Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 294: A Tactical Assault on Busyness

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

One of the biggest problems afflicting knowledge workers in the digital age is frantic busyness; days filled with emails, chats, and meetings, without much to show for all the effort. In today’s episode, Cal dives into one of the most-discussed ideas from his new book, Slow Productivity, which offers a simple, tactical assault on this state of persistent busyness. He then answers listener questions about similar issues and lists the book he read in March.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  hyoutube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: A Tactical Assault on Busyness [3:47]- How can I stop chasing the “perfect” productivity system? [34:51] - How do I avoid losing my day to distraction? [39:08]  - How do I help my partner escape meeting quickstand? [42:31]- How do we design the perfect client/task/scheduling system? [48:59]- Can Apple Vision Pro help deep work? [54:46]The 5 Books Cal Read in March 2024 [1:06:43] A Short History of England (Simon Jenkins)Into the Impossible (Brian Keating)The Amen Effect (Sharon Brous)Sink the Bismark! (CS Forester)Hidden Potential (Adam Grant)Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/can-an-ai-make-plansThanks to our Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestionsexpressvpn.com/deepzocdoc.com/deepnotion.com/calThanks 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 Question, the show about cultivating a deep life in a high-tech world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. No Jesse this week. He's traveling, so I just decided to knock this one out the old-fashioned way by myself. So all weirdnesses or unusual occurrences you hear is all my fault because we don't have producer Jesse here to help me out. What are we going to talk about today? Well, as you know, on this show, there's three general categories of topics we cover, all relevant to cultivating depth in a high-tech world. We have surviving and thriving and digital knowledge work.

We have the promises and perils of new technology. And we have creating analog bulwarks to the digital incursion. Today we're going to draw from that first category of a deep dive that gets right into the heart of one of the core problems caused by digital knowledge work. and I'm going to pull out a popular idea from my book, Slow Productivity, and give some tactical advice for putting that into action. Then I have some questions that are themed around that same topic, maybe a little more haphazard than normal because Jesse normally pulls the questions, but I think they'll be fine. And then at the end of the show, I will get into the books I read in March. Yes, this show is airing, believe it or not, in April. In fact, airing on April 1st, I thought about doing an April's Fool's joke.

I don't know, something about moving the show entirely to TikTok and trying to interpret the quest for resisting distraction and finding meaning in digital age through mainly synchronized TikTok dances. But you're welcome because I decided not to do that. Speaking of slow productivity, quick logistical announcement on April 11th, April 11th at 6 p.m., Jesse and I are doing a live recording of the deep. Questions podcast at People's Book here in Tacoma Park, Maryland, right down the street from where we normally record the show where I'm sitting right now. This should be fun. People's book is the independent bookstore in my hometown in Tacoma Park, Maryland. They've been selling the sign copies of my book. I've been going there every week or so in signing a bunch of copies. Anyways, we're going to bring in a crowd, take questions, do some deep dives. It should be a lot of

fun. We'd love to see you there. April 11th, 6 p.m. at People's Book. You can probably find more at the people's book website, and I'll talk about it more as well as we get closer. Speaking of slow productivity as well, if you haven't bought the book yet, you should. It is, in some sense, the source material for 80% of what we talk about here these days on this show. So if you're a deep questions fan, you really should have a copy of Slow Productivity. To help you learn more on Calnewport.com slash Slow, there's a way for you to get an excerpt. So if you're a reader, you can download an excerpt and see more about that.

the book and get into it. We also put up an audio excerpt. So if you're an audiobook person, I read the audiobook for Slow Productivity. I think it came out well. So we put up an extended clip at Calnewport.com slash slow. So you can actually hear me reading the book and get a sense what that'll be like. Please buy it. I appreciate your support. Final logistical note, we are putting together by popular request a list of podcast on which I've appeared recently to talk about this book. Jesse has the whole list now. We got it from the publisher. We're working on it, but we're going to publish that somewhere soon, so we heard you. All right, that's all I have for

Logistical Notes. Let's get started with our deep dive. Well, it's hard to believe that it's been a month since my book Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout was published. And one of the advantages of it having

been a month is that I have in those weeks, intervening weeks, done a lot of interviews about this book, which means I have some data. In particular, I have some data about what ideas from this book seem to be catching people's attention. So what I want to do today is isolate what I think is the single most discussed suggestion from this book based on what interviewers want to talk to me about.

It is a suggestion, a strategic suggestion that promises essentially right away to significantly reduce the sense that you're frantic and busy all the time running on a treadmill of digital freneticism and yet getting very little actual accomplished during the workday. It's a solution that overnight can make that problem significantly reduced in your life. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to look a little closer at this problem of digital busyness and get to the core of it. Why are we like this? Then I will give you the big suggestion from my book that's been discussed more than any other idea so far during my publicity tour.

And then I will talk about tactical suggestions for how to implement this idea in your actual work life. I'm going to break this into two parts. Tactical suggestions for implementing it as an individual, even if you have demanding bosses and clients who aren't on board, and tactical suggestions for implementing this if you're a team. You can get even extra power if a team works together all on the same page. All right, let's get into it. All right, so what's the problem that we're going to face here? this idea that you're frantic all day long, jumping from email to slack, in and out of meetings all day, exhausted, and yet feeling like very little is actually being accomplished on the projects that you need to do, that you're as busy as you've ever been, and yet progress on your work has never been slower.

Now, if we're going to solve this, we need to know why this problem has become worse. Now, as longtime listeners of this show know, I'm a technologist, I'm a computer science professor. I try to understand these issues through the lens of technology interacting with us, our society and cultures in unexpected ways. And I think this is almost entirely an issue of a techno-human interaction. All right. So two things happened, both coincident with what I call the front office IT revolution, the arrival in the 90s of personal computers on the desk of knowledge workers, followed in the 2000s by networks and then wireless networks and mobile computing.

So the front office IT revolution, two things came along with this that created the sense of frantic busyness in which very little was getting done. One, I think this is probably the least reported. It ended specialization. You know, and I'd be a little bit more clear about this. We've forgotten about this because we're so used to it, but it's very important. pre-front office IT revolution. Work tasks were more specialized.

There was enough custom knowledge and tools and friction involved in doing most things in the office that we tended to specialize. Different support staff would work on different things. If you were an executive knowledge worker, you would be thinking more about strategy, for example, but you didn't type things and you weren't able to make flight reservations. and certainly you couldn't put together slides for a presentation. You need a graphic department to do that. There was all sorts of different people that worked together. Things were more specialized. Then the personal computer came along.

And they said, look, this is going to be a productivity miracle. And they were right in the very narrow sense that the personal computer took many of these things that were happening in the office and made them more efficient to do. Typing is much easier on a word processor. Not really anyone can do it. You can fix mistakes. It's not, when you're typing onto a typewriter paper, you really need to be good at typing. Otherwise, you're going to be constantly winding things out. Compute, you can fix your mistakes on it.

