Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 316: Weekly Templates

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

The fall is the perfect time to tune up your productivity and organizational systems. With this in mind, in this episode, Cal discusses a tool he has long used in his own life but never discussed before in public: the weekly template. He then answers questions on the theme of personal productivity from listeners and reviews the books he read in August. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Weekly Templates [3:29]- How does Cal schedule his evening writing sessions? [26:08]- How can I leverage my current career capital to become an entrepreneur? [30:30]- How do I find time for non-urgent but interesting deep work? [35:59]- Is afternoon deep work possible? [39:16]- Can I use slow productivity to help prepare for a job interview? [45:49]- CALL: How do I not be reactionary during my busy season? [51:42]CASE STUDY: Using Cal’s toolkit while working in the Peace Corps [56:52]FINAL SEGMENT: The 5 Books Cal Read in August 2024 [1:06:05]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?Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestionszocdoc.com/deepnotion.com/calladderlife.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I am back after our two-week hiatus in the Deep Work HQ here in Tacoma Park, Maryland, joined once again by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I don't know if you felt the same way. I felt it was weird not to be podcasting, like to actually go through two weeks without the rhythm of prepping a script and talking about these things. It was like I was bursting with useless knowledge about time blocking and discipline stacks. It was unusual. It's good, though. So it's good to be back anyways, to get back on our regular schedule.

We got a good show today. I'm going straight old school technical with our deep dive. I'm going to talk about an element of my own routine that I don't think I've talked about before. We can get deep on that. We got some technical questions and get into the weeds. It's the fall. It's back to school. It's vacations are over.

People are thinking about getting their systems tuned up. So I want to get in the weeds with this whole episode. And then in the final segment, we will do the books I read in August. Jesse, I want to mention first before we get into it, though, my latest sort of quiet rebellion against the world of the ubiquitous digital. What's that? I bought a new everyday watch. We're not on camera now, but I can show it to you. It's a Zen 105 without the UTC.

complication for those who care about such things. It's an automatic mechanism. So no bits, no electricity, no batteries. It harvest the movement of my arm. Now, I've been wearing this thing every day for three weeks, haven't touched it, right? In the sense, I haven't touched this knob,

haven't wound it, haven't adjusted it, and I am within two and a half minutes still of the correct time. So these sins have got these nice Salida Swiss mechanisms that they soup up in the German factory there. Anyways, I love the mechanical simplicity of there's just gears in this watch that harvest actual movement and yet functionally solves this problem of telling me the time. So what I did that kind of make this into a quiet rebellion is because it's the summer.

So I was swimming in the ocean with this. I'm swimming and swimming pools with this. I put it on a black silicon strap that's like exactly identical to what you would have on an Apple Watch. So it's looking like I'm deliberately referencing an Apple Watch. watch, but instead of being able to, you know, text message FaceTimes with laser beams across satellites, it's just a bunch of gears and no electricity. So that's my quiet rebellion of the summer. I like that. Your other watch was pretty cool too, right? Yeah, it's not an everyday watch. I do have a Speedmaster Moonwatch, but that's, wouldn't it be something I'm going to wear

swimming in the ocean or just jiving into the swimming pool with. So I wanted like an everyday watch that I could just work out in it, do whatever. So there's my sort of quiet rebellion against Apple. Let's look at our sponsors here. Our first sponsor today is, oh, no, it's Apple. The Apple Watch is a necessary component. All right, Apple is not one of our sponsors. Anyways, we got a good show today.

Let's get technical and get started with our deep dive. So I want to talk to you today about a piece of my own productivity toolkit that I don't think I have talked much about before. But it's key to my operation. It's also an exercise I just went through preparing for the fall quarter that is just beginning. So I thought this was a great time to talk about it because I could use examples for my own life as I just went through this. So what is this tool we're going to talk about? I call it the weekly template.

All right. To understand the weekly template, we have to briefly zoom out and remind ourselves about how my multi-scale planning framework works, because weekly templates fit into this framework. All right, quick review for the new listeners. In multi-scale planning, you start at the timescale of the current quarter. It's like right now you'd be thinking about the fall, and you have a strategic plan or quarterly plan for that period of time. What are the big things I'm working on?

