Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 286: Rethinking Self Help

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

A key step in cultivating a deep life is reflecting on what matters to you and the best strategies for pursuing it. This, in turn, requires that you engage in the consumption of some manner of self help. It’s here that many people sell themselves short, limiting this intake to short videos and the occasional advice guide. In today’s episode, Cal talks about cultivating a much richer approach to self-help in which you’re able to take in wisdom from a variety of sources of various levels of sophistication.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Rethinking Self Help [3:21]- How can I prevent hard tasks from derailing my productivity systems? [38:47]- Should I get ahead in my career with a project that I hate? [47:54]- How can I make progress on my novel when my day job drains me? [52:39]- Is there such a thing as too much deep work? [59:32]- CALL: Will short deep work sessions work to write effectively? [1:12:17]CASE STUDY: Reducing stress with slow productivity [1:18:40]  The 5 Books Cal Read in January 2024 [1:30:22]  Links:https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/ FREE Download  for “Slow Productivity”: www.calnewport.com/slow Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.grammarly.com/podcasthttps://www.drinklmnt.com/deephttps://www.shopify.com/deepThis show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://www.betterhelp.com/deepquestionsThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity 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 here, I'm a computer science professor and digital theorist who writes about the ways that technology impacts the way we live, work, and relate to each other. On this podcast, I give concrete advice about the types of big ideas I write about. I'm here right now in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse, we should thank the audience. Last week we announced the pre-order campaign for my new book, Slow Productivity. Right. This did well.

I think people showed up. We are moving a good number of copies of my books, slow productivity, which comes out on March 5th. But the pre-orders, as I mentioned, is very important for helping the book. book get a big start. And well, you all showed up in a big way. The day we announced it, we hit as low as top 50 on the Amazon rankings. I think we move 800 hardcovers in just that day alone. So I really appreciate it. If you're thinking about pre-ordering, you haven't yet, just go to calnewport.com slash slow. That has the instructions for how to submit your pre-order receipt. They get all sorts of nice bonuses, my way of thanking you. There's a new. There's a new

thing we've added that I'm excited about and I want to mention it briefly, signed books. So you can pre-order a signed copy of my book. This is being fulfilled through our local bookstore here in Tacoma Park, People's Book. I always mix that up, Jesse. People's book, not People's Books. Yeah. Which one is it? Do I have it mixed up? People's book. People's book. That's why I said. Okay. So Megan and Matt, sorry for mangling that. I do in just normal conversation. Anyways, people's book right here, down the street from the HQ, they are fulfilling orders for sign copies. So you can pre-order a copy from them directly and use it as part of the pre-order campaign. Even if you already

pre-ordered a copy and you want a sign copy, you can do it through them. The link for that is on that calnewport.com slash slow page. You'll find it on there, either at the bottom, I think we're going to move it towards where the purchase buttons are. Anyways, you'll find it. There's a link to a page at people's book where you can pre-order a sign copy if you want that as well. So, I'm excited about that. So thank you all for helping to support slow productivity. We've got a good show, as always, a deep dive on something we haven't talked about. I don't think before.

I don't know. It's kind of a new topic. A great collection of Q&A, including a call and a case studies. and then because it's the first episode of a new month at the end of the show, I'll go through the books I read in January 2024. So we got a deep show. Let's kick things off, Jesse, with our deep dive. So what do we normally talk about here?

The general topic is how do you cultivate a deep life in a world that is increasingly distracted? Now, if you go back and look at all the things I've said about this topic, you could put these into three main categories of advice. Category number one is just how do you get your act together? How do you get organized in both your life and in your job? How do you stay on top of your task and your commitments? How do you find enough control over your schedule to actually intentionally choose what you want to do and what you don't want to do?

How do you develop discipline? But that's not the category I want to talk about today. The second category of advice is about how do you add the stuff, that really matters to you and how do you subtract the stuff that doesn't matter to you? So how do you add what's important and subtract what's not? This could be big changes to your job or where you live or removing from your life things that are really draining your energy. But that's not the category I want to talk about today either.

What I want to talk about comes from the third category, which is how do you periodically reflect on your life and what you've been doing, reflect on what you care about, and where you're trying to go, and then iterate back into the decisions you're making. It's that stepping away to reflect and iterate that drives forward the process of trying to cultivate a deeper life. That's a big category, but there's one specific idea within that third category that I want to focus on today, and that is self-help. If you are going to continually focus what matters to you and your strategies for how to get

there, you're going to have to consume self-help. Now, this term is one that I think is broad, but we often narrow what we think it means. So when we think about it, we're imagining potentially cheesy books from the self-help shelf in the bookstore that's going to have a lot of list of advice or a lot of emotional encouragement, like, you can do it, go get after it. It's a very narrow things, something we're almost embarrassed about. I think, though, what I'm going to try to argue here today, is that the variety of information

sources that count as self-help is much, much broader. And understanding this, and understanding how to intelligently navigate this landscape of self-help writ large, is absolutely necessary if you want to become wiser and therefore

have a foundation on which to cultivate a truly deep life. So here's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to bring to break the broad category of self-help into three smaller categories. And I'm going to talk about each. And I'll give you a piece of advice for each about how to navigate that particular collection of self-help sources in the most effective way possible. Then two, at the end, I have a couple thoughts about what you should do with all of this

information. I'm talking logistically, administratively. What do you do with all the information that you encounter in your self-help journey so that you can actually remember to make use of it going forward? All right, so that's my plan. For those who are watching, I'm going to bring up my tablet here. So if you're listening and you want to watch this, this is episode 286. Just go to the deeplife.com slash listen, find episode 286.

The video of the episode will be posted below. All right, so here's what's on my screen. For those who can't see it, there is a header, three categories. I am going to divide the world of things we could potentially call self-help into three categories. and I am going to expertly draw because as Jesse knows, I'm a fantastic artist. When I draw on this tablet, it is not unlike Picasso drawing to peasant's hands.

I'm going to draw a picture for each of these categories. Those who are watching can try to guess. All right, so for the first category, let's see, what am I going to draw here? Jesse's gotten pretty good at guessing, roughly speaking. At least when I'm drawing, maybe not what the category is. All right. Yay.

All right. So I'm realizing now, Jesse, what I drew kind of looks like a body in a coffin. It's not what I meant. I mean, category one, it would be funny if my first category is like, you want real self-help, you need to hang out at the cemetery. Memento Mori, you sons of bitches. You got to look at the corpses and say, that's going to be me. No, that's supposed to be a phone. That's supposed to be a phone with someone dancing on it.

All right. So what is this first category? I call it pre-digested self-help. So what I mean by pre-digested is that these are forms of self-help in which the advice has already been extracted and clarified for you. Here's some ideas, but more importantly, here's what you should do. Like, here's 10 things you should do. Here's a plan you can follow.

Here's a particular procedure that you can put into place. So someone has taken an information from the world that is relevant to improving yourself and digested it for you already. and they have then given it to you in the form of advice. There's three big categories, subcategories in here, and what I'm going to do is list them in the order of increasing quality. And by quality, I mean potential for impact in your own life. So within predigested, the lowest quality subcategory would be short videos and social media post.

It is a lot of this, a lot of Instagram, a lot of TikTok, a lot of YouTube, That is, hey, I'm going to help you figure out how to cut fat so you can get shredded. I'm going to help you figure out, like, how to study better for your exam and let's go. A lot of this content. Nothing wrong with it. But the reason why I'm putting that at the bottom of the hierarchy here is that there are different objectives for the authors of this content. There's sort of mixed motivations. The number one thing if you're creating this type of content is virality.

So really the master that these content creators are serving is they want the relevant algorithm to like and bless what they're doing. Over time, this pushes the way the content goes. It doesn't mean there's not useful information in this content, but the goal of the content is not to be as useful to you as possible. It's to get recommended as many times as possible. And so this is different. So it's the most watchable of all self-help content. It's the easiest and most accessible because it draws you. along, you don't have to

exert any will to continue watching it, but it's also perhaps the most deluded because the objective here is not really to make you better at what they're talking about. That's secondary. Primary is virality and that's not always the same thing. The second subcategory of predigested self-help

I'm going to say is podcast. These are better because when you're creating a podcast that's relevant to self-help, so a podcast like this one where I give you advice, I'm not serving at the altar of virality because that's not the way that podcasting works. There is no algorithm that recommends podcast, and if you do something just right with your content, you're going to be recommended to a couple million people and have this big growth.

