Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 296: Jane Austen’s To-Do List (LIVE)

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

In the first ever live episode of Deep Questions, recorded at People’s Book in Takoma Park, MD, Cal extracts a modern productivity lesson from the tale of Jane Austen’s frustrated ambitions, before taking questions from the audience. 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:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Jane Austen’s To-Do List [3:22]— Is Cal building his YouTube channel with social media tactics? [27:36]— How can I do less in such a busy world? [31:53]— How do I escape the flow state? [37:01]— How can someone become a star while obsessing over craft? [40:52]— How can I apply Slow Productivity to unrelated projects? [46:40]— How does Cal develop his writing frameworks? [50:20]— How can I apply Slow Productivity principles to a team? [52:48]— How can I avoid the Zoom apocalypse? [57:48]— Is there a conflict between working at a natural pace and obsessing over quality? [1:07:16]— How can a personal trainer build a wellness solution company? [1:09:46]— How can our team not get delayed with technical problems? [1:13:00]— How can a young lawyer manage peer relationships with teams? [1:16:38]          Links:— Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow— Use this link to preorder a signed copy of “Slow Productivity”: peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/ — Cal’s Monthly Books directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?v=448bf8afad0740d18f6b109b4bd40d51 Thanks to our Sponsors: blinkist.com/deepdrinklmnt.com/deepexpressvpn.com/deepcozyearth.com  (Use promo code “Cal”)Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a high-tech world. So I'm here in my Deep Work, HQ, but only briefly. Today's episode, we're doing something different. Jesse and I recorded a live version of this podcast at People's Book, the independent bookstore here in Tacoma Park, that's right around the corner from our studio. and today's episode is going to be that live recorded appearance at People's Book. I followed the same structure as our normal podcast. I start with a deep dive.

And then we did questions from the audience. We had some like 40 minutes of live questions. We had a packed house. So it was really a lot of fun, a little bit of a different twist on the same basic ideas of this show. So I do hope you like that. Two quick logistical points before we get into it. one people's book is still selling signed versions of my new book's low productivity so as you knew as part of the pre-order campaign for that book you could pre-order a signed copy from people's book

they still are selling them even though the book is out they'll still sell you a signed copy i just signed a bunch when i was over there we put a link in the the show notes or just go to people's book website people's book to come apart you'll find them on google if you want to sign copy you can still order them it's a fantastic store it's a good good store to support, and it's a good way of support independent bookselling in general. Also, another cool link I wanted to share with you, and it's in the show notes, is a listener of the show has put together a list of every book I have discussed on the show, me having read. So I talk about the books I read each month.

A listener has put together a dynamic list of all those books. So I put that link in the show notes if you want to check that out as well. All right, that's it. enough preamble. Let's get to our live show recorded at People's Book, Tacoma Park. All right, so here's the game plan. Like I normally do on my show, I want to start with what we call the deep dive, where I choose a topic to get into. I figured I would get into a topic relevant to this book. I've been talking about the book a lot on my show, but I'm going to focus on a story from the book I haven't told yet. So I think that should be fun. And it's a literary story.

So I think it'll be well suited for the bookstore. So I'll do a little talking and then we'll move over the questions because again, that's the format of the show and we can talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. All right. So for our deep life, the only thing I'm sad about is we don't have our music here, Jesse. I know. For those who know the show, no, we have the slow productivity theme song. I wanted to have a live band playing it for us every time.

It turned out that, yeah, Megan couldn't accommodate that. That's my one request. A live jazz trio to play the slow productivity theme song. And if you don't listen to the podcast, yes, it really is that crazy. All right. So what do I want to do in my deep dive? Let me start first by just briefly talking about what this book is about, so we're on the same page. And then I want to dive a little deeper into a decision I made writing the book and then an example of that decision put into action.

So what is the book actually about? Well, the book is in response to something that become increasingly, a parent starting around the early 2000s in a particular sector of the economy known as knowledge work. So knowledge work has a sort of precise definition. It's often defined as a job in which you are adding value to information using your brain. But you can more informally think of it as a job where you probably look at a computer screen or if you have a distaste for Microsoft Teams, you're probably a knowledge worker. So there's something that began to happen in knowledge work, starting around the early 2000s,

which was a growing sense of overload, exhaustion, and then after a while, almost a creeping nihilism with work itself, this idea of I'm here and I'm doing all these things, but I don't even know what a lot of the stuff I'm doing means. It's a lot of email. It's a lot of meetings. I feel like I'm not even really making much traction on the thing that I'm ultimately hired to do. do. This effect became pronounced in the early 2000s. It got obfuscated by all of the other forces happening during the Great Resignation, but then picked up a clear visible signal again at the end of that, really reached a peak in the beginning of the pandemic. That's when we began to see it, not just anecdotally, but also in the survey research data as well. So one of the things I wanted

to do in this book was explore why. And there's a few different major answers to this. I tried to uncover an answer that I thought, was it being included as much in the conversation? So it's not a totalizing answer to why knowledge workers began burning out, but it was an important piece. And at the core of this explanation I looked at was a definition combined with a technology story. So the definition that was relevant here was the definition of productivity itself. So when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector in the mid-20th century, right, that the term knowledge work was coined in 1959, they had a problem, which was the definitions of productivity that had been dominant, starting in the agricultural sector, followed by the

industrial sector, these definitions of productivity weren't applying well to this new type of work. The definitions of productivity that were reigning supreme in agriculture and then later industrialization were quantitative, and they're a ratio base. We have an input, we have an output, we have a clearly defined production system in between. We have this many acres of land. We produce this many bushels of wheat. Here is the crop rotation system we're using. If we change that crop rotation system and that number goes up, that's a better crop rotation system.

So let's do that. Same thing in factories. We're producing this many model T's per paid labor hour. If we change our production system from the craft system to the continuous motion assembly line and that number jumps up by a factor of 10, oh, that must be a more productive way of building cars. So we had this quantitative notion of productivity, which reigns supreme since Adam Smith first pointed it out, did not apply to knowledge work. Because in knowledge work, there's not one thing we're producing.

I could be working on seven different things. Those could be different than what Jesse is working on at the same time, and they could be different than what I was working on a month ago. To make matters worse, from a measurement perspective, we don't have clearly defined production systems. In knowledge work, unlike other types of work, how you manage your time, how you organize your workload, how you collaborate with other people, or even decide what to do during the day, this is all individualized and obfuscated. How I manage my work is different than how you manage your work. There are no central levers to pull or buttons to press and see what

happens when we do that. It's much more ambiguous. It's much more haphazard than that. So the traditional economic notions of productivity did not fit well to knowledge work. And so what happened is we fell back on a heuristic. And I call this heuristic in the book pseudo-productivity. And the core of pseudo-productivity is saying, look, we will just use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. Right. So we'll gather in buildings. We'll make office buildings.