What are the goals I have for this quarter? What do I want to keep in mind that is important to me of this quarter? This is where you keep yourself oriented towards the big picture of your ideal lifestyle. every week at the beginning of the week, you look at your quarterly plan to help you create your weekly plan for the week ahead, right? This is where you actually look at what's going to happen in the days. You're going to spend a lot of time here with your calendar. You're going to spend a lot of time here with whatever task capture system you use. You're going to put aside time when you're working on your weekly plan on your calendar for the week to make progress on important initiatives to protect that time.

This is where you might also make adjustments to your current plan. plan. You know what? I'm going to cancel this meeting and move this meeting over here because that's going to free up a lot of time here and I need a lot of time to get this bigger initiative done. You then look at your weekly plan every morning when you create your daily plan. And there, I suggest time blocking, give every minute of your day a job, end with a clear shutdown. So in this way, your big picture vision as captioning your quarterly plan is influencing everything you're doing throughout the day without requiring you to think about your big picture plan at every moment throughout your day. All right. So here's what you're a lot. So here's,

where the weekly template comes in is a piece of supporting infrastructure to span from your quarterly plan to your weekly plan. So the way I want you to think about your weekly template is a collection of guidelines that you put in place at the beginning of a quarter that you consistently plan when you're working on your weekly plan. So it's a way to, at a scale somewhat larger than each week, make sure that your weeks are going to be viable to move you where you want to go. That's pretty vague. So what I want to do is go through one, two, three, four, four types of things that you would put in a weekly template. And then hopefully this mechanism becomes more clear. All right. The first element that might be in a weekly template is

protected time. That's where you decide for this whole quarter, there is a certain time each week that I am preemptively protecting. So for myself, for example, in my current weekly template, for the fall, I don't have any teaching in the mornings. And my plan is mornings are for writing at least until 1030, but later on days when I can go later. That's part of my weekly template. I've actually gone through and just protected that time on my calendar for the entire fall, right? So part of my weekly template is I'm writing in the morning. You might, for example, have regular protected time for, I exercise every day at my lunch hour. You might have regular protected time for, you know, you're working on a self-education project to open up new

career capital opportunities. This is when I do my learning. So just fixing it advance, this time I'm always using for this particular type of activity, that's a big element of a weekly template. Now, I'm going to give you an advanced gloss on that tip. Hard thing about having a simple rule about this time is always dedicated to this activity is that you will have exceptions. Let me use myself as an example here. I want to write every morning. And I'm willing to be a pain about this, by the way. I'm willing in the moment to be a pain and say, no, I'm sorry. I know it would be convenient for everyone if I could meet at 930.

I can't do things in the morning. Like, I'm willing to protect this. But there's two things I can't get around. Once a month, we have a faculty meeting. Faculty meetings have always been on Friday mornings. I can't miss the faculty meetings. The other thing I can't get around is that my kids' school, when they have events at school where parents come in to see kids work, the way they do it. and I appreciate this, is like, let's just do this first thing in the morning as soon as school starts,

so parents can then go on to their work days without having missed too much. So clearly when those things happen, that will interrupt my plan of writing first thing in the morning. So I have these two exceptions. I know I can't get around. So what I have is an exception handling routine where I say, great, when those two things happen, I have a very specific thing I do to compensate for that lost time. So the faculty mean, as soon as that's over, I'm going to this library on campus, 90 minutes writing.

If I have to go in to my kid's school, I'm going straight from the school to this coffee shop, writing right away. So I have an exception handling routine there as part of my protected time and my template. All right. Second common element of a weekly template, daily themes. You start thinking, okay, for the quarter ahead, maybe I want to dedicate different days of the week for different types of activities. This is something you want to figure out ahead of time. For example, you might have meeting days and non-meeting days. You know, okay, I want to keep Mondays free of meeting.

