very different. Totally different culture. And you could be brilliant coming out of the other place. but you haven't been exposed to this entire culture of like, what does it look like if I'm trying to run a, and I saw that at MIT all the time.

It's like it was very good at teaching people how to be stars. Not that like their brain is not just about the, especially a lot of the physical sciences. Like there's intuition and smartness, but everyone's really smart. It's not they're just solving formats slash theorem in their head. It's like they have an approach to work and how do you actually, how do you make good of that ambition? What does even that work look like? You know, how is it different if you really want it to be. at the caliber that's going to be on the cover of nature.

It's different the way you approach that work and run your lab and triage your ideas. And there's like three more levels of sharpening it that you might not have seen at another school. That really jibes too, I think, with what you're saying with research time, I think is by Brian Uzi at Northwestern. Some of his colleagues about mentoring where basically their conclusion was that most of the value of mentoring was implicit knowledge. Like not the things that the mentor is telling the mentee, but the mentee being able to just like observe. So being around the mentor. actually doing what they do. So again, which I think is a little concerning for like the remote.

Yeah. I heard one of my editors in New Yorker was telling me stories about the cool old building before they moved. I guess they moved from downtown to Midtown or Midtown to downtown or whatever, wherever happened. But it was a scene. It was good and bad of it. But the scene sounded very interesting.

The writers would just hang around. Even if you're just like someone like me, he was like I write on a regular basis, but you know, have other things going on. You would just hang around. Yeah, I'm just going to be there. Like see what's going on. And there was researchers. You could just like grab a researcher and be like, hey, can you like go to the archive and bring clips?

And people would just be like yelling at each other in the hallways and stuff like that. And there's probably something to that. I met Jimmy Breslin, the famous columnist when I was in my early when I was a tabloid reporter. And he was like way late into his career. And he, he, I remember I must have asked him for some advice or something about that writing. And he said, well, you know, reporters are in a lot better shape right now because they go to the gym instead of the bar after work. But they're a lot worse at writing. I was like, okay.

I believe it. I believe it. We should do more cocaine. All right. Solution to everything. We got a final segment coming on. Brought to you by cocaine. Brought you by cocaine. Speaking of sponsors, before we get to our final segment, I want to mention another sponsor that makes a show possible.

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So, Dave, here's an interesting one. It's a talk that Ted just released. I guess Ted drips these out after the conference. And some people have been talking to me about it because I think it's an interesting concept. I'll show a little bit of the video here on the screen for those who are watching. So who you're seeing on the screen here, this is Louis von Ahn, A-H-N, from Guatemala, who is talking about, I believe he's the founder of Duolingo, which is software that helps you learn foreign languages. I don't know if you've used it before.

A little bit, a little bit. And so the point of this talk, here's his title, How to Make Learning and, as addictive as social media. All right. So what's going on here is he's saying, look, I designed du lingo in a way to use some of these same mechanisms that attention economy platforms use to try to keep you using their apps all the time. We should use these same ideas when it comes to productive learning, like learning a new language. People will use it more and you will net increase the amount of learning that there exist in the world. So it's an interesting idea that is sparking debate both in favor.

of this and both people who have some concerns about it. So I thought it would be worth talking a little bit here on the show. So I'll give you my thought, and then, Dave, you can give me your reaction. Okay. To how you're thinking about it. To me, I think we're talking about two different motivational centers. I don't necessarily mean literally in terms of these are distinct in the brain, but just from a cognitive science abstraction point of view.

There's two different motivational centers that are relevant here. So there's a motivational center that's going to offer you in the moment. It responds to them going to be offered in the moment some sort of immediately gratifying stimulus. So that's the motivational center that's like I'm going to grab these potato chips or I'm going to just load up Twitter because immediately it's going to show me people yelling about things that I kind of care about and I'm going to feel good or righteous or upset. And I'm just going to get that treat right away. There's another type of motivational center though. And this is the motivational center I was thinking about when I was recently, watching the new Netflix documentary on the football player. I'm using the British terms.

