Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 29: My Daily Routine, Returning to Deep Work, and Digital Minimalism During a Pandemic | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about my daily routine, restarting a deep work practice, and embracing digital minimalism during a pandemic, among other topics.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Thanks to our sponsor to Grammarly. For 20% off Grammarly Premium go to Grammarly.com/DEEP. Use your laptop or desktop (this link doesn't always work on phones).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* My daily routine. [3:56]* Ensuring employees are working deeply at home [9:09]* Keeping a to-do list constantly open. [12:18]* The best way to start deep working. [14:31]* Advice for someone just starting a job [22:38]* Restarting research after a stint in an administrative position. [32:01]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* Speed reading versus strategic skimming. [39:05]* The cost of occasional hyper-distraction [41:00]* Thoughts on Reddit and Quora. [45:35]BACKSTAGE PASS [50:17]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Digital minimalism versus Covid-19. [58:05]* Struggling to find time for depth. [1:06:52]* Strategies for transitioning to a deep life. [1:12:48]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. 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 where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. So the exciting news kicking off today's episode of the podcast is that we have new questions. I sent out a survey to my email list last week, soliciting new questions for the show and got back a lot of really good queries. This is the first time we have updated the questions since July, if you can believe it. In July, I sent out the last survey link to my email list asking for questions. I got over 700 questions back then, and they were so good that I had been trying to get through them all

before I solicited new queries. But there was just too many of them, and it was taking too long. And I think at this point, it's becoming increasingly strange for me to be tackling questions such as, hey, cow, what's your advice for a deep Fourth of July? It's just not timely anymore. So I solicit new questions. We got a great new batch. They're really smart. They also react to some degree to the stuff we've been talking about all summer. So I think that really also adds to their quality.

So I'm excited for that. If you want to contribute questions, of course, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. That is where I send out these surveys. I am not going to wait so long to do it next time because I do like the questions being timely. So within six weeks or so, I'll probably solicit more. So sign up for that mailing list if you haven't already done so. So we have a really good show today. We're going to tackle these brand new questions.

I'll do a backstage pass segment. So you can get a peek into my own struggles and attempts to live a deeper life. We also will have, I think this is also exciting, our very first paid sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast. So we'll begin to that later as well. Before we start the show, though, let's do our review of the week. This is where I go into iTunes and read a recent five-star review. of the podcast. So this review comes from Jacob and he says, I'm developing a sense of control over

my life thanks to the mindsets and practices Cal suggests. I'm enjoying life more and moving in a more productive direction. I'm developing better discernment about how to focus my time and my concerns in life are deepening. I am finally am gaining a sense that I'm making progress every day towards being able to fully provide for my family. He goes on a little bit more, but that gives you the idea. Jacob, I really appreciate that review. This is my favorite type of feedback I like to hear is when people actually take control of their lives,

people who felt distracted and adrift, people that were looking just for quick entertainment, or quick outrage, or quick fixes, or someone to blame, or blaming themselves or escaping or numbing what's going on in their lives, to hear from people like that who say, you know what, when I decide to go for the deep life, you know,

I decide to focus on the things that are important to me, put a lot of energy in there, to filter out then the noise that's not so important, to do the hard work on the things that matter so that my life has meaning. When I hear those type of feedback, that's my favorite type of feedback. So, Jacob, I really appreciate that review.

It gives me a nice dolt of motivation to keep going. here. All right, so that's the review of the week. Of course, I appreciate any ratings or reviews you leave. That does really help new people find the podcast and it helps spread the word. All right, let's get started this week. As always, we will kick things off with some work questions. A.H. asks, what's your daily routine? Well, A.H, I'm normally up somewhere around 6 to 6.6.30. I will kick my day off with a little bit of writing. In recent months, that writing has been this newsletter I've mentioned before on the podcast. I write a newsletter for my extended family, so my parents, my siblings, my aunt, my uncle,

a relatively small bubble of extended family members about interesting or positive news on the pandemic. I felt early on that the standard news outlets were too negative. Now, to be clear, it's not that there is not negative news. Obviously, this is a terrible thing that's happening, but as a, I don't know, savvy consumer of news, it became clear to me that there was some narrative shaping going on, so it felt like the major newspapers and news channels felt like their role was to help push behaviors in certain directions, So they would be careful about what they chose to cover, not cover, how they cover things in such a way to try to push people's behavior towards what they thought the right intervention should be. And I thought that it was not good for the mental health of me or my family to be exposed consistently to a news take that was systematically or aggressively negative, leaving out the optimism, leaving out the positive, leaving out the encouragement. So I basically form my own little newspaper that has 20 readers.

And so I do that for the first 45 minutes or hour of the morning. That is, by the way, going to be my news consumption for the entire day. So in writing that newsletter, I see what's going on in the pandemic, but I'll also see what's going on in the world in my region more generally because I'm looking at news sources to write it. And now I'm done and I'm not going to look at news for the rest of the day. I'm certainly not going to be watching a steady drip of news feeds and pseudo-breaking news throughout the day. That's it. It happens in the morning. Right around that time, typically my wife goes in exercises, so I am hanging out with whatever subset of my mini-kids are awake at that period.

Make some breakfast, do the typical things you do in the morning. After she's done with her morning exercise, I usually do a long walk. Typically, I'll try to do some deep work on this walk. Treat it as a productive meditation exercise. There's a segment of this walk that goes through woods, which I really like. there's a segment where I end up at a park. And there's some big shade trees there that I will sometimes get some reading under. I do track my reading.

One of the metrics I track every day is how many chapters I've read. So I try to get the first chapter out of the way if I have time in the morning. Then when I come back from the walk, it's time to block plan my day. So I work with my wife. We figure out what's going on. What's happening in my work? What's happening with our kids? What's happening with homeschool?

What's happening with doctor's appointments? whatever, right? We face the day that we have to face. We make a time block plan that does the best with whatever we have to deal with. Then I execute the time block plan. There's no web surfing. There's no news. God forbid, no social media.

Execute, execute, execute. Shutdown will be somewhere between 4 and 5.30, depending on what's going on. I do my full shutdown routine so that I can actually move away from work. Then we are in full household, sort of personal life family. mode. And we make a plan for whoever we're going to do that. It's going to be dinner. It's going to be a walk or is it a movie night.

Are we going to the pool? You know, that was one of the silver linings of a minor silver lining of the pandemic. It's that our pool, it's a big deal. Our neighborhood pool is where the whole community goes. Typically closes on Labor Day because the high school students and the college students, I guess they all have to go back to school. And they're a big part of the lifeguard workforce. well, none of the schools are open around here, so they have more free time.

So we were able to actually extend the pool and have it be open all September and it's heated. So you can, even if it's cold outside. And so anyways, a minor silver lining, but one nonetheless. And then we have our, we have our evening. But I'm completely shut down from work in the evening so we can just focus on household or personal initiatives. And that's a lot of fun. And then usually I'll do my calisthenics style workout.

if I can do it right before dinner, that's optimal. Often I don't have time. And then I'll do it maybe at 9 o'clock after we've putting all the kids to bed. All right. Then I'm in bed by 9.30 or 10. And we repeat. So that's the whole routine age. So again, the details of what happens between, say, 9 and 5,

that differs a lot depending on what's going on. But the one thing that is consistent, which I'd want to emphasize here, is that there's no uncertainty during each day, because I have a time block plan that I've made with my wife that makes the most out of whatever we're facing. And some days it's great. Lots of open time. Getting after it, getting a lot of work done.