You can format things yourself. You can build slides. You can do your own presentations. You can send your own communications. You can, you don't need voicemail. You don't need a secretary. You can send emails and wait for those emails to come in. We get intra-office intranets where now I can log time sheets and book travel and fill out compliance forms.

It made lots of things. doable by everybody. So what happened with this revolution? We fired all the support staff and said, who's left? Just do everything now. So the amount of work possible for each individual left in knowledge work after the front office revolution skyrocketed. The sheer diversity of different things you might do during your days

compared to like the Mad Men days of the 1960s to 2006 is vast. vastly increased. Right, the second thing that happened coincident with the front office IT revolution is digital networking reduced the friction of trying to assign some of this work to someone else. So now there's a vastly larger pool of things people can be doing. It's no longer, hey, Don Draper, go build this ad campaign for Kodak and let us know when you're done. Now there's all this infinitely mini smaller types of things we've got people to do. Digital networks reduce to friction of actually assigning work. there is no social capital cost or minimal social capital cost when I'm just writing abstractly into a screen.

Hey, Don, can you throw together some numbers for the Q2 report, send? I don't have to see your face. I don't have to see this as a transaction in which I'm asking for a valuable resource of you. I don't see this as a favor. It's an abstraction. Send, boom. Off that goes. It's also much easier, right?

As soon as I think of something, I could get it off my plate. I can play Obligation Hot Potato by just type, type, type, type, type, send. And I don't have to worry about it. In a pre-digital network era, it might be a while till I see you again. Maybe we have a meeting schedule tomorrow. So I need some way of keeping track of what's on my plate and what needs to be done. And once I'm more organized about things, I might actually start consolidating things and taking things off my plate or being smarter about how we organize our efforts.

But in the digital network age, I don't have to do any of that because as soon as something appears into my cognitive world and becomes causing stress, I can get that hot potato out of my hands in seven seconds of typing. And so we became less organized, less considered about tasks and just start throwing them off left and right. So we put these two things together.

The amount of possible work for a knowledge worker to do increase, the amount of possible work that was on the knowledge worker's plate increased. We got overloaded. This then created, right? So this is not directly the problem we talked about, which is busyness, but it created that problem.

And it created that problem because, of course, the reality of anything that you have committed to do, a project, a task, whatever size it is, is that it brings with it its own administrative overhead. You have to talk about, you have to collaborate about, you have to gather materials for it. And in the age of the front office IT revolution, this administrative overhead became more disruptive in time fracturing than ever before because it could be sending emails back and forth throughout the day, right? This was the, one of the most attention fracturing possible means of collaboration, asynchronous back and forth conversations that require you to constantly be checking channels and inboxes so that you see the next message in time to reply.

We also have the digital meeting revolution. It's never been easier to throw a meeting on people's calendars, to throw around invites, the cost of seeing up meetings really reduced. So now we're paying this administrative overhead on more things than ever before, and the impact of this administrative overhead is more invasive and intrusive than ever before. This is what has caused our current problem with frenetic busyness. Why we feel like we're answering messages and in meetings all day but getting very little done is because we have too many things on our plate.

And each of these things is generating its own stream of time disruption that takes our time attention but doesn't actually allow us to complete the thing. It's just talking about the thing. And we end up with days totalized by collaboration and overhead with very little time left to actually accomplish work. We have to do in the mornings. We have to do it in the late evenings. this is not just inefficient, as I like to say during my interviews for slow productivity.

It's downright and deranging. Okay. So digital office, front office IT revolution causes the problem. What is my idea? What is the idea that comes up more often than any other when we talk about this book on podcasts and radio interviews for solving this problem? Well, now that we understand it, we know what the solutions will be. How do you solve busyness? You don't, as many people suggest, try to go after the symptoms.

and say, we're going to have rules to try to put moats around, protect us from the busyness and the administrative overhead. Better expectations on email. Don't expect to reply right away, so that way you can batch your emails. No meetings on a certain day of the week, and that way you can have a day free of the meetings. This is our instinct that treat the symptoms, but this doesn't work because this administrative overhead is actually needed. You've agreed to these projects.

This is how these projects make progress. And if you're not able to be involved in the conversations and have the meetings and the emails, things stall and it's a problem. So these type of treating the symptoms approaches don't work. We need to treat the actual underlying problem. And here there's no shortcut to the solution of reducing the number of things creating administrative overhead. That is how you solve the problem of frantic deranging busyness. Have less things generated administrative overhead. It's less about taming the administrative overhead generated by a single project.

than it is having fewer projects generating the overhead itself. Now, of course, the radical way to do this would just say, like, I work on two things, that's it, and just say no to everything else. The problem is, very few of us can do that. You have to be very high up or very autonomous in your work. You know, I'm a novelist. No, I'm just writing my next novel, get out of my face. They can do that almost no one else can. So this brings me back to the idea then.

So what is my strategy? If the solution is going to be reducing the number of things during the administrative of overhead, but we can't just say no to most things, what is the slow productivity solution that could actually work? All right, here it is. It's pretty straightforward. You have two statuses for work that you've agreed to. Let's just imagine a list of things you've said yes to.

There's two statuses. Active, waiting. The project's labeled active you are actively working on. they can happily generate administrative overhead, and you will pay that administrative overhead. People can send you emails about it. You can set up standing meetings to talk about it. You're actively working on it. Everything else, the projects that are labeled waiting do not generate administrative overhead.

They are waiting for their turn in your active spot. And as soon as you finish a project that you're actively working on, you pull something new from that waiting list into your collection of active projects. And now we can talk about it. But if it's in the waiting thing, no, we're not working on those yet. These are over here. We're waiting for it to come. Now, for this to work, you have to be very clear about this, right? So as we get into the details of how to implement this two-status workload management system,

it doesn't work unless everyone knows what you're up to. So you have to be super transparent. Here are my list. Here's how I work. Here is your thing. It's here. It's in position six on the waiting list. You can watch it.

You have to have extreme clarity for the people involved so they know when to start doing administrative overhead with you. And more importantly, you've assured them, I have not forgotten about your thing. Your thing is on this list and you can check as much as you want and watch it march towards active. And when it gets to active, I'm going to execute it. You don't have to worry this has been forgotten. And that's what's going to be important here. That clarity is going to solve the problem that they really have, which is I don't want to have to have to worry about this task. all right um so this is what we're going to need two statuses clarity for everyone involved about

the status of what you're doing this can make a huge difference essentially right away think about why right i mean if you take the amount of administrative overhead your pain from like let's say 10 projects and collapse it to three that's a factor of three or greater decrease in the amount of emails you have to send the meetings you have to attend a factor of three or greater increase in the amount of time you have to actually work on projects now you can start getting things done fast. You're going to do them in a high level of quality. You're accomplishing more than you ever have before,

but it's going to feel much better. All right, so how do we actually implement this? Well, let's start about talking about how we might do this as an individual, just doing this on your own. All right, as I talked about first, there has to be clarity. So you need a shared document or Trello board or whatever tool you want to use that is shared. So you can point people right away.