David Beckham. And in the first episode of the series, they were talking about how David Beckham became such a good football player. And it was this obsessive practicing all the time. All he was doing was practicing. He had grown up in a household where his dad was obsessed with Manchester United, obsessed with the English National World Cup team. They would get the new kit each year for Christmas to wear, and he kind of internalized this, recognized also he had some sort of gifts and just would sort of practice obsessively. That's a different motivational center. Because in the moment, when you're in the back garden of your house in Manchester, just

repetitively trying to bounce a ball on your foot or whatever you're doing, that doesn't have that immediate gratifying stimuli that looking at, let's say, Twitter does. It's a different type of motivational center that's built on some sort of longer-term motivation towards a goal that has a long-term meaning. So it's a deeper satisfaction style of goal. So one point I'd put out here is that when it comes to learning, the sustainable approach here might be to figure out how do we connect out to that latter type of motivational center? That how do we inculcate an idea that being exposed to ideas, to learning things,

to building up a more complicated view of the world is a motivating part of a picture of a deeper life, a life that's going to be more rich and interesting, a life that is from a teleological perspective, taking more advantage of what it is that the humankind is available of. This is Aristotle and the Nicomachean ethics talking about deep thought as the most human of human activities. How do we tap into this more philosophical motivation, this more sustainable motivation? And it may have very little to do with the shininess or the in the moment impulsivity of the actual tools. There have been people who have been deeply drawn to learning throughout all of sort of written human history. And for most of that time period, they didn't have shiny apps. I'd be a little crumudgeonly about this day. But you know a lot about the brain. You know a lot about these motivational centers. Where do you come down on this?

Well, I haven't watched this particular TED Talk. But I think if the idea of it is that a language learning app is going to become as or more entertaining than Instagram or TikTok. or TikTok, I think that is a non-starter. You're going to have to spend two to three billion dollars a year. I just, trying to compete with them. I just don't see, unless you're layering the language learning on top of the TikToks that people are making for maximum entertainment or maximum enragement or whatever it is.

I just, that just doesn't seem possible to me. Can I make a suggestion, though? Sure. Cocaine drip. That's, yeah, I didn't want to like, you know, go so heavy-handed on our sponsor. Every time you get a verb correct. But being facetion. but that probably is what would be required to make a language learning app as desirable as TikTok. Because that's basically what's happening, right? It's like activating that same part of your brain that makes you dicted.

And so I think that's kind of a non-starter. So I think, never mind that. Like, yes, you can make a language learning app more interesting. The most interesting way to make language learning interesting is like to drop somebody in Paris or whatever it is. Or to make it effective. I mean, maybe it's not interesting. It could be terrifying. I think that's very interesting.

But it works. Yeah. Yeah. But I think, I think this larger structural issue you're talking about, I think about it in two ways. So let's say to use the Beckham analogy or into sports, right? I was a 800 meter runner in college, which is useful because people normally think of it as like the most miserable event that you can possibly run because there's lots of puking and stuff like that. Yeah, I agree. And that's true.

And training was even more miserable in that way than racing. Yeah, because you do repeats. So why do you, like, why would you do this stuff? Why would you do this stuff? because it is incredibly compelling when you have this goal of getting like a little bit better at this thing. And it's so competitive. It's not because you would never do that stuff otherwise. You like cannot even bring yourself to do that stuff unless you have this larger strategic goal in mind, which makes that an incredibly interesting thing to be doing.

Yeah. And I think I think when I think about that in sort of the larger world of learning things, like when I think about if I'm like looking at Instagram or something like that and then I switch to. to say reading something that's difficult to read. Like I spent a bunch of time last year reading James Joyce's Ulysses. Very difficult. And because I was coming from things that were so much simpler, at first I'm like,

what the heck is this? You're not even in like the mental mode of reading slowly enough to be able to grapple with it. Yeah. But once I was able to transition into that mode, it's like one of those reading experiences that changes your mind and changes your life.

