Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 309: Deep Habits

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

On this show, we often talk about major overhauls to your work and life. In this episode, we go the other way and focus on the small habits that can make a big difference. In more detail, Cal describes eight surprisingly small strategies – four focused on work and four focused on life outside of work – for finding more depth in a distracted world. He then answers listener questions and reacts to a recent article about pushback to calls to limiting social media for kids.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 Habits [2:46]- Can I keep my weekly plan in my workingmemory.txt file? [31:13]- Do you experience any pleasure during deep work? [33:39]- How many deep work sessions should I do each working week? [38:23]- How can I prioritize my goals in my personal life? [40:58]- Does the suggestion to “limit daily goals” conflict with time blocking? [44:09] CASE STUDY: Building my career around a desired lifestyle [45:53]CAL REACTS: Countering Pushback to Limiting Social Media for Kids [54:26] 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?washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/27/social-media-warning-label-surgeon-general-counterarguments/english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2024-07-06/cal-newport-the-man-who-never-procrastinates.html  Thanks to our Sponsors: grammarly.com/podcastcozyearth.com/calmybodytutor.comdrinklmnt.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. As was the case last week, I am still not in my Deep Work HQ, but am instead broadcasting from an undisclosed location up in New England where I've come to recharge after my slow productivity book tour and because I'm crazy this way, begin some work on my next. book project. Now, there's no Jesse today. Jesse is on vacation, so it's just going to be me and you, dear listener, but I do want to say that Jesse Skeleton made his first appearance in the international media. I was profiled recently for the Spanish newspaper El Pas, and in the profile, there's a bunch of photos.

And one of the photos was snapped of Jesse Skeleton at the Deepwork HQ. you, we'll put a link to that English translation of that interview or that profile in the show notes. If you want to see Jesse Skeleton in all of his glory, it's all, of course, gone to his head. I can't talk to Jesse Skeleton directly anymore. He insists that I go through his publicity agent as well as his screen agent. He's very difficult to talk to now. I think it's gone to his head. But I guess good for him for getting the exposure he so well deserves. All right, speaking of summer last week, I also mentioned that during the summer, traffic on this podcast as well as basically every podcast goes down as people are out of their normal routines. My new plan is to counter the summer drop of traffic by making the summer the time where I actually get around to doing what I probably should do more often, which is asking for your help and spreading the word. So if you enjoy what we've been up to here, please consider leaving a review and or mentioning this show in whatever internet type feeds.

you regularly post things on. If you use those things, hey, maybe consider mentioning the show. We're trying to grow the traffic to offset the summer drop. All right, that's what we got for administrative notes up front. We got a great episode here,

a deep dive that's going to be pretty tactical. It's going to cover both deep work and knowledge work as well as the deep life more generally. We got a bunch of great questions from you, the listeners, and then a final segment in which I'm going to react to an article about kids and social media that I thought was actually pretty smart. All right. So anyways, let's get started with the deep dive.

We talk a lot here about big changes. We're talking massive overhauls to how you organize your life or how you approach your work. Today, I thought it might be fun to talk instead about some of the small things that can make a surprisingly big impact on the quality of your life, both personally and perfectly. and professionally. So in today's deep dive, I have identified eight such small habits and tactics to suggest to you. Four of these will be related to the world of work. The other four will be related to your life outside of work. All of them will be oriented at our core goal here of trying to cultivate a deep life in a world that's increasingly drowning in digital distractions.

Now, here's a key point about what we're about to do here. these are small, unusual or interesting habits, not the major things, the major classic pieces of advice that I talk about on this show and in my book. So we're not going to talk about the heavy hitters, the protecting deep work, the practicing multi-scale planning, the becoming a digital minimalist, using pull instead of push for workload management, these sort of big, classic ideas is not today's goal. Today's goal is to small things that sometimes get missed. The surprisingly small ideas that make the surprisingly big difference. I've mentioned most of these before in passing, but I'm gathering them for the first time all in one episode. To other quick notes, this is not a

comprehensive list. Just a bunch of things I thought were interesting. There's a lot of things I'm missing that are probably important. It's also not mandatory. You don't have to do everything on this list to enjoy the benefits of a deeper life. Pick and choose as you see fit. All right, let's dive right into it, we will start with small ideas to make a big difference in the world of work. Here's my first idea. Reciprocal meeting blocks. All right, here's how this goes. Every time in your context as a knowledge worker in the world of digital technology,

every time someone says, hey, let's have a meeting that you have to schedule, I want you to schedule a corresponding block of time for the same week that you, you, you will then protect for undistracted or deep work. Now, you have some give here in terms of the ratio. Like the obvious thing to do is just one to one. You want a one hour meeting? I'm going to find one hour somewhere else in my week to protect time for deep work. You could also go with different ratios depending on your job. So maybe for every hour of meeting you schedule, you put in a half hour deep work somewhere else. Or you could go the other way. For every hour of meeting I schedule, I want two plus blocks. I'm going to schedule to protect.

for deep work. It just depends on the details of what you actually do. Here's why this is a nice strategy. It doesn't force you to become too rigid about when you have meetings. So I have a suggestion later on in this list of a more rigid way to deal with meetings. But this is if you need some flexibility, this takes no time a priori off the table. But what it also does is create a governor on your available time. As more meetings get scheduled for a week, more time gets grayed out. There's less time left for a meeting to fit in that week and more meetings just won't happen or they'll get pushed a later week. So it ensures that in your quest in the moment to be responsive to the needs of other people in your digital office that you don't have your schedule

become overly saturated with meetings. I want to give you a sort of bonus sub-tip here. It's related When you schedule a meeting on your calendar, add 20 minutes to the end. Now, I call this the recovery block. It gives you time after the scheduled meeting is over to, first of all, take progress, make progress and organize the stuff that came out of the meeting to make sure that the obligations that arose get written down in whatever systems you use to track your obligations. If there's quick things you can do right away, like, okay, I promise to send out this file and the follow up with someone else, you can do that right there. so it doesn't have to just float in the back of your mind. It also gives your mind chance to just clear out the attention residue of the meeting to begin to recover from the cognitive act of being part of that focused discussion

so that it'll be easier to move on to what's next. Without these recovery blocks, if you go from meeting to meeting, it's difficult because, A, the small task generated by the meeting will sit in your head taking up resources. Oh, my God, I'm going to have to do this, right? It's just sitting there distracting you as you move on to the next meeting. and it can be whiplash, cognitive whiplash, to go from one meeting to another. Recovery blocks, again, this is all tricks for playing with your calendar and meetings.