So I can really get into the week, get my arms around things, make progress on things. Mondays are non-meeting days. That's a weekly template decision. Every week you apply that to your week when you're making your plan. You might say, for example, I want to theme what type of roles I work on on different days. So maybe I need to do meetings every day of the week, but I'm going to put meetings on this particular role on Tuesdays and meetings for this particular role on Wednesdays, right? These are regular rules that you keep in mind when it comes time to actually schedule.

In my own academic career, I often have, for example, class days versus non-class days. Class days are a day where I'm teaching. I treat those days differently in my weekly template when I think about what I do there versus non-class days. I like to meet with students on class days. I like to do Georgetown-related administrative work on class days. If I have meetings with an administrator or an advising dean or something like this, let's do this on class days. Let's make the theme of class days the non-research part of being a professor.

And then on a research day, well, I'm going to schedule a few of those things. So I can have more unbroken time to actually work on thinking deeply. You can also have, for example, Fridays as a lighter day or your theme for Fridays is no meetings in the afternoon, and finish out three. So, theming days. That's a weekly template. I'm always doing this on these particular days. The third, wait on, the third element that could go into a weekly template, regular rules and limits.

Right. So this is not about particular time, but more about particular rules or limits to the things that are coming towards you, that you're going to enforce for the particular quarter. So, for example, a rule example might be. every time a meeting or call is scheduled on my calendar, I am going to make sure there is 15 minutes at the end of that calendar event for processing that meeting or call. Now, this either means I put aside an hour and make it clear

that this call or meeting is for 45 minutes, or I'm adding 15 minutes to the other end of the hour-long meeting or call, however you want to do it. But this is like a very useful rule. It's a case study. It's an example. This way you can process things discussed in a meeting, get things into your systems, clear your head before you move on.

This is like a useful type of role. Limits might be things like, I'm not speaking this semester. This is very specific to me as a writer, but there's certainly corridors where, let's say, I'm deep in the trying to finish a book manuscript, or I'm on a book tour for a book manuscript, where I will just have a simple rule. I'm taking on no speaking gigs. So you just have a simple rule like that. These could also be quotas.

I am only doing one podcast a week. That's an actual quota I have in place right now. This fall, I was on a book tour in the spring. Now I'm not on a book tour. I don't want to stop completely spreading the word about my new book, slow productivity. But I also do not want to be in that five to ten podcast a week like it was during book tour. I really need to be focused in other things now. So I have a simple rule, one podcast per week.

If that week has its podcast, I just don't make it available. having these rules in place makes it so easy to react to the incoming. You might have a similar rule, for example, with committees you're joining. Okay, I'm just going to do two committees. That's it. I have to choose two committees I'm going to be on. There's only five peer review papers I'm going to do. Maybe there's a particular type of thing you get pulled into in your company.

You say, I'm not going to do that more than once a month. Once I've done it once for a month, I'll say no, not until the next month. So rules and limits are a part of a weekly template. finally autopilot scheduling looking at things that you know occur regularly or will recur regularly throughout the quarter and say when do I want to do them I just want to figure that out in advance I don't want to be each week when I sit down to do my weekly planning asking myself when am I going to find time for this I'm going to make that decision at the beginning of the quarter Friday afternoons is when I do this type of work the online class I'm taking that's first thing

in the morning Monday and Wednesdays. I don't even, I don't want to have to think about it. That's just when it is. That's just when I do it. One of the more interesting things and one of the more effective things you can add as part of your autopiloting for your weekly schedule is office hours. All right. When do I want to regularly have time to handle short things that are going to require back and forth interaction and get it out of my inbox? I'll give you an example of that from today. I won't get too specific. It's like a Georgetown administrative example. someone wrote me from the department. Like, there's like a couple things.

None of it that complicated. It had to do with like class registration and this class is too full. This one might not be enough people. Like it was nothing super complicated, but it was, it wasn't like a little ambiguous. Like, well, so what, how can I be useful here? What's really the issue? And my first instinct was, let me just send back an email now so I can get this out of my inbox. And that's just going to be kind of clarifying.

We'll kind of go back and forth and figure this out. I said, no, no, no, no, no. We could do this in 45 seconds of talking. So I said, let's just talk at, you know, we were going to see each other later. It took 45 seconds. Like, so what did you mean by this? Oh, okay, do you need this from me? No, what about that?

