Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 305: Is Time Blocking Oppressive?

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Oliver Burkeman recently noted that time blocking seems oppressive? In this episode, Cal responds to this reaction in a surprising way. He then answers questions from listeners and reacts to this podcast being featured at the recent Apple WWDC event.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:  Is Time Blocking Oppressive? [2:38]- Can Cal elaborate on his experience with his Acceptance and Commitment therapy? [26:46]- How can I sustain my deep life program? [35:03]- How can I stop my girlfriend from always checking her phone? [38:07]- How long are your time blocks in your planner? [43:07]- How do I obsess over quality with filling into procrastination? [47:07]- CALL: Getting back on track after travel [55:10] CASE STUDY: Adopting principles from Cal’s book to design my life [1:00:11]CAL REACTS: Deep Questions featured at Apple’s WWDC! [1:10:32] Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?v=448bf8afad0740d18f6b109b4bd40d51 shows.acast.com/farewell/episodes/045-the-reason-you-cant-ever-get-through-your-to-do-list-witdeveloper.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/102/ Thanks to our Sponsors: drinklmnt.com/deepcozyearth.com/calmintmobile.com/deeppolicygenius.com/deepThanks 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. So if you're new on this show, we talk about navigating the promises and perils of new technology. There's three topics we typically touch on. One is understanding new technologies, how it impacts us, what to do about it. Two, is digital knowledge work, how to survive that world of workplace distractions. And three, we talk about how to cultivate. evade systematically a deep life, deep life, rather, as a bulwark against these distractions. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined, as always, by my producer, Jesse.

Jesse, I think today we have a deep dive that is going to tackle a topic within digital knowledge work, a sort of classic for us here. How do you thrive in a world of work that is increasingly frenetic and distracting? We're going to actually react to something that someone I really like said about something I said, it's a whole back and forth. It's going to be like a really friendly, nerdy version of the Drake. Who is Drake feuding with? I don't know.

The thought of me comparing myself to Drake is making you laugh, Jesse. Well, I was thinking about Kanye West, but... It's not Kanye West. It's Drake and someone. They're having this big rap feud. So, like, it's basically, imagine that feud, but involving me and Oliver Bergman. And also, it's not a feud in what I agree with. with them. But with

interestingly, Jesse, just as much rap. That's my whole deep dive is going to be wrapped. No, that's a weird analogy. But anyways, we got an interesting deep dive. Do some dialectical investigations. Then we got ourselves some questions. And a final segment that involves, I'll preview it for

you now. It involves a surprise appearance of the Deep Questions podcast at a pretty well-known event. So we'll get into that later. All right. I think that's all we have. Did you find out who Drake was shooting with? I didn't look it up. How did you know about it?

You sound surprised. I'm cool. I know about things. I heard it, I don't know. I heard it on podcast somewhere probably. Okay. Yeah.

I did not, you're right, secondhand. I did not directly. It was not directly. I'll check it out. I'll keep you posted for later in the show. Keep me posted.

All right. Enough of this nonsense. Let's get started for this deep dive. All right. So one of the time management ideas I'm known for is time blog. This is where during your workday you give every minute a job in advance. That is, you partition your available minutes into blocks and assigns specific projects or tasks to those blocks. I even produced a planner called the Time Block Planner to help implement this idea.

Now, last week, the writer Oliver Berkman, who I know and whose writing I really like and respect, in particular, his breakthrough book 4,000 weeks, which is just fantastic. was talking about time blocking briefly on the podcast Farewell. By the way, a show you should also be listening to. I did appearance on that not long ago talking about slow productivity. Great show. Check that out. Anyways, with great care intact, Berkman admitted that time blocking does not work that well for him, and in fact, he feels like it is a little oppressive.

So who's right? In today's deep dive, what I'm going to do is I will play the clip of Oliver talking about, time blocking and then I will give you my thoughts on it. My conclusion might very well surprise you. All right. So let's hear what it is all the hubbub is about. Let's see. We have a clip here.

Can we play this? Yeah. All right, let's listen. Here we go. Next hour in a sort of meaningful way. In the middle there is something like time boxing and time blocking. I am for the record, a huge fan. of Cal Newport's work in all sorts of different areas.

And his new book on slow productivity is absolutely fantastic. But I'm looking forward to a conversation that I think we will have one day about time-boxing and time-boxing. I've found very often for me, like, that is in this category of things that I think really help for people. I'm talking about where you sort of map out the day with what you're going to do in each period of hours. And, you know, maybe it's my personality,

and maybe it's a bad personality. But for me, that sort of almost all the time ends up feeling oppressive to a degree that just gets in the way of me being productive. And I've learned the hard way, because it feels kind of indulgent or something, but I have learned that it is better for me to have some room in my approach to work

to do what I feel like doing in a given moment. Not just always, not just like, who cares about, headlines or earning a living, I'll just do what I feel like. But to be able to harness that energy of like, oh, well, it's 2 p.m. And I wasn't expecting to feel like this, but I'd really like to get stuck into that thing. All right. So we'll clip it there. So let me start.

I'll start with the end in mind. I will start with my conclusion about all of this, and then we will work backwards to support why that's my conclusion. There's two things I think are true at the same time right now. Number one, Oliver Berkman is right about time blocking. number two, time blocking is still really important. All right. So let's unpack why both of these things are true at the same time.

I'll start with the first point. Time blocking does feel oppressive, right? This is something that comes up often on this show where people eager about time blocking and say, why not time block my time outside of work? Why not time block my weekend? I say, man, it is so, it's so demanding. being it's such a temporal taskmaster, you got to take a break from it. If you tried the time block your whole life, you're going to burn out.

It really does have this sense of when you're working, you are locked in. It is not a relaxed sensation because you have to, you're trying to stick with the blocks. You want to hit the blocks. There's a bit of urgency in there. There's an act of will and resistance of the inertia, deadening impulse to. stop or do something else. So it is, you feel it. It could really exhaust you.

You have a bunch of long time block days in a row. You feel it. So Oliver is absolutely right about that. That's not just his personality. I think that's most people. And second point, the approach Oliver mentions as an alternative where you give some leeway to say, what do I feel like doing? Where is my energy level?

What seems, you know, interesting or appropriate right now, that is more flexible. probably more natural. It is certainly something that's going to be more, it's going to feel better, right? Like, that probably better fits the rhythms of humans as we've evolved over a long period of time. And it's because it's difficult to predict in advance where your energy level is going to be at a certain time of the day, what's going to be more appealing than something else, you know, and so it's to be able to say, this is what I feel well-keyed to do. You know, that's going to feel more natural. That is more flexible. This requires, of course, but I don't think it's a critique. I think we just accept this. This requires, of course, some level of self-awareness and resistance to procrastination, right? I mean, obviously, you have to be at a certain level of trust with your own work execution to just say, I'm going to see what I sort of feel like this afternoon and go with that. You have to have some trust. You're not going to always just say, well, I feel like doing nothing.

But, you know, people get there, right? So what he's talking about, that approach would be more natural. It's also more relaxing. You don't have that sense of urgency to it. You feel like you have breathing room. So those two points, I think, are true Oliver's right. Time blocking is oppressive, being more on the fly in deciding what to work on. It's more flexible.