Recovery blocks make a big difference. All right, here's my second small idea. Work quotas. For common types of work tasks that you are asked to do on a regular basis and that are important to your job, the things you can't just not do. Establish quotas. here is how many of this particular types of projects I do per month or maybe per quarter or maybe per year, depending on the type of work we're talking about. Now, when you have these quotas, here's what happens. You can say yes to these things until the quota is full.

Once the quota is full, you have to start saying no because your quota is full, but now you have a good reason for saying no. You can say to the interested party, you know, thanks for the request. This is obviously an important part of what I do. I maintain a quota of doing five of these per season and I've already hit that quota so I can't take this on right now. But, you know, I'm going to continue to be engaged in this going forward. The nice thing about the quota rationale is that it's hard to push back against. If I'm the person who wants you to do something, yes, I want you to do it. But if you say I have a quota and it's a reasonable quota and you've hit that quota,

my only comeback at this point is your quota should be bigger. But if your quota is reasonable, they're like, well, that's a lot of work. So let's like, I mean, we'll be concrete about this. You know, I have a quota for peer review request. I'm a full professor. I get a lot of requests to review papers. It's an important part of my job. I get way more requests than I can possibly actually fulfill.

So I have a quota. I want to come back and say, okay, you know, I've already hit my quota for this semester. I use semesters because I'm an academic. If that number is pretty large for the, requesting person, like, okay, you're doing a lot of reviews. And that's a reasonable amount of reviews to do. And it's reasonable that you're done for this semester. Let me move on to someone else. It's much more precise than simply saying, I don't know, I'm busy, because everyone's busy. They want you to do this thing. They'll make their life easier. So you need a better reason.

Quotas are good reasons. Here's an advanced tip surrounding quotas. Predictively look ahead and be willing to use the quota to turn down request before the quota is Let me be more concrete about this. If you know, like in my case that there's some number of peer review papers you do each semester and a request comes in and it's not a very important review, the papers may be not, but not important, I mean, not important for you. So maybe it's not a great mix, a match for your expertise or it's not a very good venue. You can say, look, I'm coming close to my quota for papers for this semester and I want to leave

the last final spots for some papers I expected are coming out. You know, papers that are maybe like a stronger match for my expertise, you know. Or you might have a specific reason to expect in the near future you're going to have some more requests come in, right? So it might be like, look, I need to wait here because there's a, there's this big conference in my field coming up. I'm going to get some review requests. I want to keep some slots open on my quota.

So you can predictively turn things down based on your assumption that better things for quota is going to come into future. But what you get here is clarity. You're still doing important things, but you are controlling the number of those things that you do. All right. Small habit or ritual or tactic number three. Coordination Mondays and Summer Fridays. And this is the third of our four work-related small things to make a big difference. Coordination Mondays and Summer Fridays is a philosophy for thinking about how you deal with different days during your work week. So coordination Mondays, this concept says, I think about Mondays as the day where it's all about organizing my work and collaboration. It's where I get a handle on what's going on.

I check in with people. I learn more about things that need to be done. I organize and make sense of the work that has been done and get a better sense of what's still coming. Mondays is when I do this. So what this means, for example, is if you're going to ask someone for a meeting, you're like, okay, I need to talk to this person, whatever it is, the work he wants me to do or she wants me to do or the work we're working on together, we've got to talk about this, right? Your default is like, hey, let's find some time on Monday because that's when I do this coordination. You can also have a really big, prominent office hours on these Mondays, a big two-hour block

where a lot of these meetings, instead of actually scheduling them individually, So just any time during this two hours on Monday, just like call me or stop by my office and we'll get into this. Like your mode on Monday is I want to talk about projects. I want to talk to other people about projects. I want to figure out where things stand. You can also spend the first hour to 90 minutes of your day on coordination Mondays just working on your own plans, getting your weekly plan in place, looking through your task systems and cleaning that up and organizing it, all of the sort of maintenance of keeping an organized life and digital knowledge work. Monday is all about this. Someone asks you for a meeting, hey, can we talk or get into this? Like, yeah, I try to like dedicate my Mondays to getting my arms around things. So let me know when you're free on Monday.

In fact, you can even have a scheduling application for Monday where you have, you know, all of your non-office hour times between 11 a.m. at the end of the day, just available for meeting slots and just throw this link at people like candy on Halloween or beads on party. You know what I mean? Yeah, let's grab a time. a time. Anyone bother you? Grab a time on Monday. Grab a time on Monday. Any Monday you want. We'll talk about it. Monday is my coordination day. If you can get away with this, it makes a big difference because what happens on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, they're much more clear. You're able to actually make progress on work, to focus on something for a long amount of time to

get your head around something without having to constantly switch your context back and forth. And the coordination Monday is such a simple heuristic. You don't have to remember a lot of complicated scheduling details in the moment. You just have to have to have to this simple heuristic, push to Monday, push to Monday. So now you can really handle all these incoming and outgoing requests to chat or talk and collaborate. You can handle them all easily by just deferring to Monday. Now, the other end of this is summer Fridays.

Well, summer Friday is a reference to how the publishing industry schedules their work during the summer, which is they end work early on Fridays. Traditionally, this is when the old school editors needed to leave early to get to their Hampton's houses, all right? Now it just becomes a perk of the publishing industry. The summer is a slower time. They lean into this by saying we Fridays or half days or not meeting days. You get in, you get some stuff done.