Okay, this is where your project is. Watch it, March up to Q. Now, what I like about using a Trello board for this is you can have a Trello column for actively working on. And you have a Trello column for queue of projects I'm waiting to execute. And this is an ordered queue. The thing at the top is the next thing you're going to pull in when you finish an active project. And the thing right below it, that's the thing after that, you're going to pull in. So this is an actual ordered queue.

Then you can have a column for Backburner. Right. And what this is for is like a boss or a peer is like, hey, we should really think about doing blah. And you know we're not really ready to work on blah. And they don't really want you yet to do it. They just sort of had the idea. And you need to give them the respect if I'm taking it seriously. So you need a place to put that.

But that's not a cue that things are being pulled off of. It's just a stake in the ground, as David Allen would say. You could do this with a shared document, too, just three headings. Why I like Trello is you can flip those digital cards over and add information to it and attach files to it. So now you have a place because it's all shared for whoever assigned you this work, you can add the stuff they send you about it. You can add it to that card. They can go directly and add stuff to that card as well as they think up like, hey, I want you to remember this. When we get to this, let's not forget this.

You have a place for that to go. And I have to emphasize this. This is like the key point I have to emphasize about the interpersonal dynamics of this suggestion I'm talking about. you have to know what game you're playing when you're working at one of these knowledge work jobs. The game you're playing, like what it is, what it is that your colleagues and bosses wants from you. It's not what they want as fast email responses.

That's not the game you're playing. That's not the problem you're solving for them. Their problem is not how do I get responses to my emails right away? How do I get people in the meetings as soon as possible? That's not the actual problem they have. The problem you can solve for them is I have this thing that it needs to get done. I can't do it myself, and I don't want to be stressed about it. I want this off my plate in a way that I can trust it's going to be taken care of.

That's the problem you're solving for other people. So when they can see, here it is. It's in Cal's column and it's in position three. You're solving that problem for them. More importantly, when they think of something else, hey, remember this thing we're going to do? I just have three more examples. Like I asked you to update the website with client testimonials. You put it in your queue of things that are waiting.

Oh, you know what? I just thought of like I just got a testimonial from another client. We should make sure we put this in here. Or here's another idea I had. When you're using something like a Trello card, you can receive that information. Say, great, I've just added it to the card. And they can see all this stuff is being attached to this card, the files, the text, the links. And here's the information.

It's all building up here. And this project is moving up. this queue of things that Cal is going to work on next. And all the information is there. And you're solving the problem for your colleagues or clients of, I don't have to worry about this. So having a place where not only they can see their work is waiting to get done, but a place to put all their thoughts about their work, the files, the notes.

And you can tell them to do that directly, or if they send it to you, you can just add it to a card. That's not a big deal to add information to a card. If it's your boss, you should do that for them. None of this is a big deal. they're happy that this is being taken care of. All right. So you have this,

you have this transparency. Now, what you have to do is work really hard on the things that are in the active list. And you have to let people know when you pull a new project into the active list, this is critical. You got to email whoever is involved in that, whoever assigned it to you, whoever else you're working on and say,

hey, I'm actively working on this now. It's on my active list link. I'm all in on this. So let's rock and roll. Like, let's meet, email me, like all the stuff that is kind of annoying.

It's not so annoying to me anymore because this is just one of three projects I'm going. Let's go. Let's kick it off. Let's have a meeting. Let's have a brainstorm. Let's figure out a plan. I have a lot of time to dedicate to this. And you just get that thing done.

So you have to let people know. You got to actually do the things that are active and let people know when you're doing those things. And as people have gone through two or three of these cycles with you, they're like, okay, I get how this works. This is cool. Cal will let me know when my thing is active. If I think up thoughts and I send it to them, I know it'll be stored.

I trust them. When this thing gets active, he's going to let me know, and he's going to get after it, and this thing's going to get accomplished pretty quickly, and it's going to be accomplished well. So another thing that this is going to help you is this is going to allow you to avoid having to do these prioritization decisions in the moment of like, is this important or not saying yes or no? This is kind of the problem with a lot of a minimalist approach as to workload management. It's basically so you have to say no more often and you have to say yes to fewer things. Like what's the one thing you want to do? What's essential? The problem with these approaches is that's like difficult decisions to make, especially when it's 4 p.m. on a Friday and you're tired and your boss puts his head in the door and is like, I need you to update the bulletin part of the website.

I think we need a better strategy or we need to figure out how to use if we should be using chat GPT, like whatever they're throwing at you. It's really hard in the moment when you're exhausted. They're there. They want this from you. the pressures on, for you to do the calculation and say, no, this is insufficiently important to the one thing I want to be working on. It's too difficult in the moment. This approach allows you to get around that because you can sort of soft commit to one

of these things. In the moment, it just goes onto your list. And now when things are on your list, we can start talking about reprioritization and de-assessioning, actually taking things off the list. So you can think now about priority. right? So when people bring you new things or something, they're asking you about something, you can talk to your boss or clients about, how should we mess with the order of this list? And I think that's something you want to be doing a lot, the waiting list, the column in Trello.

Hey, should I move? Where do you want this? Like, how urgent? Here's my list. Like, should I put it up at the top or in the middle or like how, where do you think this should fall? Like, you get the stakeholders who are giving you this work involved. So you're often doing this reprioritization. Now what's going to happen here is that the things that kind of went on your list that weren't really that important. It was like in the moment of brainstorm or as things developed, it turned out to be less important than you thought. They're just going to sort of stay at the bottom of the waiting list because things keep getting moved above them.

So you need to be willing to reassession or de-assession those things. Maybe move them diplomatically over to the backburner list and then at some point maybe take them off that list altogether. There's a good opportunity here to see like what really is important. if you've been languishing on my waiting queue, keeps getting moved down, things getting replaced, then we know that wasn't a right thing to be working on anyways. All right, so you have to allow reprioritization,

and you have to do these de-assessioning. This is what I would do as an individual. Again, there is some pain in doing this, but it's not as bad as you think. Blame me. Say it's a Cal Newport idea. But I'm telling you, the problem you're solving for your colleagues and clients

is making their life easier. knowing you have this way of working and it produces good results and I don't have to keep track of things. I don't have to bother you. I don't have to remember things. I know how to deal with getting you work. And if I have ideas about that work, that I can send it to you and I could watch it get captured. Eight times out of ten, this is going to fly. Two times out of ten, it won't. Eight times out of ten, this will fly. And it will make your life, if it does fly as an individual, it's going to make your life so much better. because again, two or three projects worth of administrative overhead is cake. You can do all of the 1990s, 1980-style productivity tips for figuring out the most urgent thing to work on in the quadrants and all the Stephen.

All that stuff works when you have three projects worth of administrative overhead. Not when you have 13. Then you're just, ah, until blood comes out of your eyes. Three, you could do that. What about if you're on a team? How does this work if you're on a team and everyone's on board? Well, in this case, and I detail in particular in the book because there's a specific case study of a team doing this in the book. So I write about exactly how they do it.