Some days it's not so great. There are consequences to having schools closed, etc. But we get through it with as much intention as possible. Jerolyn asks, how do I ensure that my employees are doing deep work effectively from home? Well, Geraldine, you'll find a more extended. version of my take on this topic in the article I wrote for the New Yorker earlier in the pandemic about remote work. But to summarize my main take, it is very hard for people to effectively work from home

if the work that unfolds in your organization is haphazard or unstructured. If you use a hive mind style approach to work where everyone just plugs in the Slack or plugs in the email and just rock and rolls. Like you got this, what's going on here? Let's jump on a Zoom call. Hey, whatever happened to that. Hey, can you look at this? Thoughts, question mark.

You just sort of go back and forth ad hoc unstructured messaging as the main way. You identify tasks, you assign tasks, you review tasks, and you execute tasks. And when everyone goes remote, it's very difficult to keep people working effectively. So the solution is to actually fix the way that you work. Add processes, add structure. Here is how we figure out what you should be working on. Here's how we assign work. Here's how we review who's working on what.

Here's how many things. This is a scary question for a lot of bosses. They don't want to face this question. Here's how we figure out how many things should be on your plate at any one time. A limit on works in progress to borrow a term from the Can Ban project management methodology is something that scares a lot of knowledge work bosses because if there is a reasonable limit on work in progress, they might not be able to sign you something else. They might not be able to pass something off to you with an email.

They may not be able to do that obligation hot potato. Or it's like, something new just came in. Okay. Darylin, here. What do you think about this? It's out of my hands. Right? Now you actually have to think, oh, do we really want to do this?

There's not enough people to do this. What is our priorities? Anyways, what I'm trying to say here, Jerylind, is that you add structure, you add processes, you can work from home almost as effectively as you can in an office, and in some cases more effectively. So now is the time to start asking, what are the different processes that produce value or support the production of value in our organization? A lot of times these will be implicit.

And you can start looking at each of these and making it explicit. Well, how do we actually want to do this? How do we identify these opportunities? Where do we track information? Are we using shared task boards? is there a Google Doc somewhere? Do we have a stand-up virtual meeting every morning where we organize who's working on what? Do we limit people to work on one thing per block? Do we give people a lot of freedom to work on a lot of things?

How much do we want to use email? How much do we want to use Slack? You start figuring out these questions. How do we actually want work to unfold? And you can come up with configurations that can work quite well with remote work. But in their absence, it's chaotic. And as I talked around that New Yorker piece, things don't tend to go well. Juno asks, how would you rate the difference between having a to-do list open constantly

versus having one, but not visible? Well, Juno, as longtime listeners of the Deep Questions podcast know, I'm not a huge fan of a to-do list. I mean, I think you should have a to-do list in the sense of there should be places where you are storing the obligations on your plate. but a to-do list is not a tool to schedule or run a day. It's like a filing cabinet. It is not a tool that tells you what you should be doing.

And as long-time listeners know, I am not a big fan of what you end up doing if you just have a to-do list, which is what I call the list-based reactive method of time management, in which you basically react to email, react to Slack, and occasionally look at a list and try to make progress on something from that list.

that's the type of productivity philosophy that a lot of people who just rely on a to-do list actually deploy, and it's an incredibly ineffective way of producing value with the human brain. I would recommend instead time blocking. So what you're looking at is not some ambiguous list. You're like, what am I in the mood to work on right now?

What do I have the energy to work on? It is a plan that takes every minute of your day and gives it a job. And that's always visible because all you need to know is what one thing should I be doing now? And according to my time block schedule, I'm working on X, and so that's what I'm doing. No more decision needs to be made.

When that block is over, what am I supposed to be doing now? Oh, 30 minutes checking email. Great. That's what I'm doing. No other decisions about action need to be made. So, do you know, that's my suggestion. No, you should not be looking at a to-do list. No, you should not just be running your day off the to-do list.

Have a time block plan. Have that visible. run your day off that plan. If you get knocked off the plan, fix it next time you get a chance. Remember, the goal is not perfection but intention. That's the key to time block planning. You're going to get two to three X more done

if you dispense with the list-based reactive method and use this much more intentional method as you approach to structuring your day. Latinda asks, what is the quickest way to get started with deep work? Well, it's a really good question because sometimes on this podcast I talk about relatively sophisticated setups that people have to both

prioritize and intensify deep work sessions. The whole thing can sometimes be overwhelming, especially if you were new to the concept of prioritizing undistracted application of cognitive effort. So what I'm going to suggest Latinda is a keystone habit approach, a small number of tractable habits that you get used to, that signal to yourself that you take deep work seriously and inject a steady dose of reasonable deep work into your schedule.

If you do this for a while, then you will integrate this idea that I'm someone who can and does do deep work into your sense of professional identity, from which you can then go on and do the more sophisticated hacks, more sophisticated rituals, more sophisticated strategies that we like to geek out on. in this podcast. So what are the keystone habits?

Well, I'm going to give you two broad categories in which I want you to have one keystone habit that you start today. So the one broad category is actually dealing specifically with deep work, a keystone habit that actually puts deep work regularly into your schedule. And I'll give you that habit in a second. But the other broad category is going to be about general cognitive fitness. A change you make in your life even outside of deep work sessions that signals to yourself that you take seriously your concentration and your ability.

to focus. So in each of those categories, let's have a keystone habit. So let's start in the category of specifically prioritizing deep work. The easiest thing you can do is open up your calendar right now, schedule some deep work sessions for the next three weeks. For the week coming up, you might have a hard time scheduling sessions because it might already be pretty busy, rich with meetings and calls. The next week won't be a schedule. The week after that will probably be even less schedule. So you can start with a few sessions this week and then maybe up your ambition for the two weeks that follow. Do about 90 minutes per session. If you're new to it, no more than one session a day, no more than two or three days a week with these sessions. Once they are on your

calendar, you need to treat them like a meeting or appointment. If someone else tries to schedule something during a time already set aside for deep work, you have to treat that as if you had already agreed to do a Zoom call during that time and someone else is trying to schedule you. I would say, well, no, I'm already busy from 9 to 1030, but I'm available after that. Don't seed the ground. Treat it as important as a doctor's office or meeting that's already on your calendar. All right, that's a simple thing. But now you are going to, at least on a regular basis, come across blocks of time where you

do nothing but focus on one thing. Now, again, it's going to be hard when you first do this. you're not practiced with deep work, you're going to find that it's a cognitive strain and not a lot gets done, but you have to just get in the habit of having time set aside and having time protected. There's a lot of advanced tips that can help you then get better at the actual act of concentrating, but the first step is to actually have that time put aside, doing it on your calendar, protecting it like a meeting or appointment. That's the way to do it. That's the keystone habit. Now let's go to this other category, the category of taking your cognitive fitness

seriously, creating a brain that's actually capable of doing sustained thought on complicated professional work. And here, my standard suggestion for the Keystone habit is to take your phone and remove from it any app or someone makes money from your time and attention. That's going to be all social media. That's going to be all online news. Now, what is this going to do? Well, this means outside of work, outside of work, just in your life in general. The notion that this device in your hand is a default source of distraction is going to diminish because there's really nothing that interesting on that phone anymore. Your phone is going to be like my phone.

There's nothing interesting on my phone. By far the most interesting thing on my phone is the MLB app. So if there's a Washington Nationals game going on, okay, that is kind of interesting. I want to see what's happening. I want to see what's happening with the score, but that's the only interesting thing on my phone. no social media, there's no games, there's no online news app. I use it that send text messages to my family. I use it when I get lost to look up directions.