Have a longer, have a longer weekend. I suggest simulate this as much as possible. Again, how do you simulate this? It all comes down to your scheduling decisions in the moment. Don't offer up Friday afternoons for meetings. Just don't offer them up. And if someone asks you, yeah, I'm busy then, but how about Monday or whatever day, right? that will eliminate 95% of your Friday afternoon meetings.

And what this allows you to do is to have a real good shutdown at like 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock on Fridays, and then without making a big deal of it move on to something else. If you have a lot of autonomy, just move on and have an afternoon to unwind. If you don't have a lot of autonomy, then you have to sort of fake being around. You maybe still have to be in your office or do a symbolic email response block at 430, but you can be checking out mentally, working on another project, reading, exercising, doing something different during those times. Just having to slow wind up into the weekend makes a big difference. That little bit of extra time when the world is still working makes a big difference.

So coordination Mondays, summer Fridays. It's all about how you conceptually think about your schedule, but it makes a really big difference, especially in a sort of highly distracted workplace environment. All right. My fourth piece of advice, this is a small thing, but a common thing. I swear by this, you have to do this. So I'm just going to emphasize it again and again. If you work at a computer,

you need to use a working memory.txt file. The idea here is really straightforward. You got a text file on your desktop. I use a Mac, so I'm using text edit, and I make the text file plain formatting. No fonts, no bolds, nothing like that. Okay, what is this file used for? throughout the day, it is what you use as an extension of your brain.

When you're working on a particular project, the working memory.txts, you type things in so you don't have to hold it all straight in your head. You're trying to think about what are the four points I want to make in this presentation. That's where you can write them down. When you're in a meeting and there's, okay, action items are coming up, suggestions, things you need to do are coming up. You're taking those notes just right there on workingmemory.t. You have a place to put that where it's not just in your head.

When you're cleaning your inbox, you're putting notes in there. You're keeping track of like, okay, this message, I need to do this, remember to do this. You're just writing down as fast as you can type, like summaries of stuff you have to do as you clear through these messages in your inbox. Almost whatever you're doing, it is an extension where you hold information that can't all fit in your head. And then you process all that information next time you get a chance. When you're cleaning your inbox, taking things out of the actual inbox, you might be growing this list of different, things that came out of this inbox. Then when you're done, pressing your inbox, you make sense of this list.

You realize a few of these things you can skip, a couple you deal with there. The other things, you move on to your calendar until your to-do list. But this memory sits here because you can't keep this all track of all this in your head. So it sits there right there. Why a text file? Because you can type so fast. You can just type as fast as you're thinking as fast as people are saying things. Don't worry about formatting, just rock and roll on this list.

my working memory. TXT grows and contracts throughout the day. And if I have an interruption, I can come back later that day or the next day and know exactly what was going on by seeing what notes were left in the working memory. TXT file.

So this is a key bit of cybernetic productivity, but it's critical. When you work at a computer, use a working memory. txt file to be a literal digital extension of your brain. All right. So those are ideas for the world of work. Let's give a couple quick ideas here, small things that make a big difference for living a deeper life in your life outside of work.

The first thing I want to suggest here is the use of single purpose notebooks. Now, this is something we discussed on the show, I think a couple months ago. But the idea is the following. When you have a particular problem that's particularly complicated that you're working on. Now, this could be a personal problem. Like you're trying to figure out how do I fix this part of my life or this unhappiness I have? or it could be a particular professional problem. Sure.

Like, what is this a book I want to write going to be about? Or how do I overhaul my company? It's struggling and I want to make it more successful. Or it's successful, but I'm drowning. I want to reimagine what my company could be like when it was less overwhelming. Whatever the problem is, dedicate a single small notebook to this problem. I recommend using a Fields Notes notebook. These are very small.

They fit easily in your pocket. have a good pin, non-bleed pin to use. I like Unibol micro, 0.5 millimeter ballpoint pins, but you can use whatever you prefer to use. And bring this notebook with you. Now whenever you have a thought about the single problem, you have a single place to write it down. Now you can go, you know, on a dedicated thinking excursion. Like, okay, I'm going to go to this coffee shop and just think for 20 minutes about this problem. you have a way of doing that.

Bring to notebook, take notes. The notes accrete in this notebook. And over time, it's going to help you come up with a solution to the problem in hand. Now, the key about this is by having this notebook with you wherever you go, by having a ready-made place to put thoughts or insights as they arrive, you're going to get probably 5x more brain power than if you just instead, say, I'm going to schedule a time to sit and think about this problem. or I'm going to get together with someone and we're going to talk about this problem and solve it in a meeting.

Because you're tapping so much more of your brain and so many different more mind states. You're tapping so many more momentary insights and fresh starts and burst of energy. It is an accelerant to the insight that your brain can generate when you have a notebook with you at all times dedicated to a single problem. It's a powerful tool I suggest it for making sense of your life or any other big problem you're facing. right second small thing for your life outside of work take thinking walks preferably every day now a thinking walk is where you go for a walk we're outside now go for a walk and think about yourself your life for something that's that's on your mind right it doesn't have to be profound right it could just be kind of fun you're you're toying with a fantasy of like what if we moved

over here or like a new hobby you're into or it could be something like what what am i i'm excited about something let me go think about it what this means or i'm upset or ashamed of something let me go make sense of this let me walk and think about it what am i liking about my life what am i not liking about my life it's being alone with your own thoughts and enjoying the company of your own thoughts do this walking not sitting not in a car not on a train but actually out there walking in nature This is how humans grow. This is how humans make sense of the messiness that is life. This is how humans find meeting and resilience among the hardness.

They have to grapple with the world within their own interiority. And this requires thinking and walking is the best way to think. Now, there's a couple other benefits you get from this. Hey, it's just really nice to be outside. We're wired to be outside. You hear the birds. You feel the different changes in the weather. It's just going to be good for you as a human.

