Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 310: Rethinking Discipline

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Discipline is critical to cultivating a deep life, but what exactly does this concept mean? In this episode, Cal uses a concrete case study from Reddit to dive deeper into the nuances of discipline and to then identify concrete, practical advice for improving your ability to take disciplined action. He then answers listener questions and asks for Jesse’s judgment on a battle of the writing sheds.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode:  https://youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Deep Dive:  Rethinking Discipline [5:44]  - Should I work harder at finding a job? [36:13] - How can I measure the Discipline layer of the Deep Life Stack? [39:38] - How do I stay off my phone in times of stress? [44:34] - How can I regain the control over my phone that I once had in college? [48:44] - Does Cal only write on a laptop to avoid distractions? [51:54] - How can a new knowledge worker apply the slow productivity principles when starting a new job? [58:13]  CASE STUDY: Shifting jobs between teaching and administration [1:04:10]  FINAL SEGMENT: Battle of the Sheds [1:12:01]  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? reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/15sjr2h/lpt_request_how_to_stop_favoring_short_term/ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2958859/ sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240607121448.htm english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2024-07-06/cal-newport-the-man-who-never-procrastinates.html   Thanks to our Sponsors:  mintmobile.com/deep rhone.com/cal greenlight.com/deep blinkist.com/deep  Thanks 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. So I'm once again not in my Deep Work HQ in Tacoma Park, but instead recording from my undisclosed location up north. But I am joined once again by my producer, Jesse, through the miracle of internet technology. Jesse, how are things going down there in the DC area? Things are going good. It was real hot earlier in the week, but today and yesterday has been very pleasant. I had a sweatshirt on today. Midday, I was riding outside, and it was cool enough on the porch up here that I had to put on a sweatshirt. It's very rare I get to wear a sweatshirt in July, so you can tell I'm happy. That's nice. You know what? I'm coming back. So this is the last episode recorded in the undisclosed location. God willing, next week, I will be back in the HQ and we'll be recording again in person.

I miss the HQ. I miss all the stuff we had going on down there. Not the heat, but everything else. So this will be good. But it's been nice to be up here. I'm going to talk a little bit at the end of the show about one of the cooler features of working up north. And there's going to be a little competition I have between me and another well-known writer. So stay tuned for that. But all things must come to an end. So Jesse, I'm happy to get back. Yeah, I was listening to Episode 309 earlier in the week with a productive meditation, and I followed your advice on a bike ride home from work. I did that, and it worked out well. I liked it a lot. So you had a, just for people who don't remember the episode, a single topic you were trying to make progress on in your mind, and you just try to keep your mind focused on that one topic, while, and this is crucial, the productive meditation, you have to be doing something physical, sort of automatic. physically physical, like walking or biking. So did that work out? Like, do you find yourself

better able to sustain concentration? Yeah. And the bike ride, I mean, to get home from my job only takes 25 minutes or so. And then when I got home, I had some concrete things that I was able to do to make progress on the one thing that I was thinking about, which I liked. I'll tell you, I was stuck the other day, right? So I'm up here, you know, up north. And there's a riding shed on the property. Anyways, the other day I was, I was, I was, working on a new chapter of my book. And we had visitors, my wife and the visitors and the kids were off doing something. I was like, great, I'm going to make a lot of progress in my writing shed. And I was really stuck. And the reason why I was really stuck is because there's a difference

between thinking and writing. And what I realize is when I'm working on writing, these are two very important things. I do a lot of productive meditation. So I do a lot of walking, a lot of walking around Tacoma Park, a lot of walking on trails, when I'm trying to figure out what I want to say. And then I do the writing where I try to write it down. Well, writing sheds are fantastic for writing. When you know what you want to say, and now you need to be able to just get lost in your writing and be able to focus and not be distracted. Writing sheds are awesome. They're not good for figuring out what to say. Sitting in the shed, I could not crack this chapter in the same way that I could, I'm sure, if I was on foot. So I basically had to say, I'm going to stop working on this until we can go for a hike or something, at which point then I can make progress.

It was a really interesting reminder of the coolest location in the world for riding doesn't make your thinking better. Thinking and riding are two separate things, but I think we often mix that up. Yeah, that's interesting. So then were you able to go for the walk at some point and then go back to the running shed and figure it out? Yeah, I think I've cracked it now. So I told the owner of this property, it has a lot of acreage. I said, look, you should build trails, right? Like, they don't have to be long, but it'll be great to have walking trails because for a rider, that'd be optimal.

Walk to trails, sit down and write, walk to trails. But the problem is it's hunting territory. So when they're renting this house during hunting season, productive meditation could take a pretty dark turn. Especially since, as you know, Jesse, when I'm thinking, I really do like to wear my sort of deer skin fringe Davey Crockett jacket, along with my antler hat. Because it helps put me in the mood, like it connects me to my frontier forefathers. But I guess walking the trails here and during hunting season, thinking big thoughts could go wrong.

That would limit you from writing your 12th book down the road. That would limit. I don't think I would make it the book 12. Yeah. Yeah. I should, that would be funny if the owner just lives nearby. When next time he comes over, I should just have on like an antler hat and a sway jacket and just be like, hey, I'm just off for going off for a walk. See you later.

And sort of like on all four start working. Yeah. Anyways. Enough of that nonsense. All right. We have a good actual show for today. I'm going to be taking a deeper look on a topic that comes up often in our discussion of the deep life. We got some really good questions.

We got a great case study lurking back there. And then as I previewed before, we have a cool final segment where I'm going to do a little bit of playful comparison of my setup here with the setup of another very famous writer. All right. So let's get started, Jesse, with today's deep dive. So I've been thinking a lot recently about discipline. Now, I don't mean punishing other people. I also don't mean those performative shows on social media where you brag about how many miles you can run.

or how many minutes you can survive a cold plunge. I mean instead the quiet contentment of consistently making progress on things that are hard right now, but move you towards meaningful goals in the future. Now, this is the problem with talking about discipline, is that it is hard to get the definition straight. There's a lot of confusion about exactly what we mean. So I wanted to actually do something different with our conversation about discipline And today, I want to start with a concrete case study.

Excuse me. This is a question posed in a recent Reddit thread on the Life Pro Tips Reddit community that I think is going to make concrete what we mean when we talk about discipline. All right. So this is a real Reddit thread I want to read here to prime our discussion. Now, this is not a work-school-related post. I generally don't have any major problems with procrastination or meeting deadlines. I'm structured in how I work and get things done when they are expected of me. However, in my personal life, I always seem to put off things I want to do in favor of playing

video games, watching movies, or scrolling on social media. I love painting and being creative, but rarely make time to do it, even though it does seem to make me very happy when I do. I tend to skip social occasions because I want to stay home and play some video games, even though I always enjoy myself when I do push myself to go. I've always wanted to learn a new language, but when it comes down to it, I don't make the time to do it. Without external pressure, I choose an easy dopamine hit 95% of the time. Any advice on how to make it easier to choose the things that take a bit more effort up front, but will make me happier in the long run.

All right, so I like this because it's concrete. This is what we mean by discipline. being able to consistently work on your art or learning the language or going to the meaningful social event when in the moment it would be much easier just to play video games. And of course, we could replace video games here with Look at Your Phone, Get Lost on YouTube, drink, whatever it is, eat distracting food, get lost and binging on dumb shows online, whatever it is. We all have our own version of video games. So this is what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about discipline through the lens of this specific example, and I want to get practical here. I want to get practical advice for how to improve your discipline. I'm going to use this case study as a guide and divide my answer into two parts, because we see there's two parts to the question. So the first part is how do you resist playing that proverbial video game so often? How do you resist the lure of the non-discipline shallow? So we'll start by talking about exactly that challenge. Then part two of this question will be part two of this segment. We'll talk about how do you make the deep meaningful effort, the learning a language, the working on your art. How do you make that more appealing and more consistent?

