Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 308: The Power of the Quiet Mind

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

One of the trickiest aspects of new technology is that it can sometimes destabilize parts of our lives that we didn’t even realize existed and are important. In this episode, Cal talks about one such idea: the quiet mind. Our constant phone usage is eliminating this critical cognitive state, and by doing so is diminishing our humanity. Cal makes the case for the importance of the quiet mind, and then gives concrete ideas for cultivating it in a distracted world. He also answers questions from listeners and reviews the five books he read in June.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:  The Power of the Quiet Mind [3:58]- What are the benefits of walking meditation? [29:13]- How can a new dad find time to advance his career? [34:16]- How do I manage a temporary increase in admin responsibilities? [38:48]- How can my son organize his sports and school schedule? [43:31]- How can I do less when my colleagues are getting ahead for doing more? [45:54]- CALL: Pre-scheduling with a pull system [51:14] CASE STUDY: Collaborating with colleagues to effectively do hard work [57:54]FINAL SEGMENT: The 5 Books Cal Read in June 2024 [1:08:05]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?Thanks to our Sponsors:indeed.com/deepnotion.com/calshopify.com/deepexpressvpn.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the 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 distracted world. Normally, I would be joining you from my Deep Work HQ in Tacoma Park, Maryland, but not today. I am actually up in an undisclosed location up north where I am recovering from my book tour and beginning to do some more serious writing on my next book. Fortunately, due to the miracle of internet technology, I am still joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, hopefully you're doing okay down south. I'm doing fine. I'm holding down the floor of the HQ. I really, not for your sake, but for my sake, I want to hear that it's just very, very hot.

Actually, the last couple of days haven't been horrible, but today is pretty muggy and hot. All right. I like to hear that. It makes me feel better when I, when I, when I, escape up north. As you'll hear, I went back, a long-time listeners will recognize, I went back to the old intro, cultivating a deep life and a distracted world. I thought the new intro, though, informative, was too long and clunky. And what does everything come back to on the show? Well, we have this world that's distracted due to new technologies, and we want to find depth

and how we work and how we live. So I went back to our old, I went back to our old shorter intro. So I don't know if people will like or dislike it, Jesse, but I decided inspired by the Northern Era up here to make a change. I like it. All right. So we got a good show. You know, I think we are in the deep dive that's coming up. I'm going to overlap two of the common topics we like to talk about.

So, you know, I always summarize. We do digital knowledge work surviving or navigating the promise and peril's new technology and systematically cultivating a deep life. We got a good deep dive here that's going to touch on those last. So technology and the deep life, which I am excited about. And we got some good questions. We got a call. We got a case study. And because this is our first episode of the new month, I will at the end of the show review the five books that I read in June. Now, before we get going, I have a quick bit of housekeeping. The summer is often a disquieting time for me as a podcaster because in the summer, your listen numbers go down, right? I mean, most podcasters experience this because people aren't commuting to work. They're not in their normal schedules. They fall out of the routines of listening to the same podcast on the same days. And we in particular are associated often

with work and technology, so people listen to it less. And it always makes me nervous to see the numbers go down. So I figured this summer, why don't we try to counteract it by increasing our total number of listeners at the same time that the percentage of listeners is going down? I think of this as my sort of summer subscription drive. Here's what this really means. I'm just asking, if you are listening to this and you like to show, consider doing one of two things. One, leaving a review, explaining why you like to show wherever it is, you listen to it.

And two, if you have some sort of audience and you like to show, maybe consider telling them about it. Again, my goal here is to try to offset the reduced average listenership in the summer by just having more listeners. This is all about your friend, Cal Newport's mental health here. So, you know, leave a review, mention it to your audience. I don't ask about this often. I figured this would be a good time, if ever, to discuss helping this spread the word.

All right, I think that's enough of the housekeeping. Let's get started with our deep dive. So one of the tricky aspects of new technologies is that they can sometimes destabilize parts of our lives that we didn't even know exist and didn't even know were. important. We get this vague feeling of unease, but we don't really know where it's coming from. We saw this, for example, in the world of digital knowledge work. When personal computers and email and then mobile computing came along, it really changed the character of this type of work. We became more busy and more frantic than ever before. So we were assuming, given how much effort we were putting out, that we must somehow be more productive than we were before.

and yet during that revolution, people had a sinking suspicion that something was wrong. We couldn't necessarily point to all the new important things that we were accomplishing. We were busier, but we didn't necessarily feel more productive. So this was a case where it turned out that the real issue is there was two different types of work and we didn't know it. We didn't have this vocabulary before, but there was deep work and then there was shallow work. and all of the new digital productivity tools that came into the 20th century, 21st century office were increasing the speed and quantity of shallow work, but we're actually decreasing the amount of deep work. And that is why we felt more busy than ever before, but weren't actually producing more.

So we didn't realize there's a difference between deep and shallow work, and we didn't realize, therefore, the technology was subtly destabilizing this and making our lives worse because of it. So today I want to talk about a similar problem in our personal lives. As we begin to spend more and more time interacting with our phones, something that really picked up right around 2008, 2009, really hit its stride in 2012, it's easy to look at the positives, right? We have more information, more connection, more distraction, more entertainment, and all of this delivered in times that we would otherwise just be bored.

There's concerns, of course, about the specific things we were looking at on our phones, but the idea was, look, if you can stay away from the toxic stuff, if you can stay away from the toxic social media threads, this was a net positive. Life has just become more interesting than it was before. And yet, just like with digital knowledge work, we once again have this sinking feeling that something is off, that our lives are somehow not quite right in a world in which we're looking at our phone so much. We can't say exactly why it's a problem, but people just feel uneasy when they survey the crowds around them and see everyone's face looking down. So I want to get into that today because I'm going to identify first what it is that we are losing

in this current state of constant phone usage, the sort of hidden thing that was important to our lives that we didn't even realize that's being destabilized. And once we realize what it is that we are losing, I'm going to give you concrete advice for how to regain it and how to, by doing so, regain the depth in your life. All right. So let's get specific here. What is it that we have to worry about when we look at our phone so much? Well, it's a specific cognitive state that I think most of us don't realize is important. And I'm going to call it the quiet brain, right? This is the cognitive state when you are alone with your own thoughts and your observations of the world around you. So when you're truly in a quiet brain

state, it sort of feels like this. The cacophonous chatter in your head has settled into a singular internal discussion or conversation or exploration. So you sort of have a single discussion happening in your brain. What do I think about this? Or what happened there? What might be exciting to do next? And this conversation, your brain will go quiet sometimes. It'll just be you observing the world around you, seeing something around you, just fully observing. And then the conversation will come back again. It's slow. It's solid. then it kind of dies off again as you notice something else. So it's you, the world around you, and a sort of calm internal dialogue.

That's the quiet brain state. Now, here's the thing. This is basically the default state for the human brain ever since we got to the stage of verbal language. I think for most of our history, most of the time during the day, we were in a quiet brain state. We were sort of looking around as we were doing our daily labors or our daily journeys. we were seeing things, we were noticing things, and then having these conversations internally come up, stick around for a while, then sort of die down again. Not unlike being on the porch with an old friend in the rocking chairs, and as the evening wears on,

you have conversation, it drifts in and out, and sometimes you're just watching the wind blow. That was our default state. All right. Why is this quiet brain state important to humans? Well, there's three things I want to mention. First, it's calming. If you've had this state, you go for a long hike and you don't have anything in your ears and you're seeing what's around you, then you'll think about something for a while, then back

to observing what's around you, we feel restored. They use a computer metaphor, it allows our brain to defragment to sort of clean up what's going on inside. I'm sure from a neurophysiological perspective, there's something to be said about chemicals being reset and rebalanced within our brains. In my book, Digital Minimalism, I talked about the huge neural load required to do social interaction or to simulate other people's brains. And so they have relief from that to just be alone with you and your own thoughts, this lets your brain actually catch a breather. The second thing that happens during the quiet brain state is that you're able to make sense of yourselves and the world around you.