It also gets you used to not always having a screen to distract you at a moment's notice. You'll break that dopamine loop where it says, man, we are so close to getting a screen fixed. Let's just do that. We got to do that. We got to do that. Because when you're doing a thinking walk, you're not looking at your screen. You get used to that as a state. It really does make your life shift from black and white to technicolor when you're able to spend time to actually make sense of what you're seeing on this metaphorical screen.

All right. Third piece of advice for life outside of work, never post. Again, something we've talked about recently on the show, but I want to underscore here. I'm not a big fan of social media. Other people use it. There's definitely some positive information or purposes to people deploy with social media. That's all fine. But I'm going to argue, don't post unless you really, really have to.

I mean, if you run a business or you're a public figure, sure, have like a professional posting schedule that serves. a really good need, right? Okay, this is specifically how I post, preferably have someone else do the posting for you, never read the responses, that's fine. But if you're not a public figure, just don't post. It's in the posting that you get the deepest tendrils of the social media addiction mind-warping machine into your brain. It's when you post that you begin to obsess over what these faceless digital denizens think about you and what you're saying. It's where you get the anxiety of do they like this, the euphoria of they do and the pain of that they don't. You get the isolation and life destruction of canceling campaigns or imagine canceling campaigns that might come if you just say or don't do the right thing.

It's what begins to warp your understanding of the world to be based off of the feedback you're getting from this very artificial algorithmically amplified crowd. It will change what you believe to be true. It'll change how you approach your life. It's most likely going to create a digital cage of unhappiness. So don't post. There's certain things you like to consume. Like, yeah, I'm a baseball fan. I like to see what this reporter has to say about my baseball team.

These comedians are funny. I like comedy. They post funny things. I want to see what's going on here. The independent media I'm interested in breaks stories on Twitter. And that's interesting to me. Okay, you can find ways to deal with that. But just don't post yourself unless you're in a situation where it's really notable

that you're not. And even if you are in that situation, consider don't posting. I don't post on social media. I somehow still manage to get by. All right. Final small thing I want to suggest here that can make a big difference. Do something hard. Discipline is practiced. It's not a character trait. It's not a binary that you choose to be disciplined or not. It's more of like a threshold. The more you practice discipline, the more comfortable you are doing hard things that aren't going to give you rewards in the moment. The more comfortable you are sticking with hard things, even when other distractions are pulling at you. The more disciplined you are, the more likely you are to keep reorienting your actions around the things you care about most, even if they don't

lead to the easiest decisions in the moment. This is a practice. The more you practice discipline to hire the threshold gets, and therefore the easier it is to do these demonstrations of discipline. So the best way to begin practicing discipline to see yourself more as a disciplined person is to do something hard. And then when you're done with that, do another thing hard. And then something else. You will change your self-conception if you do this. As your discipline threshold grows, you'll quite literally see yourself more and more

as someone who can resist things you shouldn't be doing and do the things you should be doing even if you don't want to. Start modestly. Physical things tend to work well for people as a starting point here. I'm going to change something about my diet. I'm going to change something about my exercise. Don't make this too small. It really should be hard, but also don't do too many things.

Don't say I'm going to overhaul all of my health. Instead, say, you know, I'm not going to drink it all for three months. Or I'm going to do a workout, even if it's only 15 minutes, they'll start easy every single day. I'm just going to make that a big part of my life. So you do something hard. It could also be intellectual. I'm going to read this collection of great books. It could be craft oriented.

I'm finally going to build this canoe, but it's going to require a lot of skills, but I'm just going to do this thing. You need to be a little bit obsessive about the thing. You need to schedule time in advance. You need to come back to it, relentlessly prioritize it above other non-professional, on family obligations, but do something hard. And then when you're done, do something else hard. Get in a habit of doing hard things that are not required. Your discipline threshold will grow.

Your identity as a disciplined person will solidify. And this will be the fuel for almost anything else you want to do as part of the quest to cultivate a deeper life in a distracted world. All right. So those are my eight small things that I think will make a big difference. I'll summarize each of them real quick for work. use reciprocal meeting blocks, use work quotas, implement coordination Mondays, and summer Fridays, and always have workingmemory.t.com. TXT open for life outside of work. Use single-purpose notebooks

for big challenges, take thinking walks daily, never post if you can avoid it, and do something hard all the time. Once you're done with something else hard, do something after that and after that and after that. It's not a comprehensive list. These aren't the major heavy hitter advice I have, but it's sometimes these small things that can add up to make the biggest difference. So keep these eight tactics in mind. All right, so we have a great collection of questions, but first, I want to give a word from one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. Let's talk cozy earth.

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Get 30% off at CozyEarth.com slash Cal when you use the discount code cow. And don't forget to tell them that the Deep Questions Podcasts since you hear in the post-purchase survey and you'll get a free pair of socks. I also want to talk about our longtime sponsor, Grammarly, in knowledge work. Writing is now everything. You just write all the time, especially as work becomes increasingly remote. You're writing emails, you're writing Slack messages, you're writing memos, you're writing presentations, you're writing social media posts, you're writing blog posts and newsletters.

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96% of Grammarly users report that it helps them craft more impactful writing, so you can be confident that it could do the same for you. All right, so get AI writing support. It works where you work. Sign up and download for free at Gramerly.com slash podcast. That's G-R-A-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash podcast. Easier said, done. Now, let's move on some questions.

Without Jesse here to ask the questions, I've got to coffee up. To those who are watching, instead of just listening, I can see I'm taking my coffee break to prepare for these questions. All right, let's get rolling here. Our first question comes from Kurt. Kurt says, I'm a devout user of the time block planner. However, I struggle to use the weekly plan space, partially because of my atrocious handwriting, but also because the weekly

plan changes so much in the week. I recall you talking about when you make your weekly plan, you will read through your trello cards and notes and then make your plan in your working memory. That's where my weekly plan has been stored, but you recently spoke of wiping that text file clear in your daily shutdown. Where do you keep your digital weekly plan? All right, a couple points. Your great question, Kurt, a couple points. First of all, location for your weekly plan. This is preference. A lot of people like to handwrite. the weekly plan because it makes it concrete, it slows them down, it makes them trust it more. So that's why we have a space in the time block planner each week for writing your weekly plan.

