Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 277: From Chaos to Calm (in 1 day)

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

We talk a lot on this show about remaining organized in a digital workplace that drowns us with incoming obligations. In this episode, Cal focuses on the key question of how you get *started* toward this goal. What do you do, in other words, on day one of your quest to find depth amidst the shallows.  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: Getting organized in a distracted world [6:46]  - How do I get more excited about my work plans? [45:55] - How do I get my classmates to get better about time management? [53:59] - How should I organize my deep work blocks? [1:00:13] - How do I account for contingencies in my quarterly plan? [1:05:11] - When does Cal find time to read? [1:05:50] - CALL: How to train Deep Focus muscles [1:11:06]  CASE STUDY: Investing concentrated time [1:17:04]  The 5 books Cal read in November 2023 [1:24:08]  Thanks to our Sponsors:  expressvpn.com/deep blinkist.com/deep hensonshaving.com/cal zocdoc.com/deep  Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So if you're new to what we're up to here, I'm a computer science professor and digital theorist at Georgetown University who writes about the impact of technologies on how we live, how we work, and how we relate to each other. On this show, I give concrete advice for taking action on the type of big ideas I write about. Now, I'm here, as always, in my deep work HQ in Tacoma Park, Maryland, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I want to revive a segment we used to do a long time ago that we haven't done in a while. Yeah. Deep or crazy. You remember this one, right?

Yeah. For those who don't know, the whole point of this segment was, I talk about an idiosyncratic thing that I did in pursuit of more depth in my life. and then I run it by Jesse to see if that is a reasonable move towards depth or if I'm just a crazy person. All right, Jesse, so we're ready for today's segment? All right. Deep or crazy, I spent $150 on a keyboard. Deep, yeah? I'll give you the background.

As you know, and as longtime listeners know, I've had a hard relationship with the keyboard of my MacBook Air. this current generation of Macbooks uses a different cheaper type of plastic, which is more prone to wearing off with use. The actual black plastic will begin to wear off with use. The issue is I use my keyboard a lot. I write constantly. So as I've shown before on the show, I wore away all the letters on the keyboard and all the black and it's just clear plastic with like the back light coming through. So then I bought a latex keyboard cover. So it's like all the keys. You put it on top of the keyboard. And so I could actually see my keys. I actually know what letters were on there. But the problem is the latex thing kind of slides around a little bit.

So I was fingertip typing. And my fingernails just ripped that up. So now I have a ripped up. I wore away all the letters on the latex and have ripped it. And I'm trying to type on type of this. So I'm done. I want to get another keyboard. Once I went down the rabbit hole, though, what are we going to buy another keyboard?

What keyboard am I going to buy? I really began thinking this is what? I spend most of my professional time doing is typing, writing articles, writing books, writing scripts, writing newsletters. So I want to get a really nice keyboard. And I went down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole and ended up buying from a company called Newfee, NU-P-H-Y, the Air 75 version 2 is wireless, or you can also wire it, mechanical keyboard. I think I went with Brown switches. Jesse, Do they name the people in this world get into the particular switches that you use for each key? And there's different types of switches and different manufacturers.

And you can switch out the switches that you use that your keys are on top of. So anyways, I'm a few days into this. And it's really nice. When I'm working on my articles, I have a really good mechanical keyboard where there's a spring. Each key is a heavy plastic. And there's a spring to each key so that, you know, as you press, it returns really quickly. So it's a very satisfying click. And you can type very fast.

And it's a much more reminds me of when I first started writing as a kid. So that's my move. I figure I spent a lot of time writing. $150 not bad. Not too bad. I mean, it's kind of crazy for a keyboard. The technology used on most keyboards, like on a Mac, is essentially it's just a resistance technology. So when you press down, it's closing a circuit, but it's a membrane that you're kind of pushing down and closing a circuit.

And the only give that kind of the only bounce back you have on like a. standard mat keyboard. It's just there's a rubber layer that sort of pushes it back up again a little bit. So it's quiet. It's just kind of like you're pushing down against rubber. Mechanical keyboard, it's a switch that's springed and you're pressing down a key against a spring

to make the contact and the spring pushes it back up again. So it's very clickety clack. I like it. I mean, I write a lot, so why not have the best keyboard? Okay, good. So Jesse says that... Yeah, $150 is... You're with it? Okay. Yeah. It's fine. Interesting note about it, though.

So the new fee, I guess it's a Chinese company, so the keyboard gets shipped to you from China. It comes with all of these sort of infantilizing stickers of. Oh, I'll take a sticker. I'll put it on my lap there. But they're like anime cartoon characters. Oh, okay. I'll take one. It's a cultural thing.

I think of writing. I think of like Hemingway, like pounding his, you know, whiskey in the Key West or whatever. or this keyboard comes with like weird, like anime kid stickers. I think it's because mechanical keyboards, what is the number one audience for those? Video game players. Video game players.

Yeah. In fact, because it's quicker response time, more responsive. And you want to get that key to pop right up again. It comes with, so it works on Bluetooth, it works with a wire.

It comes with a special wireless receiver, 2.4 gigahertz open band receiver. You can plug into your computer. I believe so that you can get more responsiveness. but we'll see because I think the video gamers really need it to be super responsive So you put it on top of your existing keyboard

or off to the side? I've done both I've done both. Yeah, it does fit, it has little feet so you can fit on top of your keyboard if you set it just right without pressing the keys under it

or if I use the monitors here at the studio I can just use it in front of the monitor. So pretty excited about that. All right, we got a good show before we get going. Let me just mention there is some visual. So as always, if you're listening to the program,

and want to see the things I'm talking about. The easiest way to do that is to go to the deeplife.com slash listen. Look for the page for this episode, episode 277, and the video clips show up below. Sometimes there's a lag. Jesse, how soon typically does the episode page go up on the deeplife.com? It should be the day of. Day up, right?

Yeah. But sometimes I forget. Right. So yell at Jesse if you don't see it. But go to the deeplife.com slash listen, episode 277. And we'll put the video on the bottom. All right. So that's enough preamble.

Let's get into it. Get our sound effect board warmed up because it's time for the deep dive. All right. So what I want to talk about today is how to get organized in a world where all of the digital incoming, that's email, the slack, the digital meaning invites seem to be doing their best to drown you in obligations. Now, this is a common topic on the show, but what's different, what I want to focus on right now that is different, is what to do on the very first day on your journey from disorganized to organized. So it's the day one steps I want to focus on today. My plan is I have five steps to go through.

The first four steps are highly technical. What to do in the first four to six hours on the quest to become a more organized. person. The fifth step will then give you the maintenance activities to do for the 30 days to follow to make sure that everything you do this first day actually sticks. So this is not about having the most advanced ongoing system, but instead taking the biggest possible steps on the very first day. Before we get into those details, though, let's start by briefly discussing the psychological obstacle that we have to get past before we can hold. Before we can hold, hope to succeed in this quest to become more organized.

Here is what I think the main problem is that people have is a misperception about the reality of their workload. So I'm actually, again, with great trepidation, I'm going to draw a picture here for those who are watching instead of just listening. I want to draw a picture about how most people think about their workday. This is just sort of implicitly in their mind. So we have here a very happy stick figure and he's sitting, I don't know, he's sitting at his desk

and there we go. You know, he's sitting here at his computer, expertly drawn. So let's draw a little computer here. Perfect perspective. All right, so there is. Happy at his computer. Because in the world of the way most people just sort of imagine their work is, what's going on?

Well, there's maybe a couple phone messages. to return. I have three little phone messages over here, and there's, you know, two projects. So I may choose one of these projects to make progress on, and there's like a few phone messages that you might want to return. And in fact, our happy person here, I'm going to give them a notebook. And in this notebook, they, with colored pencils, kind of have this, like, nice little plan for the day. Work on Project A and then return these calls and go for a nice walk and then take lunch. Like, this is sort of the, implicit assumption people have about what their work life is like. I have some stuff I'm working on, some things, I have to get back to people on. All right, what's the reality?

Well, I'm going to draw a picture of what I imagine. This is what I think the reality is for most people. So what I have here is our same person, now very unhappy, running as fast as he or she can because there is a giant cloud of an overwhelming quantity of projects and requests and tasks and things that people need from them. And it's chasing him or her. I'm going to say, for, you know, let's do, for whatever reason, it's shooting lightning bolts at this person. Huge cloud chasing after the running person. There's lightning bolts. For some reason, things are on fire because I don't know that's kind of what it feels like

so there's just flames everywhere this is the reality all right what people think oh I use my color pencil so that I can differentiate my phone call from when I work with a nice cup of tea

on Project A reality running from fire as there's this giant swarm chases after you firing lightning bolts at you all right why is it important that we have this misconception is because when you think it works not so bad, two things happen. One, you don't think you really need to do much to get more organized.

Like work is not that hard. I just need to, you know, maybe draw out a to-do list in a nice format. Be a little bit careful or just buy, like I bought this nice looking, you know, Japanese paper planner online. And just we'll just, we'll ride in. It's going to make our lives will be easier. You don't, you don't see the urgency of actually taking major action. The second issue that's generated by this misconception is that, if you do begin wandering towards some more systematic organization, it's you open the door to this reality.

And my God, it's so terrible that you just slam that door shut and say, let's just pretend that doesn't exist. Denial. I don't want to confront the reality of how much stuff is going on. Here's the thing, though, and this is the first step of the five steps I want to talk about today. The very first step on your very first day of becoming organized is preparing yourself to face this. reality. So it is a psychological preparation step. There is a term of art that I used to use in the early days of this show, and that was called Facing the Productivity Dragon.