If I'm on a business trip, I'll put the Gmail app on it. If I need to, let's say, load up an email that has the details about the venue I'm going to or something, that's about it. And now you find yourself on a regular basis, just forced to be alone with you and your own thoughts. And this is all fantastic from a cognitive fitness point of view because it breaks your mind from that notion that every time I'm bored, I get a shiny treat. Every time on board, I get a custom-built distraction.

As long as that's your reality and life outside of work, when it comes time to do deep work, your mind will rebel. It will say this is boring. Where's our shiny treat? So you've got to break that connection. That simple keystone habit will help you get there. So these two things, starting to schedule deep work on your calendar, taking off any app in which people make money from your time and attention from your phone.

these two things will not by themselves make you a master deep worker. But they set the foundation for that transformation. Now you find yourself on a regular basis in a deep work block. Regardless to what happens in there, you hit those blocks regularly. Now you find yourself on a regular basis, unplugging from a constant stream of low quality distraction and being alone with your own thoughts in the world around you and thinking and sustaining concentration.

and you start to think, huh, maybe I'm the type of person who actually is comfortable thinking. It's comfortable not being distracted. And from this foundation, you can build a strong metaphorical tower of concentration-produced quality output. And now you're off to the races. And now there's any number of things you can do. And look, I could talk endlessly about how you build on that foundation. I mean, if you go over to the world of cognitive fitness, you can start doing interval training

where you actually use a timer and try to concentrate as hard as you can for 20 minutes without distraction. And once you're comfortable with that, you make it 30. Once you're comfortable with that, you make it 40. I've talked about that before. You begin to do a lot more reading, especially long form or complicated material. That's like pushups for your brain. You start doing productive meditation. That's also like push pushups for your brain over on the scheduling front. You start to have rituals that surrounds your deep work blocks. You start to have very clear artifact production goals for your blocks. Okay, here is exactly what I'm trying to produce. Your mind knows what you're focusing on. You get better at project selection. You get aggressive about location. Maybe you start to set

aside separate locations that you only do deep work in. Now, you don't have to have a, you know, outbuilding on your ranch to be able to do this. Even if you're stuck at home working from home, it literally could be I go out to the yard to do this type of deep work under my gazebo or I go up to the attic to do this work in the basement, do that work, whatever, just to change. of scenery, there's all sorts of advanced tips to then build on this foundation. But you have to start with a foundation, something that signals to yourself that you do deep work and you take your cognitive fitness seriously. And those are the two things I've always recommended.

So whenever I'm asked about this in interviews, whenever people say, what's your one piece of advice that you will give to our listeners, I always say I'm going to give you two. And those are the two I give. Deep work on the calendar, distracting apps off your phone. So we'll tend to start there. Do that successfully. Do that consistently. And once that foundation is built, you know, come on back because we have any number of endlessly fiddly and geeky suggestions to offer for how to then become a master concentrator.

Ben asks, what advice would you give for someone starting a new job? Well, Ben, I think if you are new to an industry or new to the world of work, I'm a big advocate from making this transition from dependability to indispensability. Let me be a little bit more clear about it. You start with dependability. And to me that means two things. People know that if they give you something to do or mention something to you or drop something on your plate, they know that it will not get dropped.

They trust that you are not going to lose or forget about that. they can relieve themselves of the cognitive burden. Yeah, I mentioned this to Ben. He's on it. The second piece of dependability, you deliver when you say you're going to. So if you say, okay, I will do this. I will get you that report by Monday.

You deliver the report by Monday. You say, I'll take me two weeks. You do it in two weeks. If something comes up that makes that impossible or if the work is more involved than you expected, you clearly communicate and modify your delivery date. Never allow yourself to be in the situation of, yeah, I mean, I told them I would have it done Monday.

I just couldn't get it done and I'm just not going to talk about it. Maybe I'll have it done a few days later. Dependability means, nope, I deliver when I say I'm going to deliver. And you can trust once something's on my plate, I am not going to forget it. That is the foundation in almost any field. That is the foundation of career success. If you are dependable, people are going to like you, people are going to respect you, people are going to turn to you, people are going to give you opportunities,

you are in a stable situation. Once you have built that foundation, you have that reputation of dependability, now you can start moving towards indispensability. This is where you begin to actually introduce new ideas, new concepts, new products, what have you, that increases the value that your organization is able to produce. And it's here that you're going to see that your rise within your industry is going to accelerate. You'll get new opportunities. You'll get new responsibilities.

Career capital will begin to accrue at a very fast clip. Now, Ben, the word of warning here is that you have to go through the dependability phase before you can really be successful with the indispensability phase. You need to prove yourself. You need to pay your dues. You don't have to do this for 10 years. but you actually have to establish that you are a dependable employee. This is also where you learn your field.

It's where you learn your industry. It takes some time to figure out how things actually work. It takes some time to get the necessary skills that are specific to your job to be able to identify the opportunities that you can help your organization act on. So you coming out of the gate, you focus on dependability. Once you have that reputation, you cautiously at first, but relentlessly begin to become increasingly indispensable. A small thing, slightly larger thing, slightly larger thing.

I'm telling you, Ben, there's nothing more powerful than someone that people think is dependable and then see them just again and again trying to introduce more value, trying to improve things piece by piece, delivering what they say they're going to deliver. That is, in most jobs, going to be a great recipe for success. All right, how do you do that? Well, I was talking about this in the recent habit tune-up mini episode, where I said the one-two punch here is discipline and craft. So discipline means I got to get my arms around everything I have to do.

I can't be dependable if I'm not disciplined in my approach to work. I'm not just going to run a list-based reactive productivity philosophy. I'm not just going to be the person who responds first to emails as it maybe tries to get here earlier, just stay late, and hope it all alchemizes into value. No, I'm going to get my arms around what I have to do. I'm going to run an adult productivity philosophy. I'm going to use capture, configure, control style methods. Nothing's going to get dropped.

I'm going to move the pieces around of my schedule like chess pieces on a chessboard, and I'm going to time block plan my day so that I always have intention. I'm going to be ruthlessly doing post-mortemortem to try to understand where are the problems here to have too much of my plate, not enough of my plate, where am I slowing down, where can I improve things, are going to be constantly evolving and optimizing my systems. I'm going to treat the act

of how I actually organize and execute my work as an art form that I'm trying to master and not just an aside. Right? It's the discipline. Then to get towards

indispensability, you add this craft mindset. What are the skills that are important? How do I get better? How do I train? Deliberately. like a professional chess player, like a professional musician, like a professional athlete,

how do I deliberately train myself to systematically get better and better at the things that are valuable and then repeat. And then repeat. Discipline plus craft. That's what's going to get you to dependability. It's going to then let you build

on that dependability towards indispensability. Now, Ben, I don't know your age, but if you are young, for example, then you are in a particular good situation. If you actually deploy discipline and craft early in your career, you are going to have such a long-term advantage over your peers, who many of which, and I have to say, are probably a mired in passion thinking. Wait, is this my true passion? I don't know if I like my job today. That boss is kind of mean, I don't know. Maybe I should switch careers. Yeah, if I had a different

job, then I'd be really happy. Or just really self-focused. Like, why can't I be in charge? I had a great idea that we were going to start a Reels account for the company and we were going to engage young people with social media. Can't I just be on social media all day? You know, the boss is like, no, you don't know anything yet and I need you to do this type of work, which is more boring, right? Your peers are mired in that. Trying to get too much autonomy before they've earned it or focusing on passion. If you're coming in here with discipline, so people like, wow, that guy's dependable, then you're focusing on crafts so that pretty soon you also become indispensable. It's like accruing compound interest by the time you're 30, your career capital metaphorical wealth is going to be

significantly larger than those of your peers that are only then just starting trying to get their act together. So good question, Ben. That is my advice. High level dependability, indispensableity, tactical level. You do that with discipline plus craft. I want to take a quick break from the questions to tell you about our brand new sponsor, grammarly. Now I'm excited about this one. So here's the thing most people don't know about the

publishing world is that to get our writing to that level of real professionalness that makes it really persuasive and really crisp, we work with multiple editors. We go through many, many drafts with our main editors and then a copy editor comes in and really pours over word choice, sentence structure, clarity, tone. We really run our writing through the ringer to try to get it to that professional style feel. Now, it used to be that if you wanted to have that feel in your own writing, if you wanted to write like a pro, you also had to have access to a team of editors. That is no longer true.