So you were swiping the pages at first. Right. Like where are the more interesting pages? Exactly. And then you sort of evolved over time. And then the point you realize is not to get through this thing as quickly as possible. Yeah. Right?

Because it took me like, I had to start over once I got maybe 200 pages in because only then did I realize that there were two different omniscient narrators operating at the same time. One who was like the creative one and one was sort of the normal one. Yep. And there was no signal that they were switching until you picked up on their voices basically. So you had to pay attention. And so then you got to go back and say, oh, this is something I've never seen before. But until you get into that space of I want to grapple with this and I want it to change me and I want to. to connect to these other things that I know.

Because I had gotten interested in experimental literature and modernism and stuff. Outside of that, if somebody was like, here's James Joyce's Ulysses, like it's important, go learn it. No, I needed like this wider framework. So you were driven by, I have an interest and an aspiration to be better versed experimental modern literature. In artistic, really I was interested. I'm interested in innovation generally. Yeah. And you know this was an important work of sort of early modernism.

Particularly in 1920, in particular, there was this flood at the same time of things. that completely changed art forever. And I was like, what the heck was going on? So you being able to have read and understood that book, it's sort of also like you being able to be, hey, selected on the track team like you're going to be in our first position. Like all that training was worth it because like imagine me actually being like one of the top runners. Yeah. There's a goal.

There's a longer term goal. And there was, I mean, being curious about innovation, I was curious about what was going on in that year. Right. So first I was curious just about innovation in general. Then I'm curious about artistic innovation. And then I zoom in on this particular period and what the heck is going on there. Yeah. And so there's all these.

layers of why do I want to understand this. Why is it worth it for me to grapple with this? Because it's informing all these other interests I've developed. Well, two points in that. One, that approach that Joyce used of having a difference between omniscient and non-unitient narrator that switched in a sort of non-signaled way, exact same mechanism I used in how to become a straight-eat student. I don't think most readers picked up on it, but I was really influenced by Joyce when I was trying to formulate the whatever. Second, and perhaps more serious is this is one of the things that's lost. I keep putting my crumagin hat on.

But it's one of the things that's lost when you take a 12-year-old and say, we're now giving you the digital cocaine. We're just giving you the thing that can circumvent any of the sense of like boredom or drive

can immediately solve that. Here's your phone. And you've got, you know, Roblox on there and social media and YouTube and all this type of stuff. You are perhaps stunting the ability to, I'm going to develop these type of deeper aspirations that power up that second motivational system and get me doing things. It was, you know, obsessively playing my

guitar and trying to learn the whole catalog of this particular type of music, getting really into, you know, whatever type of novels. And I want to go through like a whole phase of this writer or that and like developing that part of your identity or whatever it is, right? because you're short-circuiting then. You're short-circuiting. You need some motivation, right? We don't like doing nothing. But if you can always short-circuit it,

then maybe you never get that experience of like, well, I'm bored. And so I really want the, you know, like for Beckham, all that work was worth it for one at the age of 13. The owner of Man United called and said, hey, we went to our dev team, right? Like that, but you're not going to, you don't necessarily need that. I feel like, no, I'm making progress in my whatever online video game plan is doing better. I mean, our distraction, I was just so cram-I hate this. I sound like such a, we didn't have rock and roll music when I was a kid type of thing.

But I was going to say, like, our distractions as kids were not very good. There was like two good television shows. I mean, and Nintendo came along and stuff like that. Nintendo wasn't good. Like, I had a Nintendo and we had all the games. My mom didn't worry about screen time because, like, they weren't very interesting. I don't know. I think it was good, but I don't think it was like engineered to like keep you hooked on it. I can play for about an hour. And it would be poor. I don't know. Like how much can you duck hunt?