It probably feels more natural. Point three, it is true at the same time that time blocking is brutally effective. It is really, really effective. The amount you get done in a time block day is on average 2x versus other approaches. This is not an exact number, but sort of heuristically I hear more or less this number again and again. It's part of the popularity of time blocking the time block planner is, man, it is just effective. A time block day ships stuff at a really high rate. And there's various reasons for it.

One, there's less context switching, right? This is what I'm doing now until I'm done, then I'm doing this. Non-time blockers, you're much more likely to shift back and forth between different things, especially when it comes to communication interruptions. Time blockers have blocks for it. Non-time blockers just sort of have this as a background process going on. This is going on with Slack, what's going on with email, and you have these constant context shifts, which reduces your cognitive capacity.

Batching's a good way to tackle things as well. So I'm doing this for a 90-minute block. It allows your brain to completely get the context. the cognitive context set on what you're doing and now you're able to operate at a higher level of effectiveness. It's a better use of your hours because you're looking ahead at the whole day. So you're sort of seeing like, oh, this is going to be the best time to do this, where this time is good for this. It's a more optimal assignment of time to activities than if you just sort of say, what am I doing now? You might realize as the day goes on, you know what?

That morning block was probably the best time to do this thing. and I've missed it now because I wasn't thinking about it just got started with my inbox or something like this. It also leads to less energy being wasted on the persistent question of should I keep working or should I take a break? You're not going to work all day. You are going to take breaks. When these breaks aren't scheduled, every minute is a potential opportunity to take a break or check your email or do something else. Which means every minute you have to have this mental battle with yourself of should I take a break now, should I check my email now? You have to win that battle, no, let's keep going.

The next minute that battle comes again. When you're committed to the time blocks, you don't have to fight this battle because there is no question. This is what I'm doing for the next hour. I'm checking my email then. It's on here. I'm not in that block. So the only commitment you have to maintain is to sticking with your blocks as opposed to having to have an on-demand conversation and debate with yourself throughout today. All right.

So we have these things true at the same time. It's oppressive and not supernatural a time block. It also produces a huge amount of stuff. So why do I preach it? Because so many modern knowledge work jobs have so overwhelmed us with work. And in particular, the administrative overhead that comes along with all of our work, that if we don't harness the brutal effectiveness of time blocking, we'll drown. This is an unfortunate reality of many knowledge work jobs today,

especially more office-style jobs in which you have uncontained work. assignments when you have sort of uncontained back and forth conversations about work. There's a sort of ad hoc freneticism to it. Time blocking gives you a fighting chance of sort of being able to do a shutdown at the end of the day and sort of keep your head above water. All right. So I want us to get to a world in which Oliver's approach can be much more widely applied and to many more jobs because it's more natural, it's less exhausted and oppressive. In our current world, however, we have to go with the brutally effective technique to make sure that we don't completely drown. That we're not up all throughout the evening having to try to catch up on emails.

We don't have to get up at 4 a.m. to get the work done because nothing could get done during the day. So it's sort of a necessary compromise. I won't say necessary evil, but sort of a necessary compromise. So why do we get to this place? But if we want to solve work, and now we have this alternative definition of solving work, where we don't need something like time blocking anymore. If we want to solve work, we have to understand where the problem came from. Well, this is what I get into deeply in my new book, Slow Productivity.

The whole first part of the book is sort of understanding what went wrong with knowledge work, right? And the key idea from that book that I think explains why we unfortunately still need time blocking was the lack of any sort of consistent workload management philosophy in most knowledge work sectors. In most knowledge work jobs, there is no consistent agreed upon way to keep track of workload. How much are you working on? What are you working on? How much should you be working on? Where is the work that needs to be done that no one is working on right now?

We don't do this in most knowledge work settings. We just throw work at people through email, meetings, and chats, and it just gets on your plate. No one knows how much you're working on or how much that person's working on. It's all uncontrolled, and this leads to overload. And the reason why the overload is a problem is not only is it hard to make progress on things at the same time, but each of those 10 things brings with it administrative overhead, emails, meetings, and conversations needed to keep that task rolling. This administrative overhead begins to pile up until most of your day now becomes stuck

trying to service these different tasks. You're trying to then desperate to find any time that's left to actually make progress on the tasks themselves. This is the environment we're in. It's caused by lack of consistent workload management philosophies. It's an environment in which you have to, like a general, unfortunately, but, like a general, plan your strategy for each day to try to keep the forces of email and meetings at bay enough so that your pincer move to get progress on this report actually

succeeds. It's metaphorically war out there because of this overload epidemic and time blocking right now is sort of the best weapon that we have. So what is the solution? I mean, okay, slow productivity gets into this, but at the core of the solution is we have to fix this workload management problem. Your team, your organization, yourself, if you're a freelancer, entrepreneur, needs an agreed upon rational way to manage who's working on what, how much they should be working on, and how you keep track of things that need to be done that no one is working on in particular. This means probably you have to have some sort of centralized list of work that is waiting to be worked on. If you're a team, you have this all on a shared document or a board somewhere.

If you're an individual, do the same thing. Here's things I'm not working on yet, but have agreed to work on. We need some way of keeping track of the active things. What are the two things you're working on right now? What are the three things you're working on? This should be visible. This should be transparent. This should be public. And then we need really smart limits to what the right amount of work to do concurrently should be. And it's probably two or three things of any non-trivial size at a time. All right. We can add all sorts of other, and I get into this in the book, we can add all sorts of other minutiae here. Some things aren't discrete tasks, but are more we could think of them as ongoing or service-oriented.

Can you serve on this committee? Can you be in charge of the birthdays for the office? Can you be in charge of making sure the website stays up to date with client testimonials? We need a limit for ongoing service obligations like this as well. Yeah, you should have like two of those and two major projects you're working on, and that's it. When you finish a project, we pull another one in and we can all decide what makes sense. We need these types of systems so that we're not overloaded.

If you're not overloaded, now you've got some breathing room. and now something like Oliver's method might make some sense. All right, which of these do I want to work on today? You know what? I should think I'm going to work on this one. Actually, I'm going to kind of take it easy today. You have this breathing room in your schedule where you can have your work follow the more natural ebbs and flows of both your energies and your interest, and it seems less oppressive.

It seems less like you're ending each workday out of breath. In fact, I say this is rough, but I have this prediction that, I don't know, prediction, claim, let's say, that really the optimal type of work day and knowledge work would be one in which about 30% of your time is flex, that you could consistently do nothing for 30% of your day in aggregate, and everything would be fine. That's about the amount of flex you need. Like some days you're feeling more of that, some days you're doing less of that, you can shift around where work happens, work can take longer than you thought. 30% buffer rather is probably where we should be.