No, podcasting is very word of mouth. It's very organic. If you like this show enough, you'll eventually tell someone about it. Well, what makes you like a show? Over the weeks or months that you've listened to it, it's been effective for you. So listening to podcasts that are giving advice, this is a higher level of predigested self-help because the incentives are now aligned. I want to make this show as useful as possible to you because that's how this show grows, not because there's a thumbnail that's attention-catching. The third subcategory, this is what most people think about when they think about self-help is advice books. So I put this at a higher level of quality than just podcast

because like podcast, the incentive is inlined. I want this book to really help people. That's how you sell more advice books. Remember, it's not marketing. It's not publicity. When deep work was published, I was disappointed. There wasn't a big marketing or publicity push. Friends of mine were going to Barnes & Noble

and they were telling my friends, we didn't bother stocking a copy of this book. fast forward now, we're coming up to the eighth year that this book has been out, one and a half to two million copies sold. Why? Because over time, people found it worked. And they're like, okay, they told other people about it. So advice books like podcast, advice podcast, want to be useful,

but the authors have more time to clarify, clean up, and polish what they're saying. When you read an advice book, like my new book, slow productivity, this is something I spent a year writing, right? a year trying to get my thoughts right and clarified into the most useful structure. After spending before that, another two years previously just thinking about those ideas, writing articles, podcasting on it, just thinking about it in conversation. And then all that goes through extensive editing.

Well, this isn't quite clear. How do we make this better? So what you get in an advice book is predigested advice for making your life better that has been polished and thought through to the furthest extent possible of the person working on. So that's going to be the highest quality of predigested self-help advice. All right, so what's my advice for navigating this particular category of self-help? I would say be wary of the short videos and social media post. You could use those for entertainment.

Be wary about using them too much as a source of advice for how to live your life. Because, again, the quality is the least aligned. And you have this fear of scratching an itch insufficient. And what I mean by that is that we have a human drive to want to improve. That drives us to seek out this information. Your fear is that you scratch that itch entirely with TikTok videos. And you've convinced yourself, yeah, I'm taking an advice and I'm making my life better, but the information is not really that quality.

So you're not really getting what you need. It's like scratching the itch of hunger with junk food. It kind of works in the moment, but long term, that's not going to be a good strategy. On the podcast side, have a rotation of high-quality advice podcasts. They're just a part of your life. Of course, I hope that rotation includes our show here, but there's other good ones as well. And then when it comes to advice books, you want to read, I would say, at least one per month. The good news is they're not hard to read.

They're typically readable in a few sessions. You can skim the parts that aren't particularly important. You can use a service like Blinkist, if you want to get the main ideas in advance. to figure out which books are worth reading, but I think you should do one a month. So if you have two or three podcasts a week that you just regularly listen to in the background and you read one advice book per month, that is a really good stream of high-quality, predigested self-help content. All right, that's where most people stop when they think self-help.

But that's just one of the three categories that I want you to consider. All right, so we're going to go to category two, which once again I will expertly draw. this I'm better at drawing. I think, well, all right, there we go. Now, I'll have to explain. Got this.

And let me draw. All right. So what I've drawn here, just this should be clear, is a book. And the thing next to it is here I'll draw projection lines. It's a movie screen.

All right. So what do I mean by the second category? I'm going to call it interpersonal. that's not going to make sense at first until I explain it, but this is an important one. Interpersonal is a category that includes media typically in book form or movie form in which you create an emotional empathetic connection with another character. So it elicits in you in a empathetic connection. I can feel what this person is feeling.

I feel privy to the inner cycle. state of this other character. So you could get this in memoir. I'm reading a memoir of someone. I'm really, over time, getting to understand this person and what they were going through and what their life was like. It could be novel, right? I mean, what is a novel?

If anything, a good novel is a mind reading device. An author connecting your brain to the brain of a character that they've crafted. That's what you're using words to induce emotional states in the reader. and documentary can do this as well in particular all sorts of films can but documentary in particular if it's focusing on a particular subject if well done it sort of brings you into that person's life that's why I call it interpersonal you're connecting to another person another character so why is this important well one of the deep sources of powerful self-reflection comes from encountering another person in the psychologically complex way

and feeling resonance. There's something about the way they live their life that resonates with me. There's something about be it their internal character or something about the external world in which they live, the living on the island, the slower existence, or maybe it's the will or fortitude of a heroic leader type character, or maybe it's the exactitude and focus on craft of a sort of Giro from Giro Dreams of Sushi documentary, right? something resonates about you, about another person to which you have an empathetic connection. That's a huge source of wisdom. Because you have this complicated connection to the person, when you feel resonance, you can study this connection and say, what is it about this person that's causing this sense of resonance, the sense of attraction or appealingness? And that's great insight into what matters for you and what matters in your picture of a life well lived. So you have to think about these sophisticated characterizations that you encounter

as just as important as a source of self-help as reading slow productivity or deep work or listening to a podcast like this. Think about it in that same framework. So what's my advice for actually navigating this interpersonal category? Well, you've got to be emotionally open when you encounter these sources, reading a novel, watching documentary, be willing to open up and create that empathetic connection.

Because, again, you have to create in yourself these reactions because that's what you were going to study to figure out what matters to you. So you have to be emotionally open. Keep your resonance radar high. You should really have this tripwire of, oh, wait a second. Something about what I'm seeing or reading is feeling very appealing to me. I don't know what it is. I'm watching this movie about big wave surfers and they're in Hawaii and something here is working for me.

I don't know why, but it is. Keep your resonance radar high. When that tripwire trips, you're like, okay, there is something here to be examined. Then be willing, once you feel that sense of residence to almost right away in the moment or right after, to do the internal work to figure out, well, what specifically about what I just read or saw or encountered? What specifically about that was appealing to me? And you have to do a little bit of forensic analysis here. And a good way to do this is to take out elements and then test it.

Well, is it the surfing in the big wave surfing thing, like the sport, the challenge? Well, let me take that part, but remove it from Hawaii and all of that. And just imagine someone training for a big sport like this with an otherwise busy lifestyle. Now, that doesn't resonate the same. Okay, so let me take the surfing out of it and just keep in it living somewhere natural and having to slower schedule. Oh, that's still working for me. Okay, so what's resonating here? Nature and slowness maybe.

All right, so let me try to separate these two things. Let me think about a slow existence in an urban environment. Do I still have the same resonance? Let me think. So you know what I'm doing here is I'm taking out elements. It's like a differential diagnosis in medicine. Doing internal work while the emotions are still fresh to figure out what exactly in here is resonating. So these interpersonal sources of self-help advice do not sleep on those.

There is a lot of wisdom lurking. all right let's go let's go to our third category here all right I know what I'm going to draw and da-da-da-da-oh no that's not good hold on I have boarded I'm going to try again all right sitting

I'm going to put them on I've drawn this before Jesse so you might recognize it all right it is Rodan's the thinker again expertly expertly drawn it's a man on a rock. And what I'm talking about here is probably what people would have thought about the term didn't exist. But if you explain to them the goal of self-help, right? Information is

going to improve my life. This is what people would have thought of for hundreds of years until most recently. I'm going to call this the scholarly slash theological category of self-help content, right these are the heavy hitters the heavy hitter sources that scare most people away we're talking about seriously serious scholarly works that touch on meaning works of philosophers for example we're also talking here serious theological works like religious text or religious commentaries theology and scholarly philosophy there is clearly a lot of wisdom in here for living your life well but it also seems to scares a lot of people off. This is complicated stuff. I'm not just going to pick up Heidegger or, you know, Haft Torah reading in the original Hebrew and just like jump into it. I feel better with TikTok. So this kind of scares people away. But it shouldn't if you have the proper on ramp into these deep ideas. In fact, I'm even going to draw below this little on ramp. So it's like an on. Well, it's a ramp. It's not an on-ramp, but a ramp. There we go. I'm doing a ramp towards the,

uh, towards the thinker. So you don't have to start. You don't have to start with the really complicated seriously scholarly or theological text. Where you can start is secondary sources. So say, okay, here's where we're going to start first. People writing about the serious text, explaining them, their role in their life, why they're important. This is way more accessible because it's written with less jargon meant to be accessible in the vernacular that you're currently used to, right? So it may be instead of jumping straight into Marcus Aurelius, you say I'm going to read Ryan Holiday first. Ryan is a secondary source talking about this primary source. Maybe before you say I'm going to explore, you know, my Christian faith by reading the Gospels.

When I read like a Tim Keller book first, makes it more accessible, right? talking about those books, but it's not actually those books. Maybe existentialism, there's something here. I really want to know about these thinkers, but they're really hard. So you can read at the Existential Cafe, right? This is Sarah, I think Blakewell, which has like a great secondary source talking about these philosophers, but it's not directly to philosophy itself.