You have on a wall somewhere, be this physical or virtual, post-it notes for all the project ideas or feature additions or whatever your units of work is, you store them. Whenever something comes up, we should do this. We need to update the website. We need to add this feature to the software. We need to gather a report of all of the statistics. Every time an idea for a project comes up for the team, it goes on a wall, be it real or virtual, in a big column that's for like stuff we might do. So if someone has an idea, they have a place to put it where they know it won't be forgotten. Two, you have another column in this wall for each of the people on the team.

And when someone is working on something, you move that, be it physically or virtually, into their column. So you can see right away, what is everyone working on? you can also see right away how much is everyone working on and again you want this to be one or two things maybe three depending on what type of work you're doing the final piece of this team based to status workload management is that you have a regular efficient highly structured check-in meeting you could do this in the morning or midday it could be every day would probably be good maybe every other day maybe monday wednesday friday where we check in on this wall okay how is everything. What are you working on? I see it on the wall. How's that going? Do you need

anything from anyone else? What's holding you back? Let's figure this all out right now. We don't have to do a bunch of emails. You're going to need this information. You need that. Okay, let's just write down. And I would have a shared document, like a log of each meeting. This is all in stone, right? So you can't get away with ignoring it. Okay. So, Dan, you want to get the Laura. She's going to need this information. When can you get it to where? You're going to do it by tonight. Okay. He's stuck because he's waiting for the. You figure out who needs what. Fine. If someone is done with something, it is in these team. meetings, you look at the big pile of stuff we could do and you figure out as a team,

what things should this person work on next? We're going to pull something new to their column. And this is how you handle work. So nothing gets lost. If you have an idea, it goes on the wall. You know what you're working on. You get what you need from people. As you finish things, more things come over. People are churning through things pretty quick. But just like with our Trello list, one of the key things about this is you see languishing. This thing was on the wall for the last two months. We keep prioritizing other stuff over it. You know what? I don't think that was as important as it felt as the time. Let's take it off the wall. So you get this decessioning based on your implicit aggregate priority decisions.

So real teams use this, right? Real teams use this. They used to use Post-it notes. If you're a software developer just sounds familiar, this is a modification of a con bond style, agile methodology. Yeah, software developers are way ahead of the rest of us knowledge workers on this. So no, this is not an original idea, but you can adapt it to almost any type of knowledge work, which is the key idea I make in this book. All right. So what is the, what do we have in common here? Having two statuses, whether we're in a team or an individual, having two statuses, actively working on waiting to work on, a place for the waiting to be, a place to gather information about the waiting, transparency into what is where, so we can have group reprioritizations and de-assession decisions.

We'll drastically improve your life. Now, again, we want to get to the solution without getting to the core of the problem. And I'm just going to give this quick aside and then we'll move to questions. I'll give this quick aside. I'll give this a quick aside, but this is one of the big problems we have, I think, dealing with some of the issues in digital knowledge work is that we don't go deep enough. We look at the issue, oh my God, I'm getting all these emails, and we just treat it at the symptom level. And we, like, personify people are being bad. People have bad expectations. And we see it as almost like a bad habit people have. Like, we were just doing good work, and then we have this arbitrary habit of sending each other lots of emails. And so just tell people, knock it off.

Don't send so many emails. I'm only going to answer them once a day. And of course, this fails. But when we understand the underlying problem, oh, I see. The front office IT revolution created these massive workload footprints and this fine-grained ability to constantly be dealing with overhead for this massive workload footprint. We have to reduce the overhead. We have to reduce the number of active projects we're working on. That gets to the real solution.

Now you can slow down. You can slow down your day. even if you are sort of paradoxically accomplishing what you accomplish at a faster rate. So there's my big idea. We've been talking about this, and I don't know, I'd say 75% of the interviews I've done for this book, this idea of the two status workload has come up.

It's simple as practical, and it gets to the core of an issue in digital era knowledge work. All right, what I want to do next is move on to some questions from you, my listeners, about related issues. but first, I want to give a brief word from our sponsors. In particular, this episode is sponsored by Better Help. And we talk a lot about the show, on the show, about how to construct a deeper life in this world of constant digital distractions.

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Let's move on now to some questions. Normally, Jesse reads these, so maybe I'll alter my voice for the questions. If Jesse was here, he would recommend I use my French accent for the questions, but I will not. I will resist. All right, our first question comes from Jessica. Jessica says, I should start with the fact that I am neurodivergent and a very anxious person, which might answer part of the question. but I wonder how I can make myself stick to a simple productivity system,

instead of revamping everything pretty much every week. I always feel like if I could just find the perfect system, it would fix everything. Well, Jessica, I don't think your concerns here are specifically due to neurodivergence or anxiety. They're very common among people who get serious about how they organize their digital era knowledge work. part of the problem is a lot of people put, I would say, too much faith in what their productivity system can accomplish for them. But here's the thing. Productivity systems, they cannot do your work for you. They cannot in themselves make you successful at your job.

They certainly cannot fix everything. In the world of digital knowledge work, what do productivity systems actually do? Two things. They can help you make consistent and smart decisions about what the work on. So get you out of that, free you from that mode of reactivity of just, oh my God, something's due. Someone just emailed me. I'm just trying to answer these incoming pings and put out the rapidly growing fires. They can also help you avoid unnecessarily wasting your time and attention.

So I'm going to be more careful about, you know, how I deal with my brain. I don't want a context switch too much. I'm going to sort of build my scheduling and approach to work and my processes around one thing at a time, consolidating context switching. etc. So smart decisions, planning, and help you avoid unnecessary drags on your time and attention so you get more out of your brain. And this is more of scheduling and processes. If you have ideas for both of those goals that are working for you, then you're getting most of the benefits of productivity system can get. Now, if you tune up the system, it'll be useful, but it's not going to be night or day. Nighter day is having something in place, planning it's smart for making

decisions and scheduling and process things in place to help you not waste unnecessary time and attention. Like going from zero to that is a huge win. Beyond that, you know, it's like two users taste. It can kind of make a difference. It's not going to be night or day. So if you have something in place for both of these and given that you're a long-time listener of the show you do, you're getting 80% of the benefits. Now what about those other 20? Tune in once a quarter. Once a quarter, be like, hey, what's working, what's not, and make some tuneups. Don't have high expectations, but you do want to check in semi-regular because you want to prune things out of these two points that aren't really working or wasting your time.

Or if there's a new type of challenge within these two points that has emerged that's not being addressed by your current systems or processes, you might want to tweak something or add something new. And this will help. But I would see this more. Like the key thing is, I'm going to use a horticultural metaphor here. The key thing is you plant a tree. the tree that yields the fruit of consistent smart decisions and unnecessary wasting of time and attention.

That's the big deal as planting the tree, having the tree, having those fruits. Now, over time, you want to prune it. If you don't prune it, it's going to grow wild, and maybe it's going to no longer produce any fruit. So you can't just put something in there and let that go for the next five years. But if you're just semi-regularly pruning this, a tree will keep growing and it'll keep delivering your fruits and some years better than others. That's the way to think about this. Don't put so much on the details of your system. Yes, you need a system, but those are the two things that can do.