It is extended periods alone with your own thought where you process the information that you've taken in and make sense. sense of it, that you integrated into the multiple internal schemas stored inside your brain that you use to make sense of yourself in the world. Maybe you had an experience recently that elicited pride or shame. This lets you process that. What does that mean? Why did that happen? What do I want to learn from this? What do I want to change going forward? It helps you better understand other people because you can sit there and really think about what's going on with this person. Why do they actually feel this way? What are the people that leading or involved in a community with? What is it that it that they really need or what they're struggling with. It also helps you understand the world of

ideas. A complicated idea that you may be encountered in a podcast or a book isn't going to be excessively integrated into your brain, something you can build on or apply to other things later in life until you give yourself time to actually let it bounce around, to think about it, to explore the different hard edges of this new complex shape and to integrate it into the folds of your brain. So it's literally where you become smarter as well. Finally, the quiet brain state is where you figure out what matters to you. What's important to you, what's not? What's you want in your life?

What you want to avoid? This requires discernment, by which I mean it requires you to actually pick up and notice these subtle feelings of residence. You know, something about what I'm seeing in this documentary right now just speaks to me. There's something in there that's important. Something about this experience over here is really turning me off. I think there's something in this that I really don't like to really pull apart those threads and isolate them in a way that's usable. You need quiet time alone with your own thoughts. You know, I hear this a lot from people who are trying to follow my ideas and advice about cultivating a deeper life.

They'll realize I don't know what they aim for. I mean, I don't know what it is I'm trying to get more of in my life and what it is I'm trying to reduce. And that's because they don't have enough quiet brain time to actually figure that out. So the quieter your brain can get, the more sophisticated your understanding can become of what's important to you and what's not. All right. So there's huge benefits to the quiet brain. So what is our current problem? Well, our current problem is this is exactly what is being subtly and quietly eliminated by this behavior of constantly looking at our phones.

It's something we didn't realize was being destabilized, but it's a big source of that disquiet we feel about the constant companion model of looking at our phones. every time we have some downtime. Because we have mobile computing and high-speed ubiquitous wireless internet, for the first time in human history, we really can banish every moment in which we would have fallen into the quiet brain state. Every moment of boredom, every moment of not having something to do, we can listen to something or read something, we can have high-tech algorithms using lots of data on ourselves and our preferences,

show us exactly what's going to be entertaining in the moment. it's like going from like a state of starvation to having an advanced snack machine that follows you around that gives you your very favorite junk food whenever you're hungry. So this is the thing that we're quietly losing without realizing it by looking at our phones all the time. This quiet brain state that we used to spend so much time in is being eliminated. We don't notice it. We don't have the terminology for it. But it comes out when we just look around and say this doesn't feel right that we're all looking at our phones all that. time. And it's not because what's really happening here is that we are quite literally not fully

being human, this quiet brain state, which is so core to the human experience, we're just getting rid of it without realizing it. All right. So we want to do something about this. We want to reclaim more quiet brain time in our lives. Now, this is going to require not just making time for this, but becoming once again more comfortable with it. This can be an uncomfortable. state if you haven't been in there in a while. We're not used to our own brain. We can get bored or antsy or afraid pretty easily. So we have to reclaim our comfort with the quiet brain. We have to carve out more time to actually have this cognitive state. So I want to give you some concrete advice here. I have four ideas, four concrete ideas. All of them built towards the same goal,

the same goal of eliminating this constant companion relationship with your phone where it's something that's always with you that can deliver you incredibly appealing information distraction and that you're in the habit of doing at even the slightest hint of not having directed work to do. So we're going to break this constant companion model with your phone. We're going to do so with four pieces of advice. All right. Piece of advice number one. Make your phone more boring.

boring. So I want you to take off your phone any app where someone makes more money, the more time you use that app. So this is a course including essentially every social media app. It's also occluding, for example, addictive games, games you download for free, but the more you play it, the better it is for the company. This is also going to involve probably if you're using the YouTube app on your phone a lot too and just sort of jumping around the recommendations on there when you're bored. So what does this make your phone if you don't have those apps on it? It makes your phone exactly what it was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone when he first

introduced the modern smartphone in his famous keynote in 2007. What did Jobs outline in that original introduction of the iPhone? What did he outline as the phone's main uses? Communication. It's a really good interface for communicating with people, be it calls or text messages. Audio. He really was pushing music. music, but of course now this is audio books and podcasts. It's a fantastic audio player navigation.

You have this fantastic maps. You never have to get lost again. And looking up information relevant to what you're doing in the moment. Where is the address of this restaurant we're looking for? What is the hours of this museum? Is it still open? We want to figure out so we can decide whether we want to go there or not, right? These were the original visions for the phone. It's a fantastic vision. It makes it an incredibly useful part of your life. But it doesn't make it something that you would pull out at a moment's notice when distracted. So make your phone more boring. Number two, practice the phone FOIA method. I recommend this all the time. People do not want to do this. This is probably the scariest suggestion that I will make here, but I have to tell you it

works. It really will change your relationship with your phone. I know it sounds scary, but it really will. All right, for people who don't know it, here is how it works. When at home, you keep your phone plugged in in a set location, not in your pocket with you. So I call it a phone foyer method because if you have a house, maybe you have a foyer near the front door where you put your keys, it's a great place to plug it in. You don't have a foyer. It could be, for example, in your kitchen or in your home office. You keep it plugged in when you're at home.

If you need to look something up, you go to where your phone's plugged in, you look it up. If you need to text someone, you go to your phone and you text them there. If you need to call someone, you go to the phone and you call them there. If you need to have a back-and-forth conversation with someone, you know, you're going to have to sit there and do it where the phone is plugged in. So you're not eliminating any use of the phone, but you are eliminating the immediate access. So this means when you're at the table, when you're eating breakfast, when you're watching TV or a movie with your family, the phone is not there to alleviate any boredom. It's in the other room as plugged in.

And so you have to just stay with whatever you're doing. You sit down to read a book. You can't look at your phone real quick when you have those little moments of boredom. your phone is plugged in in the other room. Now, what about audio when you're doing chores around the house? Well, you use, you know, wireless earbuds. It's fine. Someone once said, well, wait a second.

My house is kind of large. And if my phone is plugged in over here and I'm doing the dishes over here, my earbuds don't reach. Okay, fine. Change where you plug it in if you need to to do a chore at another part of your house. The key thing is not to have it on your person. This is really effective. Because it gets to the core of the constant companion model, which is the default knee-jerk reaction of board, pull it out, board, pull it out.

You eliminate that ability, your brain pretty quickly learns to make that association less strong. And that urge that I, that dopamine-driven urge of, I'm going to feel good in a second here when I look at this distraction, that will begin to dissipate. So you really have to practice the phone for your method, even though I know you don't want to. All right, my third piece of advice, this is kind of controversial as well. Stop reading so much stuff on your phone.

