Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 311: Finding Focus in Distracting Times

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

In our current digital world, distracting world events have a way of completely destabilizing our ability to focus on work that matters. In today’s episode, Cal provides advice for escaping these destabilizing attention environments and regaining some sense of mental peace and depth. He then answers questions, takes a call, and reports on some fun sightings of his book Deep Work out in the wild.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Deep Dive: Finding focus in distracting times [7:06]  - How can I convince my boss to stop interrupting me? [34:05] - Should I switch jobs? [41:13] - How do I integrate unpredictable calls into an otherwise structured schedule? [43:38] - What’s the ideal reading ratio of difficult to easy books? [47:25] - I just turned 30. Am I too late to apply the slow productivity principles? [50:32]  CASE STUDY: Using lifestyle-centered career planning to improve work and pursue a hobby [57:07]  CALL: Switching roles to an unstructured team [1:02:06]  CAL REACTS: Two Wild Deep Work Sightings [1:11:45]  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? nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/authors-top-books-21st-century.html  Thanks to our Sponsors:  oracle.com/deepquestions indeed.com/deep notion.com/cal shopify.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 back after my long summer location hiatus up north to the Deep Work HQ here in Tacoma Park, Maryland, joined in person once again by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'll tell you why, having just returned, it's good, and I'm happy that I have, also the HQ here in addition to my house to go work and write. This is true. The house next to us, they're currently filming a movie there. Really?

Yeah. It's a little distracting. Not a major movie, but there is a novelist who lived in Tacoma Park, wrote some books set in Tacoma Park. They made a movie out of the first book. Now they're making a movie out of the second, and they wanted to film it in Tacoma Park. So they're filming in our neighbor's house.

It's a small indie production, but even, small indie productions, as I've learned, is three full rented cargo trucks full of equipment. For a week or so? I think like two weeks. Yeah. I think they're happy that I have the HQ as well. I thought this was a good idea. You can verify this or not.

But I figured sort of the help, the sort of quirky cinema verite naturalism of the movie, you know, what I would do is see what angle, camera angle they're currently filming on. and then make sure in the background I could be walking by just holding Jesse Skeleton. And I thought that would just be like a nice little thing to the movie is like no matter what scene you are in, you would just see me walking by holding Jesse skeleton. It would kind of be like a quirky indie character to it.

Anyways, one cease in the system, multiple police visits later. I'm here at the HQ and glad. Glad to be here, not bothering them anymore. No, it is distracting there. So this is, it is good to be here. I miss the office. And then you could do some stuff

with your Christmas lights and your Halloween lights. Yeah, I don't know if this is a problem, but I have set up elaborate computer-controlled lighting effects in the background. I think it helped the movie to have rhythmic lights that sort of, you know, I don't know why they're not integrating me into this production. It's Jesse Skeleton in the background, rhythmic programmed lights that I have setting up. I think all of this is, I think all this is gold. They clearly don't know about movies.

movies. It's funny. We ran into some people downtown and they sort of assume this all involved because I often have like camera crews and stuff coming by the house to do like interviews and photo shoots. So I think everyone in town is kind of blaming this on me. This has got to be like a cow thing, got some sort of god awful. And we filmed TV shows at my house before. Like we've done stuff there. So I'm kind of getting the blame for all the disruption that this crew is causing. But anyways, no, I am I am back and now have full access to all of my writing locations. So that's going to be good. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of which, how is the writing going? It started rock and rolling today. I mean, I mentioned this on the show last week. A lot of being up in my writing shut up north, I was starting a book.

A lot of it was figuring out my voice. A lot of it was trying to figure out how this book was going to unfold. I wrote and rewrote the second chapter of the book multiple times. And where I finally ended after my month up there was just the first section of that chapter written, but an outline for the rest of the chapter that finally made sense. It's like my third outline, my third swing. This morning now, just working in my normal office and at Bevco, I began working on that outline. It took weeks to figure out, and it's just flowing.

So I think I had that right. So now that you're not teaching a class in the fall, do you have a schedule on when it's going to be done? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, here's the problem. And I'll probably use this as a case study in real time on the show. Our department got a bit of a pickle with who was doing what. Anyways, I have accepted the call to take on a larger administrative position for this year. It needs to be done, a director position in the department, which is a pain. But, you know, hey, things happen.

You need people to step up to do these things. So I'm going to be pretty hardcore this year about putting a lot of my ideas from slow productivity. and a world without email in particular, putting those in the action hardcore for this role. It's going to be a case study and how can I show up for this role and keep its footprint incredibly predictable? Not necessarily small. It will have big footprint sometimes, but can I prevent it from being a sort of Chinese water torture of distraction? But I think I can, right? So I'll report back on that as we get going in the fall.

as I have this administrative thing, I'm going to use a lot of techniques we've talked about with like office hours and reverse meetings and etc., etc. So I'll report back on how that goes. The book's not due until the end of, I extended that already to the end of next summer. Oh.

Yeah. So I got time. I am going to still push hard throughout this fall because I'm not teaching, even if I have this administrative role. I'm going to push hard this fall. And then I'm going to slow down in the spring because I'll be teaching. and then pick back up the pace again in the late spring and summer to finish it.

I'm also slowing down just temporarily what I, so my magazine word count, things I owe like the New Yorker, etc. We'll sort of slow that down for the year while I'm working on the book. So I think it'll all work out okay. Yeah. I guess the lesson in all that, however, is that I'm not just stumbling into this. I have a bunch of new stuff on my plate. let's just hope it works out. I'm working backwards from how long do things take.

If there's new things on my plate, something else has to go. Like I think there's a lesson there probably in reality-based long-term planning. Yeah. Right? Don't just like, I don't know. I'll figure it out when I get there because that's how you end up completely overloaded. The overhead tax becomes unsustainable. Work becomes hurried.

Stress increases. So I'm being very, it's sort of like zero-based budgeting on my time. This takes up new time. what's going to give. I'm actually confronting the reality of what the schedule is going to be. So we'll see. But I'll finish the book next summer. All right.

Well, we've got a good show. We have a semi-timely topic. We got some great questions. We got a call. We got a case study. And then we have a final segment coming up, which is actually a little fun. A couple fun sightings of unexpected and fun sightings of deep work out in the wild that that was fun. So we'll get into that later, too.

All right. So let's get started now with our deep dive. I just got back from a month spent up at my undisclosed location up north. I went up there in part to cultivate a quieter mind so I could think deeply about the new book I'm writing and unwind. Our nation's political news, however, had a different plan for me. It was early in my trip that we had that fateful Joe Biden, debate performance. My trip ended with the current president bowing out of the ongoing race, and somewhere in between there, there was an assassination attempt. In other words, for a

DC resident trying to go get away from distractions, the most distracting possible stuff was happening, and it all fit exactly within the 25 days that I was up in my undisclosed location. So I thought this was a good excuse to talk about a topic that a lot of you have actually written me about in recent days, which is how do you focus during distracting times? So this is what I want to do today. I have six pieces of advice as well as two initial caveats for thinking about the role of focus and concentration in times where there's distractions that are crossing past the normal threshold and to a place where they can be almost crippling in their ability to grab and keep grabbing your attention and drain your energy. So focus and distracting times. Let's get concrete about what to do

here. I want to start with a caveat. So the goal is not to be an automaton grimly working deeply while Rome burns around you, okay? During an acute breaking news event, while the event is still unfolding, I think it is completely fine to say, I'm not working today. Right? If the event seems highly salient or important or historic, be it something that's happening in the larger world or an upheaval happening in your own personal life, something is happening to someone you know or to where you live or it's a weather event or whatever it is. Don't try to work while it's going on. Don't do like I'm kind of working not very well, but really this other disruptive thing is going on. It's completely fine to say, I am going to figure out what is going on, I'm going to follow the news, I'm going to spend some time just probably. processing the information.