So how do you reduce the negative? And then how do you increase the positive? That's the way we're going to structure our discussion of discipline today. All right, let's start with this first part, resisting the proverbial video game. I want to do a little bit of neuroscience here, but not too much. And I'm going to do it with some trepidation. It's easy to get overconfident in summarizing neuroscience, which is, you know, is in my experience always much more complicated than you think. So we're going to, with some

caveats here, give a little bit of neuroscience we're going to use to generate our advice. All right, I'm going to read a quote from a 2010 survey article that appeared in the journal Neuron that talks about how our brain deals with the prospect of an immediate reward. All right, so I'm quoting now. Most goal-directed motivation, even the seeking of food or water, is learned. It is largely through selective reinforcement of initially random movements that the behavior of the neonate comes to be both directed at and motivated by appropriate stimuli in the environment. For the most part, one's motivation is to return to the rewards experienced in the path and to the cues that marked away to such rewards. It is primarily through its role in the selective reinforcement of associations between rewards and otherwise neural stimuli that dopamine is important for such motivation.

Once stimulus reward associations have been formed, they can remain potent for some time. This is what you're dealing with when you see that phone or the video game is lying there and you feel that strong attraction to play it. It's a type of short-term planning that's sometimes called reflexive planning, where your brain has hard-coded. this stimuli, seeing the video game controller in the living room, seeing the phone in my hand or on the table next to me. This stimuli is directly connected to a reward that we've experienced in the past. And through having this immediate reward occur enough times, we've had dopamine-mediated reinforcement learning, which means we've meant to connect now. Our neurons will connect that stimulus with that reward.

So when we see the stimulus, we get a neurochemical flush that is an experiment. as motivation to do the activity. It's very tempting to pick up the phone. It's very tempting to pick up to controller. It's very tempting to go pour that drink. So how do we reduce this urge? How do we reduce the urge to do the immediate but shallow? All right, I have three things to suggest here that are concrete.

Two of them are obvious. One of them is a little bit more subtle. Number one, reduce the stimuli. Right? So we can actually look at just not encountering that stimuli to which we've learned the connection to the reward. encountering that stimuli as much. This is where, for example, on the show, we often talk about the phone foyer method where you don't keep your phone with you when you're at home. It's in

another room. So you're not seeing the phone. It could be taking apart your video game system when you're not playing, putting the controllers with the actual box into a closet somewhere, not just having it out and being easy to play. You can also do this by taking, for example, applications off your phone so that when you do pick up your phone to do something like listen to a podcast, you don't see the app for TikTok right there. All this is about stimuli reduction. It makes sense in the light of this basic neuroscience that we just reviewed. If you don't encounter the stimuli, there is no trigger of that neurochemical urge to do the action. Well, here's the second obvious piece of advice. Encode related but alternative rewards.

So teach your brain to enjoy through reinforcement learning, other things that are rewarding that are better for you or more meaningful or less time consuming than the thing that you're worried about. This is very common with food and drug related motivational centers. Hey, I'm used to pouring this drink when I get home from work, but I'm trying to stop drinking. So you have like an alternative activity you start doing when you get home from work. just rewarding in its own way but doesn't involve alcohol. And then you begin to really enjoy that other routine. So it's still like I come home and I go for a jog while listening to music I really like or like a fun podcast. And your mind learns to really like that too.

And so now the stimuli of coming home has this other association that's going to be less harmful. So you can encode alternative rewards just through pure engineered exposure to them. So there's other stimuli that when you get that stimuli that would normally make you do the thing you don't want to do, you're motivated to do things you do want to do. The final piece of advice here is going to be more subtle. Become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Now, here I'm drawing from something I read from the former professor and writer Michael Easter. In his book, The Comfort Crisis, which I read last month, we talked about that in the book Roundup a couple weeks ago.

In his book, Michael Easter talked about this pioneering nutritionist named Trevor Kashi, K-A-S-H-E-Y, who has had fantastic success with helping people lose weight and get into better shape. So I'm going to quote a little bit here from Easter. This is actually a summary Easter wrote of this chapter of his book. Let me quote a little bit about Kashi from Easter himself, and then I'm going to apply this to what we're talking about here. So in the book, this is Easter talking about his own book, in the book, Kashi suggests finding calorie negative ways of coping with stress. His number one recommendation is walking. It relieves stress, put distance between you in the temptation to eat and burns calories.

It also gives you the opportunity to think about why you want to eat. Developed by Trevor Kashi, nutrition plan first comes down to this and awareness well before he addresses eating specific foods to reduce body fat. So what is Trevor Kashi doing? He's saying, part of why people are eating more than they should is because they are, they're feeling these motivate dopamine-derived or mediated motivational urges to eat the bad food. Right? The stimuli is, I'm stressed. The response I've been trained for is grab the chips.

And so what Cashie does, he said, forget at first talking about what you should. eat or white chips are bad or like what the right amount of food to eat is. Kashi says, no, what we got to start with is that exact response. Why are you eating the stuff you know you're shown to eat? Well, you have this particular response. So let's deal with that response. This is probably for a lot of people at stress, but for other people it's boredom or whatever, or sociality, social context. But you have these stimuli. You're connecting with certain types of eating. And he says, so we're going to deal directly with that. And that's where he recommends like walking, for example, you have other things you do in response to those stimuli. But

one of the, where the advice ends up, and this is how Michael Easter summarized this in his book, where the advice ends up is ultimately, too, you have to just be okay with the discomfort of your feeling its motivation to do this thing and you don't. And just be more okay than most people are with like, yeah, that feels uncomfortable. With food, it's often this dopamine-mediated motivation response is felt as a feeling of hunger, as well as a sort of attraction. Like, it's hunger an attraction. And Cassie says, just be a little bit okay, being a little bit hungry, you know. See, part of what happens, this is a big thesis from Easter's book, part of what happens is we have a very comfortable life. We lose all comfort with discomfort. So we're really susceptible to these

motivational, our motivation, short-term motivational system pushing us towards things, because if we resist that, it feels uncomfortable and we flee discomfort. Easter said, what if we just get more comfortable with being a little bit uncomfortable? And if you work with Trevor Cashie, it's part of what he worked with you on is he says, let's get used to being a little bit hungry. Nothing bad is going to happen. It's just a feeling. You can separate yourself from that feeling. You'll eat again soon.

You're not going to starve. It's not the hunger pains of actual fasting. You'll be okay. And in the book, Easter talks about working with Kashi and how, like, over time, he just got more comfortable with, like, certain parts of the day I feel kind of a little more hungrier and that I'm okay. It's not the worst thing in the world. That applies to almost any of these short-term motivational system cues.

It feels uncomfortable when you don't pick up your phone. Because not only does a system make you motivated to pick it up, but it motivates it by making your current situation feel uncomfortable. I mean, if we really get subtle about what do these motivational impulses feel like, it's often presented to us as a solution to a current discomfort. How does our body motivate us to eat? It makes us feel the discomfort of hunger. and it lets us imagine that picking up that food is going to make that hunger go away.