We'll work factory shifts. And this way we can just sort of see that people. people are working. And if we need to be more productive, come earlier, stay later. So pseudo-productivity was a band-date. It was an answer to this question of like, well, how do we even manage if all of these sort of super quantitative Adam Smithian style notions of productivity no longer apply at the Don Draper marketing firm in the 1960s? What do we do? Souter productivity became the emergent answer. So my argument in the first part of the book is that was okay until we got the front office IT revolution until we got network computers followed by mobile computing and laptops

followed by smartphones. And the combination of these two things is my argument played a major role in sparking the overload exhaustion and burnout crisis that began right around the same time that the front office IT revolution really hit its stride. Because when you have personal computers at your desk, one of the things that happens is the amount of possible work you could do greatly accelerates. There is a whole process. of despecialization where the diversity of different roles in these knowledge work firms were reduced because now any one person could do almost any job using their computer and so we could just have smaller numbers of people doing more things low friction digital communication now made

visible activity something that happened at a frenetic pace and a very fine grain now all day long I have to worry about visible activity I have to worry about an email that just arrived and making sure I respond to that in time so they see that I'm actually doing something. This is why when knowledge work went largely remote during the beginning of the pandemic, the sense that I'm busier than ever before became prominent because we have low friction digital communication, which was an even better way of demonstrating visible activity, but it's also exhausting. So this combination of the computer revolution in the office plus pseudo-productivity as this

heuristic that we were just using by default, I think that's what began to lead to the overload, which led to the exhaustion, also led to the sense of all I'm doing is sort of performing around my work, but don't have enough time to get to the work itself. So if that's one of the big problems, what do we do about it? We have to replace pseudo-productivity. We need a more sophisticated notion of what we mean by productivity and knowledge work. It's going to have to be a definition that's less about activity and more about quality. results produced over time. And I make a whole argument in the book that this alternative that I call slow productivity,

which I detail, could be more sustainable. It could be work that is more meaningful. And it could also be worked that produces lots of value and is profitable if you're a for-profit organization. The pseudo-productivity really was so poor of a choice that we have a lot of options to replace this with something better. All right. So that's sort of the theory at the beginning of the book.

In the second half of the book, I explore lots of ideas for how to actually put that theory into action. So this brings me to the decision I made that I wanted to discuss when I was writing this book that, I don't know, I think it's interesting. So I had this problem. Okay, part one is the theory. Part two is the advice. I want to give advice. What can we do? What can entrepreneurs do? What can people who work for a boss do? What can small teams do? I wanted to give concrete advice. But I wasn't happy with what the most common modes for this type of advice had become in books, I was just sort of, not that they're wrong, I'm just kind of bored with them. I would say like one of the dominant modes for giving this type of advice right now is I'm going to cite organizational psychology studies. Researchers from the

University of Michigan looked into this and they found paradoxically that actually like slowing down means you do better. I mean, the research is interesting, but I was sort of tired of building a lattice of advice on top of just organizational psychology reports. So I cite not to do that. Another common approach would be, well, let me just profile very specific people in knowledge work right now who are doing things differently. But there I kept running into a problem, which was the uncanny valley problem. Or if I come in and say, let me tell you about this particular knowledge worker, the fact that their job is very similar to yours but not quite yours actually can be an obstacle that's hard to get past. Like, that's too familiar. So now I can really notice the ways this job is different than mine.

And now I can't bring the advice out of that case study because I just know that feel too well and that job's not quite mine. So the decision I made, which was a little bit unusual, was why don't I go and look at knowledge workers from times past, didn't work in offices, and didn't work at computer screens, and whose working lives in the concrete details actually looked quite different in our jobs today. There are no uncanny valley. traditional knowledge workers, I even went back historically. We could talk about Mary Curie. We could talk about Galileo. We could talk more contemporaneously about non-office working knowledge workers like

Lynn Manuel Miranda, Mary Oliver. I talked about all of them in the book. My idea was, okay, well, take these traditional knowledge workers who had all of this flexibility to figure out an experiment, what works and what does it when you create value with your brain. And then we could isolate those principles. What did they discover? And we can't mimic how they work. and we'll get to that in a second.

But we can isolate these principles and then use those principles to generate very concrete advice for people who work in offices, for entrepreneurs, for people who work in small teams. So I was trying this sort of historical case approach in this book because I thought the principles could be more powerfully isolated if the context in which we were isolating them were novel, that we weren't going to get tripped up in the Young County Valley. So I want to tell one of those stories now. We're going to test out this method. I'm going to tell one of those stories now. We're going to extract a principle out of it, and then we'll try to get some concrete advice out of that principle. So we'll sort of do one example here. So one of the stories I really enjoyed looking at when I was working on this book was Jane Austen.

So I had always heard about Jane Austen this idea that she wrote her books in small scraps of time on small scraps of paper in between all this other stuff that was going on. it turns out this story, which is cited a lot, I tracked it down. It comes from a biography, and I have the quote here. It comes from a biography that her nephew, James, wrote 50 years after she died. Here's the actual quote. In his biography, James said about his aunt Jane. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away or covered with piece of blotting paper. There was between the front door and the offices a swing door which creaked when it was opened, but she objected to having this little

inconvenience remedy because it gave her notice when anyone was coming. This story got widely repeated. Here is, for example, Virginia Woolf in a room of one's own. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. You can find similar quotes throughout. I mean, I came across this story as recently as Mason Curry's 2013 book, Daily Rituals. The problem with it is it turns out James made that all up. That wasn't true. She didn't write on scraps of paper.

She didn't hide her writing when people came in. If you go back and read the more recent definitive biographies based on primary sources, a completely different picture arises. Jane, it turns out, was way too busy to write. And it really was a problem and a frustration in her life. They worked. She writes about these genteel houses where the visitors would come and give their calling cards. They lived on a parsonage. They were running a boy school out of their own house. She was milking cows and making jelly and jam for the borders in their house. They were very busy. And she was frustrated. She would write about this. I have all the stuff going on and I can't find time to write. This went on for decades, right? She wanted to write. She had these ideas for books that she had started. She could not.

finish them. What finally happened with Jane Austen is after her father died, her, her mom, her sister, and a family friend said, we're tapped out, we're tapped out from the social life, or tapped out from the work, we're just, we need to take a break. And they moved to a small cottage, Chawton Cottage, which was on some land that her brother inherited. They moved to the small cottage. They're like, we're out of the social scene. We're just going to sit here and just take a breather. Her mom started gardening, and this was considered very scandalous, because she wasn't a gardener. Why would a normal person garden? But they were done. They were done. This is when she was able to write books. So now that after almost everything was removed,

this busyness was removed, I'm going to read here from my book here, Austin for the first time and over a decade had gained real and meaningful space to think and work creatively. It's here working at a modest writing desk by a window overlooking the road, that she finally finishes the manuscripts for sense and sensibility and pride and prejudice before moving on to compose Mansfield Park and Emma. Austin's nephew may have popularized the story of an over-schedged Austin, prim and proper in her sitting room working in frenzied burst between incessant distractions, but the reality of her remarkable years at Chalton is clearly quite different. Far from glamorizing a surreptitious discipline

busyness, Austin's story, when told properly, seems to promote the opposite of this approach. Austin was not able to produce creatively during the crowded periods of her life. It was only when, through circumstance and contrivance, her obligations were greatly reduced that Austin was able, finally,

the complete her best work. She basically wrote all of her books in like a period of five years and then died. So it was sort of a tragic ending. So what do we take away from that? So how, that we have our chance. It's an interesting story. It's historical. It deals with productivity. How do we now apply that to my job working at a marketing firm or EPA or a professor? Well, clearly the takeaway message shouldn't be moved to a small cottage in rural England and just on your brother's land. Okay, that's not a story that most of us can replicate. So what we need to do is actually zoom out a little bit. What's the key principle here? Well, the key principle in that story is that when you have have too much going on, it can sometimes be hard to really do anything. When you're busy,

that doesn't necessarily aggregate to the things I really care about are getting done. Austin was busy, couldn't produce the things she wanted to produce. Well, it turns out this exact same effect is, of course, afflicting the modern knowledge worker because what's happening to the modern knowledge worker? Well, if we decompose it, here's what I think one of the big issues is. we say yes to a lot of things because knowledge work is ambiguous we don't have systematic ways of managing workloads and people just email us and we don't want to you know we want to show that we're pseudo productive and we say yes but what happens when we say yes to many times each of the things that we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead right once i say yes to this there's emails that have to be sent meetings that have to happen we have to talk about the work right so if i've said yes to many different things what's going to happen to all this administrative overhead, it's going to pile up in my day. And now the fraction of my day spent on administrative overhead versus actually working on the things that I agree to begins to grow and grow. And it gets to the point where your schedule is so fragmented with meetings and emails and chats that there's very little time to get anything done and you have to work late at night when the administrative overhead dies down.