Grammarly can give anyone this superpower. So I've been working with Grammarly Premium recently, and I got to I have been quite amazed with what they're able to do now. I mean, this tool goes well beyond the grammar checkers of days past. This will actually, the tool will actually tell you things like word choice. This might be a better word. Sentence structure, just like my copy editors do. Your sentence will be clearer if you move it around this way. It'll even give you suggestions on your style. It's like having a team of editors looking over your shoulder every time you're writing something on your phone or your tablet or your computer, but with a lot less guilt when you use

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That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. So I think we have time for one more work question, and we'll take one from Lisa, who asks, how do I get inspired to restart my research practice? As an academic and an administrative role for the past two years, I have let the research and publishing side of my work slip in favor of the uninded administrative tasks of senior leadership in an academic institution.

How do I get inspired to restart my research practice? Well, Lisa, this question hits very close to home. I am in basically that exact same circumstance. As I've mentioned on several occasions on this podcast, I have spent the last year in an administrative role within my department, the director of graduate studies. And look, I had a whole plan for how I was going to execute this role and still keep my research at the level I wanted it to be at,

but then the pandemic happened. And the pandemic created two problems that I would say supercharged the administrative load of this position. The first problem is it just created a lot of problems involving our graduate program, a lot of logistical problems that put a lot more work on the plate of me and the department as a whole. There was all sorts of issues with students, students who were stuck overseas, students trying to get visas, where students going to be required to be in person to maintain their F1 visa. All sorts of trouble was going on that was causing requiring a lot of.

of work was very ambiguous, a lot of administrative complications. At the exact same time that this all happened, the graduate program manager, which is the kind of the more permanent position that helps run the graduate program, the institutional knowledge who knows how everything works, he left. So I had to figure out a lot of things. I didn't know how to do. I had to do the work of two different people while having an unusual amount of work on my plate. As a result, this is not a great year for me in terms of research. I mean, it's probably one of my worst years I've ever had in terms of research output. I wrote a few papers, but I did not really have time to write really good papers.

And I haven't yet found a home for the small number of papers that I wrote. So, Lisa, I am in a very similar situation as you. So my position, this position that I have ends in about two weeks, October 1st. So I have the wheels in motion trying to figure out what's my solution to this exact issue of how am I going to restart my research productivity? Look, I am not happy when I'm not solving proofs, when I'm not writing theoretical computer science papers.

It's the most intellectually stimulating thing I do. I've been doing it since I was 22, and it's been weird not to be doing it at a high level for the last year. So I'm with you. I want to get back to this. So here's a couple of things I'm doing. I don't know how many of these will apply. apply to your particular type of research, but maybe this will be useful.

So one, I am trying to create a new space to do this work, and this is entirely a psychological hack. I just want there to be a new place that I associate only with doing research, because I want to be able to jumpstart my mind into research mode. I think it's just going to be hard if I'm at my same desk where I've been answering emails about student visas for the past six months. This is going to be hard to have that psychological switch. So I have a dedicated space, not like a super nice space,

but a dedicated space. This is where I'm going to be doing research. No email allowed. Now, I don't know your situation, what your house looks like, if you have access to offices at your university. For me, as my listeners know, I have this Deep Work HQ near my house and it has a few different offices. and I'm turning one of the big spaces into my area for deep work.

And I'm going to talk more about this in the backstage past segment. It's coming up a little bit later in the show. But I'm putting a no email rule around it. I can do email right next to it, in the office right next to it, or in the studio where I record this podcast. But I just want there to be a space that is just for research. I'm putting a giant whiteboard on the wall. And it's going to be a place I go and I sit.

And just psychologically, I don't know if this is going to work, but I think that might help. Two, when I was doing my quarterly plan, I have a new metric, the three-hour rule. I want to try to hit three hours of deep work most days. I'm going to track it very clearly. I'm going to track it every day. I don't even care what it is. I just want to get back into that habit.

I want to be fighting for that time. Maybe I'm going to have to wake up early. Maybe I'm going to have to move some things around in the morning. I don't know how it's going to work. I'm going to count, I mean, just as a bit of a concession, I'm going to count my time in the classroom as deep work because that does take up a lot of time and it is really demanding. But basically I have this three hour rule. That's where I want to get to starting October 1st when I lose the administrative load from

my current administrative position. It just have this background, background beat. Work, work, work, work, work. I mean, at first, who knows? I might not have great things to work on, but I don't care. I just want that background beat. Deep work, deep work, deep work, deep work. And I want to fight for it.

Three, I've been engaging as the summer ends and we enter back into, the fall. My role as an administrator is coming to an end. I've been reengaging with a lot of my long time incredibly talented collaborators. And I'm letting the intellectual energy of these very smart collaborators, fellow professors I've worked with for a long time, help infuse me with a similar energy. I spent a lot of this last year because I did not really have time to collaborate with people. The small amount of research I did, I sort of did just on my own or maybe just me and my student. and I want to get that energy back of working with the same smart people I've been working with for years, trying to write ambitious, really good papers, really core technical topics.

So Lisa, that's my approach. I have a psychological hack, a brand new space just for doing deep work. I have a metric shift three hours a day. Let's make it happen, whatever it requires. And I have a strategic transformation of, let me start talking with my really good collaborators on a regular basis to feed off of some of that intellectual energy. To be honest, I'm kind of embarrassed by this year. I just think from a research production level, I mean, I get it. There was a pandemic and there was an emergency, but I do not like having a

bad year. I feel like I've been knocked down to the mat. And now I'm trying to get myself back off the mat and start doing deep swings once again. And so that's my plan. And I hopefully, Lisa, you find a few useful ideas in that. All right, speaking of transformations, I think that's enough work questions for today. Let's move on now to questions about technology. Andy asks, what do you think about speed reading? Well, Andy, I'm not a big believer in speed reading. I don't think it actually works.

I'm aware of the techniques. I've seen some of the techniques. I just don't think the comprehension is very high. Look, when you're reading something complicated, It is cognitively demanding. I don't think there is a shortcut to actually doing the cognitive strain required to actually build new networks, amplify the right connections, inhibit the wrong connections to actually cement that concept in your brain. It has to require work.

Just like there's no speed weightlifting that allows you to build muscles without actually feeling the strain of lifting something heavy, I think complex thought requires the cognitive strain of actually struggling with a muscle. the information coming to you either audially or visually. That being said, I am a big believer in strategic skimming. So in strategic skimming, you can actually get through, especially a nonfiction book, quite fast. And what you do is you skim very fast, like just hitting kind of key sentences, until you get to a paragraph or section that seems very relevant to what you're interested in.