Well, the same thing happens with the video games or with the phones. We feel the discomfort of boredom or stress. And we have the senses like when we pick that thing up, that's going to go away. It's the alleviation of the discomfort. Drinkers will tell you about this. That the motivational system, drug users as well, the motivational system that kicks in that makes you want to like pick up that drink or the drug, how you feel in the moment. What does that anticipation feel like?

You actually start feeling terrible. You feel bad in the moment. Like you'll get stressed or feel, there'll be a physical discomfort that builds up that your mind can then say this will be alleviated. That's very powerful. It'll be alleviated by doing that. So we have to become more comfortable with discomfort to, again, succeed with not letting the short-term motivational system just rule what's going on in our life. All right. That's part one.

resisting the proverbial video game. Part two in this example is how do you motivate yourself to do something harder instead? So we want to make the distraction less appealing. We want to make the target more meaningful activity more appealing. A little bit more neuroscience here is going to help. But again, I'm going to be very, very high level. In particular, what I'm going to do here is read a sentence from the press release describing a brand new paper that appeared in nature of neuroscience.

A very interesting kind of landmark paper on long-term planning. But the press release had a good summary by one of the authors about how does our brain generate motivation for doing things that are not going to give us an immediate reward. But down the line may give us a reward. It's a short-term thing that's hard, but it'll help us make progress towards a long-term good thing. So let me read this quote from the press release surrounding this paper. The prefrontal cortex acts as a simulator, mentally testing out possible actions using a cognitive map stored into hippocampus, explains Marcella Matar, an assistant professor in New York University's Department of Psychology in one of the paper's authors.

So what happens here is you read more in this paper, and the paper is not just about how this works. It builds a model for it. But what you learn in this paper is that you have the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus work together when coming up with long-term plans and having them motivate future behavior. So the prefrontal cortex is simulating. Where is this going to lead us down the line, this thing we want to do now? And it relies on the hippocampus, which is where memories are stored, to help evaluate the simulation outcomes. So it uses your past experience to understand. Like, okay, so if we end up over here, is that good or bad? And your hippocampus has stored these experiences or memories or exposures to what it means to be, quote, unquote, over there.

And you can sort of evaluate the value of the different things you're simulating. So you have this map and you have this memory store. And together you can do these simulations of the future. And if you find a good path forward that's possible and leads to a place that you associate with good things, you get motivation. and that's how you make progress on the longer term. Longer term goals. So how do we make that easier? Well, again, I have three pieces of advice to offer here, two more practical and one that's

going to be a little bit more subtle. So the first practical advice, drawing from this neuroscience, improve your cognitive map. So what I mean by that is improve your understanding of how the thing you're doing actually works so that your brain knows this is how people learn a language. This is how people get to this particular level of being an artist, which is very appealing to me. This is how people actually become professional genre, novel writers. This is what's actually involved. The more detailed your cognitive map, the better simulations your brain can do. So this requires you learn about the

thing. Whatever this goal is, you've got a rabbit hole and obsess on it for a a little bit. You read the forums and books and you watch videos. This is the fun part, right? You go deep on Reddit threads. Like, you really learn this world, like how it actually works. This doesn't require a lot of effort, but it makes your cognitive map much more rich. All right. Number two, boost what's stored in your hippocampus. So now you have a better understanding of how this world works. You need to store in your hippocampus lots of examples of this thing succeeding that are very positive and very inspiring. So you have to fill your hippocampus with these things, these memories, that when your prefrontal cortex is trying to evaluate a particular path forward, it will look to your hippocampus,

bring forward these examples and say, oh, that's great, that feels good, so we do want to do this. So this means exposing yourself constantly to positive examples of people who have succeeded with the thing you're interested in. Examples that inspire you or motivate you, and you want to have these as richly encoded as possible. So video is great, audio is great, read, meet people in person, and you want to just essentially fill your hippocampus with these positive examples. And this is why when people are trying to get, you know, stronger in a certain type of way, like they're constantly watching influencers online and YouTube videos and talking to other people who are in really good shape. This is not some sort of narcissism or

vainness, they're actually doing something really smart here. They're filling their hippocampus with very strong examples that resonate. This is going to allow this whole simulation system to work better. So master the field, like really understand the field, and keep exposing yourselves to examples of what you really want to do. So like, let's be specific. Let's say, you know, you have this long-term thing you want to make disciplined action on that's like writing a genre novel. You've got to really understand how writing really works. Talk to real writing. Read interviews with real writers. How did they get good enough to write this first book?

What was actually involved in, you know, doing this? What are the steps? What marks a good book from a bad book? Did they have to go to writing workshops as part of this? Whatever you really learn to feel. Talk to an agent. Talk to other people who have failed at this. Why did they fail?

Join a writer's group, right? And then you have to constantly be exposing yourself to the most exciting examples possible. Watch those videos of Brandon Sanderson's Underground Layers. and be like, man, imagine like a fantasy writer who like has this underground layer, read interviews with writers where it's really inspiring when they talk about where they go to write and what their life has been like while they're doing it. This is all really important to when it comes time for you to actually sit down and write, you're going to be more likely to be motivated to do it.

All right. So my third piece of advice here is going to be the subtle one. Distinguish this unique flavor of motivation. There's not something. I've heard written about or talked about a lot, but it's something I really believe is true. There is overlap in the motivational systems involved when we're talking about these short-term rewards and the long-term planning. There's overlap, for example, dopamine is a mediating neurochemical in both of these. The striatum in the brain is involved in both of these,

but they're not the exact same systems, right? They don't unfold. The resulting motivation does not unfold from a neuroscientific perspective the exact same way. When it comes to the short-term stimulus response, you have particular neurons that are probably or clusters of neurons that are connected to this exact stimulus that can fire pretty quickly when they recognize what that is and get a direct motivational response. Obviously, when you're doing long-term planning, the neuroscientific machinations here are way more complex. You have the prefrontal cortex. You have the hippocampus. The signals it produce is going to be different. The motivation response itself is going to be different. If we're going to

make this less neuroscience and more practical, another way of saying it is that motivation will feel different. There's a subtlety to it. There's a difference between the urge I feel to pick up my phone and the urge I feel to start writing after I've carefully primed my cognitive maps and hippocampus. It's more subtle. It has more cognitive terois. It's connected to sort of images of yourself and your future. It doesn't generate a huge discomfort that you need to relieve. It's more easily ignorable, but the signal seems somehow more authentic, like it's getting to something more about your core self. You have to just learn to be a connoisseur of that more subtle, nuanced, authentic feeling of motivation that comes for these long-term goals that you're pursuing,

and just get to really like that. And really separate it from the discomfort of the much more short-term motivational system and be more comfortable, as we talked about before, riding those waves of discomfort. There's some subtlety there. Anyways, all of this comes together to define what we mean by discipline, right? And it answers a lot of issues we have when we deal with these problems. Like, let me just point out a few things here before we move on. One, what I think is key about this example we used to structure to us is that there's two different things going on. Resisting the short-term temptation and making the long long-term valuable thing more meaningful, we don't always break it up that way.

We don't always break it up that way, right? But these are two very different things that require different responses. So if you ignore the short-term temptation, and that's derailing your attempts to do the long-term thing that's useful, the things you're going to do are never going to help with the short-term, if all you're doing is trying to work on your narrative of yourself and your life and what's important and you're getting these examples and you're getting motivated about these big grand things, none of that will affect your short-term motivational system, which could care less. It doesn't talk to your prefrontal cortex. It doesn't talk to your hippocampus. It's boom, reward, let's rock and roll.