And the whole thing can be very exhausting and make you feel like what am I really doing here. So there's a modern equivalent of Jane Austa being too busy. So now that we understand that's the issue, we can think about solutions. And the solutions clearly becomes, oh, we want to reduce the administrative overhead we're facing any one time. Well, one way to do that is to reduce the number of things that we're actively working on at any one time. So with less administrative overhead, we could actually finish those things faster and with less frustration. So if you're an entrepreneur, that could be relatively straightforward to do. Sequence things.

Work on this, then do this. Don't put them together. If you work for someone else, it gets trickier, but we have chapters in this book walking through how you can set up in a normal office job, a workload management system, where you just differentiate between, I'm actively working on this. This stuff is chewed up for me to work on. And as I finish these things, I pull in the next thing. And there's ways to do this.

It's very transparent. And what it means, though, is that you have greatly reduced the number of things generating overhead. It seems like an impossible dream, but then we find people who have tried this, and they actually get away with it. Their bosses say, the problem you're solving for me is taking this off my plate. I need the trust you can do it. Great. You have a system that works. I can watch it march along. I don't need to hear about Jane Austen. You're not a source of stress for me. Great. I've got to move on over here. So I use that just as a small case study, but what it captures is this historical method of we can actually start with the story that evokes a sort of intuition of something right or inspirational or interesting happening. We can isolate the principle.

Then we can use the principle as a loadstone to actually navigate modern work with all of the difficulties we face in these normal jobs and then use that to try to come up with ideas or tactics to escape the burden. of pseudo-productivity that we care about. So that's what I do in the book is a lot of principles isolate in that way, translating into a lot of tactical advice that can then be sort of sifted through and seeing what might work. So anyways, let me leave my deep dive there. As Jesse knows, I could talk about this book for hours. Jesse has literally heard me talk about this book for, and I'm not going to exaggerate here.

I would say probably 750 hours. Would that be? I know all the principles. He does know all the principles. He knows the principles. So here's what we're going to do. Let's switch over now. Imagine sound effect, transition music. Let's switch over the questions.

All right. I want to take a quick break from our live show to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. That's our friends at Cozy Earth. As I've talked about Offit on the show, my wife and I absolutely love the cozy Earth bedding. we have multiple pairs, so we never have to go without cozy earth sheets while one pair is being washed. We were actually just on a trip, and it was the number one thing we were looking forward to was actually getting home to our cozy earth sheets. They have other things as well. They have leisure wear.

They have other types of products. But man, the fabric that they make these sheets with, I absolutely love it. you know mother's day is coming up so maybe this is a good thing to keep in mind some cozy earth products i guarantee you whoever you buy these for they will like them all right so here's a good news we have an offer here you can get 35% off if you used a promo code cow at cozy earth dot com c-o-y-z earth dot com used a promo code cow you'll get 35% off all of their material or all their products also have a warranty. Let's see here. They have a 100-night sleep trial and 10-year warranty on all purchases. So if you don't like it, you can send it back, but you will love it.

We now have not just the sheets. My wife has some, I think, pajamas. I got a cozy earth. I don't what she would call it, like a sweatshirt, but made out of the same viscous bamboo material their sheets are made out of. I love that. I love that shirt. That's fantastic. So anyways, go over to cozy earth.com. Use the promo code cow. So after placing your order, oh, this would be useful. After placing your order, select podcast in the survey and select my show, and they'll know you came from me, and then they'll keep allowing, keep sponsoring me. So if you use that promo code, Cal, also select podcast after you order, select my show, cozy earth.com. If you don't have those sheets, you're sleeping on garbage.

I made up that tagline. That's not theirs. Also want to talk about our longtime sponsors and good friends at ExpressVPN. you need to be using a VPN. Here is why. When you are accessing websites or services, people can see what sites and services you're accessing. So even if the content of your packets,

if I'll use the technical term, is encrypted, the header is not. So if I'm in a coffee shop browsing the web wirelessly with my laptop, anyone there with the right software can see what sites and services I'm talking to. If I'm at home browsing the web or watching something, my internet service provider can see exactly what sites and services I'm talking to,

and they can sell that data to advertisers, and you better believe they do that. VPN protects you from that prying. The way it works is as follows. Instead of directly connecting to a site or service, you take that request, you encrypt it, and you send it to a VPN server. The VPN server then unencrypts to request, talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response that sends it back to you. So as far as anyone who is snooping on your communication knows, you're talking to a VPN server.

They have no idea what site or service you're ultimately trying to talk to. You gain back your privacy. If you're going to use a VPN, use the one that I believe to be the best in the business, which is ExpressVPN. Their software makes it very simple. You just turn it on. It runs in the background automatically. You use your apps and your web browsers, just like normal. This all happens in the background.

They have huge amount of bandwidth and servers all around the world so you can get blazily fast speeds so you're getting the privacy without any performance hit. It works on everything you use to use the internet. You can even get this running on your router, your wireless router at home, to automatically protect just any device connected to it. So ExpressVPN has really got this figured out.

All right, so protect your, be smart, protect your privacy online at ExpressVPN.com. slash deep. Don't forget to use my link at expressvpn.com slash deep to get an extra three months of express VPN for free. That's expressvpn.com slash deep. All right, let's get back to the live show at people's book. The way we're going to do this is Jesse's going to come to you. He's going to double microphone you. It's going to seem like a press conference. But that's because we have hard-hitting questions for you. No, one mic is going to amplify you and one mic is going to record you. Just know if you ask a question, it is going to go up potentially on a podcast. A lot of people will hear,

so no social security numbers. Jesse, I'll let you track. Thank you, Jesse. Perfect. Thank you, Cal's. Longtime fan, also at Tacoma Parker. So, you know, love the hometown vibes. I have two questions. I hope that's okay. So the first one is, in full transparency, I work at LinkedIn. I am a big follower of digital minimalism. And I see you. kind of almost like a pioneer rebel, right, against our modern work system. And I do feel like your voice is missing on the LinkedIn platform. I see some people. Cue for laughter.

I'm not signing up for LinkedIn. No, is that? But, but, and, and I know why, right? I've read digital minimalism. These are algorithmically curated, you know, attention grabbing machines. they're excellent at it. I see your YouTube videos, and I've seen the Mr. Beastification of your thumbnails, right? I've seen it. We don't do our thumbnails. Oh, you don't, oh, someone else doesn't. Got it, got it. So I do see you playing the YouTube game. So I guess my question was like,

the YouTube game is being played, right? And I'm just curious, like, why not LinkedIn, right? Yeah. So, so. I'm still not signing up for a late time. Dang, okay. I tried. Number two, listen to all your episodes. First one, I'm a new father, just had my second daughter two weeks ago. And there was, in your first episode, there was a question about busy parents, right? And essentially, the takeaway was leave your house messy. That's okay.

I'd love more resources, just some deeper answers on that. Yeah. All right, two good questions. All right, so we'll do you two first. So here's our YouTube strategy. So to us, and by us, I mean Jesse and I, so we thought about YouTube, I think video is important. It's going to be the future of podcasting. YouTube's kind of a weird place.

But there's an audience on YouTube. So what we've been told, the audience on YouTube is different than the audience listening to the podcast. So it's a new audience, right? It's not YouTube audiences do not carry over to, for example, podcast lists. It's a younger audience, for example. My audience, I like younger people. So we have a YouTube consultant, Jeremy, and the way we work is we say, look, we're going to, we just record our podcast.

We recorded on video. He says, I will put titles and thumbnails on them. They're crazy stuff, right? Never stuff I'd think to do. And he said, this is how it works is this, the way young people use YouTube is like they, it recommends things or something. And you've got to get in front of their eyes so they can know what you're doing. He's like, just trust me, we'll do thumbnails and titles.