And the idea behind facing the productivity dragon is that you confront the reality of everything that is on your plate, even if it is terrifying and overwhelming and shooting lightning bolts at you and lighting the world around you on fire. It is better to confront the reality than the pretend it doesn't exist. So step one is to prepare to face this productivity dragon. Now, this is not a new idea. If we go back to the sort of OG of digital age productivity, that is David Allen, he wrote about what was involved in trying to get your arms around for the first time, the step of getting started on being organized. He wrote very clearly in his 2001 classic getting things done, how much is involved in taking.

that first step from chaos towards calm. I'm going to reach you from chapter five of his book here. Here's a short excerpt. Just gathering a few more things than you currently have will probably create positive feelings for you. But if you can hang in there and really do the whole collection process, 100% it will change your experience dramatically and give you an important new reference point for being on top of your work. When I coach a client through this process, the collection phase usually takes between one and six hours, though it did once take all of 20 hours with one person. All right. So what Alan is teaching us here is this very first step of confronting the productivity

dragon takes time. It takes hours because there is more in there than you probably want to admit. So the concrete advice that comes out of this first step is that you need to put aside a full day for this day. When I say, what do you do the first day of becoming more organized? I don't mean here's something you can do for 30 minutes in the morning and then you'll be more organized. You actually are going to need a full day to do this right. So you could take, put aside a day that was otherwise quiet or put aside a weekend day or a vacation day if you need to.

We have plenty of those coming up. But you need to prepare yourself that you're going to need something like a full day to actually make the transition I'm going to talk about right now from chaos to calm. All right. Step two. Let's get technical. You need to set up your first. storage system, the place that is going to gather and make sense of all of these things that you actually have to do.

Now, if you go back and read David Allen, one of the things you're going to notice is that he relies a lot on an embodied physicality in the obligations in people's lives. So he sort of imagines that many of the obligations in people's lives have a physical embodiment. There's a receipt that has to be submitted. There's a phone slip for a call that has to be returned. There's a printed report that was given to you that you have to do your revisions on. And so his process of collection from getting things done is all about having these physical

inboxes, literal boxes, and you're going around your space and collecting these artifacts and putting them into these inboxes. You're building piles of your stuff. And for the small number of things that don't actually exist in the real world, he says you write down a pointer to it and put that piece of paper in the physical box. So it's a very physical process. I'm going to suggest something different. I think the difference between the late 90s and early 2000s when Alan was putting together this methodology

and now in the 2020s is that the vast majority of professional obligations in your life as a knowledge worker are digital. Very few of them are embodied. Maybe you printed something, but the thing you printed has a digital counterpart for which it began. Most stuff is actually implicitly in an email somewhere. It's a request that was in a slack. It's an appointment that's lurking on your digital calendar for which work has to be done. So to try to translate now that the vast majority of our obligations are digital, to try to somehow translate those into the physical world to gather and back into the digital would be inefficient.

So our store systems is going to, we're going to start digital, and we're going to remain digital, all right? So no physical inboxes. What is going to be the digital system in which we're going to store everything? It's going to require three things. A collection of list. The ability to rapidly add, update, or move items between these lists, and the ability to efficiently append information such as links or notes or text copied out of emails to

individual items on these lists. These are the three capabilities we're going to need in our storage system. This clearly is going to have to be digital. You're not going to be able to get all of those features in a purely analog system, the quickly moving things with back and forth, appending information to things. So we're going to need a digital system here that can satisfy those three things.

I'm going to give you three options here from simple to most complex. The simplest way to implement a system that has those three properties would just be with word processing or text files. So just imagine you have a text file. You can just have a bold header for each of the list that we're going to define

and then just write below it, separated by white space, different items of the list. If you want to append information to an item in this particular implementation, you can just put a bullet point or a collection of bullet points under the item and just copy and paste whatever information you need. It doesn't have to be neat. So you could just get going with Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Any number of online task programs let you do this easily as well. A favorite of mine is work flowy. All it is is list that you can indent. Press enter. You get another item. Press tab. It indents over. What's nice about this is you can hide indentations.

So if you have a bunch of things, extra information there are attached, you can click a sign to have it all collapse. And then you can just open it again when you want that information. So for our three properties, text files will be fine. Next more complicated solution for implementing this system is going to be something like Trello. This is what I use. It's just very well set up for what we're talking about here. Each list can be a column on a Trello board. Each item can be a card on a Trello board.

Extra information can be appended to the back of the cards, and the cards are easy to move back and forth between different columns. The more advanced solution would be to build something more custom, perhaps using a TaskView database system like Notion. I would not start here for your very first day becoming organized unless you're already a pro at one of these systems, and it's as easy for you to put together as it is for someone else to set up workflowy. This is the type of thing you can think about,

the line. Once we've made this initial leap from chaos to control, chaos to calm, down the line, you might think about if you're more tech-oriented building a more advanced system, but I want to start there. Okay. So we now know what a system broadly speaking needs, these lists that you can update and move stuff behind between and append information. We know what tech tools you can use to actually store these lists. What are the actual list we need in our initial system? I'm going to suggest six for your starter system. Again, whether this is in docs, Trello, or Notion. Ready, backburner, waiting, to discuss, clarify, and scheduled.

So, in fact, I'll even write these on the screen so we can be on the same page. I want to talk a little bit about each of these. try to type on here, Jesse, but it always just creates, makes the world just fall apart. By the way, see that issue with the trying to type on here? That's why I had the stuff using this in my classroom. When you're in projection or screen sharing mode in notability, the text does, the typing doesn't work very well.

All right, I can just write, though. I got beautiful hand-readied. All right, so what are these things? Ready was number one. What we mean by ready is going to be, think of it as like ready for action. These are things, items that need to be worked on as soon as we can get to them. I typically think about something under a ready list as something that I want to try to complete in the given week. Different people do that slightly different ways. Next, we had back burner. These are things that they need to get done.

You've committed to them, but you're not working on them right now. So we have them on the back burner. So we're not going to forget about them. We have a place. And here it is on this list, if we get more information about this thing that we've committed to but it's not coming up yet, we have a place to put that information. Someone emails us more details about the workshop we've agreed to set up, and we're not really working on that yet.

We can copy that text from the email and put it on the back of this Trello card or an indentation under this item. So that's what's going on the back burner. Waiting. This is critical. I think this is the most important type of list that people do not typically keep. This is things that you are waiting to hear back about. All right.

So this is I'm working on this workshop. I sent an email to the administrator about trying to get a room reservation. I am waiting to hear back from that person about whether or not we can get that room. That item can be now under the waiting list. So it's waiting as in waiting to hear back. Other critical lists that most people don't use in their systems but is very efficient, is to discuss. So it's where you keep track of things where I'm going to be meeting with this person. person or team at some point in the near future, what do I want to discuss with them at that

next meeting? Now, you have two options here. You can just have one list to discuss, and every item on it, the very first thing in the title of the item in bold is, you know, to discuss with Jesse. So like you can just, you can clarify for each item, who is this for? So it's for people or teams you meet with on a regular basis. And the idea here is if you, if you have things you need more information on, instead of just throwing an email into the ether, you can kind of collect list of, okay, next time I talk to Jesse, I have four things on here to go through. If there's people you have a lot of things to discuss things with and you talk to them on a regular basis, they can get their own to discuss lists.

You might have multiple to discuss lists with team, with boss, with department chair. That's fine as well. Clarify. These are placeholders. All right, I have this obligation. Something, I'm supposed to do something about this. I don't yet know what that means. In other words, like, I don't know what I should do right now to make progress on this thing.

I just know I'm committed to it. I need to think through or learn more about what this actually means. You know, I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll handle the secret Santa in the office this week or this month. And I don't really really know what that means. Like, I don't know how that works or what I need to do, but I just committed to it. I don't want to forget it. It can go to the clarify list. So it means this is an obligation that is pending more clarification on what it actually is going to require us to do.

So we have a place for it. And then scheduled. So if there's a non-simple task that is scheduled on your calendar, so it's a task that requires some explanation or maybe has some information that gets appended to it, here's what people emailed me, here's the list of steps I need to do on this, I'm supposed to file this report, I put aside time to do this on Friday morning, but here's the step someone told me about how to do this or how to submit it. This gives you a place for that item to live in your system, so all that information can

live somewhere. So an item under scheduled is also on your calendar somewhere, but the item on your list can hold all the extra information you need. Not everything on your calendar needs to be under the scheduled item. You don't need appointments for the most part under there. You don't need small things under there, you know, pick up whatever, someone from the train station. You know, you probably don't need an item there. But if it's complex, there's information you need to remember about it, then you can live there under the schedule item. All right, so you have sixth list. And that's your initial collection system.

So we've set up sixth list in some sort of digital system. All right, step three, here's the facing the productivity drag in part made real. Dump everything on your mind, in your inbox, in the world. Everything that you are obligated to do gets on these lists. All right, so what does this mean? everything you can think of. So just start. What can I think of that I'm supposed to be working on or I should be doing?

Maybe I told someone I would do it. Or I've just been thinking to myself, this is something I should make progress on. I should update the website. Get everything you can out of your head. Get it onto an item in these lists. Go through your inbox and process every single email. Get the inbox empty. This doesn't mean reply to every email.

This doesn't mean take care of every email. You're translating these emails into task items that go into your system. So for this initial collection phase, you want to clear everything out of your inbox. And it might mean you might have things showing up on your list. It's just like reply to send Jesse the information, you know, he requested about skeleton manufacturing, right? Like just whatever it is, you're just translating emails and items on this list. You are denying your email inbox to be a secondary task management system at this point. You're putting all your faith into this collection system.