It can't do your job for you. It can't make work easy. It can't be, I start turning this crank it on the other end on the president. It's not the way it works. Work is hard. In the end, you still have to give concentrated, cognitive effort to things that are difficult, to produce things that are valuable. That's going to feel the same no matter what productivity system you have.

That's going to be hard no matter what productivity system you have. You basically just want to try to clear out some of the biggest obvious obstacles to doing that in a sustainable fashion. All right, our next question is from DK. DK writes, I often have a large block at 90 to 120 minutes of time at the start of my day. I want to use this time more efficiently, but it often gets eaten up by setting up the rest of the day,

even if I have completed a weekly and or daily plan. I end up preparing for meetings, triaging my messages, or getting caught up on Slack threads. How can I be more effective at the start of my day? Well, DK have three ideas for you. One, prepare the day before for what you're going to do at the start of your day. Block off that time like a meeting on your calendar and have a set place you're going to go to do that work that's different than where you do Slack. It's different than where you think about like your meeting prep.

Like your day starts off not, okay, let's just rock and roll in all my channels and then get to work. No, your day starts off. I'm going to my writing set. I'm going to the coffee shop. I'm doing my 20 minute thinking walk to get going. And I have everything right here to start working on this code, this memo, this business strategy, whatever, this big project. And it's scheduled.

And that's what I do. And you're going to be nervous about it. What if I'm missing things? What if in that first 90 minutes really critical things happened? And you know what? It won't and you'll be fine. And then you'll stop worrying about it. People can call you if it's urgent.

They'll respect it like, yeah, I start with hard things. Then I get after like meetings and slack. They'll be fine. And you'll be fine. So you've got to be more definitive. about this. All right, second thing to suggest, do more preparation at shutdown instead of the beginning of the day. Schedule the last half hour of your day, and again, protect this on your calendar. Let that be the time where you're preparing for the next day.

Shutting down open loops. Do I have what I need for these meetings? If not, let me schedule time before the meeting to do the prep. I like my plan for the day. Okay, what am I doing to start the next day? Great. Let me gather all my materials. Great. Schedule shutdown confirmed. Check the schedule shut down box on my time block planner. Unload from work. Next day starts. You get right into the deep work you want to do that day because you already went through all the process of looking at your next day.

Do it the day before, not the morning of. Third idea, do more meeting processing proximate to the meetings. I'm a big believer of when you schedule a meeting scheduling time either before, after, or both. Time before to prep for that meeting, if you need that. definitely time after 15 to 30 minutes, always add that to your calendar. To process everything, it just happened in that meeting. All right, let me just stop for a second.

What came out of this meeting? What decisions were made? What do I now need to do? What do I need to remember? Let me get that into my systems. Let me update what I need to update. I promise to contact these three people. Let me contact those three people.

Okay, good. I can now shut down that meeting. If you go straight from a meeting to something else, all of that post-meeting work just sticks around in your head and causes a problem. So meetings are not just the time you're talking to other people. It's the time you're talking to other people and the time you need to make sense of that and prepare for it. So get that on your calendar as well. Then you'll feel more sort of in control of what's going on.

But mainly you just have to protect that time. You don't want to be doing Slack and meeting prep during the first 90 minutes? Don't. Figure out a way to get that done without having used your first 90 minutes. I think the benefit will be worth it. All right. My next question is from skeptical Sally. is someone talking about their partner.

That's always fun. Hi, Cal, my partner is a director of product management at a startup, and despite having risen through the ranks there, he has yet to be rid of a lot of the lower level work on his plate. He also has meetings all day, almost every day. Many things cannot be done without his input, but he is predictably exhausted all the time and has no time to do the thinking and writing work,

compounding the issues. His most important work is to think, so engineers can build the right, thing. And there's no thinking time because of overhead and meeting happy colleagues. He claims there's nothing he can offload and he can't cancel meetings because too much won't move forward, but I don't buy it. All right, Sally, I don't buy it either. I mean, here's what I do buy. And this is a common trap when people are dealing with overload and digital knowledge work. The common trap is to say, can I take work in the way I have it

unfolding right now and just start not doing the things that I'm not liking. Can I just start canceling meetings? He's like, well, no, because these are projects that I'm supervising and I have to supervise them and they need meetings. Or he's like, can I just radically reduce the projects? Well, for a lot of people that could be, yes, using the system I talked about in the deep dive in today's episode, you could have active projects and waiting projects. Managers can't always do that, though.

It's like, no, these are the projects going on. I'm in charge of them, but not in charge of deciding what we do. and so no, I can't offload projects. And then they throw up their hands. But what they don't think about is, can I change the structure in which this work is actually happening? Not changing what I'm doing, but changing how I'm doing it. And here we often get significant failures of imagination. So, Sally, here's what I would tell your husband.

Here's what you're going to do. Two and a half hours every afternoon, maybe three. It's going to be a 30 to 60 minute office hour block right there in your house. afternoon. Your door is open. You have zooms or teams turned on with a waiting room and your phone is on. The rest of this time, you have a calendar, whatever type set up, 15 minute blocks, 15 or 30 minute blocks, you choose which. It's like 90 minutes to two hours of just boom, boom, boom, you can go in there and grab any block you want. Here now is how you deal with all of your teams. Questions that just require an answer, and they can be answered in a single message, hey, what is my

budget for this again. What is my timeline for this again? When is it? Have you heard back yet about whatever? Those can be emailed. Great use for email. They show up. They sit until your partner is ready to look at his emails and he can send back answers and get the information to people minimal overhead. Great. Things that require some back and forth. Come to my next office hours. We're never more than a few hours away from my office hours. Drop by, jump on a Zoom waiting room, 10 minutes. Let's pound it out. Like what's going on here? What's holding you up? How can I help you?

Hmm. Okay, this, this, this, good. Let's go. You have an issue that's more complicated than that. No, we really need to think. Great, grab a 15 or 30 minute slot. You don't even have to tell me. Just do it.

What I do in the afternoons is I just go to these meetings that are scheduled. We'll rock and roll and have the longer discussions if you don't want to just jump into office. So it's going to take more than five minutes, schedule one of those slots. Guess what? This is going to handle 95% of what's happening in these meetings. and yet consolidate all of that to two to three hours a day. Leaving your husband's entire mornings free.

Right? This could make a huge difference. It's not changing what you do, managing projects and talking to people about what they need for their projects. It's not changing your workload even. How you do your work. Make a huge difference. Two, because he's in charge, he's a director here, demand better meetings too. All right, you can come to the office hours, you can grab one of these slots,

but I'm going to use the Jeff Bezos or General George Marshall approach of here is what I expect if you were bringing me into a discussion that takes my time. That you have done most of the work on your own to figure out like what's going on, where's the sticking point, where do I need outside help, what specific help do I need, what's all the relevant information you need? You know, Jeff Bezos demands that you send him all of this in a two-page memo. a certain amount of time before any meeting. So the meeting can be like a laser beam.