They're pretty crazy. But what I try to do is not, I don't even want to know what's going on over there. Like whenever I glance, YouTube, I don't like the YouTube algorithm. If I pay too much attention to YouTube and let's say like my goal was to try to get YouTube views up, here's what I would have to do. Every one of my episodes, according to the data, should be about notebooks or why social media is bad. Because those get a lot of views. So if I was like being driven, if YouTube was my primary platform, God forbid,

there'd be a lot of like very fancy notebook discussion. Fortunately, we see the podcast as our platform. And so we give him our podcast to say, you can put that out there. But we hope it doesn't go back the other way. LinkedIn. Okay, so the other question, I want to see parents. By the way, Reid Hoffman, he blurbed one of my books. I feel like I'm close with Reed Hoffman.

So we're okay. I think that's okay. I agree. I think parenting of productivity is a fantastic space. I think there's room there for books just on that. The thing is, I need to read that book. I don't yet feel qualified to write that book. So I'm hoping someone who has made it through to the other side of parenting and figuring out, like, how do you run a household?

I mean, Jesse, you know, well, occasionally have these episodes where I'll bring on a guest expert and be like, just teach us about, like, how do you run a family in a household, you know, how does those systems work? Those are just for me, those episodes. Yeah. We pretend like the audience is interested. So I agree. It's a fascinating topic. But I don't feel like I'm the expert on that yet. Excellent.

All right. Hi, Cal, I'm Clara Fang and I live in Germantown, Maryland. Love your work. I think one thing that sticks with me and I repeat to myself is your advice to do less, do fewer things and do them well. And I find that so challenging in this society time where we're just told to do more and more. And no matter how much you're already doing, you can still do more. I see you do quite a lot. I don't know how you do all the things that you do. But I'll just use my life as an example. I don't have kids even. I would be even busier if I did. But, you know, I'm running a consulting company. I'm working with a environmental racial equity nonprofit organization that has where I'm playing all the roles.

Like I'm the only staff person. So I do everything. And then and then there are so many committees to be on, you know, so you have to like be on the steering committee of this other. organization on the board of this other organization. So it just seems like it proliferates. And it's hard to figure out how do you do less things when everything seems important. And plus, like I also try to write and like Jane Austen just not finding the time and don't know how you find the time to write so much. I have ideas for books. I've been writing poetry since I was 20. but you know it just seems like the time to do that gets less and less to say get older yeah oh i mean it is it is the number one problem right now i would say it's it's

like my number one thing i'm constantly fighting in my own life like an important thing to know about this book is it's in part response to my audience we're burning out we got to do something about this also part in response to me just in during my 40s and me like okay i got to tighten up the ship right almost all of my books have that reality to it, right? If you look at So Good They Can't Ignore You, a book about how do you cultivate careers you love? That's what I was going on the job market for the first time. Deep work I wrote as I was trying to get tenure at Georgetown. So I was like, okay, how do you do this well? You know, digital minimalism. I didn't have much of a problem with my phone. World Without Email was after I had tenure and all the service obligations fell on me. And I was like, why am I on email so much. There's a lot of, I'm redefining self-help in a much more literal way, I guess, when I think about working on these books. I'll mention a few things I do with mixed success in my own life, and then maybe some of that will be useful. One thing I try to do is sequencing, right?

So there's a difference between doing a lot of things over a decade versus doing a lot of things on Tuesday, right? So, like, in my own life, I sequence. Like, I'm in book tour mode right now, so I'm not doing other things. I'm not writing a book right now. I'm not working on, like, a major academic project. there's periods of my life when I'm really all in on book writing. But like I'm not going on podcast. I say yes to a lot fewer of sort of like service obligations. There's periods where it's like department building periods. Okay, this is like just working on, I'm the director of this at my department. And like I'm giving that my attention right now. I'll often stack my classes, for example. I'm teaching multiple, all of my classes in this semester and none in that semester. So in this semester, all I can be focused on is like, I want to be a good teacher. And then in this semester, I can be writing a book

or working on, you know, an article. So that type of thing has helped. The sort of sequencing helps. Over time, as different things finish, you get a lot of things that rack up. And then there's a, there's a thing, there's a sort of a temporal collapse that happens when you hear about, oh, this person did these five things. In your mind, you collapse and imagine those things all being worked on simultaneously. But I try to sequence to a degree. I also try to be really explicit about workload management. Like one of the big issues with overload, especially in sort of the types of knowledge work type jobs, which are much less very strictly defined, is we don't have set philosophies

for how do we keep track of what we're working on and determine how much we should be working on. We don't have these agreed upon ways of doing this. Other fields do. Like if you're a computer programmer, they have these systems already where you really should only be working on one thing at a time and it's on a board and the other things go over here and we move the index cards around like they really have thought about that but we don't do this and a lot of other knowledge work jobs and I try to do it and I try to do it with things like quotas so with quotas there might be a this type of thing is important for me to do like paper reviews

but the number of potential paper reviews I'm going to be asked to do is too many for me to do so I need to determine in advance I do five of them per semester like have a quota so it's like I'm doing this important thing but I'm trying to think in advance. advance, how much of that am I going to do? Same thing with sort of involvements with activities, boards and committees, like outside of work. These are important. I want to do them. But why don't I say I do two of them, right? So just starting to think through what is the load that I want to do. That matters. So that helps as well. And then finally, this is the idea I mentioned briefly, but really having a dual category way of thinking about commitments, like the things I've said

yes to, dividing them between I'm actively working on these two and these tin I'm waiting to work on. And as I finish something here, you bring the next thing in from the list of things you're waiting on, you still have agreed to do these things. But then if someone involved to one of these things, like, hey, let's check in on this or whatever. You can say like, oh, yeah, it's not on my active list, but it's moving towards it. And I can actually show you exactly where it is. So the idea is to prevent everything you've agreed from concurrently generating overhead and trying to isolate the overhead to the small number of things that are actually working on. You throw all of these ideas at it.

You still have too much to do. But at least you feel like there's a bit of a handle around it. So hopefully that's helpful. The other thing I'll say is I just cycle on this. And I end up having too much going on. And then I get overloaded. And then I take everything off my plate. And then I get in trouble.

And then I bring stuff back on. So we all struggle with it. I struggle with it more than anything else. But anyway, it's a good question. Yeah, thank you. Hi, Cal. My name's Allison. I am a burned out government lawyer at EPA, actually. I kind of have a question about the intersection between deep work and slow productivity. I time block my day. I do my flow state in the morning, just like you say and everything. I have trouble getting out of the flow state. And we can't completely eliminate our administrative overhead, especially in government. And so I find myself in the afternoon. spacing out when I'm supposed to be doing my meetings and stuff because my brain is still rubrics cubing what I was working on that morning. Is that a feature or a bug? And if it is a bug,

how can I, you know, I've tried taking walks between my time blocks, but I can't get out of the flow state. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's a very common problem. It's a good question. It's a very common problem. the main thing that helps there is actually the ritual you have for completing the deep work block, right? So if you're good about, okay, I'm capturing everything I did. Here's where, here, I call a recording state in my own practice. Here's where I was. Here's what I'm going to be working on next. Like here's the next thing I have to figure out.

Sometimes this takes up to 20 minutes just to deactivate working on something that's cognitively demanding. that helps because your mind then trust. We got everything down, right? It's here. Here's to stay where we left off. Here's what we're going to work on next. Here's what we need to know about it. You know, Hemingway used to do this famously with his writing.

He would leave it out of a place where he knew exactly, he knew where to pick it up next time. He didn't like to finish his writing at the end of a chapter for the day. He liked the idea of, okay, I know exactly where I'm going to pick it up the next day so I can just get started. So a lot of people think about these shutdown routines. I have to do that. I have to record all the state about what I'm working on. That helps.