Right? So you have to deal with that completely differently. On the other hand, if all you deal with is this sort of, why am I picking up my phone so much? Why am I drinking so much? Why am I playing video games so much? If all you're doing is trying to deal with those, you're left with a vacuum on the other side. Because just not having those in your life doesn't automatically make the stuff that matters be more appealing. Your brain still needs a good cognitive map for those things. That takes time. Your brain still needs lots of positive examples of this thing being executed properly. That takes time and work to do. So, you know, we often just focus on one piece or the other. And that really, I think, prevents us from actually cultivating what we really mean by discipline,

which is I'm consistently and happily making progress on the things that are hard in the moment, but value are valuable to me in the long term. It also, this more subtle approach also, I think, really eliminates this idea that discipline is somehow a trait like your eye color. Oh, you're disciplined or you're not disciplined. Disciplined people do the important stuff, non-disciplined people don't. We're like, no, we're talking about brain systems that are subtle and you have to work with them.

And what makes someone more disciplined than someone else, it all has to do with what's going on with these brain systems. Like maybe they have not built up due happenstance, like where they are, how they're raised, their personality, they have less of the short-term distractions to have to come back. Or maybe because of like who their parents were, what they were exposed to in college, they have these very rich cognitive maps and their hippocampuses, stuff full of positive examples, and they don't find it hard at all to generate motivation for these long-term goals that have value, where someone else has completely empty stores there. And they have to start from scratch trying to build these things up. A lot of this is experience determined.

A lot of this is malleable. Discipline is something you train. It's not something that you're born with. So anyways, hopefully that's useful, becoming more concrete here with in the weeds what discipline might mean and giving us a fuller vision of how to hack it. You know, we get a lot of questions about this, which we'll get too soon.

And I figured it might have made sense just to spend a little time getting into this. So there you go, Jesse. That's a, I say discipline 101, but maybe it's like discipline 505. We've talked about it a lot. There's a lot of layers to this topic, but hopefully that one made some sense. I like the part one or the first point of part two

improving your cognitive map. Often forgotten by people, often overlooked. Yeah. You know, this is the problem, by the way, with looking at someone who's far along in some sort of discipline livelihood. And if you're starting out, say, give me your advice.

It's the problem of, you're starting out writing books and you talk to like me, who is working on his ninth, you know, I have such a rich cognitive map. I have hippocampus stuffed full of these positive examples that what it takes for me to sit down and write is just a completely different subjective experience than the first-time writer. And this happens for almost every field. It's the problem.

Who you want to talk to is the person who just had their first success and try to understand what was it like right before they, made progress for it. When you talk to the people who have already succeeded, you get moneyed advice. All right. Well, we got some good questions about this and related topics. But first, Jesse, let's hear from some sponsors. Look, I love a great deal, as you know, as much as the next guy. But there's only so much I'm going to do to save some money, right? I mean, I'm not going to, for example, face my worst fears, like jumping into a cave of snakes or having spend 20 minutes on TikTok. I'm not going to do that just to save a few bucks, right? It has to be

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All right. And with that, let's move on to questions. Jesse, who's our first question from today? Our first questions from Ranjit. I am unemployed and have been studying web development. I consider myself disciplined as I set aside two hours per day to look for a software engineering job. However, I've not found anything yet. Should I work harder?

Well, it's a good question. And it lets me emphasize a point I've also been thinking about a lot recently, which discipline is not about energy expenditure in the abstract. I think there is a sort of a strain of discipline being. performed online right now that sort of just abstracts away the notion of hardness. And there's a kind of a test of how much hardness can I, how much hardness can I take? Like, I think we see a lot of this happening with cold plunging, right? There's maybe some health benefits to cold plunging, but there's this other benefit of like, it's really hard and I can, you know, I can do it.

We see this in sort of ultra endurance events. You sort of imagine posting about, I didn't just run a marathon. I ran 30 miles. I ran 50 miles. I ran the Leadville 100, right? Just sort of just abstracting difficulty. Now, there's not necessarily something wrong with that. It can be, for example, cognitive training for actual more concrete goals that require discipline.

You can teach yourself through these type of endeavors that I am able to do things that are really hard that other people can't do. And that can be really important identity development. it can be really important for preparing yourself to do actual more specific goals. But I don't want you to mix up this more abstract notion of just difficulty equals discipline. I don't want you to mix that up with focused discipline, the discipline pursuit of things that are actually important. And I think that might be what's happening here. You're spending hours doing this job searching, right? You're structured, your disciplined.

I will sit here and do the job searching for hours every day. and it's not giving you what you need. And it's because effort alone doesn't alchemize in the results. It's specific effort aimed with evidence at specific goals that really matter. So in this case, really what's going on is the searching is not your problem. Your problem is not you're not searching enough. Most people, when they're finding a new job, doesn't come after 150 hours of searching. And it's all about how fast can I do the searching or how many hours I can do.

There's probably other things going on here. The web development skills you have aren't quite. right. You need to push your skill level to the next level. You're looking at the wrong types of jobs. So what you really need here is to interrogate the actions you're doing. You have the ability to do hard things, but you need to interrogate the actions you're doing to make sure that you're doing the right ones. We want to go back to the terminology of the deep dive. We can talk about getting your cognitive map here a little bit more accurate. All right. So anyways, discipline for the sake of discipline, I treat with some weariness. Again, not because I think it's bad.

But because it's not a replacement for actual focus discipline where you have an evidence-based plan for what it is that you're applying that effort towards. So I think that's your problem, R&G. It's not time spent searching. It's you need to really figure out why am I not getting these jobs. What skill am I missing? How could I get it? Is there a different type of job I should go for? Get a reality check on what's really going on in your world.

All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from RJ. I love the idea of the deep life stack. I didn't know how long to spend in each layer, so I devoted my entire quarter to developing discipline. However, I ran into a conundrum after the quarter was over. I did just okay. I was able to sustain several weeks of performing the Keystone habits, but there were also some stretches of time where I wasn't.

I was traveling. I had an injury. I was busy at work, stuff like that. Is there some objective metric I can use to determine when it's appropriate to move to the next layer? Well, RJ, as I've been working on this topic more, I tend to think, about the deep life, but for the uninitiated, we mean here creating an intentional life, focusing on things that matter and minimizing things that don't. I don't think about it as much anymore in a strict stack. You finish this layer, then do this layer, then do this layer.

I tend to think about it more now in three parts. So the first part is preparation. And that's where cultivating your discipline lies. I also would put in there right now getting organized, organizing your stuff and controlling your time. I would also put in there quieting your mind. One of the things I've learned working on this is becoming more comfortable with your own mind, spending time alone with your own thoughts, being good with just dealing with ideas and emotions. This is really important as well for being able to later discern what's important to you and what's not and how to make progress in life. That's all preparation. Then you have a planning part. How do you figure out what it is you should do to make your life?

deeper. And here, again, my big thought is don't work forward towards a big grand goal, but work backwards from a more general vision of an ideal lifestyle. And then you have execution as the third part. Like, how do I actually move closer to this ideal lifestyle and the actual art of figuring out how to get from where you are here to where you want to go over there? And here, like we talked about in the last question, evidence-based planning is really important, looking for multifactor results. Like this thing could help these three things. You know, there's all sorts of complexities to come into planning.