So you could start with secondary sources. From there, you can move to what I call accessible principles. primary sources. So now these are serious works, serious or scholarly or theological thinking, but they're relatively accessible. You can read this without having to have a lot of expert background. You know, I think, for example, we talked to this in the show. I bought an early edition of Thomas Merton's seven-story mountain, which has some really interesting reflections on theology and life, but it's accessible. You know, because he's also telling his story. Same thing with like Augustine's confessions. It's accessible. It's the very first psychologically

real biography, autobiography. I think from a philosophical standpoint, Thoreau is very accessible. Walden is something you can read and he's making philosophical arguments about the life well lived. You can get them, right? You can go through that. It's an accessible primary source. And then finally, you can build your way up to the expert primary sources. You know, now you're reading the original philosophers in translation. Now you're grappling with the original religious text or the serious religious commentaries. It's not Tim Keller anymore. It's Thomas Aquinas. It's not just reading, you know, Ryan Holiday. Now it's grappling with the Stoics directly themselves, etc. So what's my advice here? That you build towards expert sources. You build. You

Build towards the expert sources by starting with secondary sources that teach you a lot about what you were going to read. They give you the landscape of ideas. So that by the time you get to the expert source, you really sort of understand the references and what you're trying to get out of this. I would recommend at least once per year, if not twice, build towards an expert source. And you might read two or three secondary sources to get there. Meanwhile, you can sprinkle in accessible primary sources, the ones that you can just dive in and read and get wisdom out of directly. without it requiring a lot of prior study, you might want to retain like a one to two or one to three ratio

of accessible primary sources to standard self-help advice books. So for every two or three standard self-help or advice book I read, I'll try to read one more scholarly or theological primary source that's accessible. There you're going to get the right mix. So you build up the one real expert source per year that you dive into and you have a steady, not overwhelming, but sort of steady background drumbeat of sort of accessible primary sources

that are thinking seriously about how to make your life better and what strategies get you there. This is a more sophisticated strategy for consuming self-help. It draws from these different categories, all of which have something to add, and it does so in a balanced manner. It is a key attribute, I think, of any intentional plan to live a deeper life, is to make sure that you are fueling that engine of insight and thoughts and decisions with better and better understanding of what it is that actually matters for you. So that comes to my final piece of advice is, well, what do you do with all this information you're discovering? You should store it.

The stuff that really matters should be extracted and written down somewhere. So one of my recommendations is that you should think about what you're trying to do here is to maintain a personal operating system. I have a personal operating system that sort of specifies how I live my life, what values are important to me, what commitments I have, what actions I do and don't do. You have this personal operating system, and I use the operating system metaphor, in part because I'm a nerd, but also in part because we think about operating systems as something you upgrade all the time. So there's no notion of like I have to figure out the right operating system for living.

You want some operating system, and you're going to be upgrading this regularly. one of the big sources of this upgrading is going to be this encounter, this balanced, intelligent, comprehensive encounter with self-help. So wherever you write down this operating system, and I don't want to get too caught in the weeds of structure or format here, you do what works. But wherever you write down, here's what matters to me, here's what I'm trying to head towards, here's the commitments to things I do, and here's the things I definitely don't do. Wherever you write that down, you can have a place to capture and refine big ideas that you've encountered and self-react. help. This is resonating. This is resonating. And over time, as ideas in that list that is important really stay there and prominently catch your attention, they can influence the operating system rules ahead that are above it. Now, these ideas that I've had down here, been here for a year

now, I'm going to update my values in the operating system to reflect that. This over here is really resonating with me. I encountered this in a documentary and then in a couple other novels. It's going to change my list of commitments. Like, I always do this, or I don't do this. So you need some sort of personal operating system to guide this whole effort to live a deep life. And that's a topic we can dive into in depth in a completely different episode. But that's where you capture these ideas. And that's ultimately where these ideas that come out of self-help to catch your attention. That's where they ultimately are going to have their impact, changing the OS that you use to drive all of your other efforts to live a deeper life.

So self-help doesn't have to just be Eckhart Tolly and hack, and hack, videos on YouTube. It's a much broader term. We should treat it as a much broader term, and it's something we should take seriously. It's hard to live a deep life if you don't have a good, evolving sense of what deep actually means. I got a couple of follow-up questions. What we got? What was your expert source in 2023? Well, I read, I probably read more than one per year. I'd have to go back and look at our

books read list. Yeah. I've recently been reading a lot of Heschel, who's definitely a primary source scholarly thinker. We read some stoicism in the original, if I remember going back. I'm reading the entire,

I started this in 2023, and it continues in 2024. I'm reading the entire Hebrew Bible. there's a set schedule. So the first five books of the Bible, there's a set schedule that both Jews and Christians will follow in their study

that breaks it up in the 50 readings that spreads over the year. So right now, and it's the same for everybody, right? So you can follow this along. Just look up what's the weekly Torah reading, and you'll find that a lot of different websites, Christian and Jewish.

Like this week is Ten Commandments. Actually, the Decalogue is in this week. So we're in Exodus, you know, the second book of the Bible. Last week was the Song of the Sea and the Red Sea crashing on the whatever. So that's a project I'm doing right now. It's very accessible in the sense that it's not much reading. Like these readings aren't too long each week. And then what you typically do or what I typically do is couple each reading with a commentary.

So someone writing a comment. commentary on that week's reading. Yeah. Yeah. So I figured that's a cultural touchstone. They have like really read through the first five books of the Bible, what the Jewish tradition would call the Torah. And so there's another sort of source that I'm looking on.

Yeah. That's a good question. I'd have to go back and look at my list in 2023. I think there's multiple philosophical and theological. Yeah. Primary sources I grappled with. But I have to go back. I'm reading some Chesterton right now.

He's an interesting thinker. I guess that's 2024. I need to bump up my self-advice one a month per book. Yeah, right. Because what I say is one a month per self-advice book. Yeah. I don't do that. At least one expert theological philosophical source you're building towards per year

and like a three-to-one ratio. So if you're doing a three-to-one ratio of accessible primary source to self-help book, that means three, three of those a year, maybe three months, self-help book, fourth month, accessible primary source, or maybe you do both in that month. So, yeah, I basically want people to up the variety of their intellectual diet here, basically. And, and of course, as with all my advice, the foundation of that is stops seeing so much time looking at things on screens. Yeah, your analogy about eating junk food and satisfying your hunger was really good. Yeah, big screens are fine.

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All right. Let's get on to some. Questions? Who do we have first, Jesse? Hi, first questions from Larry. I found what seems to be the crux of my inconsistency with personal productivity. I have a decent system in place and can get on a roll, have a good week or two, but then it all falls apart when I run into a task that acts like an impenetrable brick wall. I can't bear to look at it directly and end up cowering into escapeism activities of endless scrolling or videos.

Is there a general advice for facing down these hard tasks? Well, I mean, I think the key here, Larry, is when you get to these brick wall tasks, your solution is to punt on the task, not on your system, right? So there's a couple things going on. I think, one, the way you're thinking about your systems is in the game version, right? We talk about this often on the show,

that people think about, especially when we talk about planning systems, in a particular daily planning systems, that it's a game. And you win the game if you can build this perfect plan that you follow exactly. And you lose the game if you fall off the plan, right? So there's a gamified version of professional planning. The problem with this version is that when you fall off the plan, you say, I lost the game.

So why keep, you know, why keep playing, right? Like once that final touchdown has been scored, you don't stay on the field and keep playing. So you're like, okay, then, you know, whatever, I failed today. let's load up the browser, let's get the TikTok up and going. That's the wrong way to think about professional planning. It's not a game. The goal is not the win.

The goal instead is to apply intention to your activities. The binary you should care about is not stuck with schedule, fail to stick with schedule. But instead, have intention for what I'm doing right now versus don't have intention for what I'm doing right now. And how do you get intention by having a plan? And what happens when you fall off your plan?

You fix your plan, and then you keep going. it doesn't matter so much that over the last week, I rarely changed my plan. That doesn't matter. What matters to me is what percentage of your work hours over the past week were spent working on things that you actually thought in advance about what you wanted to do and had chosen this intentionally as a good activity? What is your intention hour ratio?

That's what really matters. So if you get to in your plan some sort of hard task, and you're like, I just can't get going on this. you know, I don't have what I need. I just, whatever. I'm resisting it brick wall. I don't have the energy. You say, okay, take a breather.

Fix the plans. Go do something else. Not a big deal. Because what matters is that you keep coming back to intention, not that everything in your plan actually gets executed. All right. So I think that's important. Let me give you a couple tactical things here about the specific brick wall activities.

So we have the big picture. Punt on the idea, not on the system. Punt the task, not on the system. You're not trying to win a game. You're trying to be intentional. But let's talk a little bit more about these really hard activities. I'm going to give you two practical suggestions.

One, softer entry. So if you have a really hard task that every time it comes up, it just paralyzes you. For me, this might be something like, here's a really tricky, long-form New Yorker piece that you've promised to write.

It's hard to just say, sit down and be like, let's go, right? So I get it. Software entry is often the way to do. Instead of scheduling on your calendar, four hours to quote unquote write a draft of this really hard article, you schedule one half hour to go for a walk somewhere scenic and just think about like, how am I going to do this article, how am I going to get into it, like what's going to work here, what's not, what can I get excited about, what structure can I get excited about? And there will be no actual writing during this session. It is just you thinking. And what happens if you don't really come with any good ideas?

Nothing. You get a nice walk for a half hour. That's a softer entry. So you get to one of these pre-deep tasks. You'll do it. Yeah, got to go for a walk. This is an easy thing to do. And you know what's going to happen after five or ten minutes?