Other people prefer to do it digitally because they type faster than they write. They like to make verbose weekly plans, so too big to put in a planner space. And they like to change it more. They like to tweak it more than more movable weekly plan. So if that's you, digital is completely fine. A text file is great. you can put it in working memory.txte. I often do this.

When I put it in working memory txt, I just put it at the top of the file and I build a big border with like equal sign lines. It's like equal sign lines across capital, weekly plan, um, a line of equal signs. Weekly plan there,

dividing line of equal signs. And I don't wipe that part of working memory txt and everything below it is the working memory. That I then manipulate. Other people like to email their weekly plan. to themselves. They just have that comfort of when they check their inbox, they see it there. And so they know, oh, I have a weekly plan. Some people just put it in its own dedicated text file. Some people will put it in a dedicated file and print it and have the print out at their desk.

And then if they change the weekly plan, they print a new copy. So they have a printed version to look at each day. So they don't have to be on their computer to see what they're supposed to be doing. All of these are fine. The key is having a weekly plan discipline. This is part of the secret sauce of my multi-scale planning. looking at the week ahead, figuring out what needs to be done, where you're going to do it, what you might need to move, really makes a big difference.

If you just take each day as it comes, your aperture is too narrow. You really do want to plan for the whole week. All right. Our next question here comes from Nicole. Nicole said, I've just realized I am nowhere in life because I always give myself what I want.

if I want a carbonated drink, I'll give it to myself. If I want to watch TV, I'll do that. There's no denial of pleasure. If it seems to succeed in life, your pleasure comes after the hard work. Do you experience any pleasure during deep work? Well, Nicole, we have to think about a couple different types of pleasure here. You might also use the term satisfaction. Okay.

There's dopamine reward pleasure. And I'm not using dopamine here in this sort of vague sense that we sometimes hear about it's this addiction or dopamine makes me do things. But if we get really specific about the dopamine system, what it does is it gives you this sense of action towards anticipated reward. Like you're near something like that carbonated drink and your mind associates that. Like we're going to enjoy drinking that. So it's something we should probably do. Dopamine floods your brain and it gives you this sense of sort of compulsion at a trink. attraction to doing that thing.

This is the relationship, of course, we have with our phones often. Our mind's like, we're probably going to see something on there that could be, like, interesting, it could be an email about us with good news, it could be a really funny post, it could be something kind of outrageous, that's going to feel pretty good. We should do things that feel good. So dopamine response, and the dopamine response is that compulsive sense of, like, I need to pick this up. Dopamine derived pleasures are often moderate.

When you do finally drink that carbonated soda or you do look at that phone, you're like, Yeah, that kind of tasted good. Oh, yeah, that was kind of funny. You know, it's not some great reward, right? It's fleeting, it's momentary. So the compulsion is not because this I'm going to feel really great. It's just your mind's like we want good things. When you do something hard, like you're working on a book chapter, and it's really hard, you're not in a flow state. It's more of like a deliberate practice state. It's very difficult. There's a deeper pleasure that you get out of that, and especially once it's done, that does not come from the dopamine system. It instead comes from the future prediction system. The part of your brain that predicts the future says doing this longer-term thing is good for us. It will lead to good things down the line. So let's go execute this plan. This future prediction system makes you feel good when plans are executed, but it's a deeper, more fulfilling type of good feeling. It's a more lasting type of good feeling.

It's the satisfaction. I'm paraphrasing Matt Crawford here, as I often do, the quiet satisfactions. I've been able to point to an intention made concrete manifestly in the world. Right? That's a different type of pleasure. I accomplished a plan that I thought was useful pleasure. That's what you really want to get, quote-unquote, addicted to Nicole. That feeling of I'm making progress on an important plan that leads me to something good down the line.

Not the dopamine pleasure of this might feel good in the moment. Let's really do it. And then you do it and it doesn't match up to that intense compulsion you felt in the moment to do it. So, yeah, they're different types of pleasures. The practice, this deeper sort of pleasure, discipline matters. So go back to the deep dive where I recommended practicing doing hard things. That just gets you used to what that type of satisfaction feels like and makes it something that's more attractive to you. You can also deprogram the dopamine pleasures.

There's a couple things to do here. One, just be more comfortable with discomfort. I'm sort of stealing this idea from Michael Easter and his own. book, The Comfort Crisis. Your brain might say, I really want to, like, I'm bored and I really want to look at the TV right now. It's going to be great. We might find something fun on there.

And you say, I'm just not going to do that because that's not in my plan right now. That's not in my interest. And just be like, I'm going to feel uncomfortable about that. My brain will rebel and I'm going to feel bored and bad. And then it will get better. And I'm okay feeling bored and bad. That's not what I'm trying to avoid. So just being more comfortable with a discomfort that follows from define your dopamine system

goes a long way. also for deactivated these dopamine responses that around specific things have alternative habits as well you know I don't want to grab a drink here have an alternative thing you do that gives you a different type of reward and just like relentlessly go to the alternative activity when you feel the compulsion for the thing you're trying to do less of so you can deprogram some of these dopamine responses but yes to get to your original question

there's a sort of a deeper satisfaction that comes from executing a hard but worthwhile planned. It's very different than dopamine-driven-driven satisfactions. It's the type of satisfaction you want to reorient your life more around. All right. Rolling along here, we got a question from Mike. Here's a classic question. I hear this one a lot.

Mike says, on a weekly basis, what is a good number of deep work sessions to strive for, assuming my typical work week is Monday through Friday? Mike, this depends on your job. In my book, Deep Work, I talk about your ideal deep to shallow work ratio, where I say you should identify for your particular job in a typical week. What is the ideal ratio of deep work hours to non-deep work hours for being as useful as possible to your employer? For some jobs, this will be pretty high. Like, mainly what they need you to do is deep work with just like a small amount of shallow work to sort of keep up with administrative things.