These are roughly sequential, but they're not terminally sequential. Like you need to start preparing before you plan. You need a plan before you execute. But even when you start planning, you still want to worry about the preparation. And even when you're executing, you might go back and tweak your plan and then return back to the preparation. All of these things are kind of going to be happening all together once you get going, which is all a way of saying your one quarter spent working on discipline is not enough to say,

okay, now I have sufficient discipline to transform my life. It doesn't mean you have to be stuck and just working on the preparation for multiple years, but it also means you can't just move on and not think about it anymore, right? It's an ongoing process, working on your discipline, working on your organization and control, working on your quiet mind. It's an ongoing process. And I think for a lot of people who are new to this, it's probably going to be about a half year of working on those three things. Start with the discipline, layer on some organization

control, move on the quiet mind, and then keep going back and tweaking and fixing what's not working. You need about six months of that before you would even move on to the next idea of like, okay, now let me start thinking about what I want to do in my life. And then even then you're going to return to the preparation. Maybe every six months or so, you're like, okay, where am I still lacking? Where are things getting loose? But you need at least six months, I think, preparing before you're ready to even sort of think about the next part of building in a deep life. So what you experienced is absolutely normal. Yeah, you began working on discipline. You used a keystone habit strategy where you just start practicing doing small but important

things in different parts of your life. And it did okay and then it kind of fell apart. Great. That's your first data point. Now we evolve. We fix the metrics. We get better at these circumstances that tripped you up. What's your fallback protocol when you're sick? Do you have alternative versions of these metrics for when you're traveling? Maybe you do so that you can keep a discipline streak alive, even when you don't have access to the things at home you need to do the keystone habits you originally chosen. These are all data points for you to evolve your approach to discipline. You also need to build probably off of the keystone habits as a starter towards now actually taking on at least one highly disciplined long-term project,

maybe something involving fitness or physical health, those tend to work better. Like, you need to kind of up to game here a little bit. If you're starting from scratch, it can really take a while until you've cultivated your discipline muscles to be strong. enough that you're really ready for the stuff to follows. So, this is all to say, keep working on the preparation, be willing to do two or three major overhauls of what you're trying to try to find something that works. And then even as you move on to the more fun stuff, your vision of your ideal lifestyle and making the big moves, keep checking back in on those preparation stuff and say, where have I fallen off? What can I improve? What can I tweak?

That's always going to be ongoing. All right. Who do we have next? Next question. Questions from Liz. My question is about cultivating a good relationship with tech during times of increased stress, in my case, lack of sleep. After an evening shift, it is super difficult to stop picking my phone for that easy dopamine distraction. All right. This is a good question. There's a temptation here to say, look, you know, you're stressed. So it's okay. It's stressed. It's stressed. It's, it's. It's okay because it's not really fair because other people just, it's not as stress, so it's going to be easier for them to work on other types of things. But your stress, that's okay. You know, this is just harder for you. I think the reality is like it's harder for you and that's, there's empathy there, but it's still really important. It's still just as important that you work towards the same goal of making sure that behaviors that you don't think are.

are important to you or behaviors that get in the way of things that are don't take over. Because once you have that strong connection, when I'm stressed, when I'm tired, I pick up that phone and it immediately gives me this sense of relief. It is a really strong connection. And other times when you're not stressed and you're not tired and you're trying to make progress on these other things that matter to, you're not going to be able to. Because you have that strong connection that's been reinforced about the phone. So, you know, the bad news is this is going to be harder for you. But the good news is that exactly the things we talked about in the first part, the deep dive still apply.

These are still the right ideas. Reducing the stimuli, right? Okay, it's just my phone is not around as much of taking the fun apps off of it. That helps. We know that's not enough. How do we know that's not enough? Because in the full version of your question, we edited this for the episode, but in the full version of Liz's question, she talked about how she tries that. but she still goes and finds her phone,

even if it's in the phone foyer method. She uses Safari to search and get Instagram on the browser, even if she's taking the app off of it. But that's why we had the other pieces of advice there as well. Okay, now you need to build in the alternative rewards that when you're in similar stimuli situation that would normally lead you to pick up your phone, you have these other rewards you've trained yourself to crave

that are triggered by the same stimuli. You sort of swamp the stimulus that makes you pick up your phone with these other things. And it could be whatever. It's the like I, you know, the run or the walk while listening to music that creates a chemical response is a good one. The taking a book to the nearby coffee shop where you're around other people and you get the same herbal tea and like, whatever it is, right? But you have this thing that you get this deeper reward out of. You get this and it's a similar stimuli. You really get used to doing it. Right. Like I always now try to exercise at the end of my day, between the end of my work day and the start of the evening, right?

And now I have a lot of strong associations with that. And it gets lots of chemicals going and it really is physiologically active. And it prevents me from just being like, hey, let me just like, I don't know, eat snacks or veg or something like that. So that one's going to be really important. And then, of course, just a more subtle piece of advice there about getting more comfortable with the discomfort of resisting that stimuli. But the key thing I'm going to point here is this white knuckling won't do it. You have to have those alternatives that you're putting in place instead. So it's worth doing because, again, life, once the phone and for other people video games and for other people drinking, like once it becomes like what you do when you're at all bored or stressed, it really is like someone's draining a proverbial battery.

It's like it's so hard to get away from and it just like makes your life. gray, it brings down these energy. You're looking at these updates and social media. And it just stops all this other stuff that over a long time. It's just going to make that life deeper and more interesting. So it's really good that we're thinking about this. All right, let's move on. What do we got next, Jesse? Okay, next question is from Paul. In college, I didn't use any social media. It was very successful. After college, I moved to Dublin and I'm working in a tech company. However, I now feel very distracted for two reasons. First, I always have to check my phone app to find an apartment. Second,

I started using dating apps and I'm hooked on those. How can I regain control? I mean, let's think about this for a second. Okay, you used to not use social media and you were, quote, very successful. Now you're on your phone more and you're unhappy. All right. I mean, we got a clear answer here. Go back to where you were before where you didn't use your phone that much for these things. Now, the issue here, and this is like a common reaction I get, But this is the – using the molehill. I'm trying to think this on the fly here, Jesse, but like transforming the molehill into the mountain. So what you're saying is like, oh, there are these incredibly narrow reasons why I feel like I need to use my phone, searching for an apartment and being on a dating nap.

And because of that, I use my phone all the time now. But that's crazy. Look, do 20 minutes a day during your lunch hour on your laptop, not on your phone. phone, look at what apartments have come available, look at what responses you've got to your dating app. That is all the time it could possibly take in the world on a day-to-day basis. How many apartments become available throughout the day? How many people have responded to your dating profile throughout the day? Like 20 minutes a day during lunch on your laptop, you can be looking for what apartments are new and that anyone respond to my dating app response. And then you can still

maintain what you had before. Just go back to what you had before. I don't really use my phone. You're in a good situation here, Paul, because it's not like you're decoding a behavior and going to a new behavior you've never been to before. You're going back to where you were before. So your brain knows and has great memories of what life was like when you didn't use your phone all the time. So all you have to tell your brain to do is, like, that's what we're going back to. Let me just take this two stimuli that are messing me up, the dating app and the apartment app, and let me just constrain that to my laptop at lunch. All right, with that out of the way, it won't be too hard to go back to where you were before. So don't let the molehill of like I have this digital stuff I need to do become the mountain of I have to be on my phone all the time.