Look through your calendar. There are complicated things on there, reminders that should be translated into tasks that are on this list. Then go back and think some more about what else am I forgetting, what else is just in my head. Let me give you a couple advanced tips for going through this collection process. Number one, it does help sometimes to use a working memory.txte file as an intermediary in process. So just have a plain, unformatted text file on your computer. As you're going through one of these categories, you can just dump things into that text file and then go from that text file into your system. It helps, right? It feels like this is an extra step, but it actually

helps, especially if you're cleaning out an inbox. Because you can type really quickly into a text file, and you don't have to be organized or really think it through, like reply to Jesse about this, send back dates to so-and-so. You can just type really fast and just fill in this text file really fast. I call it workingmemory.txti because this text file is like an extension of your working memory. Our brain can hold five or six things at a time. With a working memory.

compte file, you can have 20 or 30 things. It's like you're extending your working memory. And then you go from that text file into your system. It takes a little bit more time to put things into your system. You have to choose the list. You have to create the card or do the font formatting if you're using some. something like Microsoft Word. More importantly, as you go from this very fast to fill in plain text file to your system,

you see things to consolidate or to simplify. Actually, I don't really need to respond to these people. Now that I look at this, I have eight different emails on here from Jesse about merchandising Jesse Skeleton. I could just combine this into one item on my list, which is, you know, set up intervention. to talk to Jesse about his obsession with Jesse Skeleton, right? So you actually get some on-the-fly organization and consolidation simplification as you go to this extended working memory and then into your system. Advanced tip number two, when you're going through this initial dumping of everything in your life into this system, lean heavily into the clarify list. Don't try to work everything out during this process.

There's too many things. Don't try for everything you come up with. like, well, what's going on with this project? Well, let me follow up with so and so about this. And let me go, let me look at this a little bit. When might not be able to do this? You don't have the time or energy to actually clarify all of the ambiguous obligations to are on your plate.

Right now, we're just trying to get everything into our system. So at first, your clarify list might be really long. You just don't want to forget it. So you just have, you know, workshop plan. I'm like, God, I don't even know what that means, but I'm not forgetting it. I'm just throw it in the clarified list for now. We'll deal with this in the next step, so don't worry about that. The key role to maintain as you're initially populating your list in your system,

and this is the rule that you should maintain going forward, is that every obligation gets one item in the system. It can move between lists. It cannot exist on multiple lists. You do not have, okay, under Ready Workshop, you know, next steps for this workshop project. And then if that generates an email to an administrator, You don't keep that item under the ready list and add a new item to the waiting to hear back list.

You move that full item over to the waiting to hear back from list and just update the status up top. I'm waiting to hear back from so and so about this. All of the information about a given obligation lives in the system, but it moves around to what is the status of this obligation right now. So think about these lists as the statuses of various obligations. If you are actually building a notion-based system to keep track of this stuff, this would be a lot more explicit because these are database entries that can have a single status. It's here, then it's there, then it's here. But everything just lives in one place. All right.

This will take a while, one to three hours probably. So we've really spent a lot of our day here getting everything into this list. But now symbolically, when you're done, everything is captured. Your inbox is empty. There's nothing in your head. There's nothing just sitting there on your calendar. You don't know what it means. It's all in this one place, this collection of lists, this system of yours.

That brings us to step four to do your initial configuring. Moving forward, configuration of your list of your system is something you're going to do on a semi-regular basis. We'll get to that soon. But we're going to do our very first configuration step during this very first day that you're making your leap from chaos to calm. This is a big thing that was always missing from David Allen's methodology, but I think is really important. This is where you make sense of all of the things in your system and you clarify and optimize,

remove redundancies. It's where you sit and move and work around and make more sense of this huge mess of stuff that's on your plate. So this means a few things. One, start going through your clarifying the items under the clarified list and try to clarify as many as you can. The stuff that's not particularly urgent, you can skip for now, but the things you think, like, I need to do something about this. Now you can clarify it.

So you don't want to clarify as you're filling in your list and doing your dumping everything in your life because that's too much friction. But now that you've done that, now we can focus just on moving through this clarified list and see, what are the things that really I should be making progress on and start doing the clarification. Now, this might mean you discard it. I don't really need to do this. Or it might mean you're sending a clarification email. This is often the case with stuff that ends up on clarifying when you go through a configuration step. Often the reaction is, I got to write to someone to say, what the hell does this mean? Like, how do I set up the secret Santa?

You did it last year. Can you tell me about it? That's fine. So those things just get moved over to the waiting to hear back from list. Other things, it might be obvious. Now that I think about it, what I need to do is set up a meeting with my team and we need to make a plan. So either I can send that doodle pool now to do that. or move this over to the ready list and change the actual description of the item to set up meeting with team to discuss this project.

All the information about is attached to this card. This is what I mean by Clarify. So it's moving things off of that Clarify list to where they should go. This is also a good time to triage. Go through and triage the back burner. Do I really need to do this? I was excited about this, but I'm thinking now I don't need to do that. So you can kind of go through, like, what's on the back burner?

Let me triage things out of this. What do I really want to stick with? This is where you might send some sorry triage messages. Hey, you know, sorry, I know I said before, like I was, I could help you with this, but actually, I think my schedule's too crowded. That creates like seven seconds of annoyance on the recipients end, but for the sender that email, it can create seven hours of freedom. So those are very powerful. Whenever I get those type of messages from someone, not right before something is due or after it's due, hey, I didn't do this.

I can't really get to this. But like three weeks in advance, hey, you know how I said we should record this thing? I honestly, like I don't, I was misreading my schedule. This is probably not the right time for it. I know that's someone who has their act together. That's someone who's looking and configuring their whole schedule and seeing what makes sense and what doesn't.

You'll actually earn respect if in advance you're stepping back from things. Now, if you wait until it's due and just don't do it and then step back, that's a different thing. Then you look out of control. Another part of configuring is adding things to calendar. that need to be on calendars. Okay, this is pretty urgent. Let me find time for this and get that on my calendar.

If there's information associated with this task, I'll move this over to Scheduled. If it's a one-time thing, like set up doc dentist appointment and I get it on my calendar, then, you know, I just delete the item from my list. I don't need it there. It's also a good time, and this is an advanced tip, to look for batching opportunities. Like this, this, this, and this. All of these things I could really make progress on if I talk to Jesse about them. So what I really want to do is take all of these five things and put them all on the back of my Trello card for the item of set up meeting with Jesse to discuss many things.

And you kind of have these things below. And then I send the email that Jesse saying, let's do this meeting. And that whole card gets moved to waiting to hear back from. Or I'm like, oh, we meet every week when we record our podcast. We'll batch a bunch of these things and put it under the two discuss list, Jesse's two discuss list, right? So it's in this configuring step. You get all these great batching opportunities. Let's wait to do this here.

Let's do all these things at the same time. I'm going into work on Friday. And so let's put aside a big group of time and we're going to like squash through 20 things that need to get done. This is really productivity ninja stuff when you begin to do these batching opportunities. Something that really doesn't happen when you're just reactive and chaotic. Oh my God. What do I need to do next? My inbox is on fire.

Oh my God. This thing is due. You're never going to see those type of opportunities. All right. So at this point, you have your system fully set up. We're about four or five hours into your first day of trying to be more organized. And you have everything in an intelligently designed digital system in the six optimal list. And you've done your initial configuring. So stuff that's important has been clarified. You've bat stuff. You've removed stuff. You've moved things where it needs to go. Some things are on the calendar. So you kind of have your arms around what's on your plate. The fifth and final step is how do we then make the use of this system stick. If you stop trusting this system, it will fall apart. If you find yourself unwilling, for example, to move something out of your inbox and onto an item in these lists, that means you don't trust yourself for this system. It means you say, I know I'll check my inbox.

I get yelled at if I don't. I don't trust myself to look at this system. So let me just keep this in here. If you're writing notes to yourself, you're not trusting your system. So how do we actually get you into the habit now of actually making it? this system part of your workflow, well, I'm going to suggest two things you do daily and one thing you do weekly for the next four weeks after this very first day of getting organized. So the first daily thing, review this system every morning when you look at your calendar,

use it to help make your plan for the day. I won't even get into now how you're making your plan for the day. This is more advanced stuff, but however you make your plan for the day, and, you know, again, the brightly colored pencils on your fancy planner or you just jotting stuff down on a text file. I don't care. For now, I look at my system every day before I make this plan. I see what's on that ready list. I remind myself who am I waiting to hear back from. I remind myself on the two-discuss list. Hey, do I have a meeting coming up today that I need to discuss things on a two-discuss list? We're talking five minutes, but you see it all. You see the mess of stuff and clarify that you haven't got to. You see the big back burner.

You see everything. Number two, at the end of every. day when you're finishing and shutting down your work, you have to go back and review the system again. Here the goal is to make sure that anything that is floating gets nailed down back into the system. Oh yeah, you know, I said in this meeting, I would do this. Let me make sure that's written down in my system. This thing came in, this request in a slack.

Let me get that into my system. You're closing the loops, making sure that there's nothing just in your head. Should you at this point empty everything in your inbox into your system? like we did on the day one, it's probably not practical because it just is too time-consuming. You might not always have that time. So let's put that aside for now. But otherwise, anything else that's loose or urgent, you want it in your system. You look at your system, make sure there's no obvious changes or updates to do.