It's still hard. So then what I have to do is have a way to dump the ideas that pop up uninvited that are relevant to what you're working on. I keep a plain text document open on my computer. It's called working memory. And I just dropped stuff into that. And then at the end of the day, when I shut down my day, I can deal with it. Like, what do I want to do with this text? So I just have a place that like when I'm in the middle of trying to do something else, my mind's like, but what about this? I can just get it out of my mind right away. But what you're talking about is it's very, very common. Yeah, it's a good question, though. I've gone in the back.

Hello. My name is Breyal Harbin. I'm a fellow faculty member and I'm saying hello and thank you on behalf of myself. And also I have a writing group of there about 20 of us across the country who are all black women who are faculty members at universities across the country. And we all have read Deep Work. And I'm about to go up to for tenure next year. And part of how I'm going to get through it has been through Deep Work. So thank you so much for that. I read slow productivity and we are actually going to talk about it tomorrow in our group. And one thing that stuck out for me is, one, I didn't know as much about Jewel as you, as you told me a lot about what I know about Jewel. Jewel is an interesting story. I did know 5% of what you wrote. And so one of the things that stuck out to me was so thinking about the principle of obsessing over quality and the story of Jewel and how. how, you know, she didn't take the million dollar bonus, sign on bonus, instead perfected her craft. But in that narrative, the story that you told, she ultimately was more interested in

the art than in the fandom and the superstardom. At the same time that I was reading your book, I was also listening to Beyonce's Cowboy Carter. And so I was thinking a lot about how that anecdote would have been different if you were talking about Beyonce instead of Jewel. If you are an artist or creator of someone who doesn't want just a modest career, you actually want to break boundaries and you want to pioneer in your fields. How do you manage, so you have given us the piece about obsessing over quality, but how you feel about it when your quality product is received differently and you keep going and you remain productive, even when people might not receive it as you have created it. So I wondered if you could

talk a little bit about more of that emotional affective component of that. Yeah, it's a fantastic question. I mean, first of all, I just want to mention, I'm not surprised that the group was reading deep work, or you find residents of that as you come up to tenure, because I wrote that book as I was worried a lot about tenure. So I'm like secretly a book about how do I get tenure? professors really resonate with that book. I don't think it's not a coincidence. It's a fantastic question, Beyonce and how we compare that with Jewel. So for people who very briefly, the story there was that Jewel had this super rapid assent, right?

She was living out of her car in San Diego and just doing these concerts at a coffee shop. She just met the owner of this coffee shop. The coffee shop was about to go out of business. She's like, let's just try this. I'm going to do these concerts here. And it just clicked. right and the crowd did this exponential doubling thing you know it's two people than four people and within six months it was record executives were flying her around and they one of them put

a million dollars on the table um and she turned out the million dollar bonus right so what was going on there is that her assent was so fast that she realized she didn't yet she hadn't polished the performing skills to where it needed to be to have a successful enough album out of the gate to make back that million dollars fast enough that they wouldn't drop her. She knew, okay, I have to work on this craft because she looked it up and she realized they're not just giving me a million dollars. It's an advance on royalties. It's basically a loan. And I'm going to have to record an album fast and it has to be a hit right away. And I don't think I'm going to be able to do that because six months ago, you know, I wasn't even performing professionally. So she instead took a, she said, don't give me a big signing

bonus. She very cleverly got more back in, though, which ended up being worth a lot of money, so that she would have time on the label to perform and get better, to re-record songs to try to find her voice. And she had that time, and then she got good enough that, when she did take off finally, she was ready to take off. Beyonce, now I don't know Beyonce's story very well, but I think Beyonce, by the time, you know, she was really making her artistic moves,

she had this very, like a much longer sort of apprenticeship in some sense, right? I mean, she had super talented and performing in the group, the multi-singer group, Dusty's Child. She got, she had a lot of time to get really good. Like, she was very, very good. And she was working, she was performing at a high level from like a pretty young age and got really good and knew it. So I sort of think about when she went solo, when she made that move, it was from a position

of, I really got this. Like, I've been doing this. I've been on the road. I know how this works. I can tell I'm really talented. I know how I've figured out what I'm going to do. I have the experience for it. And so, Jule would say, like, once she got better, that's sort of what she did.

She just decided what did she want to do? And then she started making those sort of those decisions. So, I mean, I don't know if you buy this or not, but I would say that's maybe a shared feature of both of those stories. It's this idea of developing craft opens up opportunities to do all these, like, really interesting or effective or important things. and Jewel just didn't, she didn't get the apprenticeship, the link, the apprenticeship before suddenly she had the attention of the recording industry on her. So like her, I guess her great insight was to realize that and say, look, I kind of need another year here before I even know how to be on stage. The real lesson here is that my idea to make my next book a advice from the life of Beyonce, maybe. I keep pitching that to my publisher. They don't want me to write that.

Hi, Cal, thanks for what you do. I'm C.J. Overley, fellow Hoya, and a project manager, where in my role, I typically have three to five large, long-term projects going at one time. These are multi-year type of projects, so they're throwing off smaller projects. And I was hoping, sort of you could talk a little bit about applying some of the principles in that kind of a setting where it's a little more challenging. So, for example, trying to make my workload more visible, right, externally as you talk about. Well, the project team on Project A might not care so much about the workload being generated by Project B, right, and vice versa. So making that visible to them may or may not be super relevant. But, of course, it's part of the overall macro picture from where I sit.

Or, you know, another example would be thinking about. how in that setting you, you know, pick top three priorities when you sort of have to have three per project and they all kind of have to keep moving over the course of a given week. So it makes doing things sequentially a little bit more challenging. Yeah. Some examples. That's a good scenario because it gives us some interesting things to look at. In that scenario, I was thinking out loud here, but in that scenario where you have more of a

long-term engagement with these groups, like a bunch of different priorities are going to get spun up, but we're going to be working together. These are all being spun out of the same major objective. This might be a place where actually the book that's closest to you on the stand there, a world without email, this book actually might have specifically relevant things to say here, right? Because in a world without email, what it focuses on is if you have the time and space to actually think about it, and when you have long-term projects, this is easier. It's about how do you craft sort of collaboration protocols for whatever it is you're working on in these long-term projects to reduce the cognitive footprint. And the main metric in that book, the key idea there

is like you want to figure out how to collaborate with your long-term collaborators in a way that minimizes unscheduled messages that require responses. Like so what you're trying to minimize is having to keep switching your attention back and forth. I have to be on four Slack channels for four projects and we're going back and forth. So it documents to neuroscience. why our brains can't do this well. Trying to switch back and forth briefly between a lot of projects is cognitively exhausting and you run out of steam by like two in the afternoon. We all know the effect where you're in here, you're trying to clean out your inbox

and you just eventually freeze. And then you start looking for like really easy to answer emails. It's because your brain is exhausted. It can't switch context that quickly, right? So that book is about put in place collaboration protocols. And it's all sorts of things about here's like the process by how we do this. It's office hours. It's, you know, this is, we have a particular, like, an email address for a project instead

of using individual people's email addresses, all sorts of ideas. And those can all work really well. The relationship between that book and this book is that a lot of people who read that book said, I wish I could do this, but I have so many things going on. I don't have any time to actually sit down and talk to people and say, what are our protocols are going to be. I'm just drowning in all the stuff I said yes to. So if you have a smaller number of very long-term projects, it's probably.

probably worth taking the time to say, how are we going to actually collaborate when we work on these? And it's like a pain and it's friction. And people want to just rock and roll on their slack or whatever. But it's very, very worth it if you're going to be working for more than a couple weeks with people. So that, I think that book might have a lot of useful things for your issue right here. Yeah, it's an interesting study. Double mics hard. It's weird, right? Yeah. But I just wanted to say thank you for the books you write in the podcast as well. I've been listening to it since I came back from parental leave and it's a great just weekly reminder like keep family and work and bounce so thank you for

that more of a writing question the kind of the getting things done first question but when you're writing these books do you come up with your framework first and then find all these great examples or you kind of collecting all these examples as you go along and then you're forming that framework so i think just the the number and variety of examples is so it's circular it's a good question so so how do i to come with the principles first or do I come up with the examples first? Typically, I'm drawing from examples I've already come across because I'm always reading and encountering and filing things away. Out of those begins to emerge sort of fledgling versions of the principles. Then I go seeking specifically examples to further try to understand what's going on.