Great. Oh, one exception, great. Okay, good. 45 seconds, we were done. Office hours allows you to get that compression on a regular basis. So time you can push in interactions to require more than like one message back in response, right? So just autopiloting. Where is stuff, where is the regular stuff actually?

going to happen. There's clearly some overlap between autopiloting and time protection. Time protection is more like my mornings are for riding. The exact details of that might depend on the day, right? Time protection might be Friday afternoons, I go to the cabin in the woods and just do brainstorming, right? Autopilot is more like this hour on this day is when I prep my course. This is when I go through my batch. So it's much more like specific time blocks that you know we're going to happen on a regular basis. So there's some overlap there. Anyway, so these type of things go into a weekly template. So your weekly template, I have a fall weekly template, just goes in your quarterly plan.

It's right there on the top. Like here's my general template I want to follow each week. When I'm scheduling my week, think about what's in the template. It really does make a difference because you don't have to go through all of the thought processes required to figure out these elements of your weekly template. You don't have to go through those from scratch each week. some weeks when you're creating your weekly plan you're have a good cup of coffee you got a good night's sleep and you're really like let's i'm thinking about this i'm innovative other times like oh my god i'm just trying to figure out roughly how i want to get things done um so you want the template there to support you it's it's like you're i call it a template because you think of it as like here's my template for the ideal week would have these elements i'm right in the morning i'm not doing too many of these these are meeting days these are non-meeting days like it's the it gives you the recipe or the template for what you think for that Quarter is going to be an effective week. Quarter is the right time frame to work on this because things change.

Like what's relevant for me in the fall will be different than what's relevant to me in the winter, and that's true for a lot of other period of people as well. So your quarterly plan check is like the right time scale in which to look at these templates. Two, you're going to have to adjust it a bunch. You get super ambitious. I'm going to every afternoon, you know, work in the woods. It turns out like that almost never works. There's like all these little things I can't avoid that,

that keeps messing up that plan, I need to adjust this weekly template. That's great. Adjust as needed. Finally, at the end of a quarter, these are a good focuser for reflection. If you think back, what about these weekly templates that I like? What about them frustrated me? Like, I really wanted to do this and I just could not make that work. Gives you, I think, deeper insight about what's working and not working in your job. Much deeper insight than just like a typical day. You get busy days. You can have non-busy days. You can have non-busy days. There could be a deadline where you're overwhelmed and other times you're bored. But when you think back about your lower time scale, your larger timescale weekly template adjustments,

I think you get a deeper insight about what you're looking for in your working life, what's working and what's not. You love the like my mornings were for writing. Maybe this was like super effective. Now you're having some insight of like, you know what? Maybe I'm well suited for like a more self-paced, more like what matters is what you produce type job. Maybe you're really frustrated that you couldn't make. something like that work and it's telling you about you know the meeting pace of my job is really incompatible that's what i have to find a way to change that might be changing my

role and changing my expectations i think there's great insight that comes from your grappling with your vision of the ideal week it kind of lives in this nice sweet spot between the idiosyncratic difficulties of a particular day and the very aspirational big picture visions of like where do i want to be five years from now it kind of gets that more what's happening what's not It's getting the trends of your job, not individual days, but also not the two area of images. So it's the fall now. Figure out your weekly template. Just to summarize, again, the elements that might go into that.

Regularly protected time, themes for various days, rules and limits, and autopilot scheduling. Get one of these figured out for your fall ahead. It's really going to, you're going to feel like your weeks are much better, much less exhausting, seen much more productive in the sense of making progress on the things you care about. You're going to be less frustrated. It really can make you feel like it has a different job versus the alternative of just like now I'm facing this week. It's full of all this stuff. I guess this seems fine. Let's just go day-to-day and time block and make the most of it. It is going to feel like a completely different job, even though you haven't actually officially changed anything about your role.