For other jobs, this might be very low. There are some things we want you to do that require uninterrupted hours, but there's a ton of stuff we need you to do that we need you to be more responsive. You need to know what the answer is, what your ratio. is for your particular job. I suggest talk to your boss or supervisor about this. Work with them to get this answer. So they have skin in the game on this is the ratio that's ideal. Why is it useful to have a number?

Well, now you have something to aim for. And if you're getting much less, hitting much less that number, now you have impetus to improve. It's not just a generic sense of I should do more deep work. It's I'm trying to get the 12 hours. I'm trying to get the 25 hours. I'm well short. What can I do to get there? It also gets your boss or your team on board because now you're able to say, hey, remember how we agreed that, let's say, for example, 50-50 deep to shallow work is ideal for me being valuable for this company.

I'm only getting 20% deep work to 80 shallow. So what should we do to fix this? And you would be surprised once you have a real metric that has a positive purpose, you would be surprised by how many changes will now be possible. How many changes the boss will now suggest. Oh, let's do this, let's do that. because you're working towards a positive metric. One tweak I want to add, because I talk about the deep to shallow work ratio a lot, and there's some complexities around it, one tweak I want to add.

When measuring this, your deep to shallow work hours, you need a full hour dedicated to deep work for it to count as deep work hour. So you can't have like 20 minutes here, 40 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and 30 minutes there and say, okay, that's two hours of deep work. Because if you don't have at least a full hour, you're not really getting the benefits of non-distraction. You still are dealing with the intention residue from the thing before too much. It's too fragmented. You need to count up like sessions, deep work sessions that last at least an hour to add their minutes to your total deep work count when calculating these ratios.

All right. Another deep work question here. This one comes from Sam. Sam says, I just read the section in deep work about the four disciplines of execution, the first being to focus on the wildly important. How do we apply this to our personal lives? I have so many goals I want to pursue, and I find it difficult to prioritize all of them. Well, Sam, what I typically suggest is that you first need to divide your personal life into different areas that you find important. We often use the lingo of buckets here on the show.

It's like a bucket for like family and community, a bucket for constitution, like your health, a bucket for contemplation. This is like theological or philosophical foundations for how you live. A bucket sometimes for what we call celebration. That's finding appreciation in the world in life, a connoisseurship or craftsmanship, et cetera. All right. Once you have these different areas, now I would suggest spend some time with each, but consecutively, not concurrently. We're talking three to six weeks per each. All right, I'm going to spend this month just thinking about this area of my life and clean it up.

All I'm working on this area of my life, get rid of some bad habits, put in place some new habits. If there's some one-time things to do, I'm going to buy. this workout equipment, I'm going to join this gym, I'm going to get my guitar out and reworked again, whatever it is, one-time things, new habits, get rid of the old habits, just overhaul that part of your life in a sustainable way. They move on to the next bucket. So this could take you the better part of half a year before you have sort of the different areas of your life that matter, at least all running in a reasonable way. Now you can think about some larger goals in your personal life, some more ambitious or radical goals. And again, I would do these one at a time.

This is what I'm working on this season. In this part of my life, I have this major new initiative. That's what I'm working on? Okay. And then once that's done, all right, what do I want to do next? I mean, this is a really busy part of my professional life, so I don't want any major personal goals, but when the summer comes, I'm going to take on another one. Just have patience with this, Sam. So this first thing is going to give you a good foundation for your life. You're addressing the parts that are important. You're paying attention to them. And then, you know, in the short term, it might seem hopelessly slow that you're only working on one part of your life for the next month or two. And all these other parts of your life, you have these big ideas for radical plans. But let's zoom out to the scale of a couple of years.

Now suddenly the amount of big goals in your personal life you accomplish is going to add up and it's going to seem very impressive and you're going to feel very deep. So you just got to have some patience with this. Don't try to do everything at the same time. I can remind you what the slow productivity corner is is where I answer a question each week that's related to my new book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. There we go. Look, if you like especially the first part of this show, those ideas of these small things, you got to read Slow Productivity. If you're fan of the show, you need that book. It's like the source guide for the book. So check that out wherever you buy books, slow productivity. All right, what's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? It's from Adon who says, I'm, currently rereading your latest book, Slow Productivity. I love it. A second read already. Way to go, Don. In the section, Limit Daily Goals, you emphasize focusing on one task per workday. This is a great idea, but it seems somewhat incongruent with time blocking, which seems to be useful for managing lots of different tasks within the same day. So, Don, I think this is a vocabulary

issue. Limit Daily Goals is talking about the major analysis. initiatives that you work on or make progress on in a given day. And I'm arguing if possible, just have one major initiative you're making progress on. So I'm working on this research paper. I'm working on prepping this new hard class. I'm working on my book and trying to make progress on a chapter from my book. And try to keep that the one thing. Do you have a session for and you can think about in the background and maybe return to it later in the day, I have another deep work session on? Outside of this one major thing, there'll be lots of other small tasks and obligations and things that have to go on. I have these meetings. I got to follow up on this.

I got to get this paperwork submitted. This is why you need time blocking. The time blocking is going to help you make sense of where am I going to work on my major things. Where are the other things in the other things in the most optimal way possible? So most knowledge workers have a lot of things they have to do. Time blocking helps you make sense of that. The major things you work on, in an ideal world, though, you would limit that to one per day. All right, Adon, thank you for that question. That is this week's low productivity corner. All right, I'm going to move on here.

I have a case study. Case studies are where you, my listeners, send in examples of you using my advice in your actual lives so we can see what it looks like in practice. Today's case study is anonymous, but it's interesting. All right, here we go. I'm reading now.