Typically, if the day moves fast, there's updates you need to make to your system you haven't gotten around to. Oh, I sent that email about this. I need to move that over to waiting to hear back. Or I heard back from this thing. So I need to move this back from waiting to hear back over here and then copying what I heard about it. So just do that final cleanup so your system,

everything is back in it and the system is up to date. Do that every day. First four weeks. The weekly thing I want you to do for the first four weeks is return to that step four configure step

at the beginning of each week for the next four weeks. Do it Monday morning. You can do it Sunday. Some people do it at the end of day Friday so they can go into their weekend less stressed. I don't care when you do it.

But go back and do something like that configure step, which remember, going to the clarify items and trying to like, okay, which ones can I actually make progress on? You're triaging, your batching, your moving things, your calendar are off. This is like a 30-minute process of just getting the system fully up to speed. Critically, when you do that configure process, this is a time to return to your inbox and empty it. That's why it's good to do on the weekend or before the week really gets going.

The stuff that's piled up to my inbox that I didn't really have time during the days or my daily reviews to get to, I want to get that back down to zero and everything back into my system. So it's a more thorough configuring than what you're doing at the end of each day. Do this thing. You're going to be much more organized. And you're going to be ready for the much more advanced ways we talk about of maintaining depth in a world of these increasing digital distractions in the workplace. There's all the more advanced stuff we talk about.

This will give you the foundation. The first four steps will take you two to four hours. Put aside a day to do this. You'll be exhausted after this, not want to do much else work. But that is worth it. Two to four hours, you have a fully set up and configured task, collection system is a huge difference. And then do the twice daily, once weekly routine for four weeks, and your use of this

system is going to stick. That alone, even if you do nothing else in my advice and have completely idiosyncratic ways of planning your day or doing long-term planning or anything else or how you do your email communication, all the other stuff we talk about, even if you ignore everything else I say, this will be a night and day difference. You will no longer feel like there is this cloud of ambiguous, overwhelming obligations is chasing you and shooting lightning bolts at your head, you will say, I've got this. And even if what you've got is difficult and impossible and you're completely overloaded,

you're facing the productivity dragon. You know exactly how overloaded you are. You know, what is the very best thing I can do, given my circumstance? I can't get this all done. Something's going to have to change. Until then, though, what can I? What's the best I can do with my time? It gives you confidence.

It gives you a sense of efficacy, and it can really reduce that sense of stress that comes from my God, I know I'm forgetting things. So there's my five steps. It's not going to make you the most organized person in the world, but it's going to make you more organized than 99% of the people who work in this world. So it's a great place to get started. Do you have those sixth list in every board in Trello? Yeah, so that's a more advanced tip.

So as you get more advanced in this system, what you then do is clone the six-list system for the different roles in your life. So we've talked about this on the show sometimes. I have different roles in my life, writer, researcher, teacher professor, media company related. Each of those has its own board. All six of those lists are in each board. So that's one of the more advanced things you can get to. And there, if you have multiple roles like so many of us in complex jobs do, you can just deal contextually with one role at a time and not mix together tasks from different things.

I don't want to think about Jesse's skeleton at the same time that I'm thinking about grading, get my grading post for my discrete mathematics class. So sort of having those worlds separate is one of these advanced tips you can get to. I'll just start with the sixth list. All right. So there we go. Nitty gritty. I like to balance the big picture with the nitty gritty. We got now some practical questions to get to about these type of ideas and how you put them in practice of real people's lives.

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you're quicker when you get there. So it really just makes medical care so much easier to find and get moving with. So go to Zococ.com slash deep and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then find a book a top-reddit doctor today. That's ZOC, doc.com slash deep. Zock.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's do. some questions. Sounds good. Who we got first? First questions from William. I find it much more

feasible and fulfilling to create and stick to a plan for my personal life than my job. I love working towards these daily and big picture goals as they seem to give me purpose. I do love the company that I work for and feel that engineering is a good fit for me. So how can I make my career a more important part of my life? Well, William, there's three things I'm going to suggest because you're heading down from a psychological perspective a somewhat dangerous road, this idea of my work is not what I'm excited about these other things are. And that can really lead you to despair or job hopping or radical changes that are not well justified.

Why don't I just make canoes full-time as my job? I don't need to be an engineer. And then you realize that for the most part people don't want to buy canoes. So I have three things to suggest for you. One, and this is not going to surprise long-time listeners, lifestyle-centric career planning. So when your job, what you're doing in your job, and more importantly, what you're trying to get to in your job,

is part of a vision of a lifestyle that resonates with you, you're excited about and feel really strongly about, your motivation for what you're doing professionally raises. Because it's not just an arbitrary thing. I just have this job. It's no, no, no, here's what I'm doing. I work at this engineering firm, this income is part of this larger vision we have for our lifestyle.

And I have goals for what I'm trying to do professionally. I want to actually move over to this type of work within engineering. And once I master this, then move to contract basis, which will allow us to move over to this small town in Cape Cod, which is actually part of this bigger lifestyle vision we have of sort of living in Churro in the pine forest and working remotely and living cheaply. And we have this whole plan. and my work is building us towards that in a very concrete, tangible way.

Now you're going to be motivated about work. Because your episodic future thinking center of your brain is saying, yes, this is leading us towards this bigger vision that we have really inculcated in ourselves, psychologically speaking, as being highly resonant. You need to have that bigger plan and see how work fits into it. I think a lot in this case, when I think about these examples, I think a lot about Mike Rowe from that old Discovery Channel job that shows. dirty jobs where he went and spent time with people doing quote unquote dirty jobs. So these were more not knowledge work jobs, but more manual jobs, not manual but non-knowledgework. So, so, you know, septic tank cleaners or roadkill picker uppers. And he gave this great talk, the TEDx talk, this was from years back. And he gave this great talk about the people he profiled

on dirty jobs. And he said about him, a lot of these people were very happy. He's like, you know, I knew a roadkill picker-upper who would whistle

on his way to work. He knew multiple, he had spent time with multiple septic tank cleaners who are incredibly fulfilled. And why was this? It's because

they own their own business. They were making good money. They had their arms around their finances. This was supporting their family. They had a nice house by the lake. They had a vision of their lifestyle and how they fit into their family,

of their community life, that this work and this business they created was part of. The content, and this was his big point, the content of the work is not what's important. It is the role of the work in their lifestyle, the role of their work and the life that they think is worth living. When what you're doing fits with that,

it can be incredibly fulfilling. It is much more of a recent conceit, concede. Can't talk today, Jesse. I thought I was going to be about to look that word up. more recent conceit. Well, you always use a lot of like a lot of vocabulary, so I'm always

like looking stuff up. Yeah, in this case, I'm just mispronouncing things. It's a more recent conceit that the content of your job really matters. This really emerged. I mean, I wrote a whole book about this, so good they can't ignore you came out in 2012. This really emerges in the 1990s with the whole

follow your passion movement. It's not a timeless movement. It's a movement that arises in the 1990s. That suddenly puts a lot more emphasis on the content of your work. The content of your work, matching intrinsic passion is the source of happiness. This was the idea here. And Mike Roe is saying that's nonsense.

The content of your work is often not important. It's not that I like the physical act of cleaning the septic tank, but I like running my own business and the flexibility and the money and the respectability and the ability to support myself and my family, and I like the people I work for. So Lifestyle Center Career Planning gets you away from just, do I like the specific task I'm doing today in my job? Because there be dragons. That's not when you anywhere good.

Number two, you need to connect more with the people you work with, connect more with the mission of the company. Extroverts tend to be happier in their jobs. They're really into the life of the different people they work around. Those of us who are introverts have to do this work systematically. My dad was an extrovert. So when I would go to his office, he knew the life story of every single person who worked for him and was legitimately interested into it. That makes a big difference in your experience of work. when you're really connected to all the people around you and what's going on,

us introverts have to make that effort, especially now in the era of these higher-level jobs, give you huge autonomy in terms of when you want to come in or not. And it's possible to barely come into your office. You can completely isolate yourself from other people, and you have to fight that systematically. I'm going to go into the office. I'm going to talk to multiple people.

I'm going to put time in my schedule. I have lunches with people. It really changes your relationship to your work. I mean, I can feel this difference, even in my own life, the sort of pre-pandemic, there was an era where I was going to Georgetown five days a week.

I just would go every day like a normal job because, yeah, I don't want to be at home. When we had young kids, we had a nanny, and I was like, I don't want to be home with the nanny. And I just went in every day. I was like, let me commute and that's just what I did. And compare it to like now post-pandemic, where now I'm coming in more,

but there was definitely a period where it was like people just weren't coming in, you're coming in to teach. that was kind of it. It's a huge difference. I have all these nostalgic memories of that earlier time at Georgetown where I was not just connected to the people there, connected to the campus. Just I knew, hey, they, they decorate the courtyard behind Healy. This is when like the Christmas decorations go up. And here's the view of the, just walking the campus and working in different libraries. And it had a real strong connection to place that in, say, 2021, I didn't feel. Because it was almost, you know, how elite universities. universities where they're almost apologetic about being open and it was like you don't even want to be here and just was very different it was very transactional and now we're coming in much more and it's it feels a lot better again so these things make a difference three uh get organized so the stuff we talked about at the deep dive of this episode also makes a difference when you have

your arm around work you feel efficacious when you feel efficacious you actually feel more motivation and satisfaction about your work having your act together makes work more enjoyable. Not having your act together makes it seem like an impossible intrusion. You kind of hold other people responsible for why is everyone bothering me? I'm too busy. And it is a negative force in your life. Whereas if you act together, you're like, man, I'm on top of this.