All right. I love written material, but I don't want you to think of your phone as a place that always has interesting things you can scroll through and read when you're bored. So there's a couple things you can do to actually implement this advice. First of all, I love email newsletters. You should have those all filtered. If you're using something like Gmail, filtered to a particular label. And then what you can do is every once in a while, go through those newsletters. And these can include, by the way, newsletters, daily news roundups for.

from like the major news sources you follow. So we're talking not just independent information, but major news as well. Send the interesting articles either to a reading app or there's a cool app someone was showing me the other day that can send articles to your Kindle. Send a Kindle. So either clip it in a reading app or maybe send it directly to a Kindle. Then to read these articles, you can, if you send them to your Kindle, you can read them right there on your Kindle where you have no other distractions.

If you sent them to a reader app like Pocket, you could use like an iPad that has that app. It syncs up with it. And that's what you use to read the articles you sent over there. Right. So you're not, it's not on your phone. It's on a separate device. And now you can read these interesting articles that you got digitally delivered in times in place that you've set aside for this.

Like I've talked about the Sunday morning ritual of going to a coffee shop with your Kindle or iPad to catch up on articles. Or it could be something you do right before dinner. or you do at night in your study, but you're not giving up on this miraculous element of the internet, which is there's more information from more interesting people that's more accessible. But you're taking it off of your phone. Because again, this is all about making your phone no longer this totemic source of distraction, that like everything is on here if I pick it up that's going to make my life less boring. Finally, you have to actually just practice this boredom.

And by boredom, I mean being alone with your own thoughts. you have to get used to that. This will take some time, but you have to get used to that. Now, I recommend often on the show a pretty specific rhythm for this. A small session every day where you go and do something with nothing in your ear, and nothing in your hand we're talking about. You run into run an errand, or you go to buy some coffee, and you don't bring your phone with you, or if you do have your phone with you,

it's in your bag and it's turned off. It's just every day you get a little bit more comfort with just, my brain is all I have to entertain me. Once a week, then I want you do a longer session. like a long walk or a hike or you mow your whole yard or something a longer session alone with your own thoughts for now you can really get used to that sort of uh i bring up a conversation i get and get bored with it it's just looking around for a while another conversation comes up that sort of we're on the porch and there's just some moments of silence type calm and peace so a

short session every day of boredom a long session every week all right so this is my four pieces of advice to summarize make your phone more boring practice a phone for your method stop reading on your phone, practice boredom. You do these things and you can reclaim the quiet mind as a state that you not only go into more frequently, but that you're much more comfortable being in. It will take about four to six weeks of practicing this advice before this becomes natural, before you really begin to reap the benefits and not just feel the difficulties of it. But those benefits are worth it. it really is like your life has been turned from black and white to techno color. It's just, it's slower and more vivid and more rich and more intellectually interesting.

Your sense of yourself as a person and what's happening in the world around you and what's important to you. All of this will become sharper. You will quite literally feel more human. So this advice is hard, but I think it's worth giving a try because the quiet brain is not a state that we should be comfortable fully. abandoning from the human experience. All right. So there we go, Jesse, quiet brain. You know where this came from actually was working on my deep life book.

Oh, really? Up here. Yeah, up here on vacation is where it kind of became, I began thinking more and more about the importance of the quiet brain and to discern like what you want to do with your deep life. And so I've been kind of been grappling it up here in this quiet, this quiet undisclosed location. So I thought I would try out some of the ideas.

I have two questions. For the no reading on your phone, is that due to the temptation to look at other things? Yeah. Yeah. And also just, I want your phone to seem like the Steve Jobs 2007 device, very utilitarian. So the more you have sort of just like generic button pressing nice distraction on the phone, the more you're going to be tempted to just, this is what I do when I'm bored. So a lot of people will maybe get off to like I'm on Instagram or TikTok on the phone,

but in this have so many like news feeds and recommended articles. And it can take them down that same pathway of just quick distraction. Yeah. So you're going to read, read. The other thing I would add, you know, I had this note. I'll add one more note to the stop reading on your phone. I'll add a little addendum. Read more physical stuff too.

And we might call this the Rory Gilmore method. There's a Gilmore girl's reference. She always had books with her. So consider always having a physical book with you as well. So in moments of boredom, it is a physical book and not your phone that you turn to. I think that's also a fantastic way to disassociate again. Your phone is like a distraction machine. And then in terms of the larger session every week, I guess golfing would count, right, if you didn't have your phone.

And you're like carrying your bag and walking. Yeah, they can be great. Yeah, you're golfing. Yeah. You're there with your buddy. You're talking. You're thinking about what you're doing. doing you're I think there's a reason why uh people today really like golf like one of the

benefits they get from it is like it's some of their only quiet brain time so so yeah you're justified jessie you're just think about my just amount of time you spend playing golf think about my swing quiet brain cry exactly just I want you just sit there and just contemplate what's wrong with your swing all right well we've got a great group of questions here uh dealing with this and quiet and solitude and distraction, work, all sorts of cool stuff. But before we get there, let's quickly hear from one of the sponsors. So in particular, I want to talk about a new sponsor of this show, and that is indeed.

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All you have to do is go to Indeed.com slash deep. Just go to Indeed.com slash deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash deep. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need indeed. I also want to talk about our friends at Notion. Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It's a workspace design, not just. for making progress, but getting inspired. Look, we live in an era of information overload. All sorts of information you need to run your business or to run your life. Notion helps you make sense of this information.

One of the ways we used to use Notion, for example, was to keep track of our ad reads like I'm doing right now. Our ad agency actually built out a really cool Notion workspace where we could see all the information relevant to these ads in many different forms. Like we could look at a calendar, for example, a calendar view and say, okay, what are the ads for this particular episode? But then we could click on one of those ads and say, why don't you show me all of the ads that we've done for that particular advertiser? There is the system that they set up with Notion made it easy for us to enter an information. Oh, here's the link to the episode. Here's the timestamps. This information workspace that we created for managing ads just made this so much easier than trying to just throw shared documents back around and send

emails. You can really do almost anything with your information using Notion. It is also more recently added more and more AI powered tools. Now meetings can be summarized. Docs can be easily found. Questions about the information in your workplace can be asked of the AI and it will give you an answer right there. So it has made Notions already best in class information management, even more powerful. Whether you're a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or student juggling classes and clubs, Notion will make it easier. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash cow.

That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash cal, and start turning ideas into actions. And when you use our link, you're supporting my show. So go to notion.com slash cal. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Sounds good. First questions from AAA.

Is walking meditation an important skill or is it used as a tool to learn to focus? Well, it's a good question, AAA, because people ask about this a lot using traditional meditation techniques to help improve their ability to focus. So walking meditation is a traditional technique. It comes, for example, out of mindfulness meditation. So one of the ways to do mindfulness meditation is to go on a walk so that your body is in physical motion. And then during traditional walking meditation, you just try to keep your attention just on your thoughts without engaging them, just like you do when you're sitting doing mindfulness meditation. But some people, myself included, find it easier to be moving. It also just gives you sort of more to look at, makes it sort of easier to get that distance from your inner dialogue.

So walking meditation is great for the benefits you get from traditional mindfulness meditation. However, if you want to learn to focus better, my advice is always practice directly focusing better. Don't look for a transference of ability from related tasks. It's usually better just to practice directly the thing you want to be better at. So if you want to be better at focusing on your work, let's devise routines to practice focusing better on your work. Let's directly practice what we want to do. There's two things I usually recommend here, to practice. regimes I usually recommend for getting better at focusing on your work. One is interval training.