This is where you might say, I'm going to rabbit hole on everything I can read online while this is happening. This is where you might say, I'm just going to disappear for a few hours to go for a walk and process my emotions based on some big disruptive news I just got. That is all fine. And in fact, the very reason why we have a hard time with this notion of like, hey, if something huge is happening, don't work that day. The very reason we have a hard time with that idea comes back to a concept from my book, slow productivity, the concept that I call. call pseudo-productivity. This is actually an indicator of pseudo-productivity's insiduous grip. What is pseudo-productivity? It is the idea that we use visible activity as our primary proxy for useful effort. It's endemic throughout office and knowledge-style work. It is exactly

that mindset that troubles us with the idea of, I'm going to take a break from work because something big is happening. Because in a pseudo-productivity regime, all that matters is visible activity, so it is very risky and visible to not be doing visible work. However, if you embrace slow productivity, like I argue in my book, slow productivity, you care much more about quality results over time, and in that context, you realize I can't make any reasonable progress towards anything quality while this huge breaking news event is happening today, so why would I even bother trying? When you care about productivity at a big time scale, it's not that difficult.

it's not that avant-garde or radical to say something big just happened. So let me focus on that and not work at all. So that's my first caveat. During the immediate aftermath of a big event or during breaking news itself, slow productivity says it's fine not to work. And in fact, you're just doing a show. You're putting on a show if you try to. So all the advice I have going forward is not about when something's acutely happening,

but the days after. right it's not like in my example oh there's this uh debate disastrous debate happening it's the three days after four days after five days after where now it's just chatter chatter chatter the acute thing's not happening now it's just people making things up people having ideas prognostication rumors and leaks right that is where you can have this long term destabilization of your focus that's where i want to focus all right now let me again before we get to the six pieces of advice, let me give you a foundation for the six pieces of advice that are going to follow. I want to give you two quotes from a book. It's influential to me. Winifred Gallagher's

2009 book, RAPT. Two key quotes from Gallagher that are going to sort of set the foundation for the advice that follows. Quote number one, life is the sum of what you focus on. Quote number two, living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy. all the time. Rather, it's about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there. Gallagher is hitting the foundation of the advice that follows, which says your experience of the world is determined by what you pay attention to. So especially during periods where there are many things to pay attention to that are going to give you a grim or urgent or anxiety-producing understanding of

the world, this is when it's most important to be very careful about your attention. to treat your mind like a private garden and not let all of these diversionary weeds take root. All right. So with that caveat and foundation in mind, six pieces of advice for focusing during distracted times. Tip number one, go into what I call newspaper mode. And what I mean by newspaper mode is I'm actually imagining, for the sake of an example, earlier time periods in which the printed newspaper was your only mode of receiving new information about anything happening outside of your immediate vicinity. Let's think, for example, like colonial America, 18th century America, Benjamin Franklin Times.

There was newspapers, right? The news would come in. They would print what they had. You could read the paper, whatever the primary paper, maybe there was two competing papers in your colonial town. Now you knew everything you could learn that day about what was going on around the country and the world. And there's really no new information to get until the next edition of the paper came out. That's the mode you should go into during distracting news periods in our modern times as well. Here is going to be my sort of daily ingestion of relevant information.

Outside of that, I'll be okay. I can let everything else aggregate be filtered and thought about before that. and then the next day I can check in once again with what's going on. If that was good enough for, you know, Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during the ultimate American breaking news event, which was Incipient Revolution against the Brits, then it's good enough for, you know, you today, trying to know what's going on with like a presidential campaign. people get nervous about this but remember you're not Anderson Cooper you don't need to have like this up to the minute breaking news i've heard this rumor i'm interviewing i think people feel like their cable news producers when these breaking news events hold they're gathering all this information as if they're in front of an audience trying to help people make sense of things you're not Anderson Cooper it's the world will be okay if you're not completely up the speed on what's going on with a presidential campaign to which you have no direct impact or control. So you'll be okay. Social media makes people feel like they can be breaking news producers.

You don't need to be. All right. Tip number two. Move up the information food chain. So remember back in school, they used to talk about the food chain, and it was sort of pyramidal. You had this sort of base of really big base of algae's and plants that, you know, survive off of sunlight and convert it to energy.

and then you had smaller things, like in the ocean, you would have smaller things like krill, etc. That would eat the algies. And there's like a lot of them but less. And then slightly bigger fish would eat those and a bigger fish would eat those.

And as you moved up to food chain, you got less and less animals. It was sort of like concentrating the original energy. I think about online information in the same way. At the bottom, the digital information equivalent of algae is just chatter on social media. It's just lots of information.

a lot of angling for clout or for attention of all sorts of mixed quality, huge amounts of redundancy. It's just sort of these massive proverbial algae mats of just stuff. And then as you move up the information food chain, this information gets digested and reconstituted into larger, sort of more highly caloric sources, if we're going to be sort of follow our metaphor here, right? So you have like everyone just, I saw this, what about this, what's going on, a lot of people's opinions, and then maybe that gets aggregated in the people of more influence but are still kind of making takes based on what they're seeing. And then that itself gets integrated into news articles to do all sorts of other sorts of verified fact checking. And then there's sort of the analysis pieces that are reading those articles. And you sort of move up this food chain and things get more processed and more clarified and more purified. move up the information food chain during these periods of breaking news.

Don't read the algae mass of just nonsense. That means TikTok. That means Twitter. It's going to mean Instagram. That you need higher quality, more concentrated calorie sources for what you're going to consume. So go higher quality. So that's probably going to mean major newspapers. Maybe you have like an independent media source.

you really trust like a particular commentator who has a newsletter or a podcast and you have a relationship with that independent news source. So like you have one of those, maybe one or two major newspapers that you're sampling some articles from. You want the higher quality stuff during breaking news because it's smaller, it's more self-contained. You can't follow that like you can to lower quality, lower caloric sources that there's just endless. If there's endless mats of this information, you can swim among that algae forever. There's only so many, you know, your independent news source that you're you. you trust. This is their newsletter they did today. That's it. The newspaper you're following, here's their three articles on this. That's it. So it's not as conducive to being lost for extended

periods of time and consumption. All right, tip number three, seek out flow states. What I mean by that is seek out activities, both professional and personal, that you can get lost in. Right? So like create a project, going out on adventures, getting lost in a movie or a good book, playing board games with others, athletic pursuits and training, etc. Find ways to get lost in what you're doing to enter what my haley chicks at me high would call a flow state. Why is this important? Well, part of what happens during these breaking news moments is that your mind has a

sort of anxious rumination that creates chemicals. Like you feel it as like a background hum of anxiety. Getting lost in an unrelated activity is like a cleaning pass. You're cleaning out those chemicals, right? It's like we're going to come in and power wash the brain here a little bit, reset what the chemicals are going on. It's very good for especially to get out of the cognitive shock of something really big and anxiety-producing happening. It really helps you keep on top of the negative chemicals that that generates. Right.