We talked about this last week when we were reading common objections to the idea that younger kids should not use smartphones. And one of the common objections was like, well, there's this one thing I sometimes need to do, you know, get access to my kid occasionally because like the plan changed and they need to not take the bus. so they need to tell me if they missed the bus and need to get picked up or something. And they went from that immediately to, therefore, they should be on TikTok in their room at 2 in the morning. We can't let these small digital necessities become a skeleton key to bringing unrestricted technology into our lives. And I think this is a great example of that. All right. So, Paul, you're in good shape, though, because you already know what it's like not to use your phone all the time.

Let's just get you back there. All right. Well, who do we have next? Next question is from Ron. I noticed in the El Pais article that Cal's home desk didn't have a large desktop monitor. I have both a laptop and a desktop. I use my desktop as my main computer and my laptop when portability is needed. It occurred to me recently that sitting down at a desk right in front of a massive screen

kind of sets me up to go first to the screen, temptations and news sites, email, or even the vast labyrinth or my own files and folders. Does Cal only use a laptop? Well, first of all, we should, I don't know if, do we talk, we talked about this article, right? Yeah. We talked about it. Yeah. Let me load it up, though.

We haven't, I have it here. So I'm going to load it up for those who are watching instead of just listening. So this was a profile. I want to show you the desk he's talking about. All right. So let me load this up. All right. So this was a profile in a newspaper in Spain about me.

And so it has this picture. So for those who haven't seen it, this is a picture of me, for those who are watching, at my office, my library at my house. Okay. And as you can see, and as was pointed out in this question, there is no monitor on this desk. The nice desk is a custom-made desk from Houston and Company in Maine. It does actually a university library desk primarily, so it's kind of my mini library desk. All right.

So this is what the question is about. As long as we have this loaded up, though, we might as well show the real. the real star of this article. Quick aside is there's been in the studio. For those who haven't seen, Jesse Skeleton has featured in this article. There you go. I don't know why they thought this was important.

I love the matter, by the way, Jesse, I love this matter of fact caption. A corner of Newport's recording studio. The skeleton is named Jesse after Jesse Miller, the producer of Newport's podcast. No other explanation. Just like it's supernatural.

Like, yeah, so, like, here's a skeleton. The number, this capture writer was thinking, okay, here's the number one question someone will have when they see that this author has a skeleton, a literal skeleton in the recording to you, that most people's question will be, oh, but where did it get its name from? Like, that's the question you have? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, skeletons. Yeah, but, but where is the skeleton's name from? I just think it was funny. But anyways, okay, back to my office.

So why don't I have a monitor on this desk? An important thing about this library, and here I'll turn off the sharing here, an important thing about this library is no permanent electronics. So I didn't want a permanent computer in there. There's no printer in there, no scanner in there, no big monitor in there. Because I really wanted to cognitively associate the space with thinking and writing. And there's other things I associate with admin tasks, printing out bills, doing the budget, etc. So, like, I did not make that into a home office.

It's a library. It's for thinking and writing. When I write in there, I bring in my laptop and I write on my laptop, but it's not in there permanently. Now, I also like screens. They're useful, but I have different spaces. So upstairs in my house is a smaller sort of like cubby annex where we have our home office. That's where my filing cabinets are. That's where the printer is.

That's where the scanner is. That's where the color printer is. There is a big monitor there that I can plug my laptop into. That's where I do the budget. That's where I do taxes. That's where paperwork happens. That's where we sign medical and scan medical forms to send back for our kids camps. I'll tell you, Jesse, the rough estimate of the number of forms you have to send to a camp about medical issues related to your child.

And this is a rough estimate is somewhere around a hundred. hundred thousand pieces of paper. I don't know what... Times three for three kids. You would think when you were sending your kid to a summer camp in the Washington, D.C. area, that they were probably also going to be a part of a NASA mission to the moon. It is a similar level of medical documentation between the original Apollo astronauts and fifth graders going to a day camp.

in Washington, D.C. It's crazy the amount of paperwork you need to have. I don't want that mind space to be activated when I'm writing a New Yorker article. So in the place where I write, I don't have permanent electronics. Now, at the HQ, where you are right now, Jesse, as you know there, we got a real beastie setup where we have two big monitors on a movable arms and a really powerful Mac Studio computer. And so I'll often go there. If I'm doing some part of writing where I really want a lot of, I need a lot of sources open, more so than just a single Scrivener double pane on my laptop. You know, I'm editing and I need a bunch of sources open or something. Sometimes I'll go there and use our giant sort of spaceship cockpit setup we have at the

HQ. But the library is for really like the most thinking, reading, thinking, hard craft type writing. So it's a good question because that's very much on purpose that there's no screen in that room. I thought a lot about that. All right. We should get a copy of that. I want a copy of that Jesse skeleton picture. We should, we should have got that paper from. the reporter. You could have framed it for the HQ. Yeah, that's a good idea. All right.

Oh, our next question is our slow productivity corner question. So let's get some theme music. So for those who are new, the slow productivity corner is where we pick a question each week that is related to my new book, slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. If you like this show, you need that book, right? that book is like the handbook or the source guide for so many ideas we talk about. You know, I'm really proud of it.

We reference it all the time. So slow productivity. You should check out that book if you have not already. All right. So we have a question here that's related to the book. Jesse, let's hear it. Questions from Jovita. How can somebody who is just starting a professional knowledge career apply the slow productivity

principles as they start their new job? How can I initially avoid falling into a pseudo-productivity track? without appearing lazy and unmotivated? That's a good question, DeVita, because when you're very new to a job, you're not going to, for example, make tons of proclamations about the complex systems that you're running and explain to everyone why what they're doing is wrong and how you're going to be super productive. You kind of have to earn your keep a little bit.

But as you point out, if you fall into the trap of pseudo-productivity, that is, using visible effort as your main proxy for you being useful, you may never actually escape that trap. So how do we bootstrap this whole slow productivity mindset when you're new to a job? Well, I'm going to have you focus at first on workload, right? Principal one of that book is do fewer things. Once you have too many things you're actively working on, the administrative overhead of these tasks pile up to the point where you spiral into administrative overload and most of your day is now spent tending work. You don't have much time to actually do the work. You fall behind. A quality gets lower. It's very hard to escape that trap. So we do not want you in this new job the fall into the overload that's generated by having too many things on your plate at the same time. We also have to as quickly as possible establish your reputation with your colleagues and bosses as someone who is organized and get things done.

This is going to gain you quite a bit of flexibility in how you approach your workload. If they know you have your act together, they trust your decisions about what you're going to take on or how long it's going to take. So how do we accomplish both of those goals at the same time? I'm going to focus it on one particular piece of advice from the book and suggest that you start with it. This is the advice of prescheduling time for every major commitment you are going to agree to. So you're considering your boss asks you to do a particular project. It's going to take more than just, you know, 20 minutes. Find the time to do it on your calendar, put on your calendar like a meeting.

You know, like you have to estimate and be conservative about it. It's like, yeah, this is going to take like three major sessions probably to write this thing and then a meeting and then like another major session to edit. Go find that time and block it out on your calendar. There's a lot of advantages to this. Number one, it is going to prevent you from getting overloaded. Because you're literally putting the time aside for what you're going to do, you can't overload yourself. Because everything you have to do has to find free time in the calendar. So if you have too many things for the time you have the next week or two, you just can't fit those things on to your calendar.