You are going to have some good ideas. And you're going to be like, okay, here's a good opening. And what if I do this or that? And now that you've had that preparatory period, when you next get to a bigger block scheduled to do the hard thing, it's going to be much easier to start because it's not a cold start. You already have some preparation. So for the really hard things, give yourself some of these softer entry blocks first before you tackle the main event.

The other thing to keep in mind is maybe you're procrastinating on these really hard tasks. I'm looking at your wording here, impenetrable brick wall tasks. Maybe you're having a hard time getting started because your brain is not on board with the plan. You have this task like, all right, I am going to write my killer novel, let's get going. and your brain is like, hey, buddy, you don't know how to do this. You can't just, like, load up Scrivener and start typing. No, this is stupid. There's going to be a waste of time.

You haven't thought this through. You don't have a lot of information on how one succeeds in this. We don't have confidence that this is a first step towards many that will have a high probability of a good return. There's stuff you're not doing that you kind of know you need to, but it's annoying. So you're avoiding it to do something else instead. I don't want to have anything to do with this. Hey, motivational center, turn off. So that could be going on as well.

make sure your brain's on board which means you really believe the thing you're doing that you're struggling with is worth doing and you believe you have a very good effective plan for actually tackling it so I put those two things in there I think that'll help

all right so just in terms of these specific tasks soft entries making sure you really should be doing the task that really matters more philosophically the system is not about winning the game the system is about intention and that should help you

prevent from going back. Larry, I'm going to riff on you a little bit here. One more piece of advice. Get rid of that escapeism as an option. Have better escapism activities. This is not going to help you start the activity, right?

But when you find yourself seeking escapism, don't do endless scrolling or videos. Have higher quality escapism. I mean, you're still, that alone won't solve your problem because when you get to the impenetrable task and you give up on your schedule, you're going to go through escapism. But, you know, if you're a grown man, don't scroll videos.

Make that escapism like I'm reading something. I'm going for a walk. I'm, you know, I'm watching a movie. Like, I needed a break last week. And so I put aside two hours to finally watch Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. Cool movie, by the way. Filmed it in a natural light, Jesse. Really?

They used the fluorescence in the set. They built a fake bank, but on a real street in the warehouse. used the fluorescence as the lighting. They only had to augment the lighting during the scenes where they went to the power went out. Natural lighting. Everyone was wearing their own wardrobe. So it was all naturalism.

It was all about naturalism. So they told Pacino, wear your own clothes. Just wear your own clothes. Probably 50% of the dialogue was improvised. Really? Yeah. Great movie.

Yeah. Interesting. Also, like, it's really cool because it's a, and Larry, I know you care about this. It's from the 70s. And so the actual plot that this bank robbery is turning on is like very progressive for the time. What's really happening is Al Pacino is trying to get this money to pay for a sex change operation for his boyfriend who's in a mental institution.

He's been hospitalized, right? This is like out there stuff for the 70s. So Lumet, because I just read a book, I just read Lumet's book making movies. So he talks a lot about this. he's very careful you build this connection with Pacino you don't know why he's robbing the bank till halfway through

so that you have this connection with him and then he wanted the 1970s audience is to be like okay with realizing like the full scope of the story and if he just opened with that they would have put up walls he called the people in the balcony would have been like ah

but he builds up this connection over an hour and then he layers on this much this new layer of psychological complexity and now you're all in anyway it's a great movie that's what I'm saying Larry watch dog day afternoon instead of scrolling videos okay

this is you know if you're grown man enough of this that's not going to solve your problem all my other stuff is going to solve your problem of giving up on your system but you also have this other problem of you need better escapism I mean I think of like

the compulsive scrolling is like the like the day drinking a little bit it's like in the 60s like oh man I just this job I really this runs me down my life is hard like can't we just have a couple more martini's in lunch You know, like it's getting you in the moment, you're kind of like getting away from bad feelings.

But, you know, when you get to your kid's little league practice, you're pitching the ball into the stands because you can, you know, et cetera. All right. I'm going to tighten up here. It's a long answer, Larry. Let's move on. Let's do another one. What do we got here, Jesse? All right.

We got Rameel. How should I choose a project to boost my career capital? I currently have two choices. One, I will surely enjoy at all times, but it's debated how much it will increase my career capital. The other will give me an almost immediate boost in my career capital. capital, but I will hate doing it. Ooh, there's a dilemma. Yeah.

I was going to say, but this is not fair. So, Jesse, I was going to say at first, oh, this is one of those famous questions we get where they try to lead me to the answer. Mm-hmm. You know, we're like, well, I could do this one, I could do this option. It would, it would require, you know, ritual castration, and I would have to move to Bakersfield, California. and I would have to live under an oil derrick. So, like, you know, that's going to be going on. And I'll probably be blinded by the acid fumes.

But, like, I could do that. You know, or I could try to become a YouTube influencer and live a life of peace and happiness. But I don't know. Like, what do you think I should do? Like, we get a lot of those. But this is not quite that because this is like exact counterpoints, right? So it's not, he's actually, I think this is a true. prisoner's dilemma game theory issue here because he's saying option number one for his career

will be good for his career but he'll hate it option number two will not be good for his career but he'll he'll love it so actually it's this is this is not him leading us this is like a well-balanced this is a well-balanced dilemma so here's what i'm going to say so first of all i'm very wary of the activity that you say is not going to build career capital but is fun i tend to think about professional projects that are fun, but don't actually move the needle on the things that matter in your career, you're just smuggling a hobby into your work. Let your hobbies be your hobbies, have like things you do just because they're really fun. In your work, you want to be simplifying, and with the time that remains focusing as much as

possible on things that really matter, unambiguously rare and valuable skills that you want to deploy and get better and better at. So for those who don't know what he means when he says career capital, it's an idea for my book so good they can't ignore you. It's the metaphorical substance you acquire as you develop rarer and more valuable skills. It is the main leverage you have to make your job better. You invest your career capital into the things that make great jobs great. So if you don't get good at things, you can't expect a good job. So I don't want to really waste my time, at least significant amounts of my times on projects that don't help with that. If you want just fun stuff, you know,

have a fun hobby. So that being said, let's look at. look at this other option that will build your career capital, but you'll say you hate it. Here, it just depends on what your definition of hate is about what I'm going to recommend. If your definition of hate it is just, look, this is going to be hard. It's going to require deliberate practice to master the skills needed to pull off this new project. In the end, I will have more career capital, but it's going to be hard. I don't want to do that hard work. I hate doing that type of hard work.

Then I'm going to say do the hard work and just get more comfortable with that feeling of, I'm straining myself to get here. Because that feeling of strain is how you get better and how you take control of your job. On the other hand, the reason why you hate it is more specific to the activity itself. The people are involved.

I don't have anything to do with them. Or the activity itself, I hate doing this type of thing. I'm an introvert, and this particular project is going to require me to, like, reach out and network and be super social. And I know I'm going to hate every minute of it.

If it's intrinsic, to the activity itself clashing with you, your personality, or your values, then don't do that activity, but also in that case, don't default back to the fun thing. Keep searching to find another good option. Keep searching for something else you can do that you're not going to hate, but will grow your career capital. I don't want you to give up to take your eye off this prize of systematically building rare and valuable skills because that's what's going to make your job good. It's what gives you leverage and options. It's what's going to allow you to say,

here's where I want to work, when I want to work, and what I want to work on. It's what allows you to say at 55, I'm going down to 30% time and moving to the White Mountains because I'm really, really good. And the stuff I do is really valuable.

And I have leverage in this marketplace. So don't give up building up leverage yet. So don't do something just because it's fun if it's not really going to help. On the same token, don't do something you hate. If you really, intrinsically you hate it.

But if you just hate the hard work of getting better, well, you've got to get used to it. That's just, that's what it takes to do something deep. All right, rolling along, what do we got here next? All right, we got Sammy. I quit my software sales job three years ago to pursue freelance B2B content writing full time. My goal was to get my rate high enough

to work only three to four hours a day. Leave me free to pursue my dream of writing fiction. I'm happy to say that I've reached the necessarily hourly rate to write every after but after three hours of technical writing in the morning, I'm too drained to write fiction later in the day. Any advice? Well, Sammy, I'm glad you hit your goal that allows you to actually implement the schedule you envisioned, working three or four hours and then working on your novel.

To step back, I don't recommend this path for other people. So again, going back to my book, So Good They Can Ignore You, don't use the big change as your source of motivation to pursue a different project. Like don't quit your job and say because that'll motivate me to do better at this other job and so I can write full time. Probably in this case I would have suggested write while doing your sales job to really see like do I am I good at this? Can I sell something? Sell a book. Sell a book first and then say great. I know I can make a go at this. Now I'm going to reconfigure my job so I can do this with more time. I'm not a big believer in just like taking the huge leap because I think people prioritize that momentary feeling of excitement and possibility of making the big change, but the big change might not have been the right idea.

But okay, here you say it's fine. Your new job is working out. You're making enough money. That's good. So you're having a hard time still writing. All right. I wrote down four ideas about how you might solve that. Number one, I think it's the obvious thing.