We'll never get there without more systematic ways of thinking about workload management. All right. So returning to the original debate, in air quotes, between me and Oliver, there's really no debate at all. He's right that time blocking is oppressive. He is right that it would be much nicer to be able to let your work to unfold more naturally. So the problem is, how do we get there? That's where the ideas I just talked about might help. Read a book like slow productivity to get a better diagnosis of the problem and solutions. Read Oliver's fantastic book, 4,000 weeks to get a, better understanding of why his more natural method is where we want to get to, why that's more natural. But in the meantime, while we're working towards these solutions, time blocking is probably what's going to work day to day. So it's interesting, Jesse. It's like, I've created a tool, and now all of the rest of my work is trying to make that tool obsolete. It's like a weird energy. Like, I put out that planner, and then my slow productivity, the next book I published, if those ideas were put in the practice,

the planner would become obsolete. So it's like, I want to make that part of my advice not needed anymore. There's a lot of things I give there like that. I have a lot of advice in time management organization where I say, I wish we didn't need to do this.

And if we fix knowledge work, we want to have to. But in the meantime, we got to run our lives like we're, you know, in the mission control of the Apollo missions. Like, we've just so we got to keep track of this information. We've got to keep it around. You know, not because I wonder if this is why sometimes productivity critics aren't often in these jobs.

So they'll look at me and say, you know, you guys must just be trying to optimize for the sake of optimizing. You must be trying to squeeze in as much as possible because you've fallen in love with hustle culture, right? Or the reality is people say, no, I don't want to have to optimize my day. I don't want to have to do so much every day. It's my job. It has put so much stuff on my plate and I can't keep up with it and it's super stressful and I want to be less stressed. So there's this sort of interesting tension between where we want to get with productivity and like what we have to do right now. Well, the big thing it helps with is not task switching that you talk about all the time, right?

It's a huge difference. Yeah. But it's hard, right? Like the way of working with time blocking, you don't test switch. I work on this. I'm done. Now I'm working on this. Now I'm done.

it produces, but that's hard because you have to keep your focus on one thing, then another. It's, you know, my friends and family know this because they text message on a family text thread, right? I'm a ghost on that thing during the day because when you're a time blocker, you're just, like, you're locked in, right? You know, it is a more oppressive, faster-paced approach to the day. But, you know, like in my case, it allows me to have three jobs and still fit it in the nine to five. So it's brutally effective. But on the other hand, man, it'd be nice not to have to do it. But even if you go back to like the 1800 or something with like very good schooling,

they would probably like teachers there would teach you to work, study and focus on a certain subject, right? They would. You know, this was Teddy Roosevelt secret at Harvard. So if you read, I guess it was probably the Edwin Morris, Volume 1, rise and fall of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt. He figured this out at Harvard. because he had a lot of things he wanted to do.

He had a lot of interest in hobbies or whatever is that if he could use intense focus, he could get his work done much faster. And he writes about in his diaries. He would like focus like a laser beam. Let me get this like reading done. He got really good at doing that. It's why he could finish a book a day in the White House.

He got really good at just when I'm reading laser focus and then he could move really quickly. You know, it's why he could write a naval history of the war of 1812. at law school. He just would, he could just laser. He just learned. Laser on one thing,

laser on another thing. He had this really intense concentration. So yeah, I mean, that's always been known. Yeah. It's always been known. It's funny.

When I first started listening to your podcast, I changed because I used to always be list-based. Yeah. So that in my like personal little time-blank thing, I have like the date where I changed.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, I was in like 2020 or something when your podcast. And have you been too ex-productive ever since? That's been better. Yeah. it's better yeah but again it's not

it's not being productive for the sake of being productive is being productive because the stuff is on your list whether you want it there or not like your boss gave this to you whether you want it there or not so getting it done better faster that just gives you some breathing room otherwise you just get that weird panic state and then once you get overwhelmed enough then you just end up saying like uh late stage cap late stage capitalism let's just overthrow the economy

because you're so behind you're so overwhelmed by everything it seems kind of hopeless Well, it goes back to everything you're saying even about the student books, like mapping out your plan like this semester going forward for studying for exams and stuff, not leaving stuff to the last night. Yeah. Stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, that stuff works. Yeah. I wish I didn't have to do as much of it.

But if you have too much to do, you have to care a lot about how you do it. So anyways, I'm actually talking to Oliver soon, a couple days. Yeah, I like Oliver. He's a smart guy. His column was great, too. His books are great. His column is great. like good stuff a lot.

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deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. First questions from Sean. In an earlier episode, you mentioned utilized acceptance and commitment therapy to tame anxiety that you had in the past. In my late 20s, I started having panic attacks due to a high stress move, my job, and overall poor stress management. Can you elaborate on your experiences? Yeah, ACT, or Act, acceptance commitment therapy, third wave psychotherapy. It's very well suited for panic. attack. So I'm glad that you're asking about it. So let me just give us some context. I'll talk about one of my uses of this. This was years ago back in grad school where I had developed an insomnia problem,

just sort of idiopathic, just suddenly just there would be nights where I just wanted to sleep or wouldn't sleep a lot, right? Which is a problem, right? I mean, whatever. Being tired, there's a lot of times in life when you're tired, but I was really thrown by the unpredictability of it. I was also really thrown by this idea of like, you can't do your top level cognitive work if you're tired. And I couldn't control when insomnia happened or not. And then there was this sort of revelation of, you know, hey, I'm not in control here. Like I could just, my job is to think, and this could just be taken away from me by something I can't control. So then that gave me a lot of anxiety. So now I'm in my 20s, and it settled into a kind of like a daily, just sort of persistent

anxiety feeling, the physical, physiological feeling of anxiety, all coming from concerns about sleep that sort of spiraled out of control. Because I'm a nerd, I read a bunch of books about it, and I did some self-treatment, and I'll explain it to you in case this is helpful to people, that was a mixture of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is second wave psychotherapy, with act, acceptance commitment therapy, which is third wave psychotherapy. All right. So let me briefly explain both in a way that's going to frustrate sort of any mental health expert in the audience. He's like, you're not getting this right, but I'll do my best, right? So with cognitive behavioral therapy, this is second wave psychotherapy, the idea is you point out distortions in your ruminations,

the thoughts you're having in your head. You point out the distortions and the thoughts. You sort of correct the thoughts you are having. The idea being negative self-talk is the driver of the negative physiological states. So if you correct the self-talk, things will be better. This was one of the first evidence-based psychotherapies. First way of psychotherapy is talk therapy. Woody Allen, Annie Hall, you know, you're on the couch, someone talking to you. This was the first that was more, we have this protocol. We're going to test it. We're going to see if it works or not. All right. So that's Cognom behavioral therapy, acceptance commitment therapy, which came later, that's why we call it third wave, doesn't try to even correct the thoughts. It has you diffuse or disconnect from the thoughts.

Yeah, I'm having these thoughts. I'm worried about this. I'm worried about sleep. I'm worried about having a panic attack. Yeah, they're there. But that's not reality. Those are just thoughts. And in fact, you'll often sort of name the different stories like, oh, here comes to panic attack story.

You know, as Captain Panic Attack has given the story. That's interesting. That's going on in my head. I'm feeling this thing right now. That's interesting. I'm feeling my throat's a little tighter. I can feel whatever. All right, I'm going to go on and do what's important to me.

So you sort of diffuse from the thoughts and keep committing to take what's called value-driven action. And so you're kind of limiting their power a little bit. All right. So what I did for my sleep, here is my combination of the two. This is my world-famous treatment plan. Twice a day at set times would do cognitive behavioral therapy on. anxiety about not sleeping. There's distortions in this.