So give your weekly template a try. I have one specific question and a broader one. I guess I'll go with a specific one first. When you start your writing, is it usually around 8.30? Usually it's 8.30. Sometimes it's earlier. So ideally two hours? Ideally two hours. So if I know I'm ended on the earlier side, I might start earlier, right?

So we leave the house to walk the kids to the bus stop at 7.30. And typically my wife and I both walked into the bus stop together because we like to walk back. It's like a time to catch up. But if she has something early, then I'll just take them. If I have something, like if I know I have an 11 or a 1030 meeting, I might just bow at the walking that day. And then I could start my writing right at 730 and get that extra hour. So it just sort of depends on what's going on. And then ideally six days a week or five days a week?

Five days a week, six day is needed. Okay. Right. Sunday session is needed. Occasionally evening sessions, but I won't get too much in that now because I think we have a question. Yeah. So we'll get in that as well. I don't make, right now I'm trying at least not making the six day regular.

Yeah. I would like not to have to do it on the six day. So I'm going to see if this metronome regular, relentless, every single morning you're making progress. Like I have a sense that's going to add up to, in a slow productivity sense, that will keep me on pace. Well, that's what you do when you wrote slow productivity, right? Yeah. I mean, I think I was thinking about using Sundays more. Oh, okay.

Right. But then I helped start at my kid's school, a robotics team. And we meet on Sunday mornings. So, like, that kind of took out the time I was very – I would often write on Sunday mornings that ate up that time. So then last year, like, I wasn't writing as much on Sundays as I usually do. And so now I'm going to kind of see how that goes, make that more permanent. And then my broad question is, does a template look more like a calendar in your week of plan? Is it more like a bulleted list?

The bulleted list. Yeah. So my fall template, I call it. It's categories and bullet points. Okay. Yeah. So it's like, here are my elements of, here are the elements. I think I used a wording of like, here's my, the elements of my ideal week for this quarter.

I mean, I used the word semester because I'm a professor, but same idea. Yeah. And just put it right at the top of your quarterly plan because you're looking at that every week. And that's exactly when you want to remind yourself of your template. All right, cool. So we got a bunch of questions that are kind of similarly tactical. again, we're following our theme here of back to school, back to work. Like, let's get our systems tuned up.

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slash deep questions. So you get a questions. Jesse, let's move on to our questions. All right, who do we have first? Hi, first questions from Aaron. In your podcast with Andrew Huberman, you mentioned the importance of a fixed schedule and that you usually like to stop working around 5.30.

You also mention that you occasionally have a 90-minute writing session in the evening when you need to get something written on deadline. Is that something you time block in your day ahead of time, or is it the result of overflow work just not getting done during the day? Do you wait until after it's over

to do your shutdown routine. All right, Aaron, good questions. I'm actually these days in my weekly template. I typically aim actually now, I'm finishing before 530 because I'm using exercise as my transition. So after I do my shutdown routine, I'm using exercise almost every day as my transition from work to non-work. I find that really helps to have like a difficult physical strain helps reset.

your body physiologically, not to mention your brain psychologically for life outside of work. These workouts I'm doing, though, can require, I don't know, 45, 50 minutes. So I'm ending work a little earlier now. I like to get going in the exercise when possible before five. So I'm ending a little earlier. All right. So let's get to the meat of your question. I do sometimes ride in the evening.

Okay. So how does that fit within my daily time block plan? it's after the shutdown, right? Because the shutdown routine is where you're closing all the open loops of your day, you're reviewing your plan for the week ahead, you're convincing yourself that it is fine to stop working, you're not forgetting anything. There's nothing that there's urgent that you need to deal with before the next day, and then you either check your shutdown complete checkbox in like my time block planner, or you have some sort of catchphrase you say to signal to yourself, I have reviewed everything, I'm comfortable shutting down,

and we don't have to think about work again. That is still worth doing at the end of your workday because an evening writing session doesn't require you to have all those open loops open. An evening writing session is not checking your email, it's not planning, it's not working on projects, it's not thinking ahead,

it's just a singular activity. I'm just sitting here and trying to write. So I do my normal shutdown. The evening writing is like something separate then, right? I don't time block it because I don't time block after shutdown. I don't time block my non-work time. I just know when I do a shutdown for the day, in my time block planner, I just write evening.