It becomes a positive force in your life. And again, that comes down to that key word out of motivational psychology, efficacy, sense of being effective and actually making progress towards your goals. You feel efficacious. You feel much better, more motivated. Being organized makes you feel more efficacious. All right, William. So let's get hardcore about Lifestyle Center Career Planning.

Let's start connecting to our work and the people who are there and the mission. Like get more involved in the company and let's get your act together organizationally. I think all of that is going to help you feel more motivated to do your actual work. All right. Who do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Esteban. I have been struggling with the Z. Garnick effect in college due to group work projects. I'm a software engineering student and it is common that almost everyone leaves everything to the last minute.

I've tried to tell my friends about time management, but they don't seem to hear me and I always have to correct what they did. The situation takes up incredible amounts of time that I could spend doing other things more valuable to me. How can I solve this problem? So, Esteban, I feel your pain. Welcome to my college experience. Imagine this, the guy, the kid who was writing books about time management and being organized. in college while still in college. Imagine how I felt whenever group projects came along.

College students are terrible at being students. If people worked in other jobs the way that college students worked at their jobs, we would be living in a Mad Max health skate. The power system would shut down, animals would be running wild. I mean, college students are very terrible at being college students. Now, this has been to my advantage in two ways, if I can digress into my own stuff. I'll come back to us, but in two ways, this was to my advantage. Number one, by being someone who was not really, really bad at being a student, I could really dominate, right?

There's this, you don't have to be brilliant. You just have to be, like, in the world of work, a, what you would be considered to be a generally organized person. In the context of college, you know, you're Thor, your Wonder Woman. It's like, my God, this is someone who can move things with their mind. When I got more organized over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I went from mixed grades to 4-0 every quarter except for one quarter where I got an A-minus. It makes such a big difference. It was also to my advantage because I've sold hundreds of thousands of copies of books to students

about how to be more organized because it makes such a big difference. So I feel your pain. I hated group projects too because college students are terrible at doing work. you kind of have to grin and bear it you get away from group projects when you can if you're looking for groups informally like to help you work on your problem sets be incredibly selective

this happened I mean at college and I actually heard from this guy a couple years ago was cool he heard me somewhere and like hey do you remember me from college I could find one kid I was a pretty good computer science student just as you might imagine MIT went on to all this other stuff so I was a pretty good computer science student

there was one kid that I could do problem sets with that was useful. And I found the one guy. And like we worked on our algorithms problem sets together. We worked on our theory of computation problem sets together. It's like we could keep up with each other and it was useful. And I realized like be in no other groups because it just wasn't that useful. You know, so you got to find the people that you should actually work with. When you're stuck doing group projects, it just kind of sucks, but also it's college.

So like what do you do? You try to set things up so that the work is kind of kind of. clearly set up, give yourself to work, even if it's more work, that you can get it done ahead of time and not have much to do. And then finally, just, you got to stay up. The day before products are due, it's like, this is just college life. It's like fraternity hazy. And I'm going to have to, we're going to stay up late to work on this thing. We could have got this done before, but just assume that's what's going to happen. And trust me, as you get older, the standards for organization go up and things will get somewhat easier. Yeah, you never would have

done a problem set with me. I always had a track down. I had this one guy that I would you know use for the first couple years and he pretty much dumped me. Then I had to find a new one for the software. He dumped you because you were too lazy or because you were too smart. No, I wasn't too smart. He was really smart. I just needed help with a lot of stuff and then you got to find someone who's like right at your level that you're, then you're pushing each other a little bit. Yeah. That's what and is and that are willing for me was the organization. Yeah. They're willing to, you know, I'm saying, I know this problem says it's due on Friday, but in my autopilot schedule, Tuesday afternoon is the right time to work on this. And they're willing and able to say, I'll work on this Tuesday afternoon. Like, some people just can't do that. I was good about maybe doing that, so I helped to a certain degree. And I needed to see them work through some of the problems so I could do them. And then.

So here's my, here's my just outright brag. So this, and I loved working with this guy. And he wrote me a few years ago. It was like, hey, remember, we used to work together. Yeah, you mentioned him in the show before. Yeah. And his thing was it was something like working with you on those problem sets. It was something like, whatever. It was very complimentary. It was like, that's why I realized maybe like he was like, I'm not going to go to grad school or you were fat. You know, whatever it was.

Like I thought I was really smart on this stuff and then working with you. So it was like some big compliment of like he should have told me that at the time because it would have gave me more confidence. But anyways, I thought he was very smart because. But then it's pretty wild because then when he went to MIT, you're like, oh my God, I'm in a different game, right? They're so good. I know. Yeah, so good. Now, I will say I aced MIT.

So from a class perspective, I did ace MIT, and I did pretty well. But, man, there's people there that were beast. Yeah. The beast at MIT, especially among the faculty. Faculty in particular, but there are just some real beast. Yeah. So it's, I mean, I see it completely like you're playing high school ball. Yeah, I was just, I was thinking about a draft pick.

I was like, you're around all in, like, top 10 draft picks. You're playing a high school ball. you're like, I'm, this is, come on, man, I'm dominating these games.

Like, basketball or football is not so, but, you know, you're playing football. You're like, it's not so bad. I like this,

you know, I like this game. And then, you know, Alabama recruits you. Yeah. And you're like, these guys are 350 pounds.

Yeah. And they can jump over me. Like, what the hell is going on, right? It's like a completely different, it's a completely different game. And then like a few people percolate up to be the stars in that game and,

you know, become famous. And it was like, I'm the guy who got drafted, got picked at Alabama, but did not go on to be the star NFL quarterback. That's like the way I see it. There's always like a level up.

Always a level up. All right. Enough humble bragging without the humbleness. Let's move on. What's the next question? All right. Next question is from Felipe. How should I organize my deep work time? Should I spread a big task over four days for one hour each day versus blocking off a

four hour block on a single day? Oh, Jesse. I'm going to consider this. our slow productivity corner. We get some sound effects, please? Beautiful and professional. I love it. So as listeners know, in honor of or in celebration of my book, Slow productivity that's coming out in March,

in every episode, I like to have one question that is somewhat related to concepts of slow productivity. We call it a slow productivity corner. I'm going to count Felipe's question as today's slow productivity corner because he's talking about should I spread out deep work? What seems to be relevant to principle two of slow productivity, which is work at a natural pace, ups and downs of intensity, taking more time, etc.

Now, this is a reverse a rue, if I can use the technical term here, because what we're seeing is something that seems like a good example of this idea of working at a natural pace, but is actually organizational fools goal. There is a trap here. It is an artificial slowing down that I think actually makes things worse. So let me explain. So in Felipe's case, I would say work one four hour block. Don't spread that out over four one hour blocks. Now, why is that, right? If the slow productivity mindset says, be more, let's chill out and be more natural at our pace.

Why is that? Well, because when we get to the details of this type of artificial slowing, what we have to account for is the cost of overhead. So when I look at my time block planner, I say, I'm about to do one hour of work on this larger project. I don't just flick a switch, and now I am all in on that project, and over the next 60 minutes, I get 60 minutes of intense work done. No, there's huge overhead.

All right, what am I working on now? I got to clear out of my head what I was working on before. I got to bring in the context of what's happening here and remember all the different things, and where was I when I was last working on this? then I have to build up that intellectual head of steam where you sort of get that intellectual momentum and your mind is focusing in more. You get those first initial results, which gets your motivational system going, which allows you to actually capture more energy into your cognition, and you get that head of steam going,

and now you're working all cylinders, but you're 30 minutes into your block. So then you end up getting about 30 minutes of all, you know, high cylinder work, and then you're done. So when you spread this workout over four sessions, you're paying that. overhead cost on each of these sessions. You're not getting four deep hours of work out of those four sessions. It maybe is going to take six sections to get the same amount of work done. Not only does it take longer, because again, slow productivity is not about just winning the game of in the end how many total minutes were required.

Those are worse minutes. It's like the ratio of sort of I'm not in the zone to time I am in the zone. That ratio is not very good on the project. And that's just mentally more difficult in taxing. you do the four-hour block, okay, 30 minutes into it, you're going full cylinders, and then you get three and a half hours at full speed, you can start to do some damage, especially if this is really creative or interesting type of work. So this notion of sort of slowing down and working out a natural pace, scale really matters here.

So we're talking about like a particular chunk of work, just getting after that chunk of work might be the right thing to do. If you're talking about at a bigger scale, many, many chunks of work. So the difference between I want to finish a draft of this book chapter and I want to write this book, now you want that pacing to be more natural. Now you don't want, it's just every day, six hours for six weeks, we're going to write this book. It's like, now spend the year to write the book and work on it and then take breaks and come back to it and let that be more natural in the pacing.

So the idea of natural pacing works at a bigger scale. When you get to the small scale, you have to be careful about these nitty-gritty details, like the overhead involved, like the cognitive reality of working on specific things. So Felipe, that is our slow productivity corner of the day. I appreciate the question because it allowed us to talk about this common trap when it comes to work pacing. We still need our music, Jesse. I was just thinking that. I got to get the music.

We need slow productivity. People have been sending in suggestions. Oh, can you send me? I should. People have been email, not songs, just suggestions for like what the music should be like. Oh, okay. So no MP3. No MP3.

If you have an MP3, by the way, you think we should use. use as our slow productivity corner theme music, send that to jesse at Calnewport.com. Yeah, just make sure it's like, you know, five seconds. Yeah, but you do not send a, well, but slow. So we should have like three minutes. A Brahms concerto. It takes 17 minutes. All right, let's keep rolling.