This is exactly where we need your help. You already are briefed. You already know exactly why we're asking you and what you need. What's your decision? This cuts down the time required to meetings to be very short. It also reduces the number of meetings because a lot of people use meetings as a way as like a crew time management tool. Like I don't really know what to do next. I don't have a lot of control over my schedule or time.

I don't really want to sit and think too much about it. But what I can do is just get a meeting. Now I put a meeting on the schedule. I'm no longer stressed about this because I'm like, when we get to the meeting, that's when the work will happen. But if you're the director of product management, rather, it's not your goal to do this work with people. It's not your problem that people are uncomfortable with how am I going to remember to make progress on this project. It's not your problem that the way they want to work is just put calendar things on and then get the work done in the calendar things. You demand, I need that memo.

So maybe now what you do is like, okay, before you come to office hours or schedule one of these things, like maybe office hours you can drop by, but these are five-minute discussions. If you want to schedule one of these 30-minute meeting blocks, as part of that scheduling form, you're pointing me towards a shared document that has the full briefing. And these are exactly what we need your decision on. Here's all the information. Do I have all the information you need to make this decision? Here's what needs to be discussed in the meeting. And those meetings become more efficient. I'm telling you, 95% of your interaction can now happen in two and a half to three hours a day. Imagine now what that's going to open up for your partner in terms of the thinking he can do, the strategy, the leadership he can do.

It also frees up a lot of time for the meetings that won't fit in there. When the CEO is like, we need you to come to the strategy session, when the big client presentations in town, now you have the breathing room to do those things. because your day is not with these haphazard meetings that are longer than they need to be and to haphazardly scheduled. All right. So point him towards me, Sally. I think his life could be a lot better. Here's another question from Glenn.

Ooh, another husband-wife question. My wife and I run a small accounting and bookkeeping business. It's just the two of us. We deliberately decided when we started, we did not want to manage other people, and instead reverse engineered how much we need to make and what that would look like for client load. My question is, given the nature of our work, which is repetitive and predictable,

what kind of system would you recommend to track our tasks for each individual client and can the task system interface with a calendar? My ideal system allows for a note section for when I meet with clients. I can store key information for the individual client. Again, something self-contained for tasks, deadlines and the calendar, in theory, all integrated with each other, plus notes. Well, first, Glenn, I like the mini case study in here.

More people should do this. This is sort of a lifestyle-centric career planning type move. What do we want our life to look like? What role does work play in that? So you built the business that directly support what you want your life to look at, your life to look like. Enough clients you don't have to worry, but not so many clients that it's a hassle, no one you have to manage. You're really trying to hone in on what's important, what's not. it's very different than the standard approach of like how big can I make this business

which for most people will just be lost stress. All right to your specific question, my concern here, it's not really a concern, but, you know, I think you want a complicated system. You want some sort of like Zapier enhanced notion workflow setup that is going to do everything for you. This goes here. This automatically goes there. But you're not the right use case for that.

Like when I'm thinking of like a cool notion workflow, flow. Like the use case is usually a situation where the complexity, the information is very complicated. There's a lot of information associated with what's going on and you need to be able to find and find information and put it in the different view. So like information rich, information complicated setups are where you want to have these sort of database driven customizable data systems, right? Like our ad agency uses these systems for managing all the advertising. because there's like a lot of information from these advertisers that they need to work with in different ways. And it's like they can show us, for example, a work table where just show Cal and Jesse the advertisement reads happening for this week's episode.

And here are the scripts for it. But we can also then say, let me take this advertiser that I'm doing a read for next week. And let me see a break that out now and show me all of the ad reads I've done for them in the last, let's say, six months. Now, so when you need to be doing these sort of complex interactions with data, these systems like Airtable or Notion, these integrations can be incredibly useful. But your company is too simple for that. It's too simple for it. Now, you can build one of these systems if you like it, but it's not like this is holding you back. So like in your case, what would I do?

You need some sort of place for holding tasks or information for each client. Like it could be a Trello board. It could be a folder on Google Drive. are we know here's what's pending here's like what we're working on right now the deadlines we can attach files to things we have notes relevant to the client they're all in this one place every client has their own board or directory fine then basically what you need to do and i know this is not exciting is having all hands on deck meeting which means you and your wife glen on friday afternoon and you look through your clients what's on okay what's on their to do list what do we finish these things that are active what things need to be done this

upcoming week and you make your plan for the week. You weekly plan. And this stuff goes on the calendar or in a weekly plan document. All right, this is do this day to this day. When are we going to do this work? And maybe you're putting a lot of this work on your calendar. Like this day, we're working on this client. We're doing on this. And you kind of build a plan for the week based on looking at what's going on with your clients. I mean, without too many clients and without complicated data, that's fine. The only thing I would add into it because you noted your work as predictable is do autopilot scheduling to the degree possible. Hey, we always have to file these type of things on the third Friday of every month for our

clients. Like, this is when we do that work. Thursday morning, we always have four hours blocked off. And me and my wife sit there and we go through and do all this filing, right? And we've thought about how to make this a little bit more efficient now that we're so we don't have to think about, oh, my God, this client needs this done. We just know that always happens in this time. And maybe we have like check-in calls we need to do with various clients.

We like to do them like once a month. And so we do those Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. And we kind of have a rotate. We have a way, like those are always calls. And we just sit there. We have our coffee. We go from call to call. And we make sure everyone has a recurring call.

So you can have these autopilot schedules for the regular occurring work. Here is when and how we get it done. So you don't have to be making decisions. You don't have to worry about falling behind and realizing something is due. And it gives you a consolidation of like effort. So you can look for ways to be more efficient. So when you have like the same two days, always see your client calls, you might eventually build a smarter system for how do we schedule

these. And maybe we want a calendar and maybe we want a reminder system. And you begin to find efficiencies when you consolidate like work with light work. Right. So I think you need a good place to store information tasks in their status for each client. You need to do a serious weekly plan. You need like two hours for this every Friday. This is a big part of your business. Make a plan for the week or two ahead. Use some autopilot scheduling for the repetitive work. That's probably what you need because bookkeeping is again it's not a situation where you have complicated changing data that you necessarily need to see in different views to figure out what to do. Let's do one more question.

This one comes from Scott. Scott says, what does CalC in terms of the productivity potential of Apple Vision Pro as a way to create a virtual shed for a deep work session? Well, Scott, I've been writing about this issue for years. The term I coined for this is immersive single-tasking. The idea of using virtual environments as a way to help increase your focus on working on a single task. So I've written about this on my newsletter essay, my blog newsletter for years. I did some write-down the New Yorker for this.

I did a New Yorker piece back during a pandemic where I worked in a virtual world using a tool called immersed, which at the time was the number one productivity app in the Oculus app store. And I talked to the founder of Immers. It was interesting. And I did some work in, I guess you would say it's like a pagoda in a sort of mountainous rainforest with fire pits crackling and the rain falling outside or whatever. I'm really interested in this idea because we know, I mean, I talk about this a lot. I keep holding this up, everyone who's watching slow productivity. talk about this in slow productivity.