Tip number four, implement a hard day protocol, HTTP. This is something I have used many times for many different occasions. in my life. We've talked about it before on the show, but it's a very pragmatic combination of ideas from both cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance commitment therapy. Here's how it works. So there's a thing that is this acute source of stress for you. Breaking News event that's an acute source of stress for you in your life. It's the hurricane is moving up the coast and some of the tracks show it coming towards your city and it's, I am so anxious about this, right? Or whatever it is. Hard Day Protocol says you get two

check-ins a day. Right. So the first one is earlier in the day. You do a check-in, you get the information you have, and then you do some cognitive behavioral therapy. So you go through and you actually identify what you would call the biggest distortions in your thinking. Well, you know, you're predicting the future here.

You're exaggerating. You're looking at the worst-case scenarios. You're being black and white in your thinking. So you actually push back against your thinking, point out the distortions. You sort of end this session with like, here's the reality. For better for worse. what happening, this might, this might. If this happens, it's no problem. If this happens, here's what we would do. You sort of think it through in a non-distort a calm way,

and then you shut down the thoughts on it. Your next session will be later in the day where you can open back up, check back in and do similar thoughts, pointing out distortions and ending with like, here's where I stand on this, right? In between those two sessions, and here's the magic, when your mind ramps up chemical-induced rumination, let's think about this. Let's go back through what might happen with a hurricane. Let's go back through with what's happening politically. You say, I feel that.

I hear you. But we went through this during the morning session, and we ended that morning session, shutting things down, pretty okay with the way things stood. Like, we had a good plan. And we're going to check back in this evening. So, like, even if I got something wrong in that morning session, we should be more worried than we really are. We'll figure that out in our pre-scheduled evening check-in. But right now, I'm not going back to it. this is for five o'clock, whenever I've scheduled my evening check-in.

And so you're able to respond to the urge to ruminate without actually ruminating on the substantive details of the thing causing anxiety. This is highly effective, especially if you're doing this for an extended period of time, because it allows you to get out of the ruminative grooves getting deeper and deeper. It confines your thinking to smaller points of time. the urge to ruminates pass quicker, and it can really get you out of a cycle, this sort of cognitive cycle of like, I can't escape thinking about it. I call that the HDP or Hard Day Protocol,

and I deploy it when there's particular acute sources of stress, but it's perfect for this breaking news, persistent distraction-type setting that we're talking about here. If you're having a hard time turning your attention from it, HDP it. All right, tip number five, take a break from your phone. Clearly in these breaking news moments, it's that ability to kind of keep coming back to your phone and feeding the itch to get more information that really draws out the attention to stabilizing full impact of these situations.

So this is a time, if there's any, to say, I need to temporarily but drastically change my relationship with my phone. At working at home, you need to go hardcore on the phone for your method. There's a place where your phone is plugged in. If you need to use it, to text someone or check messages, you go to where it's plugged in. You need to look something up. You go to where it's plugged in.

This doesn't prevent you from using your phone, but it prevents you from having it next to you. So you can't do the knee jerk check. Ooh, I'm a little anxious bored. Boom, I want to search. What's going on with Biden? Where's the hurricane? What happened?

Any more rumors about Trump? It's not right there for the knee jerk. You have to get up and go somewhere else to do it. Just that friction is going to greatly reduce. the amount of times you're actually on that phone. During these periods of breaking news, you're having a hard time focusing, take all your social media apps off of your phone.

Make sure that you are not logged in on Safari on your phone's browser. If you are, log out and do not click save password when you log back in. So you really want to put a lot of friction in terms of a phone-based check-in on social media. You would have to go to the website

and remember your password. If your password is easy, make it a pain and write it down somewhere that's like up in your room somewhere. Like, it really is difficult for you to log in to these services on your phone, at least during these periods, and spend more time purposely without your phone accessible at all. Drive to go somewhere for a hike and leave the phone in your glove compartment. If your car breaks down, you still have your phone, but you don't have it with you while you're on your hike. Go work at a coffee shop and leave your phone at home. It's very unlikely. again, this goes back to my prior warning.

You're not Anderson Cooper. People don't need you to jump onto the camera because of breaking news. You will be okay if people can't reach you for 60 to 90 minutes. All right. So this is a time to drastically reduce your relationship with your phone. Tip number six, work on something delightful. This is a perfect time to begin work on a new project. It could be personal or it could be professional.

That's just exciting. Like, I just love this. This is fun. It's sort of delightful to work on. Starting a project is great because that's like the fun part, the particularly fun part. You're just planning and reading and researching. You know, you're thinking through, like, what if I started? Maybe you have some sort of fun professional idea.

And what if I made, like, had some sort of online portfolio of, like, the art I'm doing? In fact, is there a way to set up something on my tablet so that I could draw each day in this program? And maybe I could use something like Zapier. so that I just like press a button and that gets uploaded and automatically goes. And then I could have this cool portfolio that's updated automatically. Or you have some personal project you're really interested in. You're like, what if I built this like really elaborate type of animatronic for Halloween? Like, well, let me start thinking about what I would need.

And you can go down these rabbit holes. Just have something that's delightful that is completely unrelated to the breaking news that's going on. And it's unrelated to any other sort of urgent or stress producing part of your life. It just gives your mind, again, a cleansing, state to go into. And the more of these cleansing states you get into day, the least you let these negative chemicals sit around and stagnate and cause larger corrosion within your sort of persistent cognitive state. All right. So those are my six tips. I'll read all six real briefly here again for how to maintain some notion of focus and cognitive health during distracting periods of

sort of distracting news periods. One, go in the newspaper mode. Two, move up the information food chain three, seek flow states, four, implement a hard day protocol, five, take breaks from your phone, and six, start working on something delightful. So I'm sure, Jesse, now that I'm home from trying to quiet my mind up north, all breaking news is going to stop. And we'll enter just an extended period. You know what, for like the last few years, it just happened year after year, just happened a time with when we'd go up north.

What consistently was the thing that would inject distracted into my life, it was always the baseball trade deadline. For the last three years, it's been the sort of dismantling of the Washington nationals and the big trades that were going on. And for multiple years,

it was like this major injection of distraction. I'd be like, okay, I'm up here, I'm just thinking, I'm relaxed, I'm away from it all, and then boom, we're trading Juan Soto. Or, you know, boom. Shurters are and Trey Turner are gone. It was like years after years, that was my main source of distraction.