And then you slow down and you do the cognitive struggle and you really try to understand, you build a new connections, and then you start skimming again. Now you're not taking a shortcut here, right? What you're doing with strategic skimming is just not wasting effort trying to understand the information that's not that relevant and preserving those cognitive efforts for the information that is relevant. So if you're a big nonfiction reader, especially if you know what type of information you're trying to get out of a nonfiction book.

So if you're doing research for an article or something like this, strategic skimming can really speed you up. But again, it's not about consuming information fast. about quickly getting to the information that you want to carefully consume. Ethan asks, can you be hyper distracted on social media, etc., on some days, and deeply focused on other ones? Or do you need to be consistent to build up decent cognitive fitness? Ethan, let's use physical health as a useful analogy here.

if you told me you're someone who takes your physical health very seriously, but you know, you just have some days each week where you just go on a bender. You just drink all day and eat terribly. And you're like, yeah, you know, some days that's what I do. But other days I'm really after it, I eat really healthy and exercise. I would say, look, you're not someone who takes your physical health that seriously. Like, what is it, what does it say about how you're prioritizing physical health

if you brutalize your body on a regular basis. I feel the same way about cognitive fitness. If you have the cognitive equivalent of Bender Days, let me just open up social media and let this algorithmically optimized content just play with my emotions, play it like a fiddle, get me just slavishly or addictively,

just scrolling, scrolling, now I'm outraged, now I'm laughing, now I'm distracted, now I'm whatever. now I'm jealous, now I'm aspirational, just Netflix, Netflix, but not even anything challenging on Netflix. Let me just watch a show. I've already watched it a hundred times.

Just let that wash over me. It's a cognitive bender. And it tells yourself, signals to yourself, you're someone who does not take your cognitive fitness very seriously. So I think if you're going to build a deep life that actually respects the bucket of contemplation, you've got to take your mind seriously.

and you've got to treat it with respect all the time. It doesn't mean that you're not going to occasionally spend an hour going down a rabbit hole on something dumb or watching YouTube videos or watching a dumb series on Netflix because you're just exhausted and why not.

It's fine, right? That's just like if you occasionally have a drink or eat a hamburger, it doesn't mean that you're not serious about health. But what you want to avoid is a much more dichotomous approach where some days are just off derails and other days you try to rein it back in. And so I would be very minimalist with my technology habits, by which I mean.

And I'm using the phrase here as introduced in my book, digital minimalism, not to minimize, but to be very intentional. Key distinction. Digital minimalism. And when I say to be minimalist is not the same as saying minimize, saying be very intentional. So you know what technology you use, why you're using it. and you have rules around it to optimize that value. So you have this nice, intentional relationship with your technology.

The tools you use, you use for particular reasons in particular ways, and it gives you real value without blowing up into a source of distraction, without blowing up into an obstacle that gets into the way of you doing things that you care about more. You've got a lot of high-quality leisure. You're reading hard books. You're talking to friends. You're hanging out with people in person. You're doing things outside.

You're honing craft. you want to just be doing that. That's what you do. You're someone who takes your mind and your attention seriously. You want to feed it quality food. You want to keep it in shape by doing the right exercises. And so, no, you shouldn't have those hyper-distraction days. Now, there's also a functional argument for this.

I mean, I talk about this in my book Deep Work. If on some days you just feed every whim, every time I'm the least bit bored, here's a distraction. Every time I'm a least bit bored, here's a distraction. If you do that on some days, on the other days, you're going to have a hard time focusing. Just like if we go back to our fitness analogy, if you have bender days on a regular basis, you're going to have a hard time getting through your workouts on the non-bender days, right? It's going to come back to haunt you. So if your brain gets trained at like, yeah, I get distraction every time I'm bored,

then when you're on a concentration day and say, I really want a lockdown to get after it here, your brain's going to say, nah. Now, when we're bored, we get treats. Remember, where's our treat? Where's our treat? Where's our treat? And nothing's going to get done. See, there's a functional reason here, too.

There's a consequence to pay for hyper distraction. But I like the philosophical reason more. If you want to be someone deep, if you want to take your concentration seriously, take your concentration seriously. Vivian asks, what is your opinion on forum sites like Reddit or Quora? Well, Vivian, I don't know a lot about those particular. forum sites. I don't happen to use them, but that doesn't tell you much because I basically use very little of the internet for entertainment or distraction, so I'm not a great source on that.

My big recommendation would be regardless of what we're talking about here. When we're talking about an internet tool that's meant for entertainment or distraction, you just have to have some guard rails up. You have to approach it with some care. And for me, that typically means two things. one, it doesn't happen on your phone. Once any of these sites gets on your phone, it is going to try to become a default activity. It is there as a beacon to pull your attention at the slightest hint of boredom,

and even if you can resist that, you are now burning cognitive energy in that resistance. Take it off your phone. It's no longer a default activity. It's now something you have to go to your laptop or your desktop and actually go see, out. There is friction and there is effort. I think that's important. Two, this is a pillar of my digital minimalism philosophy. If you think these services support

something you truly care about, identify what that is. It's a community that you like to connect with. It's a subject matter that you find interesting or is important and you learn a lot about the subject matter in a Reddit thread or whatever it is, right? Identify what is the real value I get out of this. Then once you've identified, that value, you can optimize your usage around that value. The main thing I get out of this is X, then let me put some rules around how I use it so I can get a lot of that value and then avoid a lot of the other cost. So for a lot of people, for tools like Reddit or tools like Core, when they go through this exercise, they end up treating these services more like a television show.

a really entertaining, intellectually stimulating, interactive television show, but something that happens for set durations at set times. So let's say, for example, there's some community on Reddit that you find really important. Maybe it's a discussion, you know, a group of people you share some characteristic with and they discuss this characteristic or their life or whatever it is, and you find some connection since a belonging and comfort, in this community interaction. All right, a great reason to use a tool.

This is something you really care about. This tool is helping you. It's doing what tech should do, amplifying values. In this example, though, if you know that's why I like Reddit, you can say, well, then how should I optimize how I use this tool

to get that value and avoid other cost? Then you say, okay, well, I only really want to use it to follow this community, so I'm going to bookmark just that page. And, of course, I follow Cal's rule of don't put anything like this on your phone because that's just a trap.

Get rid of that. So I'm only going to access it on my desktop. And, well, let's see. How often really is there new stuff on here? It's not a super fast rate. So why don't I check in twice a week? Maybe this is something I do Friday night. Maybe this is something I do Tuesday night.

I do it after dinner. I spend an hour. And I just go really deep for that hour, giving my full attention to the most recent discussion, talking to people, sharing things I've found, being involved in that, and then I'm done. And then the TV show ends, and it's not on again until that next session. Now, that's just an example, but it gives you a sense of how you can really contrive your

relationships with these services once you know why you're using them. And so, yes, something like Reddit and Quora, if you have a good reason to use, it could have a very important footprint in your life. But it should not just be this thing that's on your phone and it's one more source of distraction versus there with a long list of others. It's instead something you're using with intention to amplify something you really care about. And outside of that behavior, it has very little impact in your life. So Vivian, I like that question, not because I could give you specifics about those two particular sites,

but because I could talk more generally about the digital minimalist approach to this type of technological interaction more generally. All right. I think that's a good group of technology questions. let's go on and do a backstage pass. The goal of this segment, of course, is to give you a look inside my own struggles to live a deep life. So one of the big things going on in my life right now is what I talked about in my answer to Lisa's question

earlier in this podcast, which is my get-off the mat initiative to get my academic research program back and running. after this last year of pandemic amplified administrative overload. And so that's pretty important. The DeepWork HQ is going to play a big role in this. So last week in Backstage Pass, I mentioned that we had movers come and I moved all my books from my home office

here to the Deep Work HQ. I also had some furniture moved here. And so that's good progress towards getting my, my common space that I'm going to try to turn into my my deep work location. I now have a lot of stuff here to help with that effort. But as I, I don't know if I mentioned this on the podcast before or not,

but I've really now solidified my plan for exactly how I'm going to do that. So I got a lot of good suggestions from, from my listeners and readers about how to actually transform this deep work cave into a place really conducive for focus, including I may have mentioned an actual suggestion to turn that room into an actual cave, like with fake stalagmites and stalactites. I love the ingenuity there, but I did not go with that idea. But the idea that I have gone with, and I think I may mention this before,

is that I'm going to make the Deep Work Cave into a Deep Work library. I put down a very large rug that I brought for my study at home. A very nice sort of mid-century Afghan rug, which is, I don't know, it just seems conducive to thinking for me. It's a possession I really enjoy. That's covering the whole floor. And then I'm going to buy from a library supply, a warehouse, I don't know, company, an actual library table. It's like a table that you would actually put in a library with wooden library chairs.