What do we got next? Next question is from Martin. Currently I'm enrolled in a part-time online program and due to various issues. I do not know yet if I'll be continuing with a program during the next semester. Consequently, my quarterly plan is somewhat open-ended. How do you structure your plans to accommodate such situations? Well, Martin, write two plans, one that makes sense if you end up continuing with this online

education program in the next semester and one plan for if you do not. And then you can just switch to whatever one fits. So I want to overthink it. Two plans and switch is needed. All right, let's roll what we got, Jesse. Next question is from Tracy. I'd love to know where your book reading fits in your day. Is it time blocked or do you just keep a book near you at all times when you get some free time?

I have an ever-increasing list of books I'd like to read, including now the ones that you just mentioned. It's a good question, Tracy. I don't time block reading for the most part because I'm doing my reading outside of my workday and I don't time block my time outside of my work day. I have a few things I do. I do keep books around. So I do have downtime, like a meeting lunch, for example, is to have a book to read. I will do that.

Our family often has a reading block in the evening. It's just not every day, but it's not an uncommon post-dinner activity. Like, let's all go do some reading. I will sometimes add an impromptu reading block during the workday itself, not necessarily time block, just if something got done earlier, if I have some time to kill. And I read every night after the whole family goes to bed. And so depending on how into I'm in a book, I might stay up later than other days.

That gets through a lot of books. And then I combine that with finishing sprints. Hey, I'm into this book. And I did this the other day. There's 100 pages into a 300 page book. I was like, you know what? I have some time. Let's just go for it.

And I read for like two hours that evening and another hour that night after I went to bed and just like this knock this book out. So finishing sprints also helped there. my fastest book reading recently actually, Jesse, is I got a book. Someone recommended it to me on a Thursday at a 2.30 meeting. So as a meeting at 2.30, someone mentioned this book and finished it by Friday, Friday evening. So sometimes I just go for it. Like I just stayed up late two nights, got up read, put aside time to read. So sometimes if I'm really into a book, I just rock and roll.

I had a pretty cool sprint the other day because my loan was ending at the library on Kindle. Yeah. And then so I was like, I got to finish this in a day. Now, you know the trick. If you leave the book open on your Kindle, it won't take it back unless you actually leave that book and go somewhere else. Oh, really? Yeah. So if you do the loan from the library on your Kindle, my wife does this a lot.

If you accidentally click out of the book and go somewhere else, it sucks it back. it can't suck it back when it's literally open. So just leave it open on your Kindle, you can buy yourself some extra time. How is the technology not advanced enough to be able to do that? I don't know. Seems weird, doesn't it?

And maybe it's different because you'd be D.C. or Virginia, this is Montgomery County Public Library, but they're probably all using... Libby? Libby. Yeah. Yeah. So I think if you leave it open. Now that we've said that publicly,

they're going to close that loophole. My wife's always bragging to me about, like, I got this from the library, and could keep it open. I got that from the library. And I'm like, you know, you're married to a writer who makes his money off people buying his books. Like, why are you always bragging to me about how much little money you've managed to spend to read books? I am a maximalist.

I buy books just because I'm not even going to read it. I buy books. I will, on multiple occasions, I'll buy a book. I'm excited to read, like, from Amazon. And then, like, oh, there's not going to get here for four days. I'll buy the Kindle version and read it while I'm waiting for the physical copy to come because I'm like, I'm into this book and I'll probably want to have a physical copy for my library. I've done this twice now in the last two weeks where I've bought two copies of the books. I'm a book buying maximalist because it was one of the things when I was coming up in grad school, I had no money.

A lot of student loans, no money was a grad student and it was starting to make some money from the blog just like a little bit. To me, like the greatest thing of any financial windfall I've ever have is where the Amazon associate links on my blog at calnewport.com. Oh, you mentioned this before. Yeah, allowed me to basically buy book. And we're talking it was like $200 a month in Amazon credits. But I was like, basically I could buy any book I wanted. And to me, that was the greatest, all other financial milestones on past.

The ability to not have to worry about buying the cost of buying books has always been the greatest. So because I'm a writer, I'm just always, I just buy books left and write. I want the authors to have the money. So you ever have to move, you're going to have to pack up a lot of books? Yeah. But so the way I deal with that, I talk about us on the show, is I have my various shelves. So, like, my study at my house has a bunch of built-in shelves, and then our family room has a bunch of built-in shelves. And then we keep two bookshelves here at the HQ.

That's my space. So things have to rotate out. So as new stuff comes in, I'll just take the worst stuff off the shelf to replace it with stuff I like better. So, like, over time, your number of books, once you reach stasis, doesn't increase, but the quality of you. your collection goes up. So then you just donate those to the library? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, or wherever. I do the same thing with my closet, actually. Yeah, you donate it to places it'll take them. Yeah. And then that way over time, you get like a better and better collection. And so like now I'm in the process of getting rid of books. They're like, yeah, I kept this, but it's not so great.

Mm-hmm. All right, let's do a call. I always like those. Sounds good. Hi, my name is Sahil. First, I just wanted to thank you for your books. Your book Deep Work has had a profound impact on my life. It motivated me to return to school in computer science. After having not been a great student for most of my life, I've been able to maintain a 4.0 GPA and was recently awarded a job at a Fang tech company, which has been amazing. My question now was the way I was able to achieve all these results was through a lot of shallow work,

where I followed your advice of removing distractions, where I removed video games, I removed social networks, I removed a lot of my friends and hangouts that I was participating in, and just completely focused on school. Unfortunately, I also was not able to focus deeply. So a lot of times I was zoned out during class or I have to watch lecture recordings three or four times before truly understanding the material. So I was just working for ridiculously long stretches of time in order to achieve these results. I realized that's not going to be possible going into my career, nor do I want to be possible because it takes a huge toll on my life.

So my question is, how can I actually train those deep focused muscles to actually get tasks done in less time? actually focus deeply. Thank you. Well, Sahel, I appreciate this because it's a mix of a case study and a good question. There's a nice case study there. This goes back to what we were just talking about with students being terrible at being students and how if you're not terrible at being a student, you have this huge advantage. Here is another example. Sawhill said, I was not a good student. I returned to work actually caring about the mechanics of being a student and got a, began getting four-os.

perfect GPAs and got a job at a Fane company. Fing company, these are the big tech company. So Facebook, Amazon, Google, and what's the in Fing? I think Microsoft, but that's an end. Netflix, right? Netflix, okay, yeah. So see, it works. Caring about how you work works.

By the way, the same thing happens in the world of work as well. It's a little bit less pronounced because the floor is higher. So in the world of students, of college students, the floor on people's work habits is so low. so low. Like, I'm surprised that, like, you aren't walking in the walls low, that if you're a little bit organized, you have this huge relative gap. In the world of work, the floor is higher, right? If you worked in a normal job, like most college students work at their work, you would

get fired pretty quickly. But the floor is not super high. And a lot of people are just throwing stress and anxiety and just hours at raising the floor. So, again, being systematic about how you organize yourself in the world. world to work, it still opens up a gap with most people that you can get a big reward out of. Let's get to the actual question, though. So Sahel worries, he's not very comfortable with long periods of intense focus.

So as a student, he could just take a lot of time doing half focus. He's not going to be able to do that in his job. How do you get better at actually training your ability to concentrate for long periods of time? So I'm going to give you three pieces of advice. One is interval training. so you literally practice hard concentration using a timer. So you take a piece of work you're going to do. You set a timer maybe for 30 minutes.

And you say for that 30 minutes, this is full out intense concentration. If my mind wanders or I zone out, I stop that timer. I'll come back and try this again later. So you have a clear indicator of success or failure. Success means I maintained full concentration for basically the whole period. Once you're comfortable with a given duration, you up the time by 10 minutes. So just straight up practicing hard concentration. If you're roughly at a rate, which is what I've observed when I've done this with students,

of increasing the duration roughly once every week or two, you can in about two or three months significantly improve your comfort level with intense concentration. So practice directly what you want to practice. Two, reading. That's your cognitive calisthenics right there. Reading hard books, books that have difficult information or complex theories. you could read a complicated primary source. Like I'm going to, you know, read Nietzsche concurrently with a secondary source about that primary source.

You can kind of go back and force and have this framework for trying to understand the primary source that you're trying to read. Reading is just direct exercise with sustained concentration on abstract symbolic concepts. Big thinkers or big readers. So that needs to be your training. And then three, you need to spend a regular time completely away from distractions. This gets your mind very comfortable with itself. Combined this with something interesting, I would suggest hikes, walking through nature, long walks. Your phone is turned off and in the back of your backpack just for emergencies.

There's nothing in your ear. It's just you and the world around you and the world between your ears. It's just comfort. Your mind gets more comfort just being with its own self-generated thoughts and not just reacting the digital inputs. That's a slower gear. and it gets comfortable with that slower gear, it gets more comfortable than when it comes time to do concentration on something hard

because that's a slower gear than what you get when you get a bunch of those distractions. Just combine that then with the digital hygiene you already said you're doing, which is being careful about not having too much of algorithmically engineered distraction, being sure not to have too much of that in your life. That is your metaphorical equivalent

of smoking cigarettes while you're training for the marathon. It's kind of productive to what you want to do. So continue to be very wary about I'm on my phone all the time. I'm looking at TikTok, stay away from TikTok. Use the phone FOIA method. Don't have your phone with you when you're at home. Have it at the foyer. You can go there if you need it. It's not a constant companion. All the stuff we talk about, keep up that digital hygiene as well. And it's practiced. You will get better. You will get better at deep thinking the more you practice. At first, you'll catch up to good deep thinkers around you than after a while.