It's like if you did a deep dive into the concept of slow productivity, you start to see inklings of it show up 2020, 2020, 2021. start to see inklings of it. I think I used a term like this in a blog post where I had read about Galileo and about like, wow, he really took a long time to do the stuff we think about him being famous for doing. Like, he sort of slowed down. And then I had a New Yorker essay that was, I used a title, I guess, time to embrace slow productivity. But it was really just talking about workload management. Like just that, I had a couple examples there I was playing with. The Jewel, I had definitely gone on a deep dive and jewel before.

That example was just back there, and I was sort of trying to figure out what that meant. So it's very circular. So they don't come ex-Nilo, right? It's not just, I just have these ideas for three principles. They come out of, like, things I've been looking at. But then as I seek out many more examples, that's when I refine them. And so you kind of get that circular refinement. Yeah.

And the one thing I always tell people is, I spend, frameworks are hard, and often I'll spend years thinking about them. you know, it takes me about a year or like eight months to write a book, but often it's like two or three years of kind of playing with a concept, testing it on the podcast, trying to see, like, is this resonating, testing it in my New Yorker pieces, like trying to see if it's resonating or not before. So it could really take me years before I feel like something is ready to the capture. Yeah, it's an interesting process. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the team element of this and how, how to put these practices and principles into play in the context of a team where it might be that

everyone says yes, we need collaborative agreements. And then maybe there's a little bit of motivation to have that first conversation, but it is a very tangly process. And I'm wondering if you can share some insight on how to keep moving that process forward and to get it to a place where you close the loop and actually start implementing the practices and principles on a team, whether it's sequencing throughout a day or a week, and maybe particularly in the context of a remote or hybrid team stretched across many time zones. Yeah. Yeah.

So with teams, there's a couple things that can help, but they're all built around the same idea of like get a win. Like once there's one win, like we did this, we all really love this. Now like the floodgates are open. Like, all right, let's have like, let's get together. What are we going to do next? And like people, so it's all about breaking that barrier to the first intentional change that moves you away from the term I use for the standard collaboration workflow is hyperactive hive bind. So like the default is just we'll figure things out on the fly with ad hoc communication. So like when you get your first intentional practice that everyone agrees on that's not a step away from that, it makes people really happy.

Right. And then like a lot of other things can follow. So there's a couple, I'll give you two options for like potential first things to try. One that I think I profile a knowledge work team doing this in the book is this idea of let's have a difference between stuff the team agreed to do and what individuals are doing. Right. So instead of just having everything that needs to be done has been just distributed among people kind of informally. Like I guess I'm working on this now because you emailed me and you're working on this. Have a central place where like when something needs to be done or we think.

it needs to be done, this is where it goes. And the example in the book, they actually were pinning these things on a wall. They had a wall where their team met. This was at the Brut Institute in Cambridge. And they just put on an index card, put it on the wall. Like, oh, we should do this. We should do this? Like if someone, if something came up, you'd have to just send a CCD email, like, hey, what do you all think about this? Which is like, oh, my God, like, do I answer this? Like, yes. I mean, yeah, I hate that. Put it on the wall, right? Then there's, like, what each person's working on. And he made that separate. And they put that on the wall as well. Like, okay, here's like the things I'm working on right now.

Oh, I finished this thing. Let's look at this big pile. Like, what should I do next? Like, what do we think about this? Like, over time, it was like a good way of trying to see, like, what should we really be working on or not. It got rid of that anxiety of like, whatever happened to this thing and I have to email each other.

But it's significantly reduced administrative overhead because individuals were only working on a small number of these things at a time, right? So I've seen that one work because it's pretty clear. It's like we have a Trello board and it's like, anyone can add to it or we have like a Google doc, like let's work on this, let's work on that. And like here's the main things I'm working on. So that could be a really big win

because that feeling of reduced administrative overhead can be really good. Another thing that I've seen work for inducing changes, this actually comes from my book, Deep Work. But then I mentioned it as an aside and then lots of people tried it. And then they come back and tell me, and it was surprisingly effective.

Was this idea which, this was more for working for bosses, but could work for teams as well. was measuring, right? So, like, in deep work, there's this idea of talking to your team or talking to your boss and saying, okay, like, for my role, what do you think the optimal ratio, for example, like, focused work and administrative work would be? For my role, it's going to be different for different roles.

But, like, what ratio is going to, like, produce the most value for us, right? And you get a number, 50, 50, whatever, two to three, whatever it's going to be. And then you measure, and then you come back, like, oh, like, we're kind of way off. of that, like, what can we do to get the ratio where we agreed was going to produce more value? This turned out to be like a wonder drug for a lot of people where they were, person after person would tell me that they were convinced that the way they worked, like, we're always on Slack, you have to answer everything right away. This was entrenched.

This could never change. And they did this exercise. And the boss, the team lead was like, oh, yeah. So why don't we just, no meetings or emails in the morning? No, like just drastic changes seemingly out of nowhere because there's like a number they're working at and it's positive. It's framing it like how do I produce more value and not like will you stop bothering me or whatever. So those two are I think good first steps.

Centralizing teamwork and measurement. Like, okay, what should we be trying to do? Oh, we're not there. Like what ideas do we have to actually like change this number? And that actually can spur a lot more flexibility and innovation than people often expect. Yeah, it's a very good question. Thank you. Hi, Kyle.

I'm also a big fan. So the Zoom Apocalypse has been my life working remotely for tech startups since the pandemic. And so my question is, given that humans are bad at estimating knowledge work or mental tasks, and two, we can't apply assembly line metrics to knowledge work. And three, executives and managers won't like hearing, oh, I put three hours of deep work into it as a success metric. Like, how can we measure progress when using slow productivity? Yeah. All right, good question.

So Zoom Apocalypse, for those who don't know, it talked about in the book where when all knowledge workers went remote during the pandemic, we had this problem where the efficiency of collaboration got suddenly much worse because we lost all of the, let me grab you for five minutes and we'll figure this out. And everything got turned to the Zoom meetings or teams meetings. but the smallest granularity that people could easily stretch a meeting on their calendar was 30 minutes. So everything needed a 30 minute meeting. And I began to hear from people that were saying, you know, I've eight hours back to back.

Like we had this question on the show, I think, Jesse, where like the question was literally, when do I go to the bathroom cow? Because like I have these eight hours of meetings with no, there's no, like 20 minute breaks in there or anything like that. So like that was the Zoom apocalypse. I mean, a couple things. One, you'd be surprised about, especially the tech sector, if you say I got three hours of deep work done. that might be happier about that than you think. You know, that term, that term is in Microsoft Outlook somewhere.

There's some mode where they say this is for Jeep work. Yeah, so you're basically being over-meaded. So there's a couple things to do I talk about in the book, right? So like, these are little, they're not sneaky, but I think they're kind of clever heuristics. A good one is the one for you, one for me, heuristic, right? So, like, if you're in a business, it lives and dies by the calendar. they have to have a meeting, your calendar is shared, like, let's find a time or like whatever. You can have a metric of every time I schedule a meeting, I find an equivalent amount of time that

week, and I block it off for a meeting with myself. And then another person schedules a meeting. I find an equivalent amount of time somewhere else, and I block that off, right? It preserves flexibility in meeting scheduling. So, like, in a heavy meeting culture, it's hard to have rigid rules like, I don't meet in the morning or I don't meet on Monday and Fridays because it's, you know, you keep getting these situations, we're like, no, that's the only time that works. So you're not taking anything off the table, but you're just artificially filling your calendar

faster than it was otherwise filling. And so if you do a one for you, one for me, you're going to end up with like a 50-50 ratio of meetings, but you can tune that, right? If it's a heavy meeting role, it could be, if I put two hours in meetings, I put one hour of time for me. Or you could go the other way if you're like in a heavy development role or something. Every hour of meeting, I find two hours. And so you just use a calendar that's your enemy.