Yeah. And this year finally, I was like, we're well along in the rebuild. There's no like tear down blockbuster trade's going to happen. Like this will finally be a calm, you know, few weeks while I'm up there. And then the political universe exploded. So it's impossible. It's impossible to get away. I think one of these vacations, it was like the Delta variant of COVID.

There's always something. There's something about the midsummer. So these are well-worn tips for me. With the hikes, as you talked about in a previous episode as well, can you bring like a pet, like your dog? That would be great. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Or I didn't add this tip, but another tip is like hang out with people who just like are completely disconnected from the thing you're trying to get away from. You're like, yeah, here's my mountain biking buddies. Like what do they want to talk about mountain biking? And like what's going to, you're going mountain biking with them. That's all they want to talk about. That's all they want to do. that's good like unrelated socialization that's difficult in Tacoma Park DC if you're trying to get away from political news because everyone here is like involved in politics you know I mean it's like all around this are people who work at the White House you have like Jamie Raskin lives down the street the Obama's former chief of staff is the other way down the street the head of the DNC is in the same town it's very difficult to get away from politics in this town So you got to find people.

I think that's another good idea. Yeah. So hopefully that's useful. A lot of people are writing me about this. Like I'm caught up in this political stuff. There's so much news and it seems really disruptive. And I'll tell you, the more time they spend in it, the more apocalyptic they get. I think that's just the way these information sources go.

And the people who manage their attention, Winifor Gallagher-Galliger style during these times, they know what's going on. But they make it through this. Like, it'll be okay. And so why, like, waste those whole periods? It was like during the pandemic, the people who were like, I'll hear what I need to hear, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it outside of that. Like, let me just focus on the things I can control. Like, okay, my business has changed. Let me focus on like this new pivot that can work during this period.

I mean, I want to know vaguely what's going on with like restrictions, but I'm not following it beyond that. I'm working on this project. I got a dog. And you know what? They were way less anxiety ridden. And in the end, things were fine. They came out of it. Like nothing would have been gained for them to have been like,

completely lost in this like information echo chamber. They, here the information they needed was, what was it, like an hour a week. What's going on now? So what we're doing? There's a thing.

Okay, great. And then let me get back to like whatever. So, you know, controlling your attention has never been more important than this digital age, where it is so easy to be completely hijacked.

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So it's an AI-powered workspace where every day, everything takes care of itself. Meetings have summaries, docs find themselves, and every question has an answer. Notion has long been used by fans of this show as a place to build sort of custom web-based tools for managing information. You can have, you know, the information that's vital for whatever you do, you can build these really intuitive, useful different views for the data, different ways to find or manipulate the data. I have seen everything from really big companies using Notion to build out tools for like their mission critical information to, and I get a lot of emails from people to do this, individuals just building their own sort of geeked out custom task management systems using it. Notion played a big role in our relationship with our ad agency here at Deep Questions. They built out this great tool with it for tracking ad reads.

or we could see, for example, what ad reads are coming up week by week, or we could change to view and say, give me all of the ad reads for this particular company. It gave us, we could jump to an interface then to enter in the timestamps and downloads for that particular episode. It just was a tool that's super simplified dealing with all the data surrounding our ad reads. So Notion is like incredibly versatile, but what I really like what they're doing is integrating AI increasingly native to the tool, which really makes it fun to use and it upgrades its ability. The Notion AI tools help you turn knowledge into action. You can have it like summarize the meeting notes you're storing in there,

automatically generate action items. You can ask it questions about your data stored in your various views, and it will give you those answers back. So it's really upgrading Notion to the next level. So you can try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash Cal. that's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash cow, and start turning ideas into action. And when you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. So make sure you go to notion.com slash cal.

All right, Jesse, let's get on to some questions. Who do we got first? First question is from Krishna. I'm a copywriter and work remotely. My boss demands that I be constantly available during work. This interrupts my deep work sessions as I'm constantly getting interrupted with notifications. How can I deal with this? It'd be funny if it turned out that Krishna works for me.

Krishna, Krista, are you doing deep work right now? Why aren't you answering me if you're doing deep work right now? You need to answer me immediately to let me know if you're doing deep work. You know what? We're going to put a standing Zoom meeting so we can talk about why you need to check in with me about whether you're doing deep work right now. Okay, Krishna, first of all, my condolences. man, I hate that. I hate that type of management.

Anyone who has read any of my books on digital knowledge work knows that that type of management is annoying and counterproductive. I'm going to give you three ideas, Krishna. So it's like a menu. So depending on the reality of your work and the particular psychological makeup of this particular boss, you can see which of these options seems more realistic. One, of course, is the long-discussed deep-de-shallow work ratio. ratio conversation. This goes all the way back to my book, Deep Work. It's where you sit down with your boss and say, hey, here's what Deep Work is. Here's what shallow work is. Both of these

are important. Deep work is where I do the actual copywriting, but shallow work is where, like, you and I can discuss and I can, we coordinate what I should be working on and I get updates, and there's other administration and stuff that happens. Both's important. What's the ideal ratio of deep to shallow work for me for my job that produce the most possible value for you in the company? Like, let's be positive. here. What's critical when you're talking about deep to shallow work ratios is that you make it clear that a session does not count as a deep work session if there's context switched

in the middle of it, right? So for like an hour to count as an hour of deep work, it really has to be an hour of you working without also answering slacks or emails or calls, right? So you've got to kind of make that clear. The right way to talk about this, and this is drawing more from a world without email and slow productivity get more into this. The right way to talk about this is cognitive state. So the deep work cognitive state is defined in part by a sustained focus,

which allows the relevant neural networks within your brain to be activated and unrelated networks to be inhibited, and this is when you produce good work. So if you're in a state where you're checking things or responding to things, you don't have that purity of focus within your brain. So that's not deep work session. So deep work is not determined. This is key for this discussion. It's not determined by the primary activity that you're doing during that time period.

It's determined by the cognitive state during that time period. So it's got to be uninterrupted. A lot of people have reported to me that they went into having this conversation with their bosses convinced that it would be a no-go because they were in an office where it was just insisted upon that you're accessible. Like, I can't see this possibly changing. It's in the DNA of my boss. And then they have this conversation, and the boss is like, oh, 50-50 would be good. And they, like, immediately accommodates you being able to work when you work deeply and not be interrupted.

That people are often surprised by the magnitude of changes that happen. These cultures that you think are entrenched in your workplaces are often arbitrary, more malleable than you think if you have the right tool for dislodging them, which is something like this, a positive metric that's about optimizing value for the company and not about you just completely. complaining about distraction. All right. Second idea. Suggest structure check-ins. Like, hey, you know, I got to do a lot of copywriting, but there's often updates and stuff that happens.

There's a lot of interaction I need to do with you, boss. So here's what we should do. We should have beginning of the day and at 2 o'clock. These like pre-scheduled real-time check-ins on the phone. So this, Krishna works remotely. So it would be like on the phone or on Zoom or something. We always check in. Here's what I'm working on today.