I'm going to put on that desk, those type of library lights that shine down on the wood and light it up. I can put that right in the middle of the room. And then against the long wall that's facing, I'm going to have my bookcases, which are going to fill up with all of my books. And on the catacorn or that, there's a whole big open wall. where I am going to put some massive whiteboards for working on my proofs. There's a little window over there, the only window in that room.

I'm going to put an armchair underneath it. Tragically, for very long time study hacks readers know about my big leather chair as one of my prized possessions. That chair does not fit through the door in the HQ, so it's actually a different, smaller leather arm chair that's going to play that role. Then I have a mini-fridge.

I have this old bar cart that I'm going to bring over. I'm not a big hard alcohol drinker. It just seems aesthetically appropriate. They have like a mid-century glass barcar. It just seems like something you would see in, I don't know, the office of an Oxford Don in the 1940s. And so I'm going to bring that all in there. My idea is no email, as I mentioned, in that room.

I go in there and I sit down on a library desk, big open table with bright light shining straight down on it. I can sit there with my laptop and write, or I can walk up to the white, board right next to it and work on proofs and stare at that whiteboard while I then try to work in my notebooks on the table. If I really need to read something, I can then just relocate to that armchair, grab a book from my library's shelf, and when it all gets too much, I go to that bar cart and go to town, right? That's my plan. You know, it's maybe a little bit over the top. I just felt like,

as I told Lisa, that I needed an injection of something novel and innervating to try to get my research program back up and running again. Also, I have a lot of writing to do. And so I want a really good space to do that writing. And I think a library, I just look, I've been an academic my entire life, my entire adult life. And so a library pushes those buttons. It pushes those buttons for me. Meanwhile, in the studio, more superfluous equipment begins to arrive. I've been working with an audio consultant and now have a stack of stuff I don't know how to use. but he is going to help me. He's literally going to show me where to put stickers on the dial

so I can just turn it and have steps on an index card I press. But, you know, hey, you may in the weeks ahead here an upgrade in my audio quality. I'm also redoing from scratch, the sound dampening in my room. I basically, look, I mentioned I have camera equipment now, so now I have to actually care what you can see behind me in the room and so I'm removing sound tiles and relocating things. And when I say I'm doing these things,

what I mean is I'm thinking about doing these things, we don't actually have any time to do it. So it's just sort of like an aspiration, an aspiration of my head and a card on my Trello board that never gets moved. But I have goals for it. So I'm slowly but surely getting all the pieces together for A, better sound and B, video.

So you can actually see me answering some of these questions and see me doing some videos. The main thing I'm missing right now was a powerful enough computer to actually process that video concurrently with the audio, especially if I want to live stream it. So I had to buy a new computer, but that's not going to get here for a few weeks. So anyways, all these pieces are coming together. The video will probably debut with my planner release in November.

So there's going to be, well, I'm not really supposed to talk much about this yet, but we're going to have some sort of pre-order thing in which I'm going to do like a live session for people who pre-ordered the books, the planner where we're going to get deep in the time-blocking. And there's a short video I'm going to record that as soon as you pre-order the planner, you're going to get this video that shows you some insider looks at how to use it. But anyways, all that's going to be filmed with the new video setup. So that'll probably be the earliest. I really do want as much as possible you to be able to see me as well as hear me.

I also want to be able to do videos on topics just that I'm interested in, maybe not a podcast episode, but like here's a six-part thing on how to overhaul this part of your life. And so that's all very exciting. It's just moving all very slow because I have no time. So that's moving very slow. But that's what's going to happen. And I think it's exciting. I do like this sort of media piece of the sort of deep, deep life plan, this sort of media empire, slowly growing piece.

I think it's important. I think, you know, this message is important, especially now. and I can't necessarily just produce a book every two years and think that's going to be enough to actually make some impact on the conversation. So this is coming along. I'm excited about it. The final update is the Maker Lab.

I haven't done anything. I had to take apart some desks to fit them through the door. And so I reassembled those and have a good number of desks in the Maker Lab. And we are just starting this week, me and my older boys, the bit of our homeschooling curriculum that takes place in our Maker Lab, beginning this week.

We're starting slow with small projects and learning small skills, but I'm impatient. I'm excited for us to get to the point where I can buy 3D printers and laser cutters and stuff we don't really need, but it's going to be so much fun to play around with. All right. So that is the update about my quest to lead a deep life. That's what's been happening in the Deep Work HQ, where, of course, everyone concentrates better than average. And with that in mind, let's move on to our final category, which is questions, as always

about the deep life. Karen asks, how do you practice or how can you practice digital minimalism in the COVID-19 season where physical interactions are limited.

Well, Karen, I want to point you back towards an interview I did for GQ magazine at the end of March. So right at the very beginning of the pandemic, I did an interview with GQ about digital minimalism

and the pandemic. And one of the big points I made in that piece is that digital minimalism is not about minimizing. It's not about how much technology can you minimize out of your life and the more you minimize, the better. That type of philosophy would be a weird philosophy for a computer scientist to have. A weird philosophy for someone who makes their living on technology to have. What digital minimalism is really about is intention. deploying technology to amplify things you care about and avoiding uses of technology that don't.

And the argument I made in that GQ interview is that this pandemic is absolutely making clear the importance of digital minimalism. It is absolutely making clear the underlying dynamics that gave rise to that philosophy by actually just exaggerating them to such extremes that it's impossible to avoid. So what do I mean by that?

Well, most people have had a dichotomous relationship with technology throughout this pandemic. On the one hand, they have experienced deployments of technology that have greatly amplified things they really care about, to the point that if that technology did not exist, it would have really hurt the quality of their life. So during that initial few months, for example, where things were really uncertain, and we were in shelter-in-place, orders throughout most of this country. The ability to do Zoom with family members, to do Zoom with friends, to keep up with people you know over ongoing text threads where you could tell jokes or release your anxieties. Incredibly important.

It was technology taking things that are important to us in this case, connection with people we care about during tough times, and it was amplifying that value. If this pandemic had happened 15 years ago, that would have been much rougher. at the same time. And here's the other side of this dichotomy. A lot of people experienced unintentional technology used during this period, making their life much worse. And in particular, I'm thinking about people who became fixated on social media

with a steady drip of negative news that quickly shifted to, okay, let's blame people. Let's scold and blame people. Maybe it's these people's fault. This is why all this bad stuff is happening. And then they're angry and they're scared and they're outraged. And then they're following Twitter feeds of like very alarmist people or maybe like on the other into the spectrum conspiratorial people who are trying to deny that there's any problem going on at all. And it just brought people to a dark place.