You're predicting the future. You're doing black and white thinking. In between those sessions, it was pure act. So when I would feel like the ruminations would be like, come on, Cal, like, let's get going. Like, let's get into this. Let's think about this. I would say to myself, oh, I already did, dealt with this thought earlier at nine and found that had distortions and that the reality wasn't really so bad.

I'll revisit the, I'm revisiting again at five. Until then, I'm not getting into it. I'm just going to do like the best things I can with my time. That's kind of pure act. And so it was knowing like, you know, I did, I'm not going to get into it. I'm just going to accept the reality that I did a CBT session. And there's another one coming up. So really, if this thought really is so urgent, if there is a crisis here, I'm going to get into it again at whatever the time was for the second session five.

So there's no problem. I'm not ignoring it. I'm not trying to ignore it or pretend like it doesn't exist. But until I get that, I'm just going to do value-driven action. That actually was very effective. It was very effective. Over time, it really reduced. It either reduced the anxiety sort of went away.

The sleep fears would come and go, but it didn't have the impact anymore because you weren't feeding the rumination cycle throughout. So those are two different types of sort of evidence-based psychotherapies that are out there. I combine them in my own probably non-approved way with my sleep issues and my 12. and actually found that to be very effective. You'll, of course, see echoes of this in my shutdown complete routine for your schedule, right? Because I say, after you do your shutdown ritual and you actually say the phrase like

schedule shutdown complete, when you have ruminations about work, you say, no, no, no, I said that crazy phrase or I checked the checkbox in Cal's time block planner. I wouldn't have done that if I wasn't sure that it's safe to shut down, so I don't have to get into it again. That's very similar to sort of what I did with my CBT Act hybrid when it came to. asleep concerns. So, Sean, for panic attacks, classically, it's been seen that act is better than cognitive behavioral therapy. Because with panic attacks, if you're worried about panic at having a panic attack, it's not

necessarily a distorted thought, right? It's like, no, you might have a panic. This is like a thing that comes and goes. Like, it's not a distorted thought, right? Act is better here because acts like, yeah, you might, but we're still going to do the best things we can with our time. And if it happens, it happens. it doesn't define us.

Let's do something valuable right now. So act is probably the right match for you. There's a good book called The Happiness Trap, which is the sort of public-facing accessible introduction to Act. So definitely check that out. But anyways, I wanted to get into just all like CBT versus Act, what I do was sleep. All is a more general way of emphasizing our minds are weird.

And one of the ways most commonly our minds can be particularly unhelpful is when we have this internal self-talk ruminations that build up around whatever. I'm anxious about this thing happening. I'm really worried about what other people think of me. Oh, man, that conversation I just had. Was that good? Oh, no. I said the wrong thing.

I think people are really upset at me. The self-talk drives a lot of the negative physiological states. The self-talk drives generalized anxiety disorder. The self-talk is eventually what drives depressed. oppressive disorder. It's not just boom. Oh my God, I'm a hedonic. It's no, I just came off as six months of like continually berating myself in my mind and

all these things I'm worried about. So you got to get a handle on the self-talk. And that's what the second and third wave psychotherapy is very good. So I just want to introduce these things in here. So if you're out there looking for a professional, you sort of know what they're talking about. You know what you're looking for. And you know that there is useful ways of dealing with this.

You're far from alone. about it. I don't know. I should Jesse, I should take my CBT Act hybrid I invented and should like market it somehow. This is what it could have my... Shopify for the checkout. Shopify for the checkout for my new... I got to give it a really

cool name. CBT Act. We can make a... I bet there's this is like an anagram. These letters are very useful, so there's probably anagram here. Cabact, Pebbik, X of it. We could put it together.

Well, we'll get the mark. marketing geniuses on it. But anyway, Sean, thanks for asking that question because it gives me a chance to talk a lot about rumination and mental health. All right, what do we got next? All right. Next question is from Nate the Great. How can I stick to a deep life program and not keep switching based on what I perceive others to be doing? Well, good question, Nate. You need, first of all, your master narrative that describes your ideal lifestyle. It's okay that this is going to change, but it's something that's going to change the change of this is going to be harder and slower

than just your whim changes this week versus last. So your master narrative about your ideal lifestyle should describe five to ten years for now what a typical day of your life is going to be like. It's the type of environment you're in, your interaction with nature and other people, what's going on with your, what's the feel of your work, not the specific job, but the feel of your work.

It's a master narrative about this is what I want my life, all elements of my lifestyle to be like. And then we're going to work backwards from that. What can I do creatively right now to take advantage of existing opportunities and to get around existing obstacles to move closer to aspects of these lifestyles? And that's where you begin to get creative. That's where you begin to build these sort of bespoke plans of sort of moving more towards your ideal lifestyle. This is an alternative to the more common approach, which is the grand goal approach. we talked about this in a recent episode, but that's the approach where you instead say, I just have this real grand goal that I'm going to go after and it'll solve everything.

All right? So you have your master narrative about your ideal lifestyle. Don't make any major changes to that outside of, I'm going to say, your birthday. So for a year, you're like, this is my current draft of this. Do your best to make progress towards this ideal lifestyle on multiple scales. So use multi-scale planning at the seasonal scale, if that filter down to your, week and then to your daily plans, reflect and learn along the way. So if there's stuff like, you know, I have other ideas coming up that might be needed

to be added to my ideal lifestyle. This aspect of what I have here is not working for me. Or I'm learning this about myself. I don't really like this. Make sure that you're capturing those thoughts. But you don't have to act on them yet. Let that fester, let that marinate, let that evolve and blossom over time. And when you get back to your next birthday, so let's revisit this ideal.

master narrative, this time, this aspect of time and experience is going to buffer the drastic changes. It will evolve some years more than others, but it's going to do so in a more thoughtful way. And this slower sort of annual approach where you build up experience and reflections over the year, this slower approach is also going to protect you from just whim. Oh, man, I listened to a Goggins on a podcast and like, forget all of this. I got to go hammer it, right?

It prevents like a wave of inspiration leading the drastic changes and how you approach your life. So you're doing a good thing by thinking about the systematically cultivating a life that feels intentional. You got to just make sure that you have some more buffer in it. So that's what I'm going to recommend. All right. Who do we have next? Next question is from Phil. I've been embracing your ideas about systematically cultivating a deep life and it's really made a big difference in a short amount of time.

My girlfriend hasn't adopted these methods, however, and has caught some strain in our relationship. I especially get annoyed with her checking her phone a lot and not living intentionally. What would you recommend in solving this sort of issue? All right. There's nothing people love more, especially girlfriends, than getting Cal Newport thrown at them. Right. They love that almost as much as you telling them what Andrew Huberman thinks you should do with your morning routine. All women love that.

All right, I'm going to pull out two separate issues here, Phil. The checking a phone a lot, I'm going to separate that from the drive to live more intentionally. All right, so when it comes to checking your phone a lot, look, I say first of all, you do you, right? You do with your phone what you think is right, which if you're a Cal Newport fan probably means no social media on your phone, using something like the phone FOIA method at home where you don't have it with you at home. It's in a fixed location you go to when you either check something or communicate with people. Do a digital declutter, as I talk about in my book, digital minimalism, so that you're only using things that like serve real value and you have some fences around how you use it to make sure that you're getting value but not getting trapped and all these other types of distractions. So first of all, get your game dialed in. That's what's most important is that you're happy with your relationship with your phone.