And you get this really clear signal coming back. Oh, I can't, this is how long it's going to take. I don't have time for this. It doesn't fit in my calendar for another three weeks. Okay, so if I take this on, I can tell you it'll be three weeks until it's done. So it just prevents you almost literally makes overload impossible. Two, it allows you to prove that you're reliable. because you've scheduled the time in advance for when things are going to be done, you know when

they're going to be done. So tell them that and then deliver. That's like magic in the knowledge work world. When you say, yeah, boss, I'm on this. I'll get this to you by Tuesday. And then on Tuesday you deliver it. Repeat that by four or five times. Now you have earned your reputation as someone who has their act together and is organized. So now when they say, well, can you do this? And you realize you can't get it done really in a reasonable fashion for another six weeks or so, you will get the leeway. Like, yeah, I can get it done, but you know, you know me. I'm very organized and I allocate my time for everything I'm working on. There's not really enough time to get this done. It'll be about six weeks. Now you have more flexibility

to do that. So it's like a flywheel. It's like a self-reinforcing flywheel. Also, when you're explicitly scheduling your time, it allows you to turn a knob because you can decide how much time you want to schedule. Now, this is really important because early on in your job, the other thing you can do that's vital is start to master a skill that's going to move you to the next level. You want to become as valuable as possible to this company so that they really don't want to lose you. And when they're desperate not to lose you, they will accommodate almost anything you

suggest, including many of the other ideas from slow productivity. Well, if you're prescheduling your time, you can preschedule first time for working on new skills. Right? Because that's on my calendar. So when I'm trying to make these other projects fit, it has to find other time. So you can turn these knobs about how much time am I working on work, how much time am I working on new skills? And you control all of this. And it's all so much better than just being in the list reactive mode.

We have a to do list of stuff you're supposed to do that you try to make progress on while reacting the stuff that's coming on inbound. So Jovita, that's how I would get started. Long term, you're not going to want to schedule everything out in advance. This can become pretty burdensome after a while. Long term, I would suggest once you've built your reputation, you've made yourself valuable to the company, probably using something like a poll-based workload system is going to be more sustainable in the future as opposed to trying to put everything on the calendar. And so you can move onwards to a more sophisticated implementation of slow productivity, but use pre-scheduled time commitments for your work for the first like six months of a new knowledge work job. I really think there's a huge number of benefits to exactly that piece of advice. So if you buy the book slow productivity, focus in on principle one.

That's chapter three, which has principle one. That's going to have the details of what we were just talking about. All right, Jesse, I think it's a good excuse to hear that slow productivity corner theme music one more time. All right, now I want to do a case study. This is where someone will send in an account of putting into action the type of advice we talked about here on the show so we can see what it looks like out in the real world. Today's case study is anonymous, but it's a good one. So here's what it says. I taught for 14 years in a middle school classroom. This past year, I started a new role as an instructional coach. My job duties shifted and I worked on multiple projects. At the start of the

year, I knew I would need a system to maintain, organize, reduce distractions, and stay on top of my workload. My new office was located in a shared suite with tons of foot traffic. I use principles from deep work, and I also bought a time block planner. Weekly planning and using time blocking gave me a clear long-term view of what needs to be accomplished every week and month. An added benefit was that throughout the year, I was able to avoid bringing work home, which was great as I have two young daughters. Initially, I found myself blocking off more time than needed to complete most tasks other than scheduled meetings than the opposite happened. I didn't plan enough time, and tasks took longer than expected. Over time, my estimates improved. I think one of the

most underappreciated aspects of time block planning was the ideas list. In the past, when an idea popped up, I would delay my work and go down a rabbit hole. Next year, our district funding has shifted and my current position has been eliminated, so I'll be going back to the classroom. Each day I'll have four teaching blocks and two prep blocks. Each prep block will be 53 minutes. How can I be productive during these short time blocks? They seem like sprint sessions compared with what I had this past year. All right. It's a great case study that also has a hidden question. The key principle being shown in this case study is multi-scale planning. This is the power of having a bigger picture plan for like the quarter or the semester,

using that to inform a weekly plan. Okay, what's on my calendar this week? What am I going to make progress on the important things? What things are I going to make progress on? How am I going to fit my work into this week? And then using a daily time block plan on the daily schedule to make the most of the time you have and also have clear shutoffs. our respondent here,

correspondent here, use multi-scale planning in their office job and we could see how well that worked out. All right. So now there's a hidden question is, okay,

now he or she has to go back to teaching and is worried about being productive during the short prep blocks. It's interesting because it's like in this teaching role,

you have some time block planning that's already automatically happening, your teaching block and your prep blocks. Some of the things that are, going to matter here is going to be being pretty process oriented. Like what do I want to do

during these prep walks? What's the most effective way to do it? And two, like we talk about often with teachers, be very careful about extra sort of non-compensated duties. Typically, you do not have enough time to do more than like your bare bones teaching job without having to add extra time. So be very careful about taking on anything else. Be very jealous about your time. You're going to need some blocks outside of the student day. It's about making the most out of that time, having great processes and systems knowing exactly how you prep, how you grade, where you store the information, no wasted time. If you can have office hours with your parents, that's great.

One of my son's teachers did it this year, which I thought was great. Instead of just like email me any time, it was these hours on these days, call me. So things you can do that makes you less reactive and more proactive and control your time, that will all matter as well. but mainly I appreciate this case study of multi-scale planning in a sort of standard type of office job really doing making a big difference. It really is one of the core ideas on this show. If you have a non-entry level semi-complex knowledge work job, you have to multi-scale plan. It's night and day. It's the difference between chaos, busyness, and stress and being able to see over the horizon. And with some confidence, sort of aim your proverbial boat in the right direction. All right, well, we have a cool final segment coming up here, but first, I want to hear from another sponsor. So let's talk about our longtime friends here at Rhone.

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Head to roan.com slash cow and use the promo code Cal to save 20% off your entire order. That's 20% off. That's not trivial, guys. 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E.com slash cal and use that code Cal, it's time to find your corner office comfort. I also want to talk about our longtime friends and sponsor Blinkist. Blinkis is an app that gives you more than 6,500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides, each of which you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes or less.

You can access best in class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology, and more on to go and be entertained at the same time. There's a lot of ways to use Blinkist. The way Jesse and I use it is to help triage books we want to read. If we're interested in a book, we will either read or listen to the blink for that book, the summary of its main ideas. And it really does a good job of telling us, oh, this is what I thought it was, or this is intriguing. I want to go buy the book and read the whole thing.

Or, yeah, I think I know what I need to know from this blink. I'm not going to waste my time actually purchasing the book. So it's one of many uses for Blinkis is to be a triune. tool if you embrace the reading life. They also have a cool feature right now called Blinkist Connect, which allows you to give another person unlimited access to Blinkist for free. So it's basically a two for one deal. All right.

So I think that's pretty cool. So right now Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkets.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial and get 40% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled a BL. I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 40% off in a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkist.com slash deep. And remember, now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkus Connect to share your premium

account, so you will be getting two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment. All right, so I'm going to call this final segment Battle of the Sheds. So if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, and if you're not, you should, go to caldnewport.com to sign up. I don't know what it is now. Over 100,000 subscribers now who get my semi-regular dispatches about trying to cultivate a deep life. You will have noticed, as a newsletter subscriber, that in the last two weeks, or while I've been up here, let's say, while I've been up here on vacation, I've been publishing these dispatches from being up north and trying to, go deep and write. Anyways, one of these dispatches, I showed the writing shed on my property up here where I've been writing. And in the next dispatch, I went to Arrowhead, the farmhouse

bought by Herman Melville in 1850, where he wrote Moby Dick, among other famous books. And I want to compare where I've been writing with where he's been writing. I've got visual aids here. Let me load this up. I'm going to share my screen. So for those who are listening instead of watching, you can see this directly. What we have on the screen here is a scene of the writing shed where I've been working. So there's a scene here from the outside. You can see the hose, the pipe coming out of here, which is the exhaust for the wood burning stove. There is a scene from inside of this writing shed, beautiful view of the Taconic Mountains. Mount Equinox is in the far distance there. there's a nice table here I've been writing at. There's a light. There's a fan to move the air around.