So use an actual timer. You can start at 20 minutes if you're new to this and start the timer and focus on what you're doing really, really intensely. If your attention wanders, bring it back to the work you're doing and try to focus really intensely. Remember, you only have to do this for the timer duration so it doesn't seem open-ended and impossible. also that voice that says like, well, why don't we take a break now is much more easy to diffuse when you're doing interval training because you can say, no, the break is going to come when this timer's over. So we don't have to have a negotiation about whether or not to take a break now. It's in 10 minutes. We can wait 10 minutes. Now, the key to interval training is if you actually go and look at something else, you look at the web, you look at your phone, you have to restart a timer.

right so there's some stakes there as well and what you do is uh you start with a time that's a little bit of a stretch and then after you get more comfortable with that time you increase it by 10 minutes right so 20 minutes let's just go all in focus it's really hard but i can do 20 minutes because i'm going to be embarrassed if i can once it's no longer so hard i make that 30 minutes so maybe that's like a week later now i'm doing these like 30 minute chunks until that's pretty comfortable then i make it 40 minute chunks and if you can get to about 90 minutes to two hours i've been able to really focus hard, there you go. You've got a sort of a plus focus ability. So interval training directly increases your ability to focus on the type of stuff you need to focus on.

The other thing I recommend, and this might be where your connection or mix up around walking meditation and focus might have come from, is what I call productive meditation. This does involve walking, but it's not walking meditation. So what you do with productive meditation is you go for a long walk and try to make progress on a single professional problem, the type of thing you want to get better at. Make progress on a single professional problem only in your head. And when your attention wanders from that problem, which it will do, you just bring your attention back to that problem and keep trying to make progress. Do this with your phone not with you or turned off in your bag, so it's just you alone with

your own thoughts, trying to make progress on a professional problem. This will be hard at first. your mind will wander a lot. In fact, I can guarantee one thing your mind, if you're new to this, will almost certainly do, is try to write emails. I don't know why this is the case, but knowledge worker after knowledge worker reports this to me. When they first try productive meditation, the first thing their mind tries to do is wander from the problem at hand and think about emails that needs to write and that starts writing the text in your brain. That's fine. Just notice it and bring your attention back to the problem. Eventually, you'll get better at this.

you'll be able to keep your mind's eye more stable, and you'll be able to better take advantage of your working memory resources, meaning you'll have more things you can keep held in your mind's eye, the reference while you're trying to make mental progress on your problem. Productive meditation is hard, but it makes you really good at focus. I spent my two years as a postdoc at MIT doing a large quantity of productive meditation, and it really made a big difference on the ability to actually grapple with problems. So if you're going to become better at focusing, practice getting better at focusing. If you want the benefits of mindfulness meditation, practice mindfulness meditation.

But I want to depend too much on transference from one to the other. What do we got next? Next question is from Tired New Dad. I'm a new dad. However, I want to change my job and this will require that I get new certifications. But this all takes time outside of work, which I feel like I have none. How can I advance my career in this new period of my life? Don't advance your career in this particular period of your life.

Right. It's possible a tired new dad that you're having a bit of a panic reaction. This big disruptive thing has happened. It's scary and disoriented. There's a baby in the house and it's like everything feels out of control and you're fighting with your wife about like who's doing what. and it all seems kind of weird and scary and you're worried. A big change can feel like this is going to make me feel better. Changes we think make us feel better.

There's an excitement in doing something new. We want to change something up. It's a way to regain autonomy and a way to sort of seek the chemical soothing of positive change. However, this is not the time to do that. This is the time to make your sort of side hustle, your side project, where your putting your extra energy, all of that should be focused on your kids and your new kid and your wife. Like, how do we get through this? How do we make this as reasonable as possible? How do I prevent my partner from going insane? How can I be as useful as possible? Like, this is what

you should be focused on at least to this period where you're tired because you have a very new baby. That's what I'm going to suggest. Now, this idea of changing your job, wouldn't you get back to this? You get back to this after what I call the new baby stabilization point. Right. So I've been through this three times. And so I learned through experience that in that early period of everything is up in the air because we have an infinite home, the thing I would look forward to to calm myself is knowing you're going to get to what I call the new baby stabilization point, which is when you first get into a sustainable, stable, ongoing routine with a child, which usually means maternity and paternity leaves are over.

The child care situation is figured out. Like, okay, here's the daycare. Here's the nanny. Whatever it is. And it's like, great, we have the sustainable setup. Like, we dropped the kit off here at this time. We pick them up here. Here's what we do with our schedules to make this work.

So you're no longer in a period of temporarily facing a disruption. But you've come back to like, okay, this is what we're going to do for the next year or two. That's when you can start thinking again about science. projects, right? Because now you're no longer all hands on deck. You're back to like, okay, here's our new stable configuration. We have a new stable configuration for our family. Now I can actually step back and say, what changes do I want to make? All right. So that's the way I would think about this is until you're at the new baby stabilization point, just focus on the new baby and your wife right now. Like that's where you want to be, that's where you want to be focusing.

The other recommendation I'm going to give here is, you know, if this is your first kid, Now you have a family. That's different than, let's say, even just being married. You have a family, which means your lifestyle-centric planning from which any decision like to change your job should be stimming from. It should be working backwards from a lifestyle vision, not working forward towards a singular goal. This lifestyle needs to now be fully shared. You and your wife need to sit down and really think through. What do we want our lifestyle to be like the next few years, five years from now, 10 years from now? You have to be on the same page. All these decisions need to be decisions, made to help the family's vision. Very important that you do not fall into, I, me, the sort of singular, what do I want in my job? I want to react to this part of my life being harder by being able to do this other part of my life more. It's my turn to make this more what I want to be. Everything now needs to be family focused as to family lifestyle that you're working backwards from, not just what you think might be interesting or what might be best for your career. So there's a real change that happens in the air when you go from a couple to a family.

All right. I really do remember that after the first kid, Jesse, I got really good at it. It really was calming, being like, yeah, it's going to be six months from now. We will have it, will be in the stable routine. And once we're in a sustainable, stable routine, everything's possible again. And so don't worry about the moment being really, you know, chaotic. It was always knowing, like, that's not that far in the future. I remember that very clearly.

All right, who do we got next? All right. Next question is from Thomas. In a few months, I'm taking on the role of our customer support manager as she goes on maternity leave for at least six months. This will add a lot more admin work. Normally, I can work in solitude on one to two tasks per day. Should I treat this period as an intense season from which I will cool off significantly afterwards, as in your slow productivity book? Or should I be more focusing on your work management suggestions from a world without email?

I'm going to suggest both, right? So you should do both of these things. One, yes, this is a temporary season that's more intense because you're taking on this extra role, but then that role is going to go away. So it is helpful psychologically to say my expectations for the bigger, deeper projects that I execute in isolation and solitude, that my expectations are reduced for this period. I'm going to reduce my load of big, projects, I'm going to dedicate more time to accommodate this new administrative role. And I know this will end. And when it ends, I'll sort of take a breather and then go back to the way I was working before, which was, which was slower and more individualistic. So yes, I think you should do that. At the same time, I think you should also be applying the type of thinking that's in my book, a world without email, about structuring this new administrative work with systems and processes to minimize the negative impact it has on your life. You want to do both. I want to build systems around it and I want to adjust my expectations for this

period. So you want to do both at the same time. Now, the cool thing about this being a temporary assignment, you are doing like a favor for your company by doing this, right? You're helping them out by taking on this extra role. I bet they're not paying you more. So they're really grateful that you're doing this. This means, because it's not your full-time job, you can get away with being more more annoying about how you structure this work. You can get away with having pretty extremes. Like, look, here's like the systems and processes I'm going to need. If I'm going to do this and I'm going to still be able to do my other job,

I'm going to have to really structure the hell out of this. You can get away with a lot more than if they, like, hired you just to do this job and you're like, you know, chill out with all this Cal Newport stuff. You can get away with some bigger, more intense system. So like, let me suggest a few things you might think about here. Colleague office hours. Every day or every other day, here's a

hour in which my door is open and I have a virtual meeting room turned on and a phone on. And you defer as many back and forth interactions with your colleagues as possible to the office hours. Like, yeah, that's a great point. Grab me up my next office hours. We'll get into it, right? Make those demands. That's going to cut a lot of the back and forth communication down.