I would not try to fix with quotation marks your girlfriend's relationship with her phone. First of all, people don't like being fixed, right, in that manner, especially when they don't think it's a problem. And two, you don't know exactly what's going on there. Like a typical gender divide, like a stereotypical gender divide I've run into with digital minimalism. And again, it's stereotypical, so it does describe everyone. but often it's the case that so a woman with a phone might be spending a lot of time managing relationships in a way that like a guy with the phone might not be. And so you see my girlfriend's on that phone all the time.

You're thinking like what would it be if you were on the phone all the time? And for you it might be yeah, it would be on like TikTok and YouTube videos. And I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this. There's better things to be doing. But your girlfriend might be managing like a really complicated social dynamic that's happening. I've got to answer here, hands are here, make sure this person feels okay, and it's happening through text message, and it's fraught, and it's complicated, and it's subtle. So you don't even know really what's going on there.

So, you know, I would say focus on making your thing good. If she appreciates what she sees in you and ask you about it, then you can say, yeah, here's what I'm up to. I read this book, Digital Minimalism, sort of give the information to her to take in, but you sort of wait for her to come to you. All right, when it comes to living intentionally, now this is a story. something where I think there's a distinction between dating and marriage. I think married couples need to have, if possible, a shared ideal lifestyle vision, right? You're doing something

like deep life planning. You should agree on here is our vision for our family, what we want all of the aspects of our day-to-day life to be like five years from now or ten years from now, like what type of place we're living in, our connection to community and family, what our work is like, what type of things it gives to us, but also what type of footprint it has in our lives. Like, you really imagine these things. And then as a family, you're working towards this. You're married, especially when you're starting a family, if you take the tact of like, I'm just going to try to optimize my career. You're going to try to optimize your career. We're going to see everything else, everything you need. You're going to see everything I need.

We're going to see everything that our kids need. All this is sort of just like an obstacle to our individual optimization. That doesn't work out well. shared family vision that you're trying to optimize works well. When you're dating, don't do that yet. It's too early. Right? I don't think it's appropriate yet for the most part. So you're dating, work on your own vision, ideal lifestyle.

And again, be transparent about what you're doing, answer questions about what you're doing. But I don't think you need to be on the same page about that until probably after marriage is typically what I recommend. All right. By the way, all this stuff's just going to make you seem like a more attractive mate. if you're not harping on these things, but you're not on your phone all the time. You have a vision of you want for your life. You're making progress towards it. These are all really positive things.

It's all going to help you. You're going to diffuse a lot of that benefit if you preach about it or brag about it. Just do that. This person really has their act together. They really have intention. They're really systematic about how they live their life. That is an appealing trait. So stick with it.

I'm great. We should have like dating advice music we play whenever I give dating advice. I feel like it never goes well. That's actually a really good idea. Yeah. I'll find some. Never goes well. All right.

What do we got next? Next question is from Abigail. Can you elaborate on the blocks in your planner? For example, how long are you writing blocks? Do you time block classes that you teach? What is your shortest block? Stuff like that. Well, okay.

So Abigail, when I'm doing time block planning, my entire workday is time blocked. So there's no minute that's not part of a block. So if you look at a column in my time block planner, it's all blocks of various sizes with no gaps in between. Right. So that's what a time blocking discipline looks about. So we ask like, oh, do you time block your classes? Yeah. I mean, everything, those, every minute has to be in a block.

So the minutes that are taking place during my class are going to be in a teaching time block. All right. The main place where appointments on my calendar differ from the corresponding blocks. And my time block planner is that on my time block planner, I'm explicitly typically taking account of the time required to get the class, to get back from class. So on a calendar, you usually just put like, here's the exact hours of an appointment, but when you're time blocking, you have to capture the time required to actually get there, not get there, because every minute has to be accounted for. If you put the 15 minutes right before class starts and the time block dedicated to something else,

that's a bad block because you have to spend that 15 minutes not working on that block by getting to your class. How long are they? It, you know, it depends. Writing, I'm usually at least 90 minutes, I would say. I'm also willing, and I think it's important about time blocking, you don't get a medal for not adjusting your plan. You get a medal for being intentional about your time. It is fine if several times during the day you have to adjust your time block plan for the time that remains in the day. The key is fixing the plan and having intention and not just falling back to, okay, what do I feel like doing or let me throw in the towel altogether on work.

So I bring this up because with writing I often do this. If there's not urgent things happening later, the time blocks are just things I've come up with. I want to make progress on this. I want to get this done too. If the writing's going well, I'll let it blow past the block. If I'm in the groove and I can do it, it's not a hard appointment I can't miss. I'll just blow past the block. No problem.

Fixed a schedule for the rest of the day once I'm done writing. So the writing sessions can sometimes be three, four hours long if things are really rolling. All right. Let's see what else is in here? How long your writing blocks, your time block classes you teach? What's the shortest block? All right, another good question. 30 minutes is the shortest block.

So if you have something that's going to be quicker than 30 minutes, batch it with other quick things. 30 minutes is usually the shortest I do. A little tip for time blockers out there. If you have a little 30 minute block in which you're going to do a bunch of things, you can't fit those into a little block on the planner. I put a number inside that block, like a one and circle it. And then I replicate that number over on the side.

And next to it, I put the list of all the things that are supposed to happen in this small block. Another time block tip I'll give is I like to customize the borders of the blocks based on what type of work it is. Admin work gets a sort of double border, non-filled endo. So a block and then a slightly smaller block inside. Deep work, I fill in that border. So it's like a really thick border. Meetings or appointments like where another person's involved. I put three vertical lines on the right side. So it's like very clearly this is like a meeting block. so I have admin deep and meetings. It just helps me when visualizing my day on my planner to see like, okay, here's deep time, here's admin time.

It just helps me get a better sense than all those blocks being the same. So there's a couple advanced tactics there. I have a really long expository introduction at the front of every time block planner I sell where I get into a lot of these details and I give a lot of these extra tips. There's a lot of diagrams of time block planners. It's unusual for a planner to come with like a chapter of a book, but mine does. because I'm a writer, and I thought it was important to really walk you through exactly how to do this and the advanced tips and tricks. So the best thing I've ever written about time blocking is actually the text in the front of my time block planner. It's interesting.

All right. Ooh, our next question is our slow productivity corner question of the week. So, Jesse, let's get that slow productivity corner music if we could. So for those who don't know, I try to have one question every week that's relevant to my new book. slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout, so that we can get into the details of that book. If you haven't bought that book yet, check it out. Slow productivity, you can find it anywhere.

You can also go to caldnewport.com slash slow to get an excerpt or to hear an audio excerpt of me reading it, et cetera, et cetera. We're coming up now, Jesse, on the 100,000 copy sold mark, which is an important mark to me. Like symbolically, it's always a mark I like to hit. Because it's been three months because it came out March 7th, right? Yeah. So far so good. We're rock and rolling.

So if you haven't got the book yet, check it out. People are digging it. And if you dug it, maybe give a nice review or tell someone about it. I mean, some- Buy your dad for Father's Day? Excellent gift for Father's Day. Excellent gift. I would recommend get them four copies, though, right?