I've been getting a pretty good writing done here. I've been working on my Deep Life book. I wrote these two dispatches and have been doing some New Yorker work as well. All right, about 50 minutes southeast of here is the farm where Herman Melville did his writing. So here's a picture of his writing shed. This is actually not really a shed. It's the second floor of his house. He took this premium room. He has a dining table here. That view out the window there is of. You can see it in this picture here. I took this. These are my pictures I took while I went to visit recently. Mount Greylock, which would have been called Saddleback Mountain back then. He was enamored by the view of this mountain. That row of trees you see, so you have to look closely to see the mountain. You see the darker shaped here. That row of trees was not there

in the 1850s. I confirmed this with the docent. It was. these were more plowed fields. He had a direct view of the mountain. That was his inspiration. That's what he stared at while he was writing Moby Dick. He bought this farm in part because of that mountain view. His uncle Thomas had a farm right next to this that all throughout his childhood and young adulthood. He would visit every summer and he loved the view and that his uncle said, I'm going to sell it.

And Herman was like, this is really sad. But then the neighbors of his uncle Thomas, the Brewster, said, well, we're selling our farm too. and on an impulse, Melville bought it. He's like, I want to read here. He also built a piazza, which he writes about famously in a short story, but he built a piazza on the house, on this side of the house so he could sit outside and look at the mountain. And I was talking to the young woman who was working in the gift shop at Arrowhead. And she said he had built it small enough that it was comfortable for him, but if you were visiting, you wouldn't feel like you should sit and talk to him. He didn't want people to bother him. So he built it small enough. So he's like,

no, this is not a visiting porch. This is like a me sitting here thinking porch, which I really appreciate. So here is our dueling sheds, Jesse. This is my writing shed. There's Melvilles. All right. You can be the judge here. How are we going to judge this? Who's exotic writing location wins? Well, they're somewhat similar because they're in similar geo-jutor. Graphic locations, right? They are very similar. They're looking at, I'm looking at the iconic mountains. He's looking at the Berkshire Mountains, but it is very similar.

We both have a good space. Here's some criteria. It depends on your criteria. His would have been noisier because it's in his house, and his house is built around a central chimney. So the rooms are in a ring, and they're all just connected to each other. So that you have to go through the rooms to get out. I think they would go the other way, but it was noise. They had a lot of people living in that house.

So that's a point for me. A point for him is just looking at the outcome. So, you know, in my writing shed, I wrote a chapter of my, you know, Pragmatic Nonfiction book. In his writing shed, he wrote Moby Dick. So we got this sort of tradeoff here. I think mine is quieter. I think his has a better track record.

So maybe I guess we just have to call it a draw. Yep. that's one of the reasons I love this area I'm in, though, is because especially like the Berkshires, but also Southern Vermont, has this great literary heritage of people who wrote up here, right? So if you go to Southern Vermont to just start going north from the Berkshires, right, go up historic Route 7A on the way towards Manchester, right? What do you come across? Robert Frost's Farm, where he won his first Pulitzer Prize and wrote his famous poem about going through a while. in the winter woods. That's all up here. Continue up farther north in Vermont, go to the Champlain Valley, take the pass over to the Mad River Valley. I don't know if this is the Lincoln Pass or the other one.

You get to the town of Ripton, home to environmentalist Bill McKibben. You get another Robert Frost farm where he went for the last 20 years of his life to just sit on this high elevation farm. Now, interestingly, as I just discovered from my brother-in-law is staying up there this summer. It's where Ripton is also where Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgard have a house. So there you go.

They keep running into them. Anyways, it's cool around here because there is this history of writers coming that use the environment to help get better thoughts out of their heads. And so there's sort of an inspiration to it.

The anti-inspiration of Melville, so maybe this gives us another nod back to my shed, is he financially failed as a writer there and had to abandon the farm under too much debt and go back and get a desk job as a custom inspector in the city. Oh, really? Yeah, it was interesting. Not to go too far on this, but he wrote these books before he bought the farm.

But no one, except for Melville fans know about or remember, they were eventually, I mean, essentially adventure novels, right? He had been on this epic five-year journey as a sailor where he was on a whaling ship. He deserted the whaling ship in the Pacific somewhere, got on another whaling ship just as they had a mutiny, put in jail, got out of jail, made his way to Hawaii, was a farmer in Hawaii for a while, got on a Navy ship, five years later makes it back. So he writes these sort of 19th century adventure novels that draws from his knowledge of these exotic places in the Pacific, and they're like blockbusters, right? They're like, this is great. This is really fun. So he's thinking, I'm just going to be able to keep. being a successful writer. So great. Well, buy this farm. He borrows money from his father-in-law,

buys this farm. He's like, yeah, I'm going to sit here. He had these plans I learned from the docent to, like, rip down the house and build a new house with a writing tower. He was going to sit in his writing tower and, like, this was going to be his life. The problem is, is he's hanging out now with Hawthorne and other writers of this sort of mid-19th century New England intellectual explosion, and he's exposed to all this, like, really smart stuff. And so the stuff he starts writing, it's like Moby Dick and etc. Is not an accessible adventure novel,

but is this like psychologically realist proto-modern type writing that no one had seen before. No one knew what to do with it. Like, what the hell are you doing? What is this book? It's like kind of about whaling and it's like a science book, but also it's a novel

and we're going inside the characters. Hey, like what is this, right? And no one knew what to do with those books. They got terrible reviews and he just lived off a borrowed money from his father-in-law, got depressed, and they were eventually like, you can't just live out here on this farm. You need to go back and just, like, get a job. It wasn't until the 1920s that people were like, oh, Melville was a genius. Because by then, our sensibilities had evolved, modernism, and come around. Like, oh, my God, these guys were early to it. It's like going back to Van Gogh was on to something. But at the time, they thought he was crazy and he cut off his ear. So it's a kind of interesting story about he wasn't appreciated. So he did this great work there, but didn't really get to enjoy the rewards of that, that work. So hopefully,

hopefully I'll have a more direct rewards in my lifetime for my writing in my shed than the Melville had. When did he die? But it's cool up here. He died. He was, um, he was older.

I mean, he made it to his 70s, maybe. Mm-hmm. But like, so that would have been, I don't know, probably like,

he moved out of the, he moved out of Arrowhead, I think in 1863. Okay. And he would have been... 4550. 4550. So he probably lived,

so probably like the 1870s or 1880s, maybe like the early 1890s. He's buried in New York. So anyways, there you go. Battle of the writing sheds. The key lesson there, of course, is just where you do creative work

can be as important as what work you actually do. Which is my way of saying, I'm sad that I will be leaving this beautiful surrounding soon. and heading back to DC, but I'm excited to get back to the HQ, get back to some, uh, some new action as the new school year comes along. So it'll be sad to leave here, Jesse, but it'll be great to be back with you in the studio. So for everyone else, that's all the time we have for today, but we'll be back next week with the old-fashioned in-studio episode. I'm looking forward to it. And until then, as always, stay deep.

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