It can become in that scenario in some sense, your, you're, you're, you're, you're, savior as well. Or you can do the deep to shallow work ratio method. I mean, a lot of the examples I heard were from tech companies where the people said, this is just a culture. Like, you got to just be responsive. You got to just jump on calls or whatever. And they were surprised, like when they had this conversation. So what is the right ratio of concentrated work and collaboration, like talking about work? Like, what's the right ratio for my job? Time and again, people would report. They're talking to their lead or their CEO or what have you. And they immediately see in the room would be ridiculous. to say, no, I want you like 100% doing talking,

and clap meetings and emails or whatever, right? In the room, it seems like it doesn't make sense. So they sort of like, okay, we have to figure out some ratio that makes sense, like maybe half and half. That's like typically what they say. And then you have this number to measure. And like again, and again, people would come back and the tech leader, the CEO's like, all right, well, I mean, I guess we're not hitting this 50-50.

I guess it does make sense. Like, you shouldn't be spending all your time in meetings. Okay, great. These two hours and these two hours, I'll just tell your team, you're unavailable or whatever, right? So don't, uh, don't be too pessimistic about that ratio technique working because I keep getting notes from people who are surprised when they're, they're convinced it wasn't going to work. But mainly I just feel your pain because, like, a lot of people got out of the Zoom apocalypse because they were like uncle and people got tired of it,

but there are people still stuck in like, well, everything has to be a meeting. And it's my whole calendar's available to hell it's full. It's a, it really is a kind of deranging state because is like, I'm not working. All I can do is talk about the work, but when do we do the work? I mean, it's part of what made what's going on so frustrating for people. So there's a lot of empathy coming from over here. All right, let's take another quick break to talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible. That's our friends at Element, L MNT.

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There's no junk in here. It's just the stuff I need to add to the water to make sure that I get hydrated. They've got a lot of cool flavors fan favorites like citrus salt or raspberry salt, but they also have spicy flavors like mango chili. You can actually mix. I've heard about this. Their flavor chocolate salt tastes good if you mix it into a morning coffee. I'll tell you this. I won't name names.

but I've been on a podcast tour I was recently to promote my new book and I can tell you multiple podcasters who promote this element on their podcast are drinking it right there when I'm there. This is like one of these products that we all use. So I love Element, no sugar, no dodginess. We got an offer for you.

If you go to drink element.com slash deep, drinklmn.t.com slash deep. If you do that slash deep, you will get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase. So you buy a drink mix purchase. They'll send you a free sample pack so you can try out the other flavors as well. That's drinkelement.com slash deep.

I also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist. Oh, Blinkist. They just added actually the slow productivity blink to the Blinkist app. So I'm excited about that. So what is Blinkist? It's an app that gives you over 6,500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best in class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology, and more on the go and get entertained at the same time.

The way I use Blinkist is the triage potential book purchases. Like, ooh, I'm interested in this topic. Okay, here's a couple books on this topic. Let me listen to the Blinks. I like to listen to them. Jesse likes to read them. Whatever. It's a short summer.

Let me listen to the blinks and get a sense of the main ideas from the book. This really gives me the information I need to say, I get what this book's about. I don't need to read 250 pages. Oh, this book is going somewhere interesting. Let me buy that one. So I use Blinkist as a triage mechanism. Other people use it otherwise.

I know some people who just use it like a pod. It's just entertaining. It's like a really awesome podcast, right? Any author you want to be a guest on a podcast, you can just listen to the blink summary of their book and sort of get the main ideas of the book. And so some people just use it for straight up entertainment. Anyways, I love it.

Some people use it to actually learn things. I kind of want to know about crypto, but I don't want to read a lot of books. I'll listen to Five Blinks, and I'll know enough to be conversational. It's a great tool, a great accompaniment to those who are interested in their reading life. Here's another cool thing to have going on right now called Blinkus Connect. This allows you to... How does this work? Okay, you can give another person unlimited access to your account for free, so it's basically a two-for-one deal.

like Blinkist, you can bring someone else into the Blinkist fold. They mentioned they just released the blink on my new book, Slow Productivity, and it's great. So I'll say that's my favorite blink on the platform right now. So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial and get 40% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 40% off in a seven-day

free trial. That's blinkets.com slash deep. And remember, now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkets Connect to share your premium account. You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right, let's get back to the live show at People's Books. Hi, Roy from Berkeley, California, a longtime fan of your stuff. I understand the first principle about doing less.

It's not easy to do, but I get that. I should also add I'm a recovering perfectionist. where I struggle sometimes as I see a conflict between working at a natural pace and obsessing over quality, especially because I've seen some of the techniques you recommended for obsessing over quality, you know, like get an investor, work less, you know, but these sort of strike me as an external forcing function. That might conflict with me working at my own pace. Also like, you know, when you were doing tenure, you have an external deadline, right? So you may want to do insights that take you 10 years, but 10 years are going to say, oh, you got five, right?

So how do you address that sort of conflict between those two principles? Yeah, it's a good question. So these stakes in the ground, like, okay, someone is, I told someone this is coming. Or like the example in the book was talking about the Beatles and Sergeant Pepper, where they released a single. So like, okay, we kind of have to, we have time. We're taking a lot more time than before, but we kind of have to finish this. because otherwise the single is going to go stale, that's all about walking that tight rope between perfectionism and like really caring about craft because perfectionism is a real

issue and that's one of the ways you can sort of get around it. So working at a natural pace has a couple of components. One is variation in intensity. So don't try to be all on all intensity every day all year round. Right. So that's fine. That's compatible with, you know, stakes in the ground. And then the second piece is taking longer, right? Don't, don't try to rush work. We see this time and again when we look at people who really care about craft that they spend, they take their time on things, right? They sort of, they don't try to do it the fastest possible way. The stakes in the ground is making sure that time doesn't become forever time, right? So it's like, that's the protection against the like, look, slow down, don't try to rush everything, be okay

to have some quieter periods and some hard-to-work periods. You know, how do you have that plus a commitment to craft and not just say, look, my novel will be done next year and you say that for the next 50 years. And so that seems to be these type of stakes in the ground committing the people. I'm going to do this. I took on money. Whatever it is. The stakes in the ground seem to be the best way we have of like walking that tight world between them. Yeah, it's a very good question. Also, it was an excuse. I really went deep on the Beatles. That was like a fun part of the book as well. So Nick Beck's, I've been a personal trainer for about seven years, actually recent listener to the podcast as well, so not too much involved, but I'm loving everything that I'm hearing. But seven years in personal training, I've basically been on the ground listening to everybody in the corporate life struggling, and I'm pretty much committed to kind of providing some solutions towards that. So me and a lot of partners have been working towards building a corporate wellness solution. company. And we're struggling to try and vocalize basically all of these principles to hire up the chain because a lot of individuals that are working lower down the chain, they want this. You know, they're desperate for it. But the people hire up the chain are all

about just trying to get the outcome. So, yeah, how do we do that? It's a really hard challenge. And it's one that I'm relatively nihilistic about, right? Like a big decision I made in this book was to focus mainly on the individual. Because I've tried the focus higher up before. It's very difficult, especially like mid to large size organizations. It's very difficult to get drastic changes in the way work unfolds coming from the top down. And there's whole theories about why this is. There's this book I keep talking about, Alfred Chandler's book, The Visible Hand.