Because you need one in your room. You need one at your office. You need one in your car in case like you're stuck waiting to pick someone. up. And you want to go on your phone. You want to go on your phone. So you need one for the car as well. And they need one for the bathroom. So by four copies of slow productivity for your dad for this father's day. If you don't, I'm going to play the theme music again and again and again. All right. Let's see. What is our slow productivity corner question of the day, Jesse?

Hi. It's from Janet. In your book's Slow Productivity, you recommend obsessing over quality. But I sometimes find this paralyzing. I worry so much doing or so much doing about other things really well that I procrastinate. Is it really that important to care so much about quality? It's a good question, Janet. A lot of people wonder about this. I think the verb, obsess troubled some people as well. So it's worth dive it into this again briefly. For those who didn't read my book, I have three principles of slow productivity. The first is do fewer things. The second is work at a natural pace. The third is obsess over quality, which I argue is the glue for the whole program. So why is it, why is this important? Well, there's two reasons.

When you begin to care more and more about how well you do the best thing you do, busyness of the type that defines our current pseudo-productivity age begins to seem unnecessary and eventually to seem negative. You begin to develop a distaste for busyness. When you're not caring about quality. Business can be in some sort of masochistic way attractive. Like I, at least if I'm busy, I can't be accused of being a slacker. At least if I'm busy, I can't tell myself, you know, hey, you're not really getting it done here. At least if I'm busy, there's some safety in this. I know how to do busyness. This is, this is all I know about doing work well. It's safe. It's predictable. Once you start caring about doing something really well, you start to see results,

the busyness becomes an obstacle. I can't make progress on this thing because I'm so busy with all these other things. So the other principles of slow productivity, the doing fewer things it wants to work at a natural pace, begin to seem self-evident once you begin to pursue quality. The other thing that happens, and this is kind of the nice flywheel effect, as you get better at something professionally, you get more freedom to dictate what your work looks like. So as you get better at something, you're going to develop a distaste for busyness. At the same time, you get more leverage to remove busyness from your life. So these things work together.

It's good symbiosis. It gives you the power you need. A big talking point I hear from people I talk about about slow productivity. They're like, you know, a lot of stuff I get. A lot of stuff I give advice for like, here's how you do this right now in your job with a boss who's a pain. But they're like, you know, I could do this so much better if I had more control, but I don't have control.

My boss is really a pain. So I can do some of your advice, but some of the big ideas I can't do, and I feel like I'll never be able to do them because my boss will never let me do them. This is how you earned a right to do them. Right? You get really good at something. They're desperate to keep you. They really want your skill.

Your skill is very valued. Now you say, yeah, I'll stay, but here's how I'm going to do it. And now you begin to gain more control. So slow productivity, the tactics in the book, part of them are just like right away put these into action right now. They're pragmatic. The other half are inspirational. You might not be able to do these now, but they're possible. You can get there.

Yeah, you can't do this all tomorrow. But a year from now, you could if you get really good at something. That is your weapon you can wield against the scourge. That is pseudo-productivity generated busyness. All right. Now, the other issue Janet brings up here is the paralyization, otherwise known as perfectionism. If I start caring about doing something really well, maybe I'll never finish it because I'm never satisfied or I'm worried like this isn't that good yet. I need to do another draft of this novel.

I need to try to make this computer code even tighter and maybe you'll never actually ship it. So if you care too much about quality, you might fall into perfectionism. So I really get into this in the book because I think it's an important point. How do you obsess over quality without giving in to perfectionism, which is a natural corollary? The fear of perfectionism is a natural unavoidable corollary to obsessing over quality. How do we walk this tightrope? Well, the idea I give comes from a story about the Beatles. I've told it on the show before, so I'll be very quick.

But in the book, I get into the Beatles recording Sergeant Pepper. And the important thing about this album is that it was the very first album they were recording. where they knew they were not going to tour. So they did not have to write songs that could be replicated on stage during a tour, which meant basically they could do anything in the songs, any weird instrument. They could play with the tape speeds. They could overlay track after track and unusual or carcophonous arrangements.

Everything was possible, and they wanted this thing to be really, really good. This is prime procrastination territory. They could have stayed in Abbey Road Studios forever trying to build their masterpiece. So how did they walk the line here between quality and perfectionism? George Martin released the first thing they had that looked like a single, he released it. Now they had a stake in the ground. They had some pressure. We want to make this good, but we also have to ship it.

We can't take too much longer because the single's out, and we can't have the album come out too much after the single. They still took much longer on that album that they did other albums. They obsessed more about the quality than other albums. But they had to make compromises and finish things and get some. something out. It came to a best-selling album to date once it did. That is the key, Janet, to navigating perfectionism and quality. You need to put stakes in the ground. I want to do this really well, but I promised this to this person. This person is expecting this by this time. I've made an announcement about this. This has to happen pretty soon. And once you put the

stake in the ground, it changes the stakes from producing the best thing that could ever possibly be produced to producing something really good given the amount of time you have left. That is the sort of pragmatic way to actually get better at things. It's a pragmatic way to produce stuff that's too good to be ignored without subcoming to the full pressures of perfectionism. All right, Janet. So thank you for that slow productivity corner question of the week. Want to hear the music again? Let's hear it again. If you don't buy your four copies of the book, that's all you're going to hear. All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear this. Hi, Cal. My name is Emily, and I work for a small nonprofit

organization with national reach. I have a question that I hope you can help me with, considering your recent book tour experience. I travel for work roughly once every six weeks, and these trips can last anywhere from four to nine days. The reason for my travels varies, but most often it's for conferences that require me to be up early and attending sessions and professional dinners until late in the evening. These events significantly disrupt my daily habits, routines, and rituals. I find that it often takes several days, after I return, especially if there's a time change, to feel that I'm back to my normal rhythms. Of course, some habits and routines are easier to pick back up than others.

What suggestions do you have for how to get back on track quickly after disruptive periods? And are there habits and routines that you try to keep when you are doing your travels? Thanks. It's a good question, Emily. A couple things here, I think, are relevant. one, when it comes to being during your travels, it is good to understand your stripped down systems that you're going to use, and they really should be stripped down.

So you have to acknowledge that traveling is not the same at just being at your office. There's much less you can actually do in terms of the normal work you do. You should lean into that. Really warn people ahead of time. I will be traveling during this period. Get people prepared for that. You can even use an auto responder if you need to so that expectations are set, that you're not as accessible as normal,

that you're not able to be part of hyperactive hive mind on-the-flight interactions as much as before. I think that's helpful. I think it's helpful to schedule if it's a nine-day trip, two or three check-ins. All right, let's have a half-hour pre-scheduled on our calendar that works with, in this case, the conference schedule. Or just in real time, we get caught back up. What's going on? What do you need for me?

A way of deflecting a lot of emails and chat, just like we have a couple check-ins. Let me just check in what's going on. do this, do that, put a pin in that. It's a much more effective way of allowing you to deal with stuff that comes up while you're away without having to have you always constantly try to be connected. As I mentioned, you should streamline the set of systems or habits you use. Like, you're not going to time block, for example, because it's the, if you're at a conference, it's, I don't know what, it's fluid.