I kind of like bullet point below it, like roughly what I remember, I want to try to get done that evening. I don't time block it. So I just note, like, okay, I'm going to do an evening writing block. I'll usually coordinate them with my wife and be like, okay, so here's, if this works, like, here's what I'm going to do. I'll go to my office or head over to the coffee shop for like an hour and here's what I'm going to do it. And so it's roughly time blocking since I know I work out with her when I'm going to do it, but I don't actually draw a time block because I don't actually do time block. to any formal sense on weekends or after shutdowns.

For me, evening writing blocks are not overflow. I don't like this idea that if, like, you don't finish your plan, just keep working. You know, that means your plan was probably too ambitious or you weren't being sufficiently focused during your day. I don't like using evenings for overflow, if at all possible. I typically use evening writing sessions because I'm trying to break a complicated story. So this will typically happen with my New Yorker writing. those are hard articles to get into because the writing caliber is hard, right?

It's the thinking has to be super sharp, but the writing, just a craft, has to be very high. It's a high bar of entry sometimes to get into them. So sometimes I like to sort of make a running start at them by writing in a new location at a new time. So like I'm going to Bevco, like in the, that's our coffee shop, going in the evening and like coming at this in like a new environment to try to like harness some inspiration just to kind of break into the piece. And then, like, once a piece is going, then it's more workmanlike, and you can just schedule it. So typically that's what I'm doing with my afternoon writing sessions. If I am behind on a deadline, the thing I'll usually aim for is like a long weekend writing session. That's more like, okay, I need to throw five hours at this thing.

And so maybe I'm going to stay home and work on this while like the family's doing something else or will go to like my in-laws house and they have like an outbuilding on their property. Sometimes I'll like, great, I will go out there and write. while you visit with your parents, et cetera. So that's the way I think about that. But good question. All right. What are we got next? Next question is from Mark.

I'm a new high school teacher. I also play in a successful band. So I currently have two sources of income. My passion is to start my own business. What is the best approach for me to leverage my current career capital to become an entrepreneur? Well, Mark, I'm suspicious of your use of the word passion here. Like when someone says my passion is to start my own business, what that really means is I like the idea of starting my own business.

I'm going to call it my passion so that, like, you have to go along with it. But you're not wired. This is my book so good they can't ignore you. You don't have some genetic predisposition for a particular job that exists in 21st century, like freelance knowledge economy. When you say it's my passion, you're just like, I'm interested in starting a business. Okay, I'm glad you're interested in that. That by itself doesn't mean much to me, right?

So I don't hear the word passion and have that. that sort of reaction of career genuflection. Oh my God, you got to do that. Like, we got to make that work. Like, the word's kind of meaningless to me. So what should we do? Lifestyle-centric planning. Okay?

We need to have this vision of your ideal lifestyle in a few years and then 10 years or more out. Like, we'll work on those two timeframes. This vision has to be holistic. It has to capture all the different areas of your life. Like what type of place you're living in? What's the rhythm of your day? Who are you around? Like what do you smell?

What do you taste? What do you see? What do you hear? You want to build this aspirational vision of sort of like the rhythms and realities of your day. Like what is it that you're trying to get towards? And then we can assess career capital you have or career capital that you could obtain and see how it would fit into that lifestyle vision. Maybe entrepreneurship works well in here, right? You're like, oh, you know what?

If I do this, I could see a path towards this lifestyle I have that like the teaching's not going to get there. more constrained or whatever, fine. It could play a role in that, but I want you working backwards from an ideal lifestyle, not working forward from something that you've just labeled a passion, because that is really, that's rough and it's crude, and it's often working off of, like, a Halcyon incomplete vision of, like, what this thing really means. I want you working backwards from a lifestyle.