I want to share how your podcast helped remind me to build my career around my desired lifestyle. When I first graduated from Juilliard and left New York, I moved in with my parents in the Portland area to save money while I hit the orchestral audition circuit. I felt desperate to land an orchestra job as fast as possible, but the contrast to leaving New York for suburbia also made it incredibly imparent to me how much I wanted to get back to living in a dense, walkable city with good public transportation. In those early months of desperation to advance my career and move out of my parents' house, I took auditions for big jobs in cities I would have hated to live in. like L.A., Cleveland, and Fort Worth. After getting dangerously close to landing a couple of jobs and places I would have hated,

I'm now living the dream in San Francisco as a freelancer and no longer feel like my entire life hinges on landing a big, high-status orchestra job. Last year, I even had the opportunity and flexibility to accept a contract with an orchestra in Auckland and lived in New Zealand for three months before returning to San Francisco. I don't make as much money as if I had a full-time position with a major symphony, and in the eyes of the status hierarchy, I'm just a freelancer, but that's a business. worth the benefit of having autonomy over where I live. The weeks where I have holes in my calendar, I enjoy having an abundance of time to read and write and go for long walks and volunteer

in my neighborhood. Since moving here, I've been in finals for auditions for a couple of different full-time positions here in San Francisco, and there are more vacancies to be filled. So there is plenty of opportunity for upward career mobility without having to move so long as I'm willing to bide my time. In practicing for auditions, I always get my best work done when applying the principles of deep work. Well, I love this case study because it has a core idea that's part of my deep life philosophy. So when trying to cultivate a deep life, an intentional life, a life lived on purpose, a life that's remarkable to yourself and other people, when trying to cultivate a deep life, a trap to avoid is the hope that the singular grand goal will change everything for the

better. Now, this is a very common belief, especially in the American context, this idea that if I want my life to be deep, I need a sufficiently ambitious and unambiguously impressive goal. And if I accomplish that goal, my life will, because that's a hard goal and it's very intentional and hard to do, my life will be intentional and I'll enjoy it and it'll be deep. The problem with the grand goal approach is, as we just talked about in a prior question, is that there are multiple parts of your life that matter. Singular grand goals tend to just focus on one part of your life. And in making one part of your life better,

they can have unexpected consequences on the other parts of your life. So in pursuing, for example, the goal of landing a high-status orchestra job, you might really screw within this example. Other parts of your life, they're important to have to do with where you live and the pace of your life.

So singular grand goals are worrisome. So what we see here is working backwards from a general broad understanding of all the aspects that make the good life good for you. So you're sort of, I call it your ideal lifestyle plan or ideal lifestyle narrative. And that leads to a much more subtle and complicated and nuanced approach with many more options for crafting a life that's going to be much more fulfilling. So because the case study here, the author of this case study, recognized location really mattered. He did not go or accept the high status job in a city in which location be really bad.

But what he also did, because again, he's very plugged into, here's all the parts of my life that matter. It allows you to much more flexibly be looking for opportunities to how can I service more of these things that I care about. He cares about music. Got this opportunity to go somewhere interesting, to play in an orchestra, but not to go to a location he doesn't like. And also to have the flexibility of a freelancer so that like this other slower pace of life could still show himself. you can still have down times when he's reading and doing other types of things. This is not something you sit about when you're in Juilliard and say, here's the obvious thing I want to do.

I want to be a freelance orchestra player in New Zealand. You don't think about it from scratch. But when you work backwards from a broad lifestyle narrative, these are the type of subtle plans that come up that better play on all the different aspects of your life that matter. So it's a great case study of deep life planning in action. All right. So that's all we got for today. For questions, we've got a great final segment article.

I'm excited to react to. First, however, I want to briefly mention another sponsor that makes the show possible. I'm talking about our longtime friends in Element L-M-N-T. So the Element Zero Sugar Electrolite Drink Mix is something I really use, especially after I exercise, especially after a long day of giving lectures or book touring in which I'm dehydrated, because it gives me back those electrolytes I need with none of the junk. no sugar, no weird artificial flavors. I put some element in my water after a workout.

I put some element in my water on a long day of media tours. I put some element of my water in the morning when it's been a long day before and I'm feeling that sort of dehydration. So I love element. I'm excited to announce to have this new product, Element Sparkling, which delivers the same zero sugar electrolyte formulation you already know and trust in a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling water. all right so with element sparkling you can now grab an already cold can of element enhanced water straight from your fridge and once again none of the junk no sugar no caffeine just all the electrolytes that you need all right so this is becoming they're rolling out sparkling for more and more people right now at the moment if you're an element insider which you can find out

by going to the Element website. You will get first access to Element Sparkling, and then this will become more broadly available as time goes on. The website you would want to use. I have that over here is DrinkElement.com slash deep. That's drinklmnT.com slash deep. Other good news, you can get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase you make at DrinkElement.com slash deep.

And again, if you're an Element Insider, you'll have first access to Element Sparkling, a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. So go to DrinkElement.com slash Deep to find out more. I also want to talk about our longtime friends at My Body Tutor. My Body Tudor is the smartest solution I have seen to getting healthier. And it's because it focuses on the issue that most people actually have putting their plans for increased health into action, which is consistency. It's not too hard to figure out what's a good way to eat and a bad way to eat. It's hard to do it consistently. It's not hard to figure out what's a good exercise routine to do.

It's doing that routine consistently. My Body Tudor gets around this problem by assigning you a 100% online coach. This coach helps devise your plan with you. What are we doing with your diet? What are we doing with exercise that matches your constraints, what you care about, what matches your life and personality. And then here's what's key you check in with them every day. That accountability is what gives you consistency. It also is what allows you to navigate obstacles.

Oh my God, there's a holiday coming up. I'm really worried about falling off of our diet. You can talk to the coach and make an alternative plan. I'm going on vacation. I went on my gym. Like, great, here's what you're going to do on vacation. Let's help you have an alternative plan. So you get all the benefits of having a dedicated coach without all the expense of having

a physical nutritionist in your house or a personal trainer at the gym because it's 100% online. So it makes this type of high accountability personalize training much more affordable. Now, here's good news. If you go to My Body Tudor, T-U-T-O-R-com to sign up and mention that deep questions sent you, you'll get $50 off your first month. So just go to MyBodytutor.com and mention deep questions to get $50 off your first month. All right. And with that, let's return to our final segment.