Environment matters. We know this, but environment matters for cognition. Like the environment you're in can help put you into the right mind state to do certain types of cognition more focused and more effectively. I am really interested in virtual environments being used to try to get this effect. We're getting close to it. Like there's a couple problems I identified early on that have been solved or are being close to being solved.

So one of these problems was resolution. If I'm taking notes or whatever or writing on a whiteboard, solving a math equation, in the virtual world, I need to see that really high resolution. I need to be able to read things and write things. That problem has been solved. The current generation of VR as well as AR and MR, things like Applevision Pro, it's there. In fact, even a couple of years ago when I wrote about this for the New Yorker, that problem had been solved, I had three large computer monitors in this virtual world. and I could read them as if they really were very large computer monitors in the virtual world. The resolution was there.

The bigger problem is input. So how do I, if I'm writing, for example, in a virtual world, how do I actually do that if I can't see my hands? How do I actually get that done? Here, this is getting solved in a way that is much better than it was a few years ago. The way immersed worked, and I never actually got this to work very well. Well, there's a complicated way of mapping your real keyboard. You could have your real keyboard in front of you. Because a MERS was showing in the virtual world screens that were coming from your own laptop.

It was screen sharing from your laptop. So the VR helmet was creating the virtual world, but the things you were working on were happening on your laptop. And you would put the laptop in front of you, but you couldn't see it because you had a helmet on. And they had this way of trying to map the keyboard where they'd be like, okay, press the Q and you press the Q key I guess it would show you the pass-through camera and you'd like press the different keys

and it would figure out where in the real space the keyboard was and the keys were and then it would show you your like your virtual hands and the keyboard, a virtual version of the keyboard that matched up with real world so you could see your hands in type

but it was kind of a clunky technology back then and I never really got to work very well they're getting much better at that now the look forward cameras and something like the Oculus Quest 3 are very high resolution and they're getting much better at tracking your hands

learning what's in your environment like seeing a keyboard mapping the keyboard showing where it is like it can do that more automatically the Apple Vision Pro of course has the advantage of it's like made from the ground up

the mix virtual with the real world so it could you know it could take your real desk and then like change all the background around it so like you see your desk and your computer in front of you but the sound and view is as if your desk and your computer is at the top of Mount Everest,

and it's like blowing snow all around. So then you can literally see what you're doing there. So this problem is being solved as well. So I think we're reaching the point where immersive single-tasking, technically speaking, will have most of the main issues worked out. Now it's just a sort of cultural habit practice. Like, will this actually work? Will this actually when I can type and work seamlessly?

but I'm in a fantastic environment. Will it help me focus better? Will it help me come up with more creative insights? And we'll see. The main thing I learned from that New Yorker piece is the thing that is going to drive innovation in this category is actually not people wanting to focus. It's people who want more monitors.

That's why I have faith that we're going to at least give immersive single tasking a good trial run is people like having lots of monitors. and this is something you can offer in virtual work spaces. This was why Immersed was the number one productivity app, not because people wanted to work deeply, but because they were at home during the pandemic, they were computer developers,

and they were used to having two giant monitors at work, and at home they only had their MacBook Air. And when they went into the immersed world, they could have two giant monitors. Some people would have up the five monitors. I saw setups in Immersed where they had one, two, three, four giant monitors, and a fifth up top. They'd look up to see it.

So it was making people more productive because they wanted their multiple monitors and you could have them in the virtual world. But when we're enjoying that benefit, we're going to be experimenting for free with the additional benefit of, I don't know, if I'm on top of the clock tower at Hogwarts, maybe I'm writing a better chapter of my fiction book than my one-bedroom apartment. or when I'm trying to solve a math equation, if I'm in the great hall at Oxford working on a virtual whiteboard, maybe I'm going to actually get into a flow state easier than if I'm in my Wii work. It's just like looking around at the different cubicles.

So Scott, I'm interested in immersive single-tasking. Virtual multi-moniters is what's going to be the killer app that pulls people into virtual working. But whether they find this extra side effect of the virtual environment being more conducive, focusing. We'll wait to see. I want to try this out more, too. I should get a Vision Pro. I should get a new request. I haven't worked with this stuff recently, but I think I should. All right, that's all I have

for questions. No calls today, because I don't know. Jesse knows how to do that. I don't know how to do that. But keep the calls coming. We'll normally do them. We've got a final segment coming up, the books I read in March, but first, I want to briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. As our longtime sponsors and good friends at Zoc Doc. Zoc Doc is not only fun to say. It is also a free app. and website where you can search and compare highly rated in-network doctors near you and instantly book appointments with them online. We talk a lot about high technology on this podcast. I'm often surprised by how primitive it is to actually set up and find healthcare appointments. It's a lot of calling people whose websites you found on Google and they're not taking appointments or they don't

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paperwork. You can just get that done before you show up. It is the right way to seek out and set up health care appointments in our current age. It's one of these ideas that it's surprising why this wasn't just here at like the very beginning of the internet. Who knows, but it is here now and ZocDoc does it right. Sok-Doc is a smart idea. So go to Zocdoc.com slash deep and download the Zocdoc app for free.

Then you go ahead and find a book a top rated doctor today. That's ZOC, doc, doc.com slash deep, Zockdoch.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Notion. Look, if you run a business or your personal setup is one and what you have, sort of complicated information that links together in different ways that you need to view in different ways. Notion is absolutely the best in the business tool for making customized information workflows. It can combine your notes, your documents, and your projects all together in one beautiful space.

I even talked about Notion earlier in this episode where I talked about how our ad agency for the podcast uses it in a beautiful way that allows us, for example, to say, show me all the ads for this episode. Okay, here's this advertiser here. Show me all the ads we've done for this advertiser. Show me all the other advertisers that have this similar attribute. We get these different ways of working with the data and seeing what we need to see. And I love the custom ability of it. It's a big idea for my books like a world without email that you need to build sort of custom systems and workflows. Don't just like rock and roll on email and just try to make things work out. So notion is fantastic. But why are we talking about today? Because they have a new

feature, which I'm really excited about. And this is Notion Q&A, which uses AI as an AI assistant that helps you answer questions or search for information inside your existing notion setup. So it is a fantastic use of AI. I'm very interested in these sort of what they call vertical AI applications where you're using AI to solve a very specific problem. And here the problem is, look, I got all this different information spread out in different formats and that's shown in different views. And now let's say I have a question like, wait, where's next quarter's roadmap? Or what about the, I'm looking for the marketing proposal from two months ago that was sent by this client. The notion Q&AAI can just find this stuff for you.

It understands your information and can help you in seconds dig up that information you need. So now you have like the carefully constructed data views that you've built in your notion, but you can get information that's not in one of these views or that you forgot where it is very easily. It's like this extra little nudge that makes notion just super useful, right? So the type of question you might normally turn to a coworker to answer, you just ask Q&A instead. You could ask these questions from anywhere in Notion, find exactly what you need without even having to leave the doc, for example, that you're looking at right now. importantly, you can trust your data is secure because Notion AI is designed to protect your information. No AI models are trained on your information. Your data is encrypted and answers given to you will never be used, will never use information from pages you don't have access to.