Write your novel first, then do your freelance writing job. Start with the novel, then switch to the other thing. B2B content writing and for software, you don't need to have 100% going there, right? This is not Hemingway. It's not Lauren Groff needs to be writing these things. You have to carefully craft the freelance B2B software writing content to expose the human experience. So do a novel writing first. Maybe get up a little bit early.

I do that from 7.30 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. and then get my day started with the other type of writing after a walk. That's obvious. To add more rituals and routines surrounding your fiction writing. So your issue here may be just the context switch.

Sometimes when people think they're drained, what they're really feeling is just the immediate friction of my brain is in this context. It's freelance software writing. And when I wrench it away from that and two minutes later, I'm like, let's get going on the novel, your brain is saying,

I have none of the relevant stuff loaded up. I don't have the characters loaded up. I don't have the plot loaded up. You're going to have to give me 15 or 20 minutes until I have switched my cognitive context from what we were doing before to what we're doing now. A lot of people experience that 10 to 20 minute switch of cognitive context as, oh, I'm drained. I can't do this. I guess my brain doesn't want to do it.

What professional writers know is you just keep powering through and after 20 minutes, why does it get easier? Because your brain has switched over all the context and it's no longer pulling neuronal teeth. that actually make progress on what you're doing. So it might just be you need to give it a little bit more time. A ritual and routine helps here. You know, okay, I'm going to go for a walk and make this coffee. I'm going to read my last pages and then walk through the woods for 20 minutes

and then come back and start writing. These type of rituals help you through the process of converting your cognitive context. It'll feel then less strain once you sit down at the keyboard. Number three, make sure your brain actually trust you to write a not. novel. We talked about this in our answer to a previous question in this episode, but a lot of times why novelists get blocks is because their brain says, you're not ready to be a novelist. You're just writing, but you don't really, I have no faith that you're producing something here that's going to be a sellable writer. Novel. You haven't talked to other novelists about

how they got started. You have no way of evaluating what you're doing to see if it's of the right caliber to even be considered. Hey, you haven't even looked into the process of what happens when this novel is over. Why aren't you joining a writer's group? Why don't you know about how agencies work? Why don't you, why haven't you talked to two or three other people about how many books it took before? Your brain might just say, you just want to write. You just like the idea of that I write every day. You like the idea of being someone who published a book, but you haven't spent time figuring out what do I have to do to be that person. So make sure you've really convinced your brain that what you're doing with this writing has a good chance of succeeding. And if not, I've not,

you need to go get that information. You got to convince your brain first because otherwise it's going to turn off that motivational center. And you're going to read that as being drained. Because keep this in mind. There are many well-known writers, especially in genres, genre writing, who get started writing in addition to a very busy full-time job. So the human brain is capable of doing this. You're doing freelance writing three to four hours a day.

You could still work on your novel. In my new book, Slow Productivity, I have a whole thing about writers and when they, genre writers and when they wrote their first books. I talked about Stephanie Myers writing the Twilight books. She was raising three young boys. So there's these little windows of time. That's a really hard job. I have three boys.

She was writing while doing that. Jean Grisham was writing while a lawyer and a member of the Mississippi state legislature. You get up at 5 a.m. to put in those pages. Michael Crichton was writing while a med student when he would get boys. in class, he would just switch over to working on the novel that he was working on. We had Clive Custler, so his wife took a job that had a night shift. So he had the kids at night. After he put the kids to bed, his wife wasn't there.

He was bored. That's when he would write. He was an ad executive. He'd write late at night. Robin Cook spent time writing in decompression chambers. He was a Navy diver after the Korean War, doing experiments, early experiments with scuba. And so he would write and bring a typewriter into decompression chambers. He was the ship doctor on a submarine in the Navy for a while.

He'd work on books down there. So it's not like you're coming up against some physical limit. You really want to care about these other factors that are going on to see what's really going on here. And finally, be okay going slow. Key idea from slow productivity. I'm doing this with another job. It's my first book. So maybe this takes me two years instead of six months.

as long as you couple and steady with the word slow, you're okay. Keep the pace realistic. I think that'll be okay. All right. I think we got time for one more question. Let's do one more here. Okay. We got Todd.

I'm a software engineer at a small tech company and I have almost no meetings, a pull-based task management system, zero emails, and almost exclusively asynchronous communication through our project management tool. As a result, I can spend my entire day in a deep work state. Can there be too much deep work? Because to me, the entire ordeal feels dehumanizing. I'll tell you what, Jesse. For reasons that I will soon explain, I want to call this question,

our slow productivity corner of the day. All right, so as longtime listeners and watchers know, in celebration of my new book, Slow Productivity, that comes out on March 5th, I choose one question per episode to make my slow productivity corner question of the day I choose a question that overlaps with ideas from my book, Slow Productivity. If you want to get a free excerpt from that book, go to calnewport.com slash slow to learn more. All right, so why is this connected to slow productivity?

Because this question is fantastic because it connects to the evolution of work in the 20th and 21st century and the problems with the way this evolution unfolded. So Todd is explaining from a system, a systemic perspective, a perspective of systems, in my mind, a fantastic knowledge work structure. No meetings. Poll-based task management. That's a big idea from slow productivity. But that's where you pull in the next thing you're going to work on when you're done with the current thing, as opposed to having anyone and everyone push work onto your plate that you then have to juggle or manage without having to say in it.

zero emails almost exclusively a synchronous communication through project management tools, meaning you're not servicing back and forth email and chat conversations all day, which creates context switching. This is an ideal setup for a knowledge work job that's built on doing deep work, like software engineering. So why is Todd dehumanized and miserable? It's because we have a mismatch here. We have a mismatch between the way we've learned to work and the reality of these better ways of work.

So let me explain here. This is an idea from the first part of my book's slow productivity. In the first part, I say, how did we get to this place where we are very unhappy with the notion of productivity and knowledge work? And the story I tell is one of haphazardness and heuristics. So we have mid-20th centuries, 1959, the year that knowledge work is first coined as a term. This is the decade in which knowledge work emerges as a major economic sector, right? Not just we have a few people in an office to support our iron foundry, but now we have just whole companies that do nothing but work in offices, working with our brains. And a question arises, what does it mean to be productive in this new type of work? In the factories that were dominant in the economy until this point, it was really easy. Here's the stuff we produce. We produce Model T's. We measure how many labor hours it requires for each Model T produced. If you give me a system for building Model T's that reduces that number, I know it's a better system, and we switched to it. Before industrialization, we had productivity clearly defined in agriculture.

Here's how many bushels of wheat I get per acre of land. You change the system you used to rotate your crops. That number went up. That's a better system. Knowledge work just doesn't work anymore. We're not producing one thing. Individual knowledge workers, and just reflect on your own life here, individual knowledge workers work on all sorts of things.

Many different types of projects and many different types, some administrative, some more serious. There's no number to output the measure and put a number on and say this is up or down. These workloads are highly varied depending on what you happen to say yes to or not or how many things were pushed your way. So you can't compare different people, apples to apples. And there's no clear system that everyone is following to organize and tackle their work. So it's not like we can say, hey, when we changed our productivity system from X to Y, we got more work done. so that's a better system. No, in knowledge work, it's autonomous.

Everyone comes up with their own techniques. It's up to you to figure out how to manage their work. So we had no systematic way of actually talking about productivity. So what do we do instead? We fell back on this heuristic called pseudo-productivity. Visible activity becomes a proxy for productive effort. I see you doing stuff that's better than me not seeing you do stuff. So as long as I see you're busy,

then it's a good approximation as far as I'm concerned that you're being productive. I get into this in the book, but it's like, okay, and if we need more productivity, what we need is just more hours of work, just more busyness. It was just a band-aid. We didn't really know how to measure productivity in the office environment, so we came up with this heuristic, eh, visible activity.

That's productivity. We created what I call an invisible factory for knowledge work. We clock in at a certain time. We have to do stuff until a certain closing time, and then we kind of clock out and leave our office and go home. We got very used to that. But here's the issue with the invisible factory pseudo-productivity model is that most of what we're doing

is not actually moving the needle on things that matter. Most of what we're doing is we're talking about work. We're having meetings. We're trading emails back and forth. We're on chat channels. We're trying to chime in quickly on chain so people know that we're there. The activities that show that you are active can be quite orthogonal to the activities

that actually make a difference. So we're just filling our days with busyness, the administrative overhead surrounding overloaded schedules and to-do list, and 40, 50% of what we're doing doesn't even really matter. So what happens then when we get back to Todd and we abandon pseudo-productivity

and we abandon busyness as a proxy for productive effort and we get rid of the busyness through smarter systems. There's no more email change you can end respond to in five or six Zoom meetings a day. You can't hop on calls. You're an engineer program. Make good programs. When you're done with this feature, tell us you can pull in another one.