You'll be notably deeper with your thinking than other people around you and you'll reap those rewards. Right, before we get to our final segment, I want to do a quick case study. I like that this is where someone sends in a brief summary of how they've used my advice. This case study comes from Don. Don says, I just wanted to share details about the in result of deep work and time block planning practices that I learned from you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain.

At the time, I was beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race. and your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work. Your time block planner and podcasts are regular reinforcers of best practices. As a side note, the book just received a starred review from Kirkus, and the review noted the book's meticulous research. That meticulous research happened during deep work sessions, and I can't thank you enough. Jesse, he also sent around the citation.

So the book, which comes out in February, is called The Astrochimps, America's First Astronauts. Well, Don, I appreciate that case study. What that gets to, and I think this is important, is that we have to, and this is one of the whole points of the book deep work. They have to value the intensity of concentration. Intense concentration is itself an intrinsically valuable activity, and it produces extrinsically much more valuable results than less concentrated focus. So just saying, I want to make sure I write a thousand words or I spend three hours on my book is not the same as saying I want to spend three hours concentrated deeply on my book.

When you're doing high-level knowledge, creative output like creating a book, you're doing, this is alchemy, right? You're trying to have this brain take in information and congeal it into something that is more valuable than the information that came in. the harder you concentrate, the better this result is. And so the intensity of concentration should be a really key variable when we think about doing high-level knowledge work, but it's often not. And we know it's not because in the same companies that we make our money off of people

doing high-level knowledge work, we also say you should be on Slack. You should be contact shifting to email back and forth. You should be doing seven or eight meetings a day because that makes my life more convenient as a manager. A complete disregard for the actual goal of trying to get intense concentration. Even though intense concentration is behind almost any major value production and knowledge work. So I appreciate that case study, Don. It's not just words.

It's not just hours. It's not just task list. It's concentration and the quality of the concentration that matters. We should talk about that more. All right. We have a final segment coming up where I'll talk about the books I read in November. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. In particular, I want to talk about our friends at Blinkist.

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you to share your premium account. You will be able to get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. We also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. If you do not use a VPN, you should. If you don't use a VPN, people can see what websites and services you're communicating with. If you're at a wireless access point, people nearby can sniff those packets right out of the air.

If you're at home, your internet service provider can see your packets and gather this data and sell it to advertisers, which they do. So even if the content of your messages is encrypted, the headers that say who you're talking to, what website, what service are not. And so everyone can know what you're using with your internet time. VPN saves you from that and gives you privacy. The way a VPN works

is that you write down who you really want to talk to in a encrypted message. You send that to a VPN server. The VPN server then talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response, and sends it back. So the people who are watching you know nothing beyond the fact that you're using a VPN. They have no idea what site or service you're using. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN because they make this process so simple. You put their software on the devices you use.

You click one button, it turns on, and you use your apps just like you would normally. all of this happens in the background seamlessly. They have servers all around the world. So wherever you are, there is probably an express VPN server nearby. So you can have a very fast connection. Or, little hint, you can purposely choose to connect to an express VPN server in a part of the country that, a country that's different than yours, in order to access information that's only available to people in that country.

I know people, for example, who will, in the U.S., connect to an ExpressVPN server in the UK and then watch Netflix because there's shows like the Office that are on Netflix in the UK. As far as Netflix is concerned, because they're just hearing from the VPN server, you're from the UK. So there's these little hints you can do with it as well. ExpressVPN also has good bandwidth. So again, it's very fast, very fast connection.

So if you're looking to gain some privacy or maybe check out some shows that aren't available in your country, give yourself the gift of. of a VPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash deep right now, and you will get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. That's ExpressVPN.com slash deep, expressvpn.com slash deep to learn more. All right. Jesse, let's do our final segment where I talk about the books I read in November.

If those you don't know, I try to read five books a month, and the first podcast or so of each new month, I talk about the books I read. in the month before. All right. So the first book I read in November was the identity trap by Yasha Monk. Interesting. I talked to Yasha more recently after I read this book. It turns out when I was up at Dartmouth last summer on a fellowship, he was also up

at Dartmouth on a fellowship. But we never crossed paths. We didn't realize it. We're both from the D.C. area. At some point, some of my students talked about, oh, I just went to see Yasha monk give a talk. I didn't realize we were both there simultaneously. and we just didn't know it.

He doesn't listen to the show? I guess not. Dude. Yeah. That's on you, Yasha. You should have known. That's how we know you don't listen to the show. Yasha's an academic.

He's at Johns Hopkins. Works a lot in international relations. The identity trap is taking a look that has two goals. And goal number one is to try to just give a scholastic history of the sort of modern progressive thought, the collection of theories that will sometimes be crudely summarized as woke, what I often call on the show postmodern critical theories. The first half of his book is academic history. Where did the particular collection of ideas that make up this sort of collection of beliefs

that the modern progressive left have? Where do they come from? Yasha calls it the identity synthesis. The second part of the book is then him making an argument for, do these ideas work for accomplishing the goal that they have, which is justice, and if not, what works better? If we have a history, then an analysis of what we have is it actually working. I know these histories pretty well because I've been an academic my entire life. I watched a lot of these ideas come together.

I've read multiple books on this as well. Yasha's was really good. I thought it was really accessible, but also really accurate. But there's a lot of complexities because academic theories are complicated and this begets this and this is similar to this but not quite this. It's easy to get lost in that complexity. I think Yasha did a great job of saying, let me cut through. Here's basically, here's the through lines you need to care about. So if you're wondering about where did all these ideas we hear today from modern progressives that are everywhere?

Where do they come from? this book is the best one I've read to give a sort of objective story. The short version of his story, and I think this is probably right, is that the two big theories emerging in the 80s and 90s on which a lot of the current, what he calls identity synthesis, came from is he really says the two main ones that begat most of the other important ones would be post-colonial theory, as in particular initiated by, Edward Said. So when I was in grad school in the, you know, 2000s, earlier 2000s, post-colonial theory was like the thing. Everyone was choosing all the humanities students were choosing Arabic as their language so that they could do Edward Said-style studies of sort of post-colonial theory. And then the other big progenitor of the modern thinking would be Derek Bell's critical race theory. both of these drew heavily from postmodernism and in particular Michelle Foucault's notions of postmodernisms and the way various discourses create and maintain power imbalances.

Now there's this, and I won't go too long on this because I'm an academic and I'm a nerd and most people aren't nerds and don't like nerds. I won't go too long in this, but I just love academic theories. There's an irony in this because the postmodernism of Foucault was a reaction to the grand theory. of Marxism, and basically these French intellectuals were disillusioned. Marxism kind of fell apart because it turned out like, the Soviet Union wasn't so great. So like the ideas, these radical ideas got put into action in a lot of places, and it didn't go well. And so there a lot of steam fell out of Marxism as a sort of foundational theoretical family that a lot of academics were drawing from. And the postmoderns were very nihilistic and existential. And they didn't think

that any sort of grand political theory of like this explains the world and it's going to improve the world if we just do this, they gave up on all of that and they talked about so it was a deconstruction, right? It was all about deconstructing these theories. They hated the idea of grand narratives. Well, you get Said, you get Bell. They're taking these ideas from the postmoderns, in particular about how language can construct and be used to reinforce power dynamics. And they said, let's use this to create grand narratives. Let's use this to actually create political movements, explain the way the world works, and said, just actual action. So they're using

postmodernism to do the exact opposite of what the postmoderns thought that you should do. So there's a little bit of irony embedded in that. But anyways, from post-colonial theory and from critical race theory, you get a lot of branches of related descendant theories and connected theories

and almost all the ideas that you would hear today in like a DEI seminar or in a march at a college campus where you're like where these terms come from. all of it comes back there. So I was a really, I think, focusing on post-colonial theory and critical race theory,

in particular, Saeed and Bell's initial movements in these worlds and all the ideas they collected afterwards was, it's right. I think it reads right. It is a good history. So it's a really good book and it's accessible. He writes it much more accessible than Eve and I just talked about it there. What is his analysis is, well, he's a big believer in what he calls philosophical liberalism, which is not sexy. it doesn't have complicated theory it doesn't draw from Foucault.

Its core ideas have been around for three millennia. Its core ideas have been at the core of essentially every major justice movement in the history of humanity. We're thinking just even more recently the civil rights movement,

the gay rights movement. A lot of these recent, even the recent big wins we've seen in the fight for justice all came from philosophical liberalism. And it's not a exciting, and it's in opposition to the ideas and the identity synthesis, which actually try to deconstruct a lot of the key ideas behind philosophical liberalism.

It's more utopian and dystopian at the same time. And Monk makes a pretty good argument of, like, I know it's not exciting, but philosophical liberalism, which is flexible, but also matches our moral intuitions that go back to our very earliest emergence of ethics in the very earliest, you know, books of the Hebrew Bible. This idea is what works. So there's this nice sort of polemic as well of let me analyze these. I don't think the identity synthesis is going to lead us to more justice. I think we have these older ideas do.

So I think it's a great treatment. It's not that long. It seems very informed. It seems very even-handed. And so I think it's useful. Especially if you're young or sort of new to this, like something that happens with grand theories is the problem is if you're like 19 and you go to college and you encounter whatever grand theory, is big at the time, the dialectic in your mind is, or the binary in your mind is no theory and theory.