What else do I need to know? Okay, great. Let's check in back again at 1.30. or two. Hey, what updates you have for me. Let's talk them through. Let me talk to you about what just happened. And you can make the argument that these twice a day check-ins are going to very efficiently keep you coordinated and actually free the boss from the burden of like having these like ongoing back and forth email based or slack conversations that he or she has to sort of keep track of and they're bouncing back and forth at random times. Remember, from the point

of view of the person talking to you, from the point of view of your boss, They probably dislike these drawn out back and forth conversations as much as you do because they have to keep track of it. So it might be more attractive. Like we have this very concentrated check-ins. If I have issues, I know exactly when we're going to talk and that I can get you. I don't have to just send it off in an email and just I don't know when the response is going to come. So twice-day check-ins might be a solution for both parties here. The third idea, and you can actually add this idea onto the first two.

This is it comes from my book, A World Without Email. Add a safety valve. So for almost any type of more structured communication process that you suggest, it's often useful if you think there's going to be some resistance from other people involved to put in what I call a safety valve, a way they can always reach you if they need to outside of the system's rules. And the key is to add enough friction to this that it's not something that you would easily do. So usually it's, here is my personal cell phone number. Now, this is really critical. I have it in do not disturb mode when I work. So I don't see text messages, but calls come through.

So if, for example, there is like something really urgent that comes up before our next schedule check-in or when I'm in the middle of the deep work session, you can just call me on my personal number. The call will come through. that's not impossible, right? So it destabilizes the fears, right? So often it's fears of particular rare outcomes to prevent bosses from agreeing to new communication processes. What if there's emergency X? It alleviates those fears. If there was emergency X, I could call you.

Right. But it's high enough friction that they're not going to do it unless it's a true emergency. If you let it be text messaging, it's too low friction. bosses will be like, let me just text you. That's low friction. There's no social capital costs for me. I can just do it and move on with my day. But a call is high enough friction that it has to be sort of more of a legitimate emergency.

So the safety valve method works well because it's what finally helps convince like your boss or your team. We can do this more structured communication because the worst case scenarios can't actually happen. You can always just call me. But the friction is high enough that they basically won't. So it's like a trick. It's a trick to get the system you want. your boss is thinking like, oh, I can get them whenever I need to. It won't be a problem.

But no one wants to call people. And so you end up actually getting the system for the cost of like once a week you get a call. All right. So safety valves is the third thing to suggest. All right. Who do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Tion. I'm comfortable with my current job, but it's risky.

It's a startup and it might not make it. Should I change jobs? I would say don't change jobs now, right? Because actually the best way from a career evolution perspective to leave a startup to go to something else is actually the startup failing. Because that's not on you. And it makes you very attractive. You're like, oh, this is someone who has been in other startups and has had this role before. Yeah, most startups don't work.

But now they're available. Let's grab them. So you actually have more, I think it looks better and you have more leverage in the technology startup world. if you came out of a startup that didn't make it, as opposed to I left a startup when it was still rock and rolling. Then people are like, what's going on there? Like, were you not cutting it? Like, they're like, we need to get someone better in here.

So I would ride it out. However, take advantage of the flexible or sort of building the plane while it's in the air nature of startups to max out your career capital acquisition while there. So career capital, for those who don't know, It is a concept from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. It is my term for your rare and valuable professional skills.

Career capital is your primary tool for crafting your working life towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. Startups give you a lot of flexibility. Don't squander that flexibility by being tapped in Slack. What I'm offering here is a jack-of-all-trades. I answer everyone's questions at all hours of the day, and it's all sort of like small stuff, but I'm kind of like this useful glue that kind of helps everyone else do what they're doing.

No, you want to be building up demonstrative skills. Hey, why don't I take on our API architecture? Because that is like a really valuable thing to know how to do, and I'm going to dive into that and know how to do that. Don't, I'm not going to be bothered by a lot of other. I'm doing the API architecture. I'm going to learn, you know, how to do our digital marketing. I don't want to take that up? So use the flexibility and autonomy of startups to build up skills you think are.

going to be very valuable with whatever comes next because the more rare and valuable skills you have, the more control you're going to have about the nature of your work. All right, Jesse, who do we got? Next question is from Brendan. I'm a journalist working on my second book. My days are largely time blocked and I do stuff like transcribing recordings, phone interviews, some in person, research, reading and writing. My problem is dealing with source phone calls.

How can I prevent unproductive? source phone calls from interrupting my focus on other tasks? You know, I've heard this question before. I have this issue a little bit as well. Not so much incoming source phone calls, but for a lot of my journalism, there's I have to set up calls and interviews, right? And what happens, this is what this reporter, I believe, is talking about. What happens is it becomes very disruptive because your instinct when you're asking someone

to call you or do an interview with you is to be as flexible as possible. Hey, when can you do this next week? And just sort of everything does not currently booked with a meeting or appointment is on the table. But then you get this sort of scatter shot of meetings and trips that like eats up your time to like consistently make deep work. Like I can't write every morning because three mornings out of five, I have a call this morning. I have to go see this source this morning. The best thing you can do is have what I think of as like very granular ranges for when the type of stuff happens, both outgoing and ingoing.

So, for example, you might say Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, anytime in the afternoon is loosely left open for interviews and calls. You can tell sources, you're like, hey, yeah, just let me know. In fact, I'm usually always around Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, afternoons. You can just, here's my personal number call me, right? So you're kind of directing the incoming towards those periods. And when you were scheduling meetings, outgoing meetings, hey, when can we talk about this. Instead of just saying, when are you free next week? You say, when are you free Tuesday

through Thursday in the afternoon? That's when I typically do this type of stuff. Right. This now constrains the sort of range, the territory within your schedule in which these type of disruptions happen, which means Monday and Friday, you can really go in an autonomous, undistracted way. Every single morning, you can work in an undistracted way pretty predictably. So it's not a super narrow range. Like, I do my calls from 3 to 3.43 on Thursdays. And if you cannot do it then, then we will not talk. If you get that restrictive, you're going to have no sources.

But if you're talking like half the week, half the days, you would be surprised, right? And sometimes maybe people have to go forward a couple weeks where that works, but people don't care. In fact, people like having a little bit of constraints, right? What do we really dread worse from a cognitive effort standpoint than when you get that email from someone? You're like, yeah, we can talk and they say, when is good for you next week? Like, I don't know. You're talking to like 40 or 50 possible available hours. Like, do I just pick a couple?

Do I give you every single hour that's free? It's actually nice to have some constraints. Like, which afternoons Tuesday through Thursday? When in that are you free? And now you're like, oh, there's two times in there I'm free. You've made my job in answering your question easier. So have those rough ranges. That helps.

I mean, I'll be doing something similar with my upcoming temporary administrative role. I will have these sort of rough ranges where I'm like, this is when we set up. What's me? Pick a time. When in here works for you. This is when I normally meet. You can call me any time during these periods if you have a question. I'm definitely going to be trying something similar because I need every morning.

I really want every morning if I'm not teaching. I want every morning free for writing. And I want at least one day a week where I'm going to get that full day pretty autonomously working on stuff. So I'll report back how that works, but that would be my suggestion. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Carolina. At the start of every month, I look forward to your review of the books you read. I can't come close to reading five books per month, but I do enjoy reading.