So what happens when we get rid of all the busyness? The eight-hour day no longer makes sense. So much of our eight-hour day is filled with this sort of filler stuff that we can do endlessly. It's not too draining. When you get rid of all of that, there's only so much deep work you can do. And we know this by studying what I call in my book traditional knowledge workers. Let's go back and study people who traditionally made a living with their brain, but because of the time and their situation had a lot of autonomy to figure out how they wanted to work.

You know, scientists and philosophers and novelist. And what do they do? They would work hard for three or four hours most, and that would be it. And then they're done doing that type of work. Novelists don't write for more than three hours a day. The best scientists can think about physics for a while, but they can't do it all day long. Shakespeare would write his plays, but not in eight-hour shifts. So the reality of a world without pseudo-productivity and performative busyness is that to try to sit for eight hours, the artificiality of that in the context of knowledge production becomes apparent.

If all you're doing is really trying to create valuable stuff with your brain, sitting somewhere for eight hours is not the right way to do it. Traditionally, people who have done this never work that way. So what you're experiencing, Todd, is when you get a better structure of work that gets rid of the performative busyness, you're realizing the eight-hour work day doesn't. match what you're doing. So long story, short, work less. If you have to obfuscate that, obfuscate that. Two hours, 90 minute break,

hour, two hour break, another hour. If you need to spread it out in the day, do. If you don't, if you're entirely results oriented, knock in four hours, get really good work done. And then with your other time, go do something else that's just as life-affirming and meaningful. Go back and listen to the first part of this episode

where we talk about how to navigate the complex world of self-house help information, reflect, reiterate, build, add, subtract, do all the stuff that makes a deep life deep. Think of it like you've won the lottery. You get to actually worked the way that knowledge workers should be working. So yes, to try to fit in eight hours of deep work all day long, that is dehumanizing because a human brain can't do that.

The eight hour day makes sense for factories. The eight hour a day makes sense for a pseudo-productivity regime where we have no other way of knowing what you're doing. It does not make sense, however, if your real goal is, you're not. just to produce the highest quality best results using your brain. You have a chance to do that, Todd. So, work less. Was your coining of the invisible factory,

did you use that for the first time in the upcoming book? I think so. I think so. The only reason why I'm saying I think so is possible, and so my New Yorker writing, maybe I mentioned it, but I think I coined it in the book. Yeah.

Yeah, chapter four. but I don't want to, it's possible. There's a particular New Yorker piece. The New Yorker piece that overlapsed this is I did one last year where I used anthropological research of extant hunter gathering communities to try to understand what did work mean for humans for 300,000 years, like Intel just very recently. And how does that differ most from what knowledge workers do today? Because presumably where we have the biggest friction points between how we work today and how we

evolved to work, we're going to find dissatisfaction. And that's where we want to change how we work today. And all this, I elaborate this whole thing in the book, of course, but it started as a New Yorker article. And this pace thing was a big part of it. This idea of, like, working full intensity for the same amount of time every day year round is incredibly foreign to the human species. And that's where the invisible factory notion applies.

I don't know if I coined it in that book, I mean, in that article or from the book, but I like the term a lot. Yeah, it's a cool term. The types of knowledge you will learn. See, I'm doing an ad here, Jesse. The type of knowledge you will learn when you read my book, slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. Do it again in your French voice.

For my French readers. It's the type of knowledge you shall learn when you read the slow productivity, the lost art of the accomplishment without the burnout. Villefort.com slash slow. The French love slow productivity, by the way, because they're already on board with this, right? Like, the French think we're crazy in the U.S. Like, what are you guys doing? Like, look, you're not going to be Jeff Bezos, most of you, right?

Like, I get it if you're, like, crushing it to make a billion dollars and have a yacht that can't fit under a bridge. Great. But they're like, what's up, man? You're like an HR manager. Like, you're not going to be Jeff Bezos. Why are you guys crushing it, you know? They're like, they should be drinking the wine, you know. We work.

We work. But, like, we're going to work at the afternoon. I mean, the afternoon is when we drink the wine. What is this going on here? So the French get it, man. The French are on board. The Americans I have to convince. The Germans I have to convince.

Deep work is like a big book in Germany. So, like, yes, we shall. Yes, I am. We walk hard. Work deeply. Yes. So I got to convince the Germans. I got to convince the Americans.

The British, it's not the, The British don't, they're neither, they work really hard or, like, really like to relax. They just don't trust Americans. So I have to kind of convince them. Though, actually, my books do well over there. But they're like, I don't know. They're like, I, how long are the British not trusted Americans for? I'm just thinking the self-help category.

They think we're all kind of boorish. You know, they're like, oh, cheer you all. It seems a little brash, little brash. I'm so sure about this. Like, the British and the Canadians are very worried about, like, tall poppy syndrome. Who are you to be telling me What to do? So it's interesting

Every culture has their thing US is like Give me whatever Let's go for it Like let's Though telling Americans To work slower It's gonna be interesting

Yeah we'll see That's why we've got Pre-order this book So that you can help spread the word All right That's a slow productivity corner Let's get some theme music All right

Let's um Do we have a call this week? Yep Let's do a call All right Hey, Cal, a long-time fan going back a decade plus. As a fellow Dartmouth alum, I really appreciate what you're doing to elevate the visibility of our institution, so thanks for all that you do.

I have a question for you relating to writing and productivity. I am currently in the midst of working with a writing coach who has been encouraging me to adapt my processes to kind of move the ball forward a little more effectively on some papers that I'm working on. There's one in particular where I'm not necessarily beholden to another team, but am intermittently chipping away at things when I have time. Unfortunately, it keeps winding up being a second or third on the bucket list, and then competing priorities kind of overrule it. My coach is encouraging me rather than trying to slave away and find rocks in the schedule of large chunks of time where I can do some high quality writing to instead

I'd look for short intervals, short bursts, as short as as five minutes, 15 minutes, things like that, and to do that with more frequency. I know in deep work you talk a little bit about different approaches and structures to being productive in this way. I find it really hard to kind of rev up for that, but I'm willing to give it a try and we'll plan to do this, probably in the interim between submitting this and you answering the question,

but I would just love to hear a little bit around your thoughts in terms of writing productivity. I know you tend to write every day, but it sounds like your chunks are actually pretty substantial on a daily basis. I'm currently at a point between family and other work demands where I don't know that I have the bandwidth to do that effectively right now. And I just love to hear your thoughts on the tradeoffs or considerations in like microchunks for focused deep work versus more of the macro chunks with lower frequency and the relative merits of both. Thanks very much.

Well, always happy to give advice to a fellow Dartmouth man. is crazy, Jesse, because you're the same age, you're in the same place, same boat here. We're going back to Dartmouth this summer. For your 20th anniversary? 20th anniversary. I was getting a lot of emails. I haven't responded.

It's kind of crazy. Kind of crazy. 20th anniversary. There was a book that was big when I was in grad school. It reminds me of this question. I think it was called writing your dissertation in 15th. minutes a day. And like that was the theory of this book. Hey, 15 minutes a day, that's not so bad, but if you really do the math, this adds up to a lot of writing. It was similar to that really

popular financial advice in the early 2000s, the latte effect. If you just don't buy one latte, every day, just don't buy your latte. That's $3 a day. Well, that's going to be, you know, $20 a week. But, you know, $20 a week is going to be $80 a month, which is going to be almost $900 a year and if we have that $900 a year and we put interest over 20 years, you're going to have $15,000 or like whatever it is, right? Just little stuff adds up. It's definitely compelling. That's not going to work.

It's not going to work for difficult writing. It's not going to work for scholarly writing. The problem is you need about 15 or 20 minutes just to fully load up all of the context, all the cognitive context in your brain. Until then, you're not even really ready. to write anything of any substance. I mean, I would say you need 15 or 20 minutes of a startup ritual before you even start writing.

And then you want to write 90 minutes minimum. You really need 90 minutes minimum to produce enough that it was worth all the cognitive startup work you had to do to get rolling. If this paper is important to you, find the time, block it off, and deal with the consequences later. I'm just going to make this happen. Three days a week, I'm going to do this first thing. I'm going to do it for two hours or 90 minutes, and I'm just going to have to make that happen.

I can't have other meetings scheduled here at work, and I'm just going to make it happen, and I'm going to give it its attention, I'm going to finish it, and then I'll free up those blocks. You know what? Nothing terrible will happen, almost certainly. And maybe it's I have to get up early. I talk about this in deep work, Brian, who actually just talked to the other day, keep in touch, but I had this example of Brian working on a dissertation while he was doing full-time teaching other types of stuff. He did in the morning.

He had this real ritual around it. Read that chapter. Went to his basement. I had this really set ritual around an exact cup of coffee made at the exact time just to get his mind in the writing mode every day. He did the sort of 5 a.m. thing and got it done. I'll sometimes do afternoon or evening blocks when I have a big deadline. I've got to get this chapter done. I really need the crack.