But even even that feels to me like more legitimate problem solving than a lot of the stuff that's going on technology today. I agree. Well, okay. Here's my, this is an important rant. Is it an important rant. Maybe not duck hunt, but arcades. So if you play a game in an arcade today. It's like if I take my kids to Dave and Busters or something like this and like you're playing at the arcade games. They've engineered out like any type of complicated. like decision. You can't even move your guy around anymore. It's all like it'll move you through a space. You can't move and all you're given like one thing to do. It's like I can, they'll pop up these like dinosaurs I can kind of aim my gun at and shoot. Like there's no degrees of freedom in it anymore. They've tried to just make it into this like directly engaging experience of just sort of like lights are going on. They've minimized what you actually try to do. There's there's no friction into it or like I was in the computers as a kid. There was so much friction being in the computers in like

1991. Like you were basically taking the cover off and writing code and working with the memory or this or that and now consumer facing electronics. The whole thing is like it's just delightful. You just sort of touch the screen and it pops open and it like shows you what you want to show and

Is there like, I don't know, do your kids do like Minecraft or anything? I don't really know anything about Minecraft. You know what I let them do? But Nintendo. Oh, okay. Because I have this, this is my theory and I think it's been borne out. It's like you can games that cost a lot of money are typically games that are designed for a closed gameplay experience.

It's a certain number of hours, and then you're done, like Zelda or something like this. And they're hard. And so you play for a little while, and it's fun, and then it's tough and you get kind of bored with it. It's very, if a game is cheap, then their entire business model, if it's free or cost a dollar, the entire business model is we want you to play this as long as possible. It's like, if I give my kid a Nintendo Switch, like, they'll play for a while, Zelda or whatever, a World War II simulation aviation game, and you get kind of bored. It's kind of hard.

But if one of my kids gets their hands, we learn just the hard way on an iPad with games, they'll just, like, obsessively just switch from thing to thing. It's this weird sort of stimulation trance because most of the iPad games are designed around engagement. Interesting. That's really interesting. You made me think of to bring, like, some of this full circle to when we were talking about, like, my career progression earlier, is when I was trying to build my tool set and I was first at this, like, New York tabloid in journalism. I never had to come up with ideas because someone was always just killed or something blew up or was lit on fire or whatever. And you're just running out to whatever that thing is. And then I go to a job that's totally different from that.

And I'm like, oh gosh, I have to like generate ideas. Yes. And that like forced you to do, you know, you have to go just like talk to strangers or figure out how to even I generate ideas out of nowhere. Right. Whereas when I was in the environment where there was like always something happening. Yeah. I never had to come up with it ever. You have to think about it.

So I didn't. Yeah. Yeah. So a similar effect could be going on now with people where I never have to actually like think of what I want to do to get rid of my boredom. Yeah. I mean, the one important thing I want to add to the Beckham point, by the way, too, is that I think once you have that sort of larger other interests or larger interests, the stuff that could otherwise seem very much like drudgery and probably does to be able from the outside actually becomes a super compelling thing to do. Yes. Right.

doing the like torture of 800 meter training it wasn't like oh I hate this I mean I was I didn't like like throwing up and stuff but it was like I love this like it sucks but I love it yeah I'm getting better at it yeah like I'm pretty good at this is just like so engaging so incredibly engaging yeah there's a level of engagement from working towards a highly aspirational deep motivation goal that is really different than the engagement of like the dopamine system going in the short term maybe that little motivation of like I just want to turn this thing on right or I just want to eat this thing. It's a completely different type of engagement. So yeah, so maybe the game is

figuring that out. And so the game with learning is trying to connect the things that you want to learn to a vision of life or a goal that is, you know, highly, highly resilient. And I don't think, like, I think a little bit of like scrolling here and there is okay, right? Because you have to like sort of do mindless stuff once in a while, but.

Yeah, there's no problem with that. But it's, but it's it takes over. That shouldn't be the model for everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So good. We've been, we've been sufficiently curmudgeonly. All right, Dave EFstein, thank you for joining me as my special secret guest on the show today. I apologize again for the Jesse Skeleton interview and apologize to anyone who saw it. Again, you'll never get those moments of their life back again. We'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.

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