My question is about reading difficult and long books. How do you suggest I read those? What's the ideal ratio of reading difficult to easy books for someone in my shoes? Well, first of all, Carolina, I think you probably could read five books a month. You know, again, the easiest thing to do here is stop using. using your phone so much. Most people's phone usage is already right there, about five books a month worth of reading.

The second thing you can do is just integrate reading as a default activity to more parts of your day. It's like what you do when you eat lunch. It's what you do at the end of the day. I have a pretty busy schedule, but the books still sort of add up. All right, but to get to your specific question, long books, we say hard books,

I'm thinking long books. They can take a lot of time. A couple things I would suggest is when it comes to difficult books, Pick those that delight you. If you make it a chore, it's going to be very hard to get through. So if you're reading a big book, it's because you're fascinated in what that book is about. That will really help.

Big books, hard books. It's good to have a regular time for those. I often do this where, you know, like I need to read a big book on like AI policy or like right now I'm reading for an intellectual biography of Thoreau, which useful context for the introduction of my new book where I'm going to be talking to out the row. And like when I was on vacation, it was, that's just what I do first thing in the morning even before, like, my kids wake up is like get in a reading session of this book. And it's like the slow and regular. Like, now you just do that. And you got the slow and regular pace.

Combine the big books like shorter fun or stuff. If you're just only reading the big book and you can't read anything else until it's done, its footprint is too big. And you go too long without being able to read anything else. And you encounter new books you hear about that seem fun or exciting, you don't get to them because you're waiting for this big book to end, and you're going to abandon the big book. So just have that, like, steady time for reading the difficult book and be okay with it taking a very long time. And then, like, still have, like, fun books you're reading outside of that. And above all, don't sweat the timing. I mean, unless you have a podcast where you actually have to report on your reading each month, no one's tracking it. So what's

important is that, like, you're constantly engaged in books you like. Sometimes you make more progress than others, but that you're enjoying the time you're spending doing that intellectual activity as opposed to seller intellectual activities, like just looking at your phone. So for that morning session when you read the Thoreau book, how long would you, like half an hour? Yeah, like 20 minutes, half hour. Yeah, stuff adds up. So when I first got up there, I finally finished reading The Coming Wave, which is just like an AI book that everyone's reading, written by the co-founder of DeepMind.

And then I moved on a Thoreau book. Yeah. And I'll probably ramp it up a little bit. You know, it just depends on the day. It'll take me a while to read, but I don't really care. I want that background, though, so I can talk with more confidence about Thoreau and just sort of finishing this whole book is going to give me that confidence. All right.

Let's see, we got here. Ooh, is it our next question, our slow productivity corner? Yes. All right. Let's get some theme music. So for those who are new, we have one. One question every week that is relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

We call this a Slow Productivity Corner. If you haven't checked out that book, do so. It's like the source Bible for 60% of what we talk about on this show. So check out Slow Productivity if you have it. Okay, Jesse, what is our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? Hi, it's from Josh. I just turned 30 and I'm getting worried. I feel like my mind doesn't fully trust the slow productivity approach.

I feel like I've started too late and should have dubbed these strategies five to 10 years ago. I still have high ambitions for my professional and creative life, but deep down, I worry that I'm still not good enough and I'm too late. Oh my. If 30 is too late, Jesse, we're in trouble. Yeah, we're dinosaurs. We're old men. We're old men. Look, you're not too late.

The way I think it's useful to think about career and your age is the decade approach. You've got your 20s. You have your 30s. You have your 40s. You have your 50s, et cetera. For most people, your 20s is just about getting on your feet, becoming an autonomous adult, having a job, holding down a job, saving a little money, having a place to live, you buy your first car, right? It's just, you know, hey, I want to, while still just like enjoying being an adult for the first time. Your 30s really, especially in like a knowledge work context, right, where jobs are more fluid and the potential promotion ladders or advancement ladders are long and go far into the distance.

your 30s then are about, okay, now I want to like figure out my professional life, figure out, make my, my, like this is where I want to live. This is where I want to do. I want to be able to support myself and support my family. I want to be sort of like comfortable. Like this is where I figure out what I want my life to actually be like. So you're 30. This is perfect. Perfect time to start thinking about slow productivity.

New to it in your young 30s. I'm going to highlight a couple things to focus on right off the bat. I would really start with actually principle three obsess over quality. This is the right time to change your mindset towards, I'm going to figure out something that is really important in like what I do or what I want to do, and I'm going to master this like Jiro the Sushi Chef and Jero Dreams of Sushi, reference to those who know that movie. Like now I'm going to start really caring about mastery because that obsession over mastery of something that's valuable.

It could take one to three years so you really get the full rewards for that but that's perfect timing to start this in your 30s. That's going to be the engine for everything else. For one thing, as I talk about in my book, as you really obsess over mastery of something that's valuable, you're going to find more meaning in your work. This is a key time to find more meaning in your work

because if you don't, the excitement of just I have a job from your 20s has worn off and you might stumble towards a sort of nihilistic existentialism. So this is a good time to find meaning your work. Two, it is going to make pseudo productivity. It's going to make this potentially sort of crippling addiction to activity for the sake of activity seem increasingly absurd. So it's just going to change your mindset. So a slower productivity approach is not going to be something you're convincing yourself to try and you're afraid of.

A slower productivity approach is instead going to become self-evident. And three, as you get good at things in your early 30s, there's your career capital. there's your flexibility. You are now in demand. Your employer doesn't want to lose you. Other employers want you. Now you can start getting interesting as your 30s go on. Where do I want to live?

Now I have choices. I want to be in the countryside. I want to be, you know what, I want to live up by like the White Mountains in New Hampshire and do my job remotely and do it at 75% time. This is where if you've become excellent at what you do, people like, okay, sure, that's what we'll do, right?

Like this is where you gain your autonomy. This is where you gain more options. So obsess over quality right now is going to give you lots of advantages. If I was going to point towards a second thing to do right now, I would say this is a great time to do lifestyle-centric planning if you haven't tried this exercise yet. Figure out where for like, think of the second half of your 30s. That's probably the right time frame if you're 30 even right now. What do you want your day-to-day life to be like in the second half of your 30s?

all aspects of your life, like where you live, the rhythm of your day, who's around you, how you're spending your time, the general characteristic of your work, as well as a general characteristic of your time outside of work. If you have specific examples of real people that you've seen in magazine profiles or documentaries or videos that resonate, integrate them into this, get this really clear vision of your ideal lifestyle for the second half of your 30s. This is the time to do it and start working backwards from that vision. All right.

So what different things can I be moving towards now that's going to move me closer to aspects of this vision? And that's when you start building up these interesting, nuanced, bespoke, evidence-based lifestyle plans. This is a very different approach than what most people in our culture lean towards, which is working forward to a singular grand goal. It's our instinct as Americans. I have a singular grand goal. If I do this, then my whole life will be better. And it doesn't work out that way. You're much better off having your ideal lifestyle.