It's from the 1970s as an economic historian won a bunch of prizes, Pulitzer National Book Award. But he talks about the rise of the big organization. And one of his ideas in this book is as we switched over to big organizations, which really didn't exist pre-railroads for the most part, as we switched over to big organizations with many layers of management, it's really a new type of capitalism that he calls managerial capitalism. And one of the things that characterizes managerial capitalism is the way that the organizations internally operate, like the way like the managers operate internally, are

relatively buffeted from market signals. So like it's fine for them to stay ossified in a way of organizing worked. It's like not a really good way of working. When they're big enough, the signals that they begin optimizing for more like things like stability, like risk reduction, I don't want to lose my position in the C-suite or as a high-level manager, etc. And I really think that's a strong force that's preserving a lot of these ways we work that's just objectively terrible way to take human brains and produce value, right? It's like running a car factory, but you know, you have all like the lights off to save money and people are putting steering wheels where the wheels are supposed to go. It, you know, it doesn't really make sense. But in

these like large organizations where things are more ambiguous, I've talked to a lot of C-suite people. I've talked to a lot of well-known CEOs. It's really difficult to try to affect that change. So I'm with this, I went back to what can you do as the individual to begin to integrate some of these principles into your life or your team's life in a way that you can make things much better, knowing that that's much easier than getting, you know, the person 10 levels up to say we're going to get rid of email. Yes, it's a, it could be frustrating. The knowledge work is a weird space. Hi, my name's Josh and Perry. I'm a local to this area. I followed you through all your podcasting friends, Ryan Holliday, Scott Young, all those people. But my question is, so your

con bond system. I implemented it like in my work because I work in cybersecurity and we have a research project. So like we have the needs doing column, the in progress and the finished, right?

I think the issue that running into is like if we get stuck on any technical problem, like it throws you down a rabbit hole and you end up spending like too much time on that like one issue. and like we have to be really efficient with our hours because we have like a limited number of hours because of budget constraints right like we can only spend like 400 hours on the project and we've already spent like 150 hours on the project so we each hour is like extremely important to how so like I guess like how do you make the those three columns work in a team setting if some problems, like, you get stuck because of, like, technical constraints.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're getting stuck is, so what's happening is then it takes a long time to try to figure out what's going on. Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that term, I guess I should define for other people. So con bond, a lot of what I'm talking about with, like, centralized workloads and keeping track of, like, who's working on what, and you work on a smaller number of things. This is a well-known methodology.

So people in cybersecurity, people in computer programming, development shops, know these methodologies very well. And so conbonds, like one of the names that comes out of industrial manufacturing. You may have heard of agile methodologies. Most of those borrow these metaphors of different work and different statuses. So I have one suggestion. This is probably not going to be the killer suggestion. But one thing I've seen work well in these type of firms is having sort of more of these prescheduled they're short, but sort of all hands on deck kind of check-ins, like even throughout the day, right?

So it's like at noon, all right, everyone that, you know, let's all stop what we're doing. Okay, who's stuck? Who needs what? And it's like you have everyone's there. Okay, I don't know what to do here. Oh, I know about this. I read about this. You get all the brains together and you swat all the problems you can right away.

And if you can't swat them right away, you're able to figure out a plan right there. Well, who's well-suited to figure this out? go do that do that now and we can check back in again when we have this meeting again it's like trying to prevent there being really like long or ambiguous amounts of time where like someone is just starting to work on trying to figure this out and a couple days go by and then they email someone else like I'm stuck on it so that might help a little bit because I've seen that model of of not just like the morning meeting like morning midday late afternoon especially when like a lot of collaboration like has to happen for solving problems yeah but

But cybersecurity, like computer programming shops, they're so far ahead of everyone else, I feel like when it comes to workload management. Like they already know these ideas. At least they think about these ideas of externalizing work and having a system. I mean, even that question is a question that wouldn't be relevant to most knowledge workers because they don't have even a notion of like work and what status it is. It's just email, you know, things are just flying back and forth. And so I take a lot of inspiration from those sectors, actually.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. Hi, thank you for being here. I'm curious about in the question that was just asked before me, you answered it a little bit, but I'm curious about being early career and on teams where, you know, I'm pretty much able to balance my workload. I have, I work at a big law firm, so I have a number of any partners that could possibly be assigned me to work at any time. And I've gotten to a point where I'm, you know, comfortable in my work and comfortable to be able to say, you know, I have this assignment. I'm happy to get to this next week and that's working well. I'm curious if you have thoughts on managing peer relationships with folks that are on teams.

And if you don't respond on teams, send an email a couple minutes later and sort of balancing that teamwork where the teams are more nebulous and super fluid. Yeah, yeah. It's a great question, especially early career. One thing that definitely helps is to as quickly as possible develop a reputation for being, incredibly organized. And develop a reputation early on as a time management nerd. A partner comes to you

to ask you questions about, hey, are you using like a time blocker? Like, what do you know about this or whatever? They sort of know that reputation gains you. Adam Grant has a term for this. He calls it idiosyncrasy credits.

It gains you flexibility because there's a trust there. Right. So, for example, if they don't know if you're organized or not, or if you have a reputation of being disorganized, there's going to be an expectation of like, I would rather you just do this right away and respond right away because I can't let this go. I can't trust you to do it necessarily. So now I have to keep it in my head

until you're done. So I would really just rather you do this right away. But if on the other hand, it's like, I wish you would stop talking about Cal Newport and these time blocking and all this type of stuff, you're still solving the problem of like, oh, she'll get it done. Right. So I don't, it doesn't matter to me as much of, you know, is she on teams right away responding? If you have that reputation, if they're like, did she really just send us like an IT ticket for like whatever? They're like, okay, she's got it handled. So that it can earn you so much breathing room. Like the more you develop that reputation, the more people trust you, the more like they know you have these idiosyncratic systems, but they work well.

It helps. And then you begin to get some flexibility. I'm like, yeah, I don't always like respond right away. but also you always get a response within two hours. I send you these updates. There's a couple examples in the book you'll like along those lines where it's like really almost over the top. Like you're sending these like these update emails to the stakeholders of like the status

of your task has just shifted to over here. It all seems crazy. But what it does give you is like a lot of breathing room. It came back. I'm back. Yeah. Are we tight on time? I think so.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, excellent. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming out. these questions, this deep dive, we're going to clean that up and we're going to release it on the podcast feed.

So if you want to hear yourself and your questions, the podcast is called deep questions. I think we're going to use AI to just alter all the questions to be just mainly very positive. I knew you were smart cow, but I didn't know you're in that good shape.

Oh, well. Thank you, Congressman Raskin. So we're just going to really work with, we're really going to deep fake the heck out of this now. I'm joking. We will. But thank you very much for coming. I love the questions, and I love Tacoma Park in people's books.

So this was great. Thank you. All right, it's Cal here again, back in the Deep Work HQ. I thought that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the questions at that live show. I was there for another hour. So after what you heard ended, I was there for another hour just talking with people. We were signing books and just talking with people.

People had come from all over. I think one of the coolest things was there was multiple couples there from somewhere from Canada, somewhere from California, I believe, who just coincidentally were vacationing in Washington, D.C. and just saw me mention I was going to do this show, so they were able to bop over and be like, hey, let's go on, let's see Cal. So it's cool. I got to see people, I got to see people from all over. I got to see someone who I talked to years ago and had given him advice to go ahead with a book idea. And he told me at the show afterwards, that book is now coming out. It's now going to be published. That was really cool. So anyways, that was a lot of fun. It was great to see everyone.

I love those questions. Got a lot of good feedback. Got a lot of good support. So thank you everyone who came. Thank you people's book. Favorite bookstore in Washington, D.C. Again, you can buy a signed copy of slow productivity straight from them. We'll put a link in the show notes.

Great way to support independent bookstores. And that's it for today. We'll be back next week with a standard NDHQ episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep. Thank you.