So try Notion AI for free when you go to Notion.com slash Cal. Now this is all lowercase letters. Notion.com slash Cal. to try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today. When you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. So remember, all lowercase letters, notion.com slash cal. All right. Now let's move on to our final segment of the show.

This podcast is coming out on April 1st. So let's talk about the books I read in March, 2024. Longtime listeners know, I aimed to read five books a month. And yes, that's what I did in March. It kind of been a weird month because I was traveling a lot. A lot of big books that I half read and then actually am finishing in April. But anyways, it's an interesting. I ended up with an eclectic mention of a list of books for March.

The first was A Short History of England by Simon Jenkins. I put the word short in quotation marks. It's not exactly a short book. England, it turns out, has a long history. But I wanted to know more about it. And it was interesting. It's also, I'll tell you this, like from the American, perspective, we're used to our own history having a relatively simple triumphant list core of

we had this revolution based in these ideals and like we lived happily ever after. England's history is messy. It's, you know, kings, foreign invaders, tension in wars between like the kings and the people who were given land from the last foreign invaders who don't like the new kings, a lot of capriciousness and arbitrariness. And yet somehow out of all this messiness and ugliness, what emerged in England, and this is the point Jenkins makes, I thought this was interesting, different than other places in Europe. What emerged in England was this, like, carefully balanced tension between the people and the monarch. And the people for a while, meaning the earls,

but then eventually a house of comments as well. And they didn't really trust each other, and they kind of kept each other in this sort of messy check in a way where power was way more absolute in other places like monarchical power. I thought that was interesting. It's a messier history, but the messiness actually became a feature, not a bug. It is why when post-American revolution, you have these sort of revolutionary movements across the world, England sort of survives this in a very prosaic way without major reform.

They're not cutting off the heads of kings. They did do that, but that was in the 17th century. They're not toppling monarchy and starting a republic and then having that get toppled, have an emperor come in. The messiness actually created enough a sort of self-regulating, self-reinforcing loops that they were able to basically kind of adjust and tweak and get through that. So it's an interesting history, but a long one. Next book I read was Brian Keating's book, Into the Impossible. Into the Impossible is the name of Brian Keating's podcast as well, which I went on to talk about slow productivity. It's a cool interview. You should look for it.

Brian Keating Into the Impossible. Brian's an astronomer. He said, UCSD, an astronomer who also has a public-facing podcast. This was a cool book. What I liked about this book, and I told Brian this, it's like, more people should do this. He looked in his field. He's a physicist. He's like, I'm going to interview seven Nobel Prize winners and just learn from them. Like, what's interesting did they learn?

What interesting advice do they have? Like, that's the book. And I told Brian, there should be more books like this. more like this is my field and I've talked to like seven people who are very notable in this field and here's wisdom from it. Let's not lose it.

Like what did they learn? There should be a cool series. Barnes & Noble and Amazon and you just see like these monographs or you know, it's magazine writers. It's like tech CEOs. It's like whatever the different areas are

and it's, you know, volume three. Tim Ferriss did some books like this. But there should be more like this, I think. Like let's just, we don't have to be fancy here.

Tell me about like science in your life and you want to know Bell, like why and how and what's important in reflecting it. Let's like extract your wisdom. A quick read, but a good book. Then I read Sharon Brals, B-R-U-O-U-S's book, The Amen Effect. So Sharon is a rabbi in the Los Angeles area who started this Jewish fellowship that is, I don't quite know how to describe it. It's progressive, but not like necessarily in a political sense, though it is, but more in like a religious practices sense. It's like much more like emotionally forward.

They dance a lot. It's like a more like emotionally salient Judaism. Anyway, she wrote this book about the Amin effect talking about essentially, I mean, it's based on the idea of like Amen and how this is something that's meant to be said together and about people coming together to deal with like the hardship and challenges and joys of life. And it's like a really cool theme. and she has a lot of good theology on it and a lot of good pulling from our own experience. And it was a cool book.

The one thing I will say, I don't know if this is good or bad, I'm just going to say, is throughout the book, like 80% of the examples, it's all her dealing with congregants that are coping with, like, unexpected and tragic death, right? And so it's very powerful, right, on the one hand. but on the other hand you would maybe be looking for more of a broadness because there's such a like our age

of social media internet isolation there's such power in this idea of real community built on real sacrifice something I talk about all the time and how this gets to the core of like humanity but it's also heavy because it's all about these like the deepest tragedy in this book

that it can maybe accidentally create a sense of remove from the advice for your own life if you're not dealing with, you know, a tragic death, and yet you could still benefit from more of a communitarian approach to socialization. So if you can kind of get past a little of that darkness, it's very smart book, and she's a good writer. Then I read CS Forrester's Sink the Bismarck. See, I love CS Forrester's book, The Good Shepherd. I talked about it on the show. I think it's like the original techno thriller beautifully written. It's like anuteur type of work, all from

the, all looking at one character following them real time. Like the way it was, it's just a fantastically written book. I'm actually looking now for a first edition hardcover of the Good Shepherd because I want to have it as an artifact as like one of the first true techno thrillers, like American techno thrillers. I know people look at Vern and Wells, but like modern form techno thriller. So I read this other book, Sink to Bismarck about the sinking of the battleship to Bismarck. They're like, let's try this. It wasn't as good. It was more disjointed and kind of all over the place and didn't have the rigor of the perspective narrator rigor and the following and the creation of mood.

So I like the Good Shepherd all the more highly because I think synceded Bismarck was not so good. And then finally, I read Adam Grant's book, Hidden Potential. I hadn't read Grant in a little while, and I talked to him. I did his show, which I recommend everyone listen to my interview with Adam Grant, talking about slow productivity. I like Adam a lot. I just want to catch up on what he's up to.

So Hidden Potential is classic Grant, you know, drawing from the social psych research to get at this question of like how do you unlock your your internal potential? Like what Adam's very good at is here's like the four different ways the research has emerged that are relevant to this topic. And let's get into each of those. I'll give you really good stories. Make it seem really applicable. 30% of the research is his own typically, which is always very impressive. There's a reason why Adam Grant's books just dominate.

Like he's sort of taken over that niche. I think Gladwell gave it up when he went to work on his podcasting company. I don't know who else was there, but this niche, I mean, I think Adam Grant is just the pretender to the throne who has won. If you want science research, pulling lessons that are like relevant to your life, business, but also not necessarily business, made accessible, story driven, but with a deep understanding of research, he's like killing it with that format. So way to go, Adam. Classic Adam Grant book. All right. Anyways, that's all the time we have today.

We made it. I don't like doing Jesse Free episodes, but we made it through. I'm excited for him to be back next week. Keep in mind that April 11th date with just now will be recording a live podcast at People's Book in Tacoma Park. I'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go.

If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at CalNewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. You know.