And your 30s is the time to figure this out. And then say, okay, how am I going to work towards the aspects of that lifestyle? That's where, again, you get, that works hand in hand with the career capital you generate by obsessing over quality. Works hand in hand with that. That you begin to have some pretty interesting options that maybe are very specific to your exact job and situation. It's not some big thing like I'm going to write a screenplay or I'm going to sell my novel. It's like very specific and boring to the outside world. But for you, it's what allows you to transform these aspects of your life that really

get closer to your ideal lifestyle. So your 30 is the perfect time to think about this. But I'm glad you asked. If you haven't read it yet, though, definitely pick up slow productivity. Also pick up so good they can't ignore you. That will also be really useful to you right now. And with that, we'll leave it with some more theme music. All right.

Now we have a case study. This is where people write in to talk about them applying the type of advice we do here on the show to their specific life. So we can see what do these ideas look like in practice? Today's case study comes from Old Coder, who says, I have two scenarios to share. First, over the last few years, my job has been transitioning away from coding to management. There are also changes in the leadership of the company,

and I found myself disagreeing with many of the new directions. I had a strong urge to resign and search for a perfect job that I would truly enjoy. However, I resisted this temptation. and decided to use the lifestyle-centric career planning approach instead. I reflected on my long career at this company and realized that I enjoyed coding more than management. I was able to interview for a couple other jobs within my company. I was selected for one as a remote developer, no more managing to people, and hardly any direct communication with top-tier management,

much better work balance to address my priorities outside of work. Second, ever since I started listening to your podcast, I have undergone many changes in how I look at and live my life. Over the last 10 months, with discipline, I have learned and started progressing and playing the flute. For the initial three to four months, there's almost no progress, but I kept at it. While I'm far from being a musician, I'm also not as bad as I thought I could be. This gives me a lot of confidence that I could put discipline efforts into a hard thing and keep doing it. All right, old coder, this is a great example of many ideas from the sort of deep life questions that we deal with often here on the show. I'm going to point out two things here for the audience.

Notice, lifestyle-centric planning, working backwards from your ideal lifestyle, not forwards towards a singular grand goal, opens up these really interesting possibilities. Now, I just talked about this in the question before this, and we're seeing an actual practical case study of these ideas in action here. What most people would do in Old Coder situation where they're like, ah, man, I don't like this job. Right. It's in management. I don't like the upper level management. I just don't like my job. They would try to do a grand singular goal.

Like, let me start from scratch and become, you know, a genre book writer. You have some grand plan for how you're going to change everything and make it better all at once. What Old Coder did instead was lifestyle-centric planning. And when thinking about the professional aspects of their. life. He didn't fixate on specific jobs, but on the characteristics of the work life. And what he realized was, I'm solitary, kind of introverted. I do like coding. I don't really like managing people. And there's a lot of friction when I have to deal with other, like, top tier management people. I get really caught up on their ideas, whether they're good or not, but I don't actually

have much control over them because they're a higher level. So really, for me, more ideal work would be something where it's much more solitary and it's much more sort of focused intellectually demanding and sort of flexibility about how you do that work. Once he realized that, he's like, looking at my options, I see, oh, here's a great option

to move closer to that lifestyle. I change my job away from management towards this remote developer position I see it's available. This might be less money. It's probably less prestigious. So it's not what shows up when you take the grand goal methodology

of like, well, what's something cooler or impressive I can go after? But it comes up blaring with neon lights around it when you take the lifestyle-centric approach. The other cool thing I want to point out here, which comes up in almost every discussion of the deep life, is that discipline by which we just mean the ability to consistently work on hard things, things that are hard in the moment, but that deliver important results down the line, that type of discipline is to fuel for everything else.

Everything that goes into transforming your life requires as an input to the system that type of discipline. It's thing after things that are kind of hard in the moment, less exciting than like your phone, but you need to do long term to move towards a deep life. What we see here is you get better at discipline if you practice it. What a cool example, he began playing the flute, and by doing so, it was like, oh, I can learn hard things. Ten months later, I'm pretty excited where I was, even though in month one, every session was hard, I could see no results. He is absolutely right that that translates over. that translates over to your general sense of what psychologists would call efficacy, your ability to pursue hard things and accomplish them.

So this is like a fantastic case study of ideas of our practical approach to the deep life and action. And for those who are wondering, how do I know it's a he? It's because we have parts of this. We have correspondence that go along with these case studies and questions often that we don't read on the air. So I'm not making assumptions. Actually, it is a he. Let's see here. Now, Jesse, do we have a call or are we going right to the question?

Yeah, we do. All right, let's hear it. Okay. Hi, Cal. My name's Justine from Australia, and I'm about to start a new role in a new team, but in the same company, so doing a similar role as a senior data analytics lead. I'm moving from a team that is quite structured and follows an agile ways of working with quarterly planning, two-week sprint planning, and everything's quite methodical in

how the work that we do is planned out. So I'm moving into a new team that I've heard is reactive, it's frazzled, doesn't have a structured way of planning future work. So what advice would you give to someone in my position who wants to find the right balance between being seen as a strong performer in the new role who delivers high quality work within the required timeframes without allowing myself to get sucked into the stressed out, reactive, frazzled last-minute rush hive mind that I've heard the new team can be like just due to the lack of overall structure in how they plan their work. Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks, Cal. Or Justin, I like this question. This is also sort of a stealth, slow productivity corner question because the ideas here come straight from my book. The key thing I want you to think about here is that there's two different factors at play. There's you're wanting to produce a really high-quality work that you're known for. And then there's separately from that not being socially difficult in terms of your responsiveness. These are two unrelated things. You being super responsive and really leaning into the hyperactive hive mind-frazzled workflow of this team,

that might be important from I don't want to be annoying or difficult to them perspective, unrelated to whether or not you get known as a top performer that produces really good work. So first of all, let's keep that in mind. As time goes on and you're able to produce really good stuff when you said you're going to do it, you're going to gain more and more idiosyncrasy credits in terms of how you structure and approach your work. So these are two separate things. So what you do in the meantime to walk this balance between, I don't want to be fully frazzled in the hyperactive hive vine,

but I also don't want to be super obnoxious. Like, this is a social issue, not a productivity issue. What you can do is, A, ramp it up over time. So, again, as you produce more, as you finish more and more stuff that's great, you get more leeway in how you interact. Two, and I, this is super detailed in, especially principle one in slow productivity.

But two, you can move a lot of this. structure that your team adopted in your last team, you can move it onto yourself. And, you know, again, I have a whole big, long book chapter about this, so I won't get too detailed now. But there are ways to move a lot of this structure from the team to the individual so you can gain some of its benefits, right? So this is where you get things like, for example, your own work tracking queue. You're kind of simulating a con bond board of waiting for working on done within just your

own life and you make it transparent for everyone else. Well, my WIP, my works in progress limit here. I work on two things at a time and here they are and here's the other things you guys are brought up and here's where they are and you can see their order and I'll tell you when I pull them over there and it's a transparent and you can see it so you know what I'm doing.

You can really push a lot of like office hour structure communication. Lots of just again and again you're deflecting like next time you're free these hours, I'm always here, grab me, we'll talk this through. Like completely deflecting again and again ongoing conversations. You have a meeting planning software where you have a bunch of little short blocks, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday afternoon.