I think cable news did the same for a lot of people. You were just plugged into CNN for the last six months. My God, I hope you probably have finished digging out your bunker by now. And in your mind, it's like the opening scene of 20 days later out there, 28 days out there. Is that the right title? I'm thinking of that zombie movie where the guy wakes up in the hospital and everyone's been turned to a zombie from virus. And they're running around real fast and eating human flesh. Yeah, that basically is in coverage of the current moment.

So my point being is some technologies, especially those that were used more casually without real intention just as a source of distraction or default, made people miserable. That's the dichotomy that digital minimalism plays with. Tech can go both ways. So you've got to be on top of it. What do I care about? What do I value? How can I deploy tech strategically to amplify those things? Great.

I'm going to do that and everything else. Forget about it. I'm not interested. That's digital minimalism. I can't think of another time in our history in which those dynamics have been made more clear. So, Karen, this is a period where the dynamics of digital minimalism are really playing out. You've got to be really careful about how you deploy technology right now because it is going to either make your life much better

or it's going to make your life miserable, and you have a choice to amplify the former and avoid the latter. Now let's get back to, I think, what your actual question was. So that was an excuse for me to talk about digital minimalism and the pandemic. But your actual question asked about physical interaction. So I think when you said digital minimalism in your question, what you really meant was, hey, if we don't spend as much time on connection related technologies, aren't we going to become

lonely because we also do not have as many opportunities to do physical interaction? And yeah, that's true. So if you're going through the digital minimalism philosophy during the pandemic, it would probably have you spend more time on some of these digital connection technologies during the periods where you have less options to do physical interaction, because it's constantly doing this calculus. What matters to me? what's the best way to get it?

So in a normal time where you can see people and go to events and be at people's houses, you might say that's really the way that I get the most value. So I'm going to spend very little time on SMS or Zoom. It would be weird in a normal time if you were doing a lot of Zoom happy hours when you could be doing real happy hours with those people. So if you're doing the digital minimalism calculus,

you should have very naturally have shifted some of that attention to high quality digital interaction alternatives. And as you continue to this calculus, this calculus as things get safer, you will probably shift that energy back towards more physical interactions. Well, let me say more generally, also just about right now, do more physical interactions. Right now.

Do them outside. There's, look, there's plenty of ways to do this that is essentially zero risk. It takes more effort than it might have taken before, but spin the effort. Go out of your way. How can I maximize the amount. amount of people, I'm able to actually see and interact with analogly in the real world while keeping a baseline of essentially zero viral transmission risk. And once you're at a reasonable distance in a well-ventilated outside area, you are probably

there at the zero-vival risk. So great, how much interaction can I do in that context? I don't think we're spending enough energy on this. I mean, some people are. Some people are, but I think some people are stuck in a lockdown mentality. The lockdowns are over, the shelter and places are over, but they're still living because of the scolding on social media and this environment of like, look, if you're doing anything,

anything that might be positive for you or for your mental health, that's not just like being home and being on Zoom, then like somehow you were doing something morally questionable. You're doing something morally bad. Someone's going to see you, post about you on social media. I say you have to ignore that. You're not in a lockdown unless you, I don't think there's any, maybe some parts of California.

I don't know what's going on over there, but you're not in, almost certainly you're not in the lockdown. You need to see people and do it outside and do in a way that's safe. And don't, you know, as I always say, don't go down to the underground rave being held at the abandoned warehouse down by the docks.

But we crave physical interaction. By physical interaction, I mean the ability to actually see facial expressions, see body language, to hear tone and voice, to actually have mimesis in your body language and tonalities. All of this stuff really matters. All this stuff is an important part of human.

interaction. You can get a lot of it through digital tools. You can't get all of it. So to the degree you're able to do this safely, which I think is a very large degree for most people. You got to start injecting that into your life, just like you should be injecting vitamin you know, D into your life by getting some sunlight, just like you should be getting sleep, just like you should be staying hydrated, like all the other things you do to try to stay healthy. This should be a big part of it. This should be a big part of it. And so that's what I would say, Karen, is inject yourself with vitamin interaction.

Unless that's maybe not kind of a failed that might be a little bit of a failed metaphor there, but you know what I'm saying. Go see some people's faces, do it outside, but put in the effort. I think you're going to find that it makes a big difference.

Okay. DB asks, I am the sandwich generation, taking care of kids and parents. This takes a lot of time, mental, physical, and emotional energy. I want to engage in deep work as I have money-making projects to work on,

but it seems I never have the time for it. How can I get that time? Well, Deep, the first thing I would say, we need to broaden our definition of deep. What you are doing in terms of caring for your children and caring for your parents, that is deep effort. It is something that is.

important that produces value in your life and the life of your family. And it's something that is serviced by the application of skill and unbroken concentration slash presence. So I would change my mindset. That's the first thing I do. I changed my mindset to say, my God, I'm doing a ton of deep work. I'm taking care of all these people and still have these other professional money making projects and all these things. I'm somehow able to give attention to all of them. I am doing a lot more deep work than most. people. And for that, you should applaud yourself. Now the question is, okay, there's some ratios here that you might want to tweak that the money making projects, you might want to give more time to

those if possible just because maybe the money is important. The financial stability is important. All right. So how do we do that? Well, you know, you're in a classic situation here of having a constrained schedule for very different reasons. I have a sort of similar situation, you know, because I work 17 jobs. So I don't have an abundance of flexible time. I have to be very careful about my time. But when I'm careful about it, I am able to eke out more deep work on the things that matter.

And so what I'm just going to suggest your DB is after you've made that mindset shift and after you've acknowledged it, man, you're really doing a lot of deep work and you should be proud, is that you go to at least a weekly daily planning discipline. So you look at your week and you have to move the blocks around on your week, you know, hey, you know, Tuesday morning. the kids are here, and I'm not with my parents, and this is a downtime, and that's a good time

to make some progress, and then Wednesday afternoon is really busy, so don't try to do anything there. You move the chess pieces of your time around on the board that contains all of your weekly obligations, to get a sense of what's the best way to spread things out, and then when you get to a particular day, you do time block planning. And really, that's where you get the big advantage. Time block planning is what allows people to get 2x more done than their peers. When you give every minute of your day a job, those minutes are able to produce much more work for you. So you do weekly planning, you do time block planning. You're going to be able to squeeze out some more time blocks for the money-making professional endeavors that you want to give a little

bit more attention. The other thing I'm going to recommend, though, the other thing I'm going to recommend is that you get very careful about your shutdown routine as well, because what you're doing is not just intellectually draining, but the type of caretaking depth that you're involved with is, as you mentioned, emotionally and physically draining as well. And so for someone in that situation, having a very clear shutdown routine is going to be crucial from just a recouping cognitive energy perspective. So to really have a clear, my time block ends here for my professional efforts. And I check all my inboxes and I look at my weekly plan and I look at my calendar and I have a

sketch of what I'm doing the next day. I record any of the metrics that are relevant, the metrics I check about my day, my Keystone habits for both work and life. And then I say, embarrassingly, but with pride, schedule shutdown complete. I can let that go and then be fully present

in the activities that remained that night, any caretaking you still have to do. And importantly, in any rejuvenation, relaxation time you have for that night for high quality leisure activities. In all of that, you can be completely present and minimize cognitive drag. So for someone in your situation, which is difficult, clear shutdowns on the stuff

you can shut down, this is just like taking care of your sleep. It's just like taking care of your diet. This is cognitive health. And that's going to play a big role. The only other thing I would recommend here, and I'm going well beyond your original question just to give you some advice more generally that I think might be useful in your situation, is you need to be very disciplined about the task element of your productivity system, of the care.

capture of the configuring, not just the controlling. Because again, this is all about cognitive health, cognitive fitness. You do not want to waste any cycles. You do not want to give yourselves any extra quanta of stress, keeping track of the fact just in your head that you need to call the plumber or that there's a form that your kids need for school or that you need to upgrade, you know, some piece of equipment that broke in your house. You want to be completely disciplined that on top of that stuff. It's not fair that you have to be more disciplined than other people, but you do because

you're trying to reduce the strain on your brain. You're trying to increase your cognitive health. That will do it. So you want to be very disciplined about your task. You want to be very disciplined about your time. It will be very disciplined about shutdowns. This will help you get more time on your money-making ventures.