I'm trying to crack a New Yorker piece and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I'll sometimes just arrange with my wife. Like, look, I'm going to do four to six 30. and I'll probably go to the coffee shop right there just to get into the writing mode and then go to my office here and right here. And it's just a way of thinking through like here's like special time I can deploy that's really for pushing it. But make the time and do it.

You have it. I mean, think about this. If you, God forbid, fell and broke your arm, right? Let's just say that happened. You have a busy job. You have a busy family. Like, what's going to happen? The doctor's going to say you got to do PT.

Right? You got to do PT for six weeks. you're going to lose mobility in your arm. You have to come to this place. You're doing it three days a week. It takes a couple hours. It's a pain. But you wouldn't lose your job and your family wouldn't abandon you because you would work

around it. You'd cancel some things. You'd work a little later. You'd make it happen. That's what you got to do. If this writing is important to you, give it 90 minute plus blocks, do the fixed schedule productivity thing, work around it, make the changes you need to make. Focus, use rituals to get your mind really going.

And then just get into it and write. And don't think about it as a scary. everything. It's just your job. That's what you do, right? Your job requires you to write papers. You're going to write papers. That's part of the job. It's the way I think about writing. It's my job. It's like a football player doesn't say I hate the like the running and the weightlifting stuff. It's, it's, you know, that's so hard. It's like that's the job of being a football player is that you're able and willing to do that and other people aren't. So don't do the many, give yourself more time. Trust yourself and your organizational abilities for you to keep your job. it's possible. I think it'll be okay. All right, I'm going to do a quick case study. I like to do these when possible. It's when someone sends in a more detailed account

of using some of the ideas from the show. This one, I might need your help here, Jesse. This one's a complicated one. It's a particular system someone built. I don't know that I fully understand it. But people like when we sometimes get into the really complicated systems people build. So let's try one of those.

And we'll see if we can figure this one out together. So this system was sent in by someone named Cade. who said, I study international business with a minor in economics. I bought How to Become a Straight A Student and Deep Work, reading the former multiple times over. One thing I would like to highlight is the benefit I've found in the quantification of goals in regards to their estimated time.

I've created a task planner in Excel that I will readily admit is both over-engineered and integral to my daily life. All right. So here's the description of his daily planner. spreadsheet. It contains rows for all of my projects. The first column is the day I put it into the planner. The second is the project name. The third is the due date. The fourth is the days left. So the current date minus the due date. I think he has that backwards. It should be the due date minus the current date. The fifth column is the class or job function. The project is four. The sixth

column is the estimated time it will take. The seventh column is the percentage complete. The eighth column is the time left in the project. Here he gives an equation. It's the estimated time minus the estimated time times percentage complete. Okay, so it's, if you're saying it's 10 hours to do this, is my estimate and a finished 50% of the project. I'll subtract 50% of the total time and get five hours left.

And the ninth column is the time left per day. This is the one that was confusing me, Jesse. Time left divided by days left. That's the one that's confusing. Time left, hours left. So the equation he has here is time left divided by days left. Yeah. It says the time left per day.

Oh, okay. Maybe it's just the, I get it. So the eighth column is the time left in the project. So how much of the estimated time is left? and the ninth column is saying if you spread this work out evenly over the days that remain till the deadline here's how much you'd have to do per day.

Okay, all right, I get that. All right, going on. When I designed this system, I had no idea how much the estimated time and time left per day would change my work. Though not perfect, I can usually guess within an hour how extensive a project is going to be.

Through this system, I'm able to flag projects due in a day and with the exception of those, tackle problems based on time left per day. This keeps big research papers from distracting me from smaller projects that are coming up fast, while still allowing me to ensure I attack them in a timely manner without procrastinating. This triaging has been essential to my life, and now this Excel project has essentially become my time block planner. Additionally, I can see exactly how many hours per day I have of work in total,

how many projects I have opened in the semester, how many I've completed and much more. I bring this up because I think this sort of quantification allows for major stress reduction preventing anything from creeping up. Additionally, as I sit here, I see 65 completed assignments totaling 200 plus hours of work just from the past semester.

To see this, it truly reinforces the idea of slow productivity. Since implementing the system, I have never felt like I'm scrambling. Instead, I feel like I'm comfortably plotting along as new problems arise. And that's pretty cool. I mean, right away, Jesse, he doesn't say, oh, he did say business administration. I was going to say, if he didn't say with an economics. If he didn't say that, I think we could guess that he was in some sort of like economics or science or engineering as his discipline.

This is not the type of system. You're not going to see a system like this explaining your nine column spreadsheet with all these, equations, you know, in a, and at the end of it, it's like, and this is how I've organized my life, signed Maya Angelou. You know what I mean? It's like, there's certain types of jobs. There's certain types of jobs. It's not, is not a, a poet from the West Village that's writing this system. This is an engineer.

Let's be honest. Yeah, this is, right. I like it. I like it. So there's a broader point there I want to emphasize if his nine column spreadsheets intimidating and not to keep bringing everything back to the book's slow productivity, but it's another thing I talk about in that book is time quantification. Time quantification as a, not a permanent discipline, but actually as an exercise you can go through.

So for a certain amount of time, so you don't have to worry that this is permanent. But for a certain amount of time, you do like what Cage does. and when you accept something on your plate, you figure out how long is this going to take. And even more so, you start to figure out where is this time going to come from. So like one of the suggestions in my book, which is gets at the same idea

but a little bit more lightweight, is for a while what you do is every time you are about to agree to a commitment, you figure out how long it's going to take and you go and you find that time on your calendar and mark it off. So like you're forcing yourself to actually confront the real time demands.

It's easy to say yes. It's just as easy to say yes as something that will take you 10 minutes as something that will take you 100 hours. It doesn't take long. It's three letters. But the impact there is different. So if you take everything you're saying yes to you,

and before you say yes, you go and find a time and block it off. A couple of things happen. One, you have to confront the reality of how long things take and what your schedule looks like. So you might say, wait a second, This project is going to take 20 hours.

I can do this over like four sessions. I can't really find time for these sessions for another month and a half. Now you have realistic timeline. You can say, okay, I can do this, but I don't have time for this. I'm looking at this. It's going to be six weeks until I get going. So it allows you to be more realistic about your timelines. It also allows you to be more realistic about your workload.

When you're trying to fit this in, it's stressing you the hell out. Like, I don't have time for this. I'm going to have to go six months in the future. Now you can say with confidence, yeah, I can't do this. Yeah, I just don't have time, right? Because you're not just going off a gut feeling. You're going off of a realistic assessment of what your schedule looks like. And finally, you're protecting time for these things.

So when you do commit to them, you know it'll get done because the time has been protected. So it's a good system. Now, it's heavy-handed and it's annoying. You don't want to do it all the time. But what happens is if you do this for like a few months, you build a good instinct for how long what do things take? How busy am I right now? And you're able to do this triage much more quickly once you get a little bit more sophisticated. All right, good case study. So I want to move on now to our final segment. But before we do, I want to mention another sponsor that makes the show possible.

So the show is sponsored by Better Help, H-E-L-P. This is a tough time of year, I think from a mental health perspective, winter. The excitement of the holidays has gone. It's dark. It's cold. You feel as far as you've ever been from summer and the changes and vacations. So it's a good time to think about your mental health. If you find yourself lost in ruminations or negative thoughts or a hedonic feelings where you can't feel hope or excitement about things, this is a problem that requires professional help to solve, and therapy could be exactly that help. This is where better help enters the scene, because it makes the process of getting started with therapy easy. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible,

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slash deep questions to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. E-E-L-P dot com slash deep questions. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing. However, you, chaching. And a little saying I thought of, Jesse, I don't know.

I was just riffing. And the fact that there's sound effects there, you know, I just had the sound, it just had a cash register right here. I just riffing. However, you chaching. Here's the thing about Shopify. If you're going to sell something,

especially if you're going to sell something online, you just go to Shopify. It's a no-brainer. It's like, oh, I want to search for something. You go to Google. I want to sell something online. Shopify is the global commerce platform that you should be using all stages.

You're just launching an online shop to, I have my first real-life store and want to appoint a sales service in my store that works well, to, oh, my God, we just hit our millionth order regardless of where you are, Shopify is there to help you grow, whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits. Shopify helps you sell everywhere. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform.

They have fantastic in-person POS systems. Wherever and wherever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. Their online checkout experience, for example, is really, really good. Really helps you convert potential buyers. In fact, they have a 36% better on average conversion rate at checkout than other leading commerce platforms. They even have some AI called Shopify Magic to help you sell more. Shopify is not new. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

They're the global force behind all birds, Rothes, and Brooke Lennon, to name just a few examples, among millions that span over 175 countries. They also have award-wain support there to help you succeed at every step of your business path. All right, so sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep. And do that all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash deep, all lowercase. Now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in, that's Shopify.com slash deep. All right, let's move on. to our final segment.