I don't know what's going to happen. What's going to happen next? Don't have a lot of expectations for getting a lot of deep work done. I often like to have one sort of contemplative project to work on, something I'm in the early stages of. And so I put all of my decompressed time, and I'm going to go for a walk by this river. I'm going to go explore the town. The sort of decompressed time, I can have one thing to think about.

And over like a week-long trip, you can make pretty cool progress if you keep thinking about something in these unusual environments. But don't expect to do too much more deep work outside of that. And I would schedule admin blocks onto my calendar each day. Here's the one hour I'm going to just sit down and try to crank through everything this admin. So it's all about consolidation so that most of your time you can just be doing the thing you're there to do and not be worrying too much about the other things. On the way back, if it's a long trip, take a day off the day after, either officially or not, just to sort of gain back your energy. Then you need an entire full day of catch-up.

Right. So it's a, I'm going through my inbox. I'm going through my calendar. I'm going through my quarterly plan, my weekly plan, you know, let me get a new weekly plan. And it's like you're wrapping your arms around things. You're pushing things off. You're telling people I'm back now. But let's wait two weeks to get into it.

You're sort of touching on everything that got temporarily frozen. You're touching on everything. Updating your plans, moving things around. No, like, long, deep work, no meetings. Just like getting your arms around everything. Spend an entire day doing that. And then you can hit the ground running the next day. I think the biggest problem people have in this situation, especially after long trips,

is they try to interleave the ketchup with like a normal day of work. And then it's like, oh, my God, the normal day of work doesn't work. The ketchup is overwhelming. The overwhelmingness then gives you more resistance to your standard systems and rituals because those don't work well when you feel super stressed. So just give it the time it requires. A good way to do this is just when you schedule your trip, you add that one or two days on the end, onto your calendar as well.

Whoops, to leave your camera there, Jesse. So then when you're in the future, when you're scheduling meetings and such, you just don't use those days. You've blocked them off just like the seven or eight days before that are part of your trip. So just add that one or two days as part of any long trip on your calendar. Protect those days. One day off, one day catch up, then get back into it. You will not have as much hard of a time as you think getting back into your ritual if you have your handle on everything. So that's what I would recommend.

I do that for sure after every major trip. There's definitely a catch-up day. All right. Ooh, we've got a case study here. So something else we like to do is read case studies sent in by you, my listeners, about how you have specifically put the type of things we talk about in the show into action in your own life. Well, it'll ask people to see sort of what practically these type of ideas look like when the rubber hits the proverbial road. So our case study today comes from Prudence.

Prudent says, I'm a huge fan of your work, and I wanted to share with you some of the ways it has impacted my work in life. I was introduced to your work through your conversation with Lewis Hauves on the School of Greatness podcast when you were talking about digital minimalism. I closed off my personal Facebook account in 2012, but it found a pullback to social media platforms by the mainstream marketing narrative that it is essential to have a presence on social media to run a successful business. Digital minimalism helped me question those beliefs and find other ways to market my business, which feel more alive. aligned. The ideas in your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, were also fundamental, this time in shifting my mindset around my career. In my 20s and 30s, working as a divorce lawyer with the popular message, Follow Your Passion, it was tempting to think that doing away with law and the pressures of billable hours and constant

deadlines was the way to go and that I should seek out a totally different job. But your work helped me open my mind to the possibility of leveraging the career. Capital I had worked on over 18 years of legal practice to build and serve my clients in a different way. Drawing on the ideas and so good they can't ignore you and your lifestyle-centric career planning model, I now work as a divorce coach consultant, which uses my skills and experience, but also helps support my broader lifestyle vision. In 2022, I sold my bricks and mortar legal practice, and as my coaching practice now is entirely

online, my family and I were able to fulfill a long-term dream. of moving from a capital city to a regional beatside community on Australia's sunshine coast. The career change has also afforded me the flexibility to be a present and involved parent and contribute to our local community. Well, Prudence, I really appreciate this case study because it actually captures a few different ideas from my canon that I think are worth emphasizing. I love your application of digital minimalism, where instead of just using things by default until they prove themselves to be dangerous,

you instead say my default's not using something until I see its value is really clear and can't be avoided, and then I'll use it with rails around it. When you did this with your online business as a divorce coach, you actually found it sounds like social media wasn't super important, and that saved you from having to be caught in a relationship with that tool that you didn't really like. I then love your application of my career capital theory from so good they can't ignore you, right? It's the idea that says the thing that matters most in cultivating a career you love is getting good at things and then investing the metaphorical career capital that generates to get things in your job you really want.

The stuff that makes great jobs great is in demand. You have to do something great to earn it. So I love this way of thinking. The follow your passion model that I push back against it's so good they can't ignore you would have told you, as you mentioned here, this isn't your passion. Being a lawyer is not your passion. Quit it. Go do something completely different. that would have been probably a big mistake because without career capital, this different thing would probably not give you what you need.

And finally, what a great example of the core component of my deep life philosophy, which is working backwards. We've talked about this throughout the show, working backwards from your ideal narrative, your master narrative of an ideal lifestyle. And you guys, you had this narrative, and you didn't give us to details, but it seems like it involved living in a quieter place, living closer to nature, more time with family and flexibility. but also implicitly freedom from boring a lot about finances. And so to move closer to that vision, you took the career capital that you had generated being a successful lawyer for all these years to build up this consultant coaching practice,

which requires your really specialized skills, which allows you to probably charge a good amount of money, but is way more flexible than billable hours to actually being on cases, and is fully remote, and allowed you to now move to that other location that's going to be much better to you. That's classic deep life sort of jiu-jitsu right here.

It's not one grand gesture. It's you figuring out if I use this skill over here and this develops, it'll eventually allow me to do X, Y, and Z. That's going to be a better situation. A little key point and nuance in here I want to emphasize for the listener. Notice how she said, by 2022, I was able to sell my standard legal practice and do the coaching full-time. That meant she started this thing on the side,

validated it was working, built it up in a natural way, had evidence it was doing well before she quit the legal practice. It's not always grand gestures for the deep life. It's knowing what your ideal lifestyle looks like and constantly creatively looking at ways to move you closer. So a masterclass prudence in cultivating a more meaningful life along the way applying other ideas for my books. I appreciate that.

It's a good case study. And anybody can send case studies to me at jessie at calnewport.com. Yeah, please do. We love them. All right, so we have a cool final segment coming up about a sort of surprise appearance of this podcast at some place kind of well known. But first, let me tell you about another sponsor. Particularly, I want to talk about our friends at Mint Mobile.

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All right, so this was a nice little treat, but I'm going to use it as an excuse to talk about something a little bit more specific to the show. Deep Questions, our podcast that you're listening to here, made a cool appearance at the Apple WWDC, their worldwide developers conference. So they have this big splashy conference. I think you probably remember it from years past when Steve Jobs would give these big keynotes. one of the big speeches, it's a pre-produced video, but one of the big presentations at this conference is what they call the platform state of the union. So if you're someone who develops for Apple platforms,

this is sort of like the big deal speech where they talk about here's what's coming up with the platforms, what new features or capabilities are coming along, and you can think about like, hey, what can I do with the apps or whatever I build for it? Anyways, deep questions made a little cameo in the WWC platform state of the state of the, Union.