Ticketing systems. You're in customer support. Use ticketing systems or simulated ticketing systems. I talked about in a world without email for non-customer-facing things as well. All right. Yeah, you did make this request to me. you can see its status. Here it is.

It's in a Trello board or in a free ticketing system somewhere. I'll update you when I get to this. I'm going to pull tickets off of here. So you're structuring information. You're making status of information transparent. All this again reduces unscheduled back and forth communication. If you have a team, use docket clearing meetings

to take care of lots of little things so it doesn't just unfold on Slack channels. In fact, you should even demand. We don't use Slack. Or if we use it, it's when we're having a, a meeting on Slack at a certain time, but it's not something that otherwise I'm going to monitor. Definitely structure the time you use for working on this particular job. You say, look, I have two jobs. Here are the hours I work on this one. So like the first three hours of every day is working on my other job. The next three hours is like for meetings and everything else for this other job.

And so when you're scheduling meetings for the new temporary job, you say, yeah, I spend half the day on this job, the second half of the day. So no morning is available. Again, you can get away with this. stuff because you have agreed to take on these extra obligations for your company. So you have more wiggle room here to structure your time. And finally have communication protocols for things that have to happen again and again. Again, you have to read a world without email to get the details on that. But for types of work that happen again and again, figure out this is how we talk about it. This is how we request come in. This is how we keep track of request. Here's how we update the status of things. Take the time to build protocols around these. Do not just let things

come with haphazard unscheduled messaging back and forth. All right. So lower your expectations, put a temporary hold on almost everything else you're working on, make this reasonable, but then it's structured a hell out of the work anyways. Those two together, I think, will make this completely survivable. All right, what do we got next? Next question's from Scott. My son is two years away from university.

He's also a highly competitive judo athlete. Can he start to implement some of your strategies such as weekly planning, multi-scale planning to help him manage his time more effectively and balance the priorities of school and judo. Yes, students can definitely gain massive advantages by being more aware about how they schedule their time and activities. It can almost be because there's so little of this happening among young people, so like at the high school level or the college level, it's almost like a superpower. If you have even rudimentary control over your time and schedule, it prevents deadline pile-ups, it prevents you having to work late at night. It gives you a realistic assessment of your actual workload so you can make reductions or figure out what's really messing up with your time.

It's a fantastic, I very much suggest it. I have two different books that give advice specifically on students doing this. First is how to become a high school superstar. the part one playbook in that book specifically gets into how a high school aid student could manage their time and schedule. The second book is How to Become a Straight A Student. That book gives advice for university students

on how they should manage their time and obligations. So how to become a high school superstar sort of simplifies the straight A student advice a little bit to make it more appropriate for a younger student. However, if you have an advanced student with a complicated schedule. Either of those books, I think, you'll find the student-focused, time management,

advice really useful. So, yes, students should care about this. It is going to look different than what, like, I would do as a middle-aged professional with five jobs, but scheduling makes a difference. Speaking of which, I had a little note about this, how to win at college, Jesse,

my very first book from 2005, was featured on the Fox News website the other day. Oh, really? Yeah, it's interesting. A, blast of a past and not the place you think about when you think about college advice books. But I guess they had a roundup of like books to get for students. And it was one of the books.

So it's good to see. My very first book has made a reappearance. That's good. I have a lot of fondness. A lot of fondness for that book. How to Win a College. All right. Ooh, we got slow productivity corner coming up.

Is that right? Yes, we do. All right. I may be separated by many miles from the. HQ right now, but I think I can still rock out to the Slow Productivity Corner theme music. Let's hear that musical interlude. So if you're new to the show, the Slow Productivity Corner is where we do a question each week that's relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity, and the Lost Art of Accomplishment

Without Burnout. If you have not yet checked out slow productivity, but you do like the type of advice you hear on the show. You've got to read the book. You can find anywhere books are sold or find out more at Calnewport.com. slash slow. All right, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week? It comes from from star to slacker. My colleagues are great at pseudo productivity and get praised for busyness, whereas I'm taking my time doing less and trying to be Newportonian

and seem to be viewed as a slacker rather than a star. I tried to focus on three big projects over a quarter semester while my colleagues did 10 to 5 or 10 to 15 smaller ones. And the perception is that the people who do more are inherently more valuable and get raises, promotions, and more prestige. How can I do less when my colleagues are getting ahead for doing more? All right. Well, there's two approaches here, right? One is just to recalibrate what you think the right size is for a project, okay? Because the advice from slow productivity is actually agnostic to some degree about the size of projects you're working on. It says, the advice says, don't do too many projects at the same time because this creates too much administrative overhead.

It adds up to be too much and then you can't get anything done. So you want to not have too many concurrent projects, regardless of how big they are. Two, it says to take your time, right? So this might be the place where you're thinking about. So give projects a time required to do them well, but also have more cycles throughout the year, have busy periods and less busy periods. And then three is like obsess over quality, do things really well, you want to increasingly sort of become better at what you do.

All right. These are somewhat agnostic to project size. So it's possible, this is option one, it's possible that in your particular workplace, the appropriate size of project they want people working on is relatively small. All right. If that's the case, work on smaller projects,

but still use the rules of slow productivity. Only do a couple at a time. Make sure you have variability, like you have more intense periods and less intense periods, and really focus on doing each of them well. Like try to get better at them so you're doing them at a higher level of quality. So you could just work on smaller projects, but by applying the rules of slow productivity,

not get overloaded doing it and really begin to do really well on them. Your other option, if you say, no, no, no, what I want to do is work on a smaller number of projects that have way more impact. you got to roll the dice on that, right? You would have to roll the dice on that. And what I mean by that is if you're in an organization where people are doing lots of little things, pseudo productivity, and it's not really that valuable, but it's safe.

And it's attention catching that you're just like, no, I'm working on these really big initiatives. You have to actually put the chips down on the table, right? This is what I mean by roll the dice. And like make it clear, I am doing less things right now. But the thing I'm working on is really important. hold me to that. My claim I'm making is the small number of things I'm doing really well is going to make a huge difference. So, right, let's check back in in three months and I'll prove that to you.

So that's where, you know, this is the gamble because it actually has to make a difference. If you want to say, no, I'm saying no to more of these smaller things. I am stepping out of the pseudo-p productivity buzz to focus on a smaller number of things. there's a necessary element of accountability. In the book I talk about this is to trade off. You're trading the sort of accessibility. Just give me any work I'll get it done for accountability. I'm not going to do that, but you have to hold me accountable.