It will greatly reduce the stress and mental strain of what you have to do. And that's basically the best I can offer. But let's go back to the very beginning. you are doing a ton of deep work. So basically the way I see this is like you are one of these deep work superstars that's trying to just optimize around the margins. That's the way I think you should think about what you're doing.

So thanks for that question, DB. All right. I think we have time for one more question. One more chance to forget my use of the phrase injecting vitamin interaction. Which I'm still ashamed about. And so to cleanse that from our brain, let's turn our attention to Raphael, who asks the following. I rationally agree with arguments for depth. However, when it comes to implement, when it comes time to implement deep habits, sometimes I lack motivation to do so.

It seems that my previous habits are too strong. How do I overcome this? Well, Rafael, we often underestimate the difficulties of lifestyle transformation. Especially if we're young and we haven't tried a bunch of them yet. What happens is we get fired up moderately about some sort of new lifestyle we see. We come up with some assorted tips that seem tractable but kind of fun. We try them. We lose interest.

We go back to the way things were. If you really want to do lasting lifestyle change, it's actually non-trivial. And you actually have to think through best practice. What's the way that people have actually successfully made this transformation before? That's the advice I'll give you now about what I've observed, about what really works if you want to switch over to a deeper lifestyle. Now, this will overlap some stuff I've talked about on this podcast before, but I think it's very important and I think it's worth coming back to again and again. So first, let's start with the psychological before we get to the strategic. From a psychological perspective, you've got to get actually committed and fired up about the deep life.

You have to feel it in your bones. This is the type of way I want to live. I am tired of this just constantly looking at screens, distracted, emotionally and cognitively manipulated by these statistical algorithms running these giant social media platforms, on here late at night doing emojis, not feeling healthy, feeling run down, feeling like I have no resilience. Like if something goes wrong, I don't even know how to deal with it. So maybe I drink too much or I'm eating really unhealthfully to try to find some sort of chemical relief, feeling adrift in work, feeling vulnerable, feeling angry, always looking

for people to get mad at, always feeling terrified, all these type of things that can afflict a shallow life, especially in periods of difficulty like we're in right now. You have to really feel I'm done with that. There's nothing I feel more sure about than I want a life where I am in charge of my time and attention and I am aiming it towards things that are worthwhile. Then I am building a resilient life of meaning and satisfaction by doing work that matters in a way I'm proud of being invaluable to my community, friends, family, people who live around me, serving them, being a leader, someone they look up to, someone who is pushing my intellectual,

intellectual capacities, exposing myself to interesting ideas, challenging my assumptions, grasping for Emerson's intellectual self-reliance that he really said was at the core of the American character. From a contemplative standpoint, that I'm connected to ancient wisdom, I'm connected to the mystery of the universe, I'm connected to awe. All of these elements add up to making a life of meaning of satisfaction. I want you to feel that deeply. then yes enough is enough that's what I want that is more important to me than my follower account

on Twitter getting a bunch of likes or hearts for an Instagram post it's more important to me how do you get fired up about that follow people who live a deep life listen to their podcast listen to podcasts listen to podcasts like this read biographies read books by people who live deeply watch documentaries that expose you to the deep life just awash yourself in this until you you build up a psychological confidence that this is what I want. It's a psychological foundation there. Next comes to strategy. This is the bit I've talked about before, so I'll do it quickly, but I think it's important.

This is what I tell people who are starting from scratch to leave the shallows and get somewhere deep. A, you identify the buckets in your life that are important to you, the buckets that you want to be deeper in. This can differ from person to person, but I've often used buckets like, craft under which I capture professional endeavors, constitution, under which I capture sort of physical fitness and health, community, under which I capture connection and sacrifice and leadership among the people in your life. I put contemplation under here, your philosophical, political, ethical beliefs. Where do they come from?

Why do you believe in them? how do you integrate them into your life? If there's spiritual beliefs in there as well, those are all connected. All of this is important. So you find the buckets that are important to you. And then for each of these buckets, what I suggest is that you begin, the very first thing you try to do, your initiation to the deep life, is to identify a keystone habit for each of these buckets. Something that you do every day that's not trivial, but is tractable enough. that you can actually get it done.

So it's not look at a book on my shelf every day. That's trivial. But it's not read a whole book every day because that's not tractable most days. But it's something in between, like read one chapter a day. It's hard. You might have to make some sacrifices.

You might have to move things around. You might have to stay up late some days to hit it, but it's tractable. Figure out a keystone habit for each of these buckets that you identified. Track every day in a notebook. Did you do it or not? you know you're going to be tracking this, so you're going to feel motivated to get it done.

You also have a record of how well it's going. It may take you a couple months to get these right. Some habits might be too trivial. More likely, you have a couple habits that aren't quite tractable, so you want to shift and transform until you have a good set of habits that you consistently do. It's a foundational rhythm in your life. And you signal to yourself because of these habits

that in each of these buckets that are important, I am willing to do non-necessary intentional activity to support those buckets. Once you have this foundation of Keystone Habits, rock and rolling, you trust it.

It's key to your daily routine. Then you rotate through those buckets one by one, spend one to two months with each bucket, and go through a transformation of that aspect of your life during that dedicated time where you say now it's time to make some big changes

to engage with this more deeply. you know, during the craft bucket weeks, for example, you get your capture control configure productivity system up and running. You begin to train your mind for depth. You're doing productive meditation. You're doing interval training. You get a scheduling philosophy for deep work. You apply some essentialism and take a lot of things off your plate.

Whatever you need to do, right? And then when you're done spending a couple months, maybe one month, maybe six weeks, maybe two months on craft, you move to the next bucket. You do that until they've gone through all buckets. all the while you keep your background beat of the Keystone Habits in each bucket. You're done with that. Your life's going to be a lot deeper. Take a breather.

Then you rotate through again. Take a breather. You rotate through again. I'm telling you, Raphael, you do this. You're going to begin honing in on a life that is significantly deeper and therefore significantly more meaningful and significantly more satisfying than probably what's going on now. So that's my game plan.

Get your psychology in order. You've got to live and breathe examples of depth until you are convinced there is nothing else you are going to tolerate. then deploy my strategy of the Keystone Foundation followed by bucket rotations. It has worked for a lot of people. I think it's a great way to reliably and successfully increase the amount of depth that you experience in your life. All right. That's a good question.

Rafael, go for it. The deep life I really do believe is the best type of life there is. And the sooner you get started, the sooner you can reap those rewards. All right. So that is all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to submit your own questions for the podcast, sign up for my email list at caluport.com.

If you want to support the podcast, a rating or review goes a long way. Thank you also to our sponsor Grammarly. I will be back later this week with the Habit Tuned Up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.