Because it's the first episode of a new month, I like to review briefly the books I read in the month previous. That means I will be reviewing the books I read in January, 2024. I usually strive to read five books per month. In January, actually, Jesse, I read six. Because, you know, you get started in the Christmas break,

and I think there's at least one or two in there. Maybe I finished in January. I count books when I finished them. So, you know, I got some reading them. All right. So it's an interesting mix. Book number one was The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks, classic, classic book, I think it's like 15 years old now. Classic book in the Deep Life literature. I've heard many people mention it. It's written by a shepherd. A shepherd in England that does fell shepherding where you keep the sheep in the valley, but the grazing lands up in the hilltops is public.

and so it's shared lands. Beautifully written book, really beautifully written book about life as a shepherd. So as I was going to this book, I was like, wow, this guy, this must be like a savant. He's like a fantastic poetic writer, and he's a shepherd. Well, about two-thirds of the way through the book,

you realize he is a savant, he grows up on a farm, but gets a scholarship to Oxford. So actually, you don't realize this until you're well into the book. James Rebanks goes to Oxford, gets a classical education, gets an office job,

says this stinks, goes back to becoming a shepherd. So it's this interesting mix of a classical education, but this interesting life is an agriculture. And so he writes beautifully about it. It's a great book.

Really recommend. It won all the awards when it came out. Definitely worth reading. Then I read The Man from the Future by Ananya Bata Charya. This is a biography

of Jean von Neumann one of the smartest people who ever lived, huge figure in 20th century physics and mathematics and computer science. Yes, I listed all three different fields because he was big in all of these fields in that world of the Manhattan Project, which he was involved in, and the U.S. physics revolution as it picked up steam going to the 40s and 50s. In that whole world, he was considered this huge brain. He was the guy who could walk in, solve the equation on the chalkboard, walk out, and on his way out, build a computer.

So, anyways, if you don't know Jean Van Neumann, you should. Incredible polymath, brilliant guy. And this book was really good. It really covers it well. What I like about this book, it's a serious science writer. He gets the science and math right. So there's multiple fields that Von Neumann was involved in that overlaps my own training as a professor. and I can say Bada Charya got this right.

So he goes deeper on the science and math than you sometimes get in these science biography. So I really love this book. I'm a big von Neumann fan. If you like Richard Feynman, for example, you should read von Neumann. If you're interested in Turing, you should read von Neumman. He was deeply involved in both of their lives. Great book. The Man from the Future.

Going the other way, I read the Pelican Brief by John Grisham. I realized, like, I don't know if I'd ever read that before. and it was fine I don't know I've been re-reading some Grisham recently it was fine it's a reasonable

serviceable thriller I would say then I read If You Could Live Anywhere by Melody Warneck I like the premise of the book this is if we go back to the categories

from the beginning of this episode this is classic classic self-help advice and the book is about in a world of remote work, you have a lot of options about where you could live. So how do you figure out where to live? That's a good premise. It's very advicey, you know, very checklist advicey.

Think about this, build a spreadsheet. So it's like a very pragmatic book. She wrote another book before this that I'm interested in reading, which was how do you learn to love where you are living? So she wrote that pre-pendemic. I might go back and check that book out because I think it has more of her personal story, which sounds interesting to me. They moved to a small town. I think it's in Virginia.

Maybe it was in North Carolina. Maybe it was in Tennessee. Actually, I clearly have no idea where this town was. But she moved into some small town, and the book is about how she learned to love this town. So how do you love the place you are? Like get involved and learn to love it, as opposed to always looking and thinking about what place could be better.

So that book, which preceded this one, sounds interesting too. I just haven't read it yet. Then I read Man's Quest for God by Abraham, Joshua Heschel. It's a book about prayer. A book about prayer coming at it from the Jewish perspective. Classic Heschel, so the thing about Heschel, I don't know if you know, the audience knows much about Heschel. German, Jewish theologian and scholar brought over, essentially rescued from Germany at like the last possible minute before the door slammed shut for Jews in Germany under the reign of Hitler.

Comes to U.S. doesn't speak any English, becomes a great theologian and scholar in the U.S. His style, like the thing about Heschel, and he's one of the best known Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, March with Martin Luther King, really interesting figure. The thing about his style is he has two things he's mixing, so there's a scholarly aspect to him, because he's a scholar, right? Like systematically, let's break this down and think about it, and here's the framework, and what have other people said about this,

and let's cite things. He's also very poetic. So he's a poetic writer. And so when he's writing about religion, he will mix sometimes very scholarly style, but also he'll also be poetic. Like I want the poetic nature of my words to convey information, also my scholarly structures and information.

Man's Quest for God, really mixes these two together. It's kind of interesting. So there'll be these like long poetic statements as well as like very systematic conversations. This books from the 1950s about the emerging role of symbolism and modernism and reconceptualizing religious thought. And it's like it's all mixed together. So it's not quick reading, but I thought it was really interesting. It was a really interesting take on prayer, especially the Jewish approach to prayer, which is halakic, meaning, it's very structured, ritualized.

Islamic prayer is very similar to this. As opposed to more of a ad hoc petitionary personalized prayer style. It's just when I feel moved, I try to connect to the divine. The Jewish and I think Islamic style, it's much more structured. And they think that actually you're going to, in the end, get more intimations of the divine and insight by building structure around the activity.

And he gets into all that. So if you're interested in that type of theology, it's a good book. But it's hardgoing because, again, it's semi-academic, semi-academic, semi-coetic, semi-accessible. So that was probably one of your expert primary source. That's an expert primary source. Yeah, yeah. I just been finishing up another Heschel book that I think is more accessible. So we'll talk about that next month, but I would call it an accessible primary source.

This kind of accessible, I've read other Heschel, I've read other theology. So yeah, maybe it's expert. Finally, I read Palestine 1936 by Orrin Kessler. Part of my ongoing efforts to self-educate about that part of the world. So Palestine 1936 is about the big uprising. I think it was called the Great Uprising that occurred under British imperial role of mandate Palestine in the 1930s. I mean, 1936. That's why it's in there.

the argument of the author here is that that's really the birth of Palestinian nationalism. Like you can't understand Palestinian nationalism without understanding what was happening on the British rule and this first revolt that occurred in the 30s that this really galvanized a lot of the a lot of the structures and thinking and fault lines on which the whole rest of the 20th century conflict and there played out along. So you have to go back. You can't start with 1948. You got to go back to the 1930s to really understand what's going on. Now, Jesse, I felt for this author personally because he tells the story early in the book that he comes across this topic. He's like, no one's written about this, you know?

So I'm going to take on this book project because he can read the Arabic, he can read the Hebrew. There's not a lot in English, right? So it's a hard project. Three-year project. going to take this on. He gets going in the book. He's deep into the research process. Two books on the topic are announced. Like after years, right?

Like there's like some book in Hebrew and that's it. He's like, all right, I'm going to cover this. It's going to be great. He gets into the project, two books are announced after he starts. But they were both very scholarly books, so I don't think they really stepped on his toes. But that's like classic writers' kismet. But anyways, it's a difficult research challenge that I think he did

a very good job on because the sources here you have to you have to contextually understand early 20th century Arabic sources you have to

contextually understand early 20th century Jewish sources these are different languages different contexts and he does and he pulls it together and I think there's a

pretty good job of talking about talking about this period that and it's also just an interesting period I mean all these everything going on now it's all about Britain's promises and changing promises for that area.

And so Britain comes in. We don't have to go into the whole history of the Middle East. But when Britain takes that over after they beat the Ottoman Empire in World War I, they have this declaration where they say, okay, we're going to take this over, call this mandate Palestine. Part of the goal here is we're going to establish a Jewish state. And then they kind of come back from that. Like, actually, maybe we don't want to do that.

And then they changed their mind again, like, no, no, we do want to do that. And it was in response to that second. No, we definitely do want to do this that caused the great uprising, the 1936 uprising. So there's like this negotiation back and forth. Britain was basically using that region as a pond. I mean, a lot of their interest had to do. Like, why did they, as they got closer to 1936, why were they saying, why were they going back and forth on this?

They were trying to set things up for this impending World War II and were they going to need Arab support? It's like a very complicated political picture. I think the book does a good job of capturing what's going on there. So I think that's useful. I mean, obviously there's other, you're going to put a lot of emphasis on whatever you write about. So Kessler puts a lot of emphasis on 1936. And this did seem like an important period. But obviously there's other really important things that happen subsequently that you need to understand Palestinian nationalism.

I mean, like you really do need to understand Algeria and, you really do need to understand Algeria. and that decolonial movement in Algeria and how that influenced Yasser Arafat and there's a lot of other things, especially in the 60s I think that happened, that were just as important for understanding like modern Palestinian nationalism. It's not the full picture,

but when you write these books, you know, it's always my thing I'm writing about was the key. But I could follow it. I could follow it. So I thought it was a good, good history book, well researched. So, you know,

complicated. You got to speak a lot of languages to write about. If I ever became a historian, it's what I've learned. You want to focus on a topic that is in your language and from close to your time period. So you just understand the language. You understand the context already. It makes things easier.

All right, anyways, that's probably enough time for today. Thank you everyone for listening or watching the show. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.