And so you just think of it as like most people just don't realize that there's theories that explain the world and we can use these theories to figure out better ways of living. But I do understand that. So you just see it as this binary between no theory and theory. The good thing about books like monks is it steps back and says, no, there's many different theories. So you can't just look at the connection between I see the world theoretically or I don't. You have to say, why do I see it through this theoretical framework? There's other ones.

Like, for example, if you're on a college campus, this is something I think people get wrong about the modern identity synthesis or postmodern critical theories. Outside observers think that, oh, everyone on a college campus is just completely locked into this and thinks that's the way the world works. It's how you get the sort of Ron DeSantis of the world being like, we have to just defund colleges and it's all crazy. If you go to a college campus and go to a philosophy department, philosophers hate this stuff. They're like, no, no, no, hold on, hold on. We have been studying philosophy, you know, forever. This is our expertise. Like these theories aren't, these are wonky.

It's not good philosophy. They're intellectually inconsistent. It's like philosophers don't tend to like the identity synthesis, right? And these are people on the same campus. Professional ethicists don't tend to like it. So it's not, you have to evaluate these things. And not just say it's binary versus, no theory or theory. But when you first go to college, so if you went to college 50 years ago, it would have been classical economic class-based Marxism was everywhere.

Every professor seemed like they were talking about it. And that would be the big thing. But then that fell out of favor. And so now we have day dinny synthesis and some other things that are competing with it. And those will fall out of favor eventually. So you have to have some epistemic humility when thinking about theories and not just see it as dumb people don't know about theories. that I know about the capital T theory. There's lots of different theories.

So it's important to step back and say, where did this one come from? What is it say? What are the alternatives? How do I feel about these different alternatives? Why is this the right one versus the other right one? And, of course, be very suspicious if the proponents of a particular theory say,

wait, whoa, whoa, asking questions about it is that's wrong. Don't ask questions. Always be nervous about that with any particular theory. Of course, you can ask those in Soviet Russia who ask questions about, Does this make sense and found themselves quite cold in Siberia? So you have to be, you do have to be careful about that particular strain. So anyways, I like these type of discussions.

What I told Yasha about is when I was up at Dartmouth, there'll be a final thing I'll say on this. When I was up at Dartmouth, I was reading books from people who had had the same fellowship over the decades earlier, right? The Montgomery Fellowship had been around for a long time. And they buy the books of the fellows and put them on the shelf. And so they had a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, which he wrote in the late 50s or early 60s. And so I was reading that just because it was there on the shelf. And Galbraith had come through in the 70s or something like that to be a fellow. And I have to go back and find this quote.

But he was writing this at a time when Marxism was really big on college campuses. It was like the unifying framework of a lot of different departments on campus. And this is sort of the classic kind of class-based Marxism. and it was really big and there was a sort of Marxist critical theory from the 1930s it greatly expanded where you could apply Marxism

not just the economics and it was everywhere so that was the big theory of the time and Galbraith has this throwaway line where he's like you know this is really popular right now and he didn't you know obviously he was not a Marxist

but he's like this is really popular right now in college campuses why is this so popular among so many thinkers and it's interesting line he said I don't think most of these thinkers are fully on board with all of the actual implications of these theories

because a lot of them and if anyone goes back in studies it can be kind of kooky. He says the real issue here is that these theories are complicated. To understand them

means you're smart. The fear is that if you don't if you don't demonstrate you understand them people might think you're not smart and that's a huge motivator. And it was John Kess Galbert's analysis so why did this theory spread?

It's not because all of these anthropologists economists and all these socialists. They all were really on board with the really intricate proposals of Marxism, but it was complicated, and to be involved in that theory meant you're with the smart kids table.

And to not meant that maybe people would think you couldn't keep up. So that's just something to keep in mind whenever a grand theory is sweeping through intellectual worlds. It could be that everyone has studied this thing and read Yasha's book and said, this is right. It could also be that people want to seem smart.

Fascinating questions. All were raised by a book. That's the sign of a good book. So good work, Yasha, definitely worth checking out. All right. So then moving on. The next book I read was Israel by Martin Gilbert. Really steering towards a controversy in my books this week.

Like, what else? The next book we read is Apple Pie is bad. And a book that is, you know, I'm trying to think like what all the, oh, God. Anyways, Israel by Martin Gilbert. This was part of my, I mentioned this last week. I got three books about that part of the world to read back to back to back after October 7th. This book's written by Martin Gilbert. This is not an Israeli book.

This is a book written by a British historian. So it's just more of, I just wanted a TikTok view of like 1850. This goes up to about, I think, the second Intifado. So like early 2000s. Just TikTok history, right? This is not someone, it's not a Palestinian writer, it's not an Israeli writer, just like, let's get the six. This is a tome, too, as you might imagine, big tome. Hard book to write just because it's a lot of history to fit in the six or seven hundred pages.

And I thought Gilbert did a really good job in, you know, his redaction, like what things to talk about and how not to get lost in the detail. So just as a work of history, I thought it was good. I mean, it's not edgier seat excitement. It's a long, we're talking. about like it's straight up history but I thought it was you know I do now have the TikTok history of this happened in this year

and that happened and here is who this person was and who that person was and how the rise of the PLO and Arafat and how that changed the PLA and just getting the on the ground detail so if you're looking for a sort of non-polymical history of that part of the world I learned a lot

especially as compared to Noah Tishby's book which is much much more I think polemical and has an actual goal, like a sort of pro-Israel goal. This book just felt, comparably speaking, let's just get the facts. So it's useful. I know a lot more about that history. I know a lot more about those names. Moving on, then I read letters to my Palestinian neighbor by Yossi Klein-Halevi,

who I really like. Actually, he went on Ezra Klein's podcast recently. I think that episode is worth listening to. This book is interesting. you need to get the current edition because it's actually two books in one. So it's the original book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,

followed by a bunch of responses from Palestinians to the original book. So you read the original book and then you get a bunch of responses that were sent back. And so it's almost like a dialogue, though you get this book and then the responses. But I thought that was really interesting. to get those responses.

Yose is a very interesting character. Again, I mentioned him before. He was someone who was on the Israeli right wing, who over time moved to the Israeli left wing. So he has sort of an interesting, self-reflective view on Israel and Palestine and the peace process. And so I thought this book with those two parts, his letters, and then the letters back, was really interesting. Elsa kind of hopeful.

It was an interesting book. He has a podcast, by the way, the Hartman Institute, produces it called for heaven's sake and it's every week or twice a week it's him and another host it's like 20 minutes an episode and it's if you really want to understand what's happening inside Israel right now it's like really good it's an english language podcast where they're really bringing you up the speed on what the mood is in the country and the dynamics and the political factions um that's a useful podcast all right then i changed gears because that was a lot of hard reading and read two books there were maybe a little bit less

intellectually sophisticated, be useful by our friend Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was, I guess it's a self-help book. It has like seven ideas and he gives his advice.

I think my recommendation, I think Arnold is an interesting person and in a lot of ways an inspiring person and has good advice to give. My advice would be to instead of reading this, read his autobiography

Total Recall. and you're going to, you will extract for yourself a lot of these same ideas, but it's just his story is so interesting. When you read Be Useful, you're just going to want more of his story.

So just read his story. Total Recall is a fantastic autobiography. And I would say every lesson in Be Useful, you will extract for yourself as just a consequence of reading his autobiography. So that would be my recommendation. And then finally I read John Grisham's newest book, The Exchange.

Yeah, it's okay. Not much happens. It's a follow-up to the firm. It mainly just helped remind me how good the firm was. It's interesting. If you have these hit books early on, the books that follow don't have to be so good. There's no way the exchange is a fine book. But if this was a debut book, there's no way it would grab a lot of attention.

I mean, not that much happens in it. It just reminded me of how good the firm was. So I'm not giving that my Roger and Ebert, two thumbs up, I suppose. which, by the way, I'm thinking about because I'm reading a book about Ciskel and Ebert. I'm reading a book about Ciskel and Ebert right now, which is kind of interesting.

But it was fine. If you like Grisham, it's fine, but it's not the firm. So there we go. Those were my books. A real mix of high and low this week. From academic theories to political conflict to Arnold Schwarzenegger's giving something to the identity trap.

Explanation was spot on. That's good. I mean, I love academic theories. I love academic theories. I just, well, it's probably not a fair hope for the world that like everyone has time to, not everyone's professional academics, to like deeply engage in ideas and theories. But it's like what's, it's water for me. It's like deeply engaging with ideas and theories.

And, you know, Yasha did a great job of summarizing these particular theories. What's good, what's bad? He makes a pretty compelling case for philosophical liberalism. I've made a case for philosophical liberalism in so many words many times before on the show as well. So he's an interesting guy. I want to go up there and spend some time with him. Is he up there full time? Yeah, he's at Hopkins.

Oh, right. Yeah, it's not far. Yeah. Baltimore's not far. Yeah. I was thinking about Dartmouth for a sec. No, he was just up there for the summer. You know, because everyone who lives in the Mid-Atlantic, if we're given the excuse to go to New England during the summer, we'll go to New England in the summer.

You could be like, hey, we want you to be a fellow. at our water park outside Durham, New Hampshire where like what we mainly need you to do is help make sure we don't have people go down the slide too soon after each other.

But like also, you know, you can lecture on artificial intelligence. It would be like, yeah. Durham, what's the average high in July? All right, we'll be there. We all want to get out of the swamp town for the summer. All right, speaking of which, that's enough time.

I think we spent enough time talking today. Thank you for listening, subscribe and leave a review. That really does help. If you want to leave a question, go to the deeplife.com slash listen. The links are right there. And we'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at Calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

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