And if the stuff I produce is not great. If the stuff I produce really doesn't move the needle, then it's going to be unavoidable. And I'm going to have to go back to working the other way or maybe even lose my job. So you have these two options. You either recalibrate your project size. Like, great, I'm working on smaller projects, but in a slowly productive way.

way, or you roll the dice and say, I'm pitching to you, my company, to be different than other people here. And I'm going to, the only way to succeed with that is to really lean into the obsession over quality aspect of slow productivity and deliver the hell out of what you're doing. And it's so valuable, what you're doing and so skilled, they're like, we need this. So fine, you're different. You're not the person we're going to think of when we have these small little stupid crises, and we're not going to invite you to every meeting.

So those are your two options. Go smaller or put the chips down and say, hold me accountable and then actually, actually deliver. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do have a call. Oh, excellent. All right. Let's hear it.

Okay. Hi, Cal. My name is Kevin, and I'm an attorney, and I had a question about two of the ideas you propose in slow productivity. First, you advocate for prescheduling time to complete your projects when something new is assigned to you. I love this idea, and I found it to be very helpful in management. my workload. It's given me the ability to give an informed answer once when actually asks me if I can take on something new, rather than just guessing. However, I'm having some trouble

using pre-scheduling with another technique from the book, the poll system. I like the idea of a poll system and only working on one thing at a time. My pre-scheduled calendar is now effectively pushing projects forward before I'm ready to work on them. Like I'll be working on project A, but then my calendar tells me it's time to work on project B, so either I have to stop project day to shift my focus or rework my entire pre-scheduled calendar to accommodate. Now, there is an element of poor planning here. I'm not good at estimating the time it will take me to finish things, but it's also because I am juggling important projects that don't have a deadline with urgent deadline-driven projects. Do you have any tips for managing

the two systems, or more broadly, can a pole system survive in a deadline-driven work environment? I'm in your excellent work. This is a great question because these are two different suggestions that I give in the slow productivity, my book's slow productivity, during the chapter on doing fewer things. And I'm giving very practical advice about how to actually get away from this. And there is a tension between these two pieces of advice. It's partially fundamental, but there is a way for them to work together. So let's get into, let me highlight this tension a little better for the audience, right?

So the prescheduling method says, okay, if someone asks you to do some work, go find the time for it ahead of time. Put that on your calendar. So you have to deal with realistically how much time you actually have available, right? So what happens when you have to schedule your time on the calendar? Well, A, you might not be able to find it, at least in a reasonable window around the current moment. In which case, you have just gotten clear feedback. I'm too busy to do this.

And it's not arbitrary. I just feel busy, which people don't react well to. It's concrete and evidence-based. I went to schedule the time to do this. I pre-schedged time for all my projects. I couldn't find it in the next six weeks, so I must be too busy to do this. It's hard for people to push back on that because they either have to claim you're lying or they have to insist that, like, I guess you work outside of work hours, right?

They can't just let that implicitly happen. They have to insist on it and they don't want to. All right. Another thing that might happen is you find the time for it, but it's, you know, three weeks from now. Now you can be super clear. This is when I'm going to get to this. And then as long as you deliver, that's probably okay, right?

But it gets you out of the situation where you just agree to things and then people just constantly bothering you, when am I going to get this, and you don't actually have time to get it done. So prescheduling can be very powerful. The poll system is different. The goal of the poll system is to make sure you don't work on too many things at the same time. All right.

And the way it solves that problem, instead of having you just schedule your calendar, so like you're not putting too many things into the same amount of time, the poll system says I only have two or three active projects at a time. When I finish an active project, then I pull something new from the list of things I'm working on. So it's impossible for me to be working on too many things because I have a what in Conbon they call a WIP or works in progress limit. I have a limit on how many things I work on at the same time. Here they are.

If it's three, I'm never working on more than three things. And if someone gives me something to do, I can say, yes, I will do it. And here's its status. It's on the waiting list. It's in position three. And I'll let you know when I pull it in. All right. So two different strategies to get you to the same place, which is not working on too many things.

at the same time. They do, they are intention for exactly the reason the caller talks about. If you try to do two at the same time, your pulled projects are stepping on the same time that you have pre-scheduled, right? So how can these two things work together? They can only work together if you are sort of dividing your work between these two systems in a very intentional way. So maybe you have a certain type of work that's,

that's very deadline-driven and need specific times and other types of work that's more on you to figure out when it gets done, right? And so what you could do, for example, is schedule, pre-schedule regular time on your calendar for the non-deadline-driven work coming out of your poll system. And with the remaining time on your calendar, it's when you pre-schedule the deadline-driven stuff. So now when I'm going to have a new deadline-driven thing that I'm prescheduling, part of the time that's off the table here is the time of my calendar I've already put aside for my pull system work. So I have to work with whatever time remains. Then when I get to the time on my calendar that's for the pole system stuff, I work on whatever is active.

And when I finish something, I pull something new in. So you could have these two things work together, but you have to schedule time for the pull system work in general. Typically, I would say what the people I know who actually use these systems, they tend to do one or the other. So the pre-scheduling, for example, and I talk about it this way in the book, it's not something that people tend to use for a long time. It's often something that people will use for like six months. And what they learn when they do this is they get a much more realistic understanding of how long things take, what busy really means, like what workload actually is unsustainably busy, and it structures their time more. It's like a learning tool. and they come out of their prescheduling experience,

having recalibrated for their new job. And now they don't need to do this so much because they just have this intuition now that's born through evidence-based experience of like, no, no, no, I'm too busy right now because you've had to grapple with this time and know how long things take. So often, that's what I see with prescheduling.

People do it for a while, get better to understand their workloads, and then stop using it. The pull-based system, by contrast, is meant to be sustainable. It's just like, this is how I'm, I organize my work. Here's my waiting list.

Here's my active list. You can look on the waiting list to see exactly where your work is. You can watch it mark forward. If you want me to reprioritize it, you tell me what you want to swap for it. You can help me make priority decisions. That's meant to be a long-term sustainable system. I love the poll system because it prevents overload. I love the prescheduling exercise because it forces you to learn how long things really take.

You can put them together in the way I suggested if your job requires that. It's a little bit more complicated. You're starting to get a little fiddly here, but it is possible, but that's going to take some more care. That's a good call. I think we have a case study here. Case studies, if you're new, this is where people ride in to talk about putting the type of advice we talk about this show into action in their own lives. So today's case study, it's short one. It comes from Beth.

Beth says, I'm a tenured professor whose main job is doing research. I do a lot of collaboration with co-authors and recently stumbled upon something that works great for focused work and minimizing administrative overhead. In the past, my co-authors and I would work independently for a week or two than have an hour-long meeting to discuss and repeat and repeat. I recently tried to have day-long sessions devoted exclusively to a single academic project with a co-author or team of co-authors. we get so much more done when we work together for a half day or whole day than if we string things out over many, many weeks. I'm sure this builds on many of Cal's concepts, but I'll leave it to him to say which ones exactly. Well, Beth, I've had the same experience in my own career as a professor, research-oriented professor, especially early in a project when you're

trying to make progress. If you're just doing this with, let's check in. once a week. What do people do? They do either nothing or the bare minimum to have something to talk about at the next meeting, right? It's just not urgent to them. Like, oh, we have a standing meeting to talk about this research paper and you spend a half hour kind of reminding everyone where you are and maybe someone thought a little bit about something. And you're right, months can go by and not much gets done. On the other hand, if you all get together for a day and you load up this problem collectively in your heads and you put all of your attention on it, leveraging what I call the whiteboard effect, where everyone's working on the same

deep project at the same time. So it eggs each other on to be even more focused. You can crack problems. You can figure out the major results. You can make a ton of project progress. I mean, this was at the core when I was at the height of my CS paper production, these long, annual in-person sessions, like this is where a lot of the work got done. We had certain times of the year where we'd get together and we'd call it cracking problems.