I think Jesse's going to bring this up on the screen here. So if you're watching, you can see there someone is on the screen. She's talking about, there we go. See it, Jesse? Yep. They're showing the Deep Questions podcast is on an Apple watch next to it as some computer code. So it was a segment where they were really talking about some new hooks in the computer

code if you're writing apps for the watch to make it easier. But, hey, deep questions is what they chose as the sort of sample podcast there. So I think at least when it comes to our nerd audience, we're doing very strong. I got maybe six messages from listeners who saw that, which meant we have at least six listeners who were really carefully watching the WWDC State of the Union platform conference. It kind of makes sense. It does. I'm a computer scientist, so we sort of get it. So I thought this would be a good excuse to give a brief state of the union of our own on the Deep Questions podcast.

So as mentioned, Apple State of the Union, let's have our own. State of the Union, like how a few thoughts about the podcast, how it's going, and sort of what we have in mind. So I would say the state of the union here, should we say, is strong, Jesse? I mean, I think the show is doing well. Yeah. It's like a, I feel like a lot of things I do, it is successful, but somewhat underground, right? We're not a runaway top of the category hit. You know, it's not like Lex Friedman show or something that's just.

you know, dominating, but it's really actually a little underneath the covers, underneath the waves a little bit, but we have a really big audience is doing really well, our advertisers really like us, we sell out all of our slots. I think this is the sweet spot because it means we can have a strong community of listeners, but we don't have, people don't, outside of this community, don't know about us, so we can have our own little thing going on here. That's my sweet spot. My newsletter is sort of like that as well.

A lot of my books are like that as well. It will sell a lot of copies, but it's not atomic habits. So we can have a big audience. We're all in on the kind of the club together, but the club can still feel a little bit secret, a little bit special. So I'd like that about where we are right now. A couple of the thoughts I wrote down.

The pandemic was started, I mean, the podcast was started rather early in the pandemic. Back in 2020s, I was listening to a lot of podcasts, sort of lonely, and was like, hey, let's, I think I'll finally pull a trigger on podcast because I wanted to have a way of, sort of talking to people and not just be, you know, by myself. I think that inflex, there's like a big inflection from that origin stories and what you hear on this podcast.

I think if I had started this podcast in very early 2020 or 2019, it would have been more 100% just tech and tech impact. What's going on with your phone? What's going on with your email? And that's still a huge portion of what we talk about. But we have this third leg to our conversations on the deep life, this idea of systematically building an intent. intentional life as a bulwark against all these digital forces. It's hard, for example, to step away from the distraction to versions of your phone if you don't have something better to step towards, right?

It's hard to leave the scrum of email slack-driven busyness at work if you don't have a better vision of what work could be without it. So this deep life idea has become critical to these otherwise technology-driven topics. that is an impact of when and how this podcast was started. We were just thinking about these things in the spring of 2020. I was newslettering. The Deep Life just sort of came out of nowhere when I was writing a daily newsletter in the first month of the pandemic. It was just the vibe.

The vibe was a lot of people, especially in the knowledge, worker tech space, saying, what am I doing with my life? What do I want to do with it? And I was saying, hey, we can talk about this. And I'll bring some of my systematic nerd sort of algorithmic approach to it. It won't be touchy-feely vibes. It'll be matrices and buckets. and whatever, but let's talk about this. And so that's an interesting twist to this podcast, and that's where that came from, that

happened to be started during a moment early in a pandemic where a lot of us were thinking about these issues. The final thing I'll stay in the state of the unit of the podcast. It's something I really look forward to recording each week, and hopefully that comes through. I just talk about what I like to talk about. These are the things I like to talk about. We have our weird little community here, our sort of deep, deep,

life, deep work, digital minimalism, geek community on here. I only talk about what I'm excited to talk about. Some stuff is probably more popular than others. It's certainly probably not down the mainstream, like what's going to grow things a lot. And I love that about the show. For me, what makes it work long term is not trying to make it work too much in the short term. These are the things I care about. I'll spend a year talking about something that maybe I'm developing into a book.

So I'm going to give this a good. The state of the union of the podcast is strong. it's doing well it's the right size it pays for itself right that's the right size our team now how big are we now

so jesse you and I are the core people on the show we have um I'm sorry our ancillary team now we have an editor yeah with the indomitable mark yeah we have a YouTube guy the indomitable Jeremy and that's basically it

I think we run this pretty lean right am I missing someone yeah yeah there's it there I go so jess and I run this with just like a little bit of help we have a cool HQ so anyways thanks for listening everyone who's listening uh i'm still having fun doing this it's doing what i needed to do for me uh and my life it's filling what i wanted to fill and so it's a lot of fun so let's just keep doing it um what did you think about first

starting it like you said you thought about like eight years ago right yeah because i mean all throughout i became so okay it's interesting kind of backstory it reminds me me of there was definitely this is a weird connection but you'll see why it makes sense there were some professional comedians who came up in the 70s and 80s like Steve Martin Albert Brooks and the way they came up is there's a lot of talk shows

you know there's like the tonight show etc but a lot of shows during the day as well there was like the Merv Griffin show and all these other Donnie and Marie and all these shows they were just on TV and there was this group of comedians coming up that just did all those shows all the time. Martin was just doing all of those shows all the time, right, before we finally got to the tonight show. Albert Brooks was just doing all those shows all the time.

Well, starting around 2014, in the media space, this was podcast. And I was sort of doing all these shows because deep work had come out and had become an underground hit. And so people were asking me on these shows in the sort of early stage of this type of podcasting. And I was just doing all the shows. I'm just someone who was just around and really got used to this medium and was just a and have been a sort of mainstay. This is why like

you get to 24 and you know this new book comes out and I basically did like all the major shows. This is like a decade of I've just been on the circuit for a decade. I just, I know how to do it. I know a lot of the people in it. So not surprisingly throughout this whole period, people have constantly been saying start your own show, start your own show. And I was always saying no because I said do less, do better, know why. That takes time. I'm very worried about things to take time. I've young kids at home. I'm trying to get tenure. I'm writing books. It's enough. Enough is enough. So, you know, it wasn't really until the pandemic freed up a lot more time that I was like, okay, and I was lonely that I said, I'm going to pull the trigger. That's what led

me to finally pull the trigger on it. Got it. And I'm glad I am. And we keep it to a half day a week, and I think that really works. It doesn't have a huge footprint on my schedule. And it's doing well. I mean, at the very least, it gives us the glory that is the Deep Work HQ. Which is nice. Yeah, what we do without the HQ. One other quick point. Drake is feuding with Kendrick Lamar. All right.

So the two big feuds going on at the moment. Drake and Kendrick Lamar, Cal Newport and Oliver Berkman, similar in many ways. Similar in terms of the perceived coolness of the participants. Similar in terms of the savagery of the rap-related attacks.

very similar. Not similar in a way that actually, this doesn't work anymore. This bit doesn't work anymore because my whole deep dive was about how I agree with Oliver and he's right. So it's not an effective. That is not an effective way to feud. Like Kendrick is right.

All right. Anyways, enough of this. Thanks everyone just listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com.

Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. 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.