All right, so one of the things I like to do in the final segment of the show is react to interesting articles that I have seen around the internet. I have an article today that I really liked. So I want to echo these points. I'm going to, for those who are watching, instead of just listening, I am going to attempt with trepidation to pull this up on my screen here. So you should see this now. The article is called Countering Pushback to Limiting Social Media for Kids. It's written by the Washington Post columnist Lena Wynn. Now, why I like about this article is that Lena is talking back or addressing

five of the most common complaints that people have about the renewed push that we should limit social media for kids. So in other words, there's this growing push driven in large part by the popularization of research by John Haidt, that we should be careful about giving unrestricted access to social media the internet to kids. Don't just give a 13-year-old a smartphone and say rock and roll. Kids are kids, rock and roll. The data, I believe, is very clear that this is dangerous.

Our best bet is to delay unrestricted access. access to the internet and social media in particular until kids are older, probably high school, post-puberty, the safest age would probably be 16. Okay, there's been a lot of pushback. Any big trend is going to be pushback. I've heard a lot of this pushback over the years, but Lena, I think, in this article, does a good job of responding to the most common pieces of pushback. I'm going to go through her responses briefly right now because I think she's right on.

All right. So I'm going to share this again on the screen. let's start with, okay, first common complaint about limiting social media kids. There are positive uses of social media. Here's Lena. Some claim that because social media can offer educational resources and facilitate communication, LGBT Plus, and other youth who normally feel ostracized are able to use the platforms to find community more easily. Thus, limiting social media could hurt especially vulnerable teens.

I hear this complaint or concern, I don't say a complaint, but concern about social media. social media restrictions. I hear this concern a lot. Here is Lena's response. This is ignoring the fact that without social media, young people seeking community have other online resources such as forums and support groups.

She's exactly right about this. And these other online resources I actually think are much better than trying to be in an algorithmically driven attention economy echo chamber. All right, here's objection number two. Is parents being worried that they need them to keep in touch with

their kids. Here's Lena's response. While I understand the convenience of messaging your children in case pick up plans change, surely this does not outweigh the substantial downside of kids being distracted from learning. There's ample proof that phones are distracting dot, dot, dot,

just like the old days, if there's a true emergency, parents can pass messages by calling the front desk. And for parents who must have a direct line to their kids, they can use dumb phones that don't have internet capability. I'm really on board with this. It seems like it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to have, you know, hey, I might need to access my kid directly in some

scenario of concocted. Therefore, they should have unrestricted access to social media. It's jumping a little bit too far. All right, let's look at the third objection that she addresses. I'll put this back on the screen again, just for those, for visual varieties sake. The third objection, kids will find a way around the controls. All right. Lena has the right response here. This is like saying teenagers will drink and smoke anyway, so why bother trying to to stop them. Yeah, that's crazy.

They will, so just don't get them a phone, don't put controls on it. It's not a reason to stop it. All right. Complaint number four. It's too simplistic to say limiting social media will improve kids' social health. Lena goes on to elaborate this complaint. The mental health crisis among young people has multiple causes of which social media is one. No one is saying that restricting social media use will solve the crisis.

Oh, okay. Then she says no one is saying that restricting social media use will solve this crisis, as opposed research shows that it will help. Okay? Yes, I think, again, to say there's other things that are causing mental health, just getting rid of social media is not going to solve all these problems, doesn't then follow. So let's stop trying to do the social media piece. That is a big piece of social media of mental health issues. It's one we can control.

So let's do something about it. you know, sometimes this complaint takes a common form of complaint for a lot of issues, which is about messaging control. So often there's this concern of if you focus too much and a lot of different progressive issues. But if you focus too much on a concrete solution that could make progress, people will stop paying attention to these other things that are problems that we think are important. Often things require like more systemic changes. And so there's a hesitancy to get concrete.

It's never a good reason to a problem. avoid concrete things that can help. All right, let's go to the final, I'll load it back up here, the final objection that Lena responds to, there is an adequate data to prove social media worsens kids' health. All right, here's Lena's response. While it's true that not all studies have found a strong correlation between social media and youth mental health issues, the data in my view is plenty strong enough. I will add, I agree. I have spent a lot of time with John Hyatt and Gene Twinge's annotated bibliography on this research. I have have watched over the years as the data gets more conclusive. Research literatures are not about

unanimity. They're about directions when they all begin to head towards the same point. Different experimental designs and studies all point towards the same conclusion. That's how you know the research literature is converging on something that's more likely true. And that's what we're seen in the harms of social media debate. Back to Lena, she has a good way of saying this. The question isn't, are we 100% sure of cause and effect? But rather, what is the harm of taking actions versus the harm of not doing so? Right? So unless you work for Apple or meta, there's not a major harm to your kids not having these

phones. The biggest harm is maybe the perceived social complexity. That is super solvable. But the harm of having these things is becoming increasingly well documented. To ignore, it's interesting, to ignore the data on this, it reminds me a lot of climate change denialism. Well, you know, like there's this other thing I saw that saying like the island. islands aren't shrinking. There's this other thing that it's like more complicated about the

changes than the temperature. And the climate change scientists have to say, look, the literature is direction they pointed, not like every article saying the same thing. We're getting a lot of that same, I think, kids in social media denialism happening now. Well, you know, what about this study over here in the potato study? And you kind of have to trust the experts here who are looking at the preponderance of the evidence and seeing the research moving clearly increasingly in this direction. So as Lena, that was a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a a good column. There's a link to it in the show notes if you want to read it at the Washington Post. Those are common objections, and they all are relatively easily paired.

All right, so that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Remember to help spread the word if you can. I think we'll have Jesse back for next week. He'll be done with vacation. But, you know, thanks for putting up with the solo episode. We will see you or hear you next week. 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, afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calduport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.