I would travel all the time, go to Europe. I'd go Iceland. You'd go wherever you need to sit down with professors you worked with. Spend three days. That's when papers got cracked. Now, once they're cracked, you have the main results. Like, now you can be distributed. But now when you're being distributed, it's not just think about this paper and make progress.

You're assigning tasks. You write a draft of this intro. We'll check back. You'll write up this proof. I'll write up this proof. And then we'll check them. So, like, once you have specific work to do, then it's fine to be virtual. So I think this rhythm of get together until you crack the heart of what you're working on.

And now just the workman-like effort of putting together the paper, now we don't have to do this together. We can spread this out. I think that's a really good way, a really good way to do this. The more general lesson here, I think, in general for knowledge work is that spending a significant amount of time on a problem with other people is like a super brain tackling the problem. Like, it really is effective. And the trap here that in general knowledge workers should be careful to avoid is the weekly meeting trap. When you have a hard thing you're trying to solve, a new business strategy, a new program,

a new business, a result you're trying to crack it mathematically or a new idea to publish in a paper. This illusion of if we just put a standing meeting on our calendar for us to talk about this every week, we'll make progress, is just that. It's an illusion. Like Beth experienced or I experienced, this will just seem like an obligation on people's calendars where they'll either do nothing.

So you just spin your wheels each week or they do the bare minimum. So it's not socially embarrassing when they show up on their call. But the total amount of work that each person is doing when you just have a weekly meeting, it's like 10 minutes of productive thought. On the other hand, if we're here for five hours, and here's our whiteboard, you know, let's make progress. Now you actually have a chance of getting

the smartest possible thinking out of their brains. I mean, I've talked about this before on the show, but I experienced this during the first year of the pandemic. And I was like, why are my CS papers not coming together the way they normally do? And I realized it was like, oh, because we're not getting together to do these like full-day sessions. We had standing meetings all throughout the early pandemic. Get on Zoom every week. Things weren't being cracked.

There's one paper in particular we're working on all throughout the pandemic. And it was these standing meetings and nothing was happening. as soon as I could get away with it, I brought my two local collaborators, one from Georgetown, one from Hopkins, to the Deep Work HQ, have a whiteboard in there, right? Don't tell the COVID police, but let's come here, let's look at the whiteboard, let's spend the day,

and we cracked a problem, right? And then we published that paper, and it won the best paper awarded our conference. It's like, oh, that's what we were missing. Until we sit together, there is no real work actually happening. So I love this idea. groups of minds working together on the same problem for an extended period of time is very, very effective for making progress on something.

Weekly meetings to check in on a project is often incredibly ineffective, unless, again, you have incredibly specific things people are working on with clear criteria of it being done. So, Beth, I appreciate the question. All right, we have a cool final segment coming up. It's the first podcast of July, so it's when I'm going to talk about the books I read in June. But first, let's talk about some of the sponsors that make this show possible. In particular, I want to talk about our friends at Shopify, selling a little or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching.

I'm sure you've heard about Shopify. It's a global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. We're talking from the launch your online shop stage to the first real-life store stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million? an order stage. Shopify is here to help you grow, whether you're selling things online or need a point of sales solution for your physical store. They really are the industry leader on the sales experience. When we start our long-awaited deep question store, it is 100% Shopify that we will use to take care of the e-commerce. It's going to make it so easy. Jesse, I had another

store idea, by the way, since I've been up here. Well, I needed a hat. right because I have my my national's hat but it's starting to fall apart and it's kind of hot and so I had to search around and we looked at a bunch of stores just to buy a new hat and I remember thinking man I wish we had our own hat because I could just be wearing my own hat like I don't have to wear so I have like a patagonia hat I bought it's like I want to wear my own hat so like that made me think I wish we had our deep questions store um I'm thinking like black and gray mesh like maybe trucker type hat and I don't know I want really small just the initials for values-based lifestyle-centric career planning.

Like just VBLCP. Just small letters right down here. Like, if you know what it is, you know what it is. If you don't, you're like, I know this is like really specific and probably really cool. Anyways, when we get that hat shop together, Shopify, right? They already power 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. They know what they're doing. So that's going to make our tasteful and provocative EBLCPP hats really fly off that digital shelf.

So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep. Type that in all lowercase that's Shopify.com slash deep to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our longtime friends at ExpressVPN. I really think about this more when I'm traveling, but going online without ExpressVPN is like not closing the door when you. use the bathroom, right?

Why give random creeps a chance to invade your privacy? Well, that's essentially what you're doing when you use the internet without a VPN. Why is this? Well, when you use the internet, your address and the destination of the sites or services you're accessing are out there in the open. It's called the packet header, right? So if you're on a wireless internet connection, anyone nearby can see what sites and services you're using. If you're using a private internet service provider at home, they see what

sites and services you're using. A VPN hides all that. When you use a VPN, you instead encrypt in an unbreakable code, here's the site and service I want to talk to. You then send this to a VPN server that then decrypts that code and talks to the site and service on your behalf, encrypts their answer, and sends it back to you. So the person listening into your wireless connection, your internet service provider that you're directly connected to, all they learn about what you're doing is that you're accessing a VPN server. Right. So it gives you actual privacy. It's the digital equivalent of closing that door when you go to the bathroom. Your IP address is hidden. It's easy to use. You just fire up the ExpressVPN app and use your apps and services like normal. It just happens

automatically in the background. You can use ExpressVPN on all your devices, your phones, your laptops, your tablets, and more. It's rated number one by 3.5. top reviewers like CNET and the Verge. I like it because of its ease of use and its speed. It's got servers everywhere. It's got high bandwidth. It just works well. You click a button and you're protected.

So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep. That's EXPR-E-S-S-V-PN.com slash deep. You will get an extra three months free when you go to expressvpn.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, time for our final segment. As long time, listeners know, my target is to read five books per month. I'll tell you what, Jesse, the July list is going to be a little longer than that because I'm on vacation. Yeah. It's going to rock and roll.

We'll have a little longer segment when we get to the next one. But I want to report now on what I read last month. So this is early July. So I will report on what I read in June 2024. All right. I'll start with, I'm going to reorder. Let me all reorder these a little bit. I'll start with, I wrote two movie-related books. The first was called hit, flops, and other illusions by Ed Zwick. So Ed Zwick is sort of a well-known director in Hollywood. Directed a lot of well-known movies. Maybe he's best known for Glory. Dinsall Washington won his first Oscar for that movie, and a lot of other movies as well. This is just a Hollywood memoir. And I, you know, I'm a sucker for these jesse's.

I've said this before. I just think it's a cool, interesting industry. And I like hearing about how people break in and get started and then like what it's actually like working in the industry. Ed has an interesting story about breaking in. He kind of like stumbled into being a head writer on a TV show. They liked a script. They hired him.

The head writer got fired. He got put into his position. So he was sort of in the industry. but he was in the television side of it. And the way that they made the move, Ed made the move from this sort of lucky position in TV to movies is that he pitched a TV movie, which now I want to track down and find. This is like a pretty innovative thing. I believe this was in the 1980s. He pitched a TV movie where the premise was there was some sort of disaster.

I think it was nuclear war, but it might have been something else. I think it was like a nuclear attack. And the made-for-TV movie, they played it like, they played it, I don't have the right word for this. It was like, it was really happening. It was like a war of the worlds type thing. So it was, you know, newscasters. It was like newscasters and news footage. So it's like you were watching a news program and getting like, okay, now we're on scene and the stuff is happening.