So you're like, and if you need to grab me just individually, boom, grab any time on here that works, whatever works for your schedule. You're just again and again deflecting them away from just, can't we just go back and forth now? Because in the moment, it's easy for me to say, to send this email, then it's off my plate, obligation hot potato, you're it. You again, like, deflect these type of back and forth to real time. this is not necessarily a bad thing from their perspective, right? People just want clarity. Like, okay, whatever. The thing is I'm stressed because I have this question about this thing we're working on.

And if I send you an email, it's off my plate, and that's great until it comes back to me. Then it's on my plate again. Then I'll send you another email and it's off my plate. I'll be happy again. That's fine. Or if they get back from you, like talk to me at three. Or here's a link and click a time and then it's on your calendar. You've solved the same problem.

They no longer have to keep track of this thing. There's a next step that's scheduled out there. All right. So you can be structured about how you organize what you're working on and have a work in progress limit that's constrained and just be super transparent about this with everyone else. You can deflect more back and forth asynchronous conversations to more structured real-time sessions. You can just do that even if your team doesn't like it. If you're careful about it, they'll be annoyed, but it won't be insufferably annoyed. And as you deliver again and again, then they'll just be like, Justine's super organized.

You know, it's really impressive. She gets stuff done. She has these cool systems. How did that work? What are you doing with this work in progress queue? Tell me about that again. You'll, you know, they'll be kind of impressed by it. The key is you do have to produce, but you can put some structure on yourself in the meantime.

All right. So we have a final segment coming up. But first, take a quick break to talk about another sponsor. Look, if you need to hire, you need Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350. million global monthly visitors according to Indeed data and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Ditch the busy work. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. And Indeed doesn't just help you hire faster.

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matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets at finding you the right matches. Over 3.5 million businesses worldwide use Indeed to hire great talent fast. You should join them. So here's the good news. Listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility if you go to Indeed.com slash deep. Just go to Indeed.com slash deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash deep. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. You need indeed. I also want to talk about our long-time friends at Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing. However, you chaching. Look, Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

We're talking from the launch your online shop stage to the first real-life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, like the deer outfit we talked about last week on the show, that I like to walk around my vacation home in. to upset the owner. Whatever it is that you're selling, you need Shopify.

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In fact, Jesse, we have a Shopify account kind of waiting to go. We were messing around with it before. Yes, we were. Yeah, so we are good to go with Shopify. All we're missing is something to sell that's not going to terrify or horrify

people countrywide. Lots of big companies do. Shopify, it powers over 10% of all e-commerce and has award-winning help to help you at every stage. because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep, but you got to type that all lowercase letters.

That's Shopify.com slash deep to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in, Shopify.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, we're now moving on to our final segment. Okay, what I wanted to do, I just had two sort of fun sightings of the book, Deep Work, in unexpected places. I'm going to bring something up on the screen here. So if you're watching, instead of listening, you can see what we're talking about.

All right, first, let's talk about, you know, the New York Times just released their list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Now, the way that they generated this list is they sent out surveys to about a thousand notable people from the world of books and asked them for their 10 best books. what do you think that 10 best books are of the 21st century and then they aggregated those votes and did a little magic

and got their list of 100. They put up here and I have this on the screen now a list of some of these ballots so some of the people they asked give us your 10 best books

of the 21st century said yeah you can put my ballot on here right? So this list that they have here they have the ballots of Stephen King Menjin Lee

you have R.L. Stein Juno Diaz, Sarah Jessica Park. Staphne Graham Jones, Annette Gordon-Reed, etc. All right. So this is a bunch of people's known literary figures saying here's my thoughts of the 10 best books of 21st century. Here's where we get involved. One of the people that they asked and who allowed them to put their ballot live was our good friend, Ryan Holiday.

So let me just click on Ryan Holiday here. Here is his ballot of the 10 best books. And what do we see? Deep work is in that list. So he gave 12 books, his opinion for the 12 best books of the 21st century. So I think we have to figure out how to state this carefully, Jesse. But maybe we can say officially nominated as one of the 10 best books of the 21st century. Yeah.

There was somewhere around 5,000 books that were mentioned. But I mean, technically maybe that's true, officially nominated. Or would just be like one of the, potentially one of the, potentially one of the, 10 best books of the 21st century and attribute that to the New York Times. So the problem is they do give the vote totals on here if more than one person chose it. So we see in Ryan's choices, he had like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and there's an emblem that says 13 people picked that as one of the 10 best books of 21st century. So Deep Work, he was the only one to actually suggest that.

But I think it counts, Jesse. It does. At least in the opinion of some, it is one of the best books of the 21st century. All right, we have another siting here. I'm going to load up of deep work. A listener sent this in. Pretty cool. It is a license plate.

Here's a picture of his California license plate, vanity license plate, and his license plate is Deep Work. Missing the O, but anyways, he sent that to us. So there we go. Our super fan in California has a Deep Work license plate. If you see his car on the road, because it has a distinctive license plate, if you see his car on the road and you see the driver looking at his phone, you need the ram his car. Good. Hit it in the back corner so it spins out and roll because, you know, you got it. He's

representing deep work. Actually, what I want to see is you see this car on the road, you know, he's on the 405, 80 miles per hour. What I want to see is that driver is reading a thick book while he drives. Because he has a Tesla so I can self-drive. That's what I want to see. It's a Tesla. is that what it is? Yeah. Oh, that'd be fantastic. There's another picture in there. You can see it.

All right, let's see. Where do I go? Just in the, no, in the, it's another post. Oh, it's another post. Okay. I didn't realize you sent it. Oh, there it is. Oh, it's on a Tesla.

Oh, man. I really want to see a picture of a video. I want to be a video. You're pulling up behind the Deepark Tesla, right? And then you pull off to the, you kind of come up to its side and you pan the camera over. And what you see is to drive. just with, you know, a thick thorough biography with reading glasses on, just reading in the driver's seat while the Tesla drives. I feel like our lawyers have to get involved and say disregard everything to Cal just said.

Be fantastic. There we go. So deep work is making its impact. I thought those were both fun to see. One other quick note. We have a fan, Zach, who's sending us some VBLCCP hats. Oh, he made them? Yeah.

Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. All right. I'm excited. I will wear it. I will wear my VVLCPP hat. It should be in the mail soon. I will wear it on air when we get it. I need a new hat. My Nationals hat got two beat up. I had to buy a different hat when I was up north. But I remember thinking, I wish I just had my own hat. I was like, I should just design my own hat. Like, why I go buy? I bought some Patagonia hat and a outfit or so I had something to wear while we hiked. I was like, why not just have my own hat? So, okay, I'm excited about this. VVLCPP. That's how we'll know who the true fans are. Jesse if they recognize the hat. That probably fits on a license plate too. All right, everyone. Well, anyways, thanks for listening.

We'll be back next week with another normal in-person, in-studio episode of the podcast. But thanks for listening. 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 Kavis. Calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at CalNewport.com and get some deep wisdom, delivered to your inbox each week.