And they had real newscasters behind death. So it was just sort of like really interesting war of the world's type update, really kind of innovative. and it wants some Mimis, and that's like what let him then jump over to movies. It also makes it clear that the movies are a stressful business. So let's just make that clear. The other movie-related book, I actually listened to this once at a Reddit,

was Surely You Can't Be Serious. It's written by the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abraham's. This is an oral history, essentially, of the making of the greatest comedy movie of all time, Airplane. So surely you can't be serious. If you haven't seen the movie, I mean, come on, you should know this reference. This is one of the famous lines in the movie where Leslie Nielsen, who's playing the doctor on the plane, someone says to him, surely you can't be serious.

And he says, I am and don't call me Shirley. It's like a classic airplane, classic airplane line. Interesting book. I listen to it. And I suggest listen to it because it's oral history style. If you've read like a ringer oral history, it's very. It's various people talking about things, these different moments in the build up and making of this film. The Zuckerers and Jim, but then also like interludes from famous comedy personalities from today.

It'll be like Bill Hader, Judd Apatow, right? We'll have comments on it and the influence of this movie. And so it goes back and forth. If you listen to it, it's the real people talking. It's like different voices. So it's like almost like a conversation. It's a little bit weird. Here's a couple things that's weird about it.

One, the conversation is clearly like a transcript. It reads a little weird in the audiobook because it's not the original conversation. It's clearly them rereading the edited transcript for the audiobook. So there's like a sometimes there's a bit of a, it's false, not false, but like this is someone reading something they said earlier, but without the same inflection. And one of the Zucker brothers is older now too and his voice is not very strong. So, like, it's a little bit weird. And the structuring is a little weird on this book, too.

Because it's not, it's not just a straight chronological. Like, let's just move forward, starting from, like, how the Kentucky Fried Theater, the Zucker Brothers Theater got started in their first movie and how they got the airplane and the steps of airplane. It's almost that. Except for early on, they pull some stuff from later on and move it earlier. But then they kind of give up on that. Like, so early on, you're starting to get the stories of, like, how the,

comedy troop came together. But then you'll also get stories about casting airplane. And then it'll be back to like, okay, here's the first thing they did in L.A. And then as you get later in the book, it's strictly chronological again. So it was a little bit confusing. So maybe be quicker to read and make more sense reading. But you got fantastic information there about like how these brothers got together, how they made this movie, why it worked.

So I enjoyed it, especially if you are an airplane fan. All right. then I read, this is a random, two ocean-themed books. The first was, and you can tell, by the way, just this is a weird reading list. You know why? Because I was exhausted from my book tour. You'll see in my next reading list, because I'm already well into it. The books are way more, like, interesting and complicated.

But I was exhausted, and you get this in this reading list. All right. So the next book I read was In Oceans Deep by Bill Strever, which actually had in my library from a while ago. I had bought it but not read it and I got around the reading it. It's like a history

of underwater exploration and diving. You know, like early diving suits, submarine, submersible, scuba, just like a history, Bill Strever is a former diver.

So I was like a straight history perfectly competently written about like the history of underwater exploration. Then I read, I had never read this before. Jaws. by Peter Benchley. Like the original novel Jaws that was made into the movie. As people who read

Slow Productivity know, Peter Benchley wrote Jaws essentially across the street from the house where I grew up. So in Pennington, New Jersey, it's like two houses down. It was a house that he was renting in the 70s when he wrote Jaws. So I always felt like a connection to that. Jaws was great. I see why this book did well. I mean, it's a cool, it's a tight book, it's great, it's entertaining. It has another storyline layer or two that's not in the movie. So Spielberg really, rightly so, simplified this thing down, man versus beast. Like this unlikely trio of guys are going after the shark, either the shark will win or they will win. And that was the right thing to do for the movie, for a book that might not be enough. So there's a, there's two other

other plot lines. There's like a mob plot line in this where like the reason the mayor is trying to keep to town open is because he's in hawk to all these mobsters and they're sort of like threatening him and forcing him to do this. And there's like a plot line where the wife of the police chief is like unhappy and has an affair with the Richard Rifis character. And there's a whole like psychological backstory there where she used to be one of the rich people who would summer in this town. And then she married a local. And now she's like a local, but the rich people still come there. So like in a good novel, sort of a pre-Kriton-era novels, you have to have the sort of psychological realism. So it has these other things going on that fill it in. But the shark stuff is cool. Clearly they don't know, they didn't know a ton about sharks back then. It's kind of funny the way Peter talks about Jaws.

It's like this mindless killing machine that is just going to like eat you from the bottom up. bite after bite. Like, you know, they didn't know much about Great White Sharks. It's just like, these things will, and they would just eat to figure out what things are and like complete like automaton. And it's, it's interesting. It's like they clearly were trying to figure out what this thing is. But anyways, Jaws was great. I enjoyed a great, great summer book.

And then I finally got around, this is a book in sort of my orbit more. I finally got around the reading Michael Easter's book, The Comfort Crisis. So this is an idea book. Michael Easter, he runs the online community 2% and was a lecture, I think, at University Nevada, Las Vegas, but recently left out to do writing full time. But he writes a lot about, like, fitness and health. He's really good, I think, getting into like the studies and what's going on. The comfort crisis, this book was from, oh, 2019, maybe, a little while ago.

And it was really good, actually. It's very impressive. I think this book is doing well. It has legs. It came out a while ago, but it's still selling really well. His basic idea is we are uncomfortable with being uncomfortable and that this is a problem and that we need to become more comfortable with discomfort and it opens up all sort. Not only is it more aligned with our sort of natural wiring, but it opens up all this, like, possibilities for, like, growth in your life.

There's a cool set piece story in Easter's book. that goes throughout the whole thing. So he keeps returning to this story of this sort of epic month-long elk-hunting, like really trying elk hunting trip in the Arctic. And it has plenty of discomfort. Like they're not starving, but they're hungry all the time. And it's cold and it's hard. And so it's like a really great spine for the book.

And, you know, what makes these ideas books good is where there's, A, like an overall idea. You're like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, I should have more discomfort in my life. But then what really makes these things work is when there's like interesting ideas or people to meet who are putting that in the action. And you're like, oh, yeah, that I should do that. Or maybe that changes the way I think about things. So like in this book, he gets really in the rucking, which is like a big thing right now. But like in a very compelling way, like with the guy who started go ruck.

And there's this other fitness nutritionist he talks to where he like really gets that being comfortable with the discomfort of feeling hungry. is like a big part of like what's really involved and losing weight. And like that was a kind of a compelling story. And then Michael's own story is compelling. Him being in Alaska is compelling. Um, him kicking, going sober is like another part of it. So all the pieces came together. Anyways, I really liked it.

I thought as these sort of make your life better idea books go. And I'm reading more of these now because I'm thinking about the deep life. It's a good one. So I enjoyed reading that. I should probably reach out to Michael. I think it'd be a cool guy to know. you might like that one Jesse yeah for crisis yeah

they talk about that in sports a lot like coaching and stuff like being uncomfortable and yeah like athletes are used to yeah yeah all right so anyways those are the books I read in June all right Jesse so I think that's all the time we have for today's episode but we will be back next week with another episode again probably

recorded from my undisclosed location maybe we'll talk more next week about the writing shadow on this property that's something I can talk about for a while. There is an excellent writing shed on this property, and I have some ideas about that to share. So remind me, Jesse, we'll talk about that next time. Yeah.

But 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

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