That's how you do a real career capital analysis. You know exactly what you want to invest that career capital in, and now you're saying, can I get enough career capital? I mean, you're being much more, you're being much more systematic about this. When you're doing lifestyle-centric planning in your situation, Mark, a big thing I want you to do is be very realistic about finances. So figure out, okay, for this vision I have, like, how much does it cost? Like, how much am I spending? Like, what would the spin be there? What would get real numbers here, right? I mean, this is really empowering for people. I'm sort of thinking about this chapter for my

deep life book I'm working on now, that getting concrete numbers as well as this sense of, like, like complete understanding control over your money right now and these concrete evidence-based numbers for, well, if I lived here, it would cost this much and I would need this much, and here's how much I can earn doing this and that. Working with real numbers is important because then you can start saying, for example, okay, if I wanted a small business to support me because then I could be more flexible and live this lifestyle where I'm in the woods all the time or whatever it is, now you have numbers. And now you could say, okay, so I need a small business to generate this much money.

And now you can be like, okay, is that reasonable? Like, who's making that much money in these small businesses and why? And then you can start doing an idea that I talk about and so good they can't ignore you called using money as a neutral indicator of value. Start seeing on the side. Okay, well, how much money am I making money? I'm selling this product. Am I making money? Am I selling it?

Right? Is no one buying it? Okay, this is a problem. Oh, people are buying it. That means there's some value here. So I could imagine I would have to 3x this for this plan. So you're getting really detailed about the financial reality. all of it working backwards from an ideal lifestyle vision.

So I love hearing people talk about used to phrase lifestyle or ideal lifestyle when thinking about their careers. I get nervous when I hear them say passion. Passion just means I want to and I don't want you to say anything about it. But I'm not convinced by that. So, you know, look, some sort of entrepreneurial push here might be a big part of achieving your vision. That does give you lots of autonomy, lifestyle, you know, jobs are a way of scaling up income that's separate. separate income from time. There's a lot of cool options there, but it's also really hard. So you want to get realistic about that. Also, very cool that you play in a band. I think that,

I love that. You know, Derek Sivers, so I talk about him in that book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. He talks about leaving his job to be a musician full time and then leaving his job as a musician to run a small business. So that's my homework for you, Mark. Read So Good They Can't Ignore You. find in particular that chapter about using money as a neutral indicator of value. Read Derek's ever story because he was, you know, he made exactly these decisions. And I'll give you the TLDR. He left his job to be a full-time musician once he was making enough money already being a musician on the side to cover his expenses. He stopped his performing to work on his company full-time once his company was making him enough money on the side that he could live off of those expenses.

expenses. So he let the money, not his sense of what would be cool, be the indicator of when he was ready to make a jump. He then sold that company for like $20-something million. So it worked out well. Interesting. Okay. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Susan. I have academic writing that needs to be done for my career. I also have creating writing projects. Whenever I try to schedule my creative writing, the academic writing takes precedence. And I have telling myself that I'll fit the creative writing stuff in whenever I find extra time. I do find extra time, but never enough to make real progress. I find time blocking from my creative slash fun projects is stressful. This is where your weekly template is going to be useful because you need to probably

pre-protect this time. Like you got to have it figured out, this is when I do academic writing, and I have enough time put aside to feel very comfortable about my academic writing, and that's going to be a lot of time. And then you're going to say, I'm going to put aside and regularly schedule my time for my fun writing. And it's going to be in a different place. And that's where this time is put aside, and that's when I work on my fun writing. And there will be less of that because it's not your full job right now.

What you should not do is what you're doing now, which is approaching your day and saying, okay, I'm going to time block my day. Do I have time here? What should I do next? Should I do creative writing? Should I do academic writing? oh my God, I don't think I've done enough academic writing. And once I finish my academic writing, I'm busy, I don't have time for my creative writing.

This time has to be protected way in advance. And you've got to have rituals around it. And it's got to be, here's where I go to do this writing. And it's like clockwork. And I feel I feel bad. If I ever miss it, it makes me feel like something's incomplete in my life. And probably it's going to be like first thing in the morning you're doing academic writing. And then two evenings and one weekend day a week.

You have these late afternoon evening sessions at a coffee shop or you do your creative writing. like you've got to figure out how to make this regular and ritualized but protect that time. And if you don't have that, if you're like, okay, but I don't have enough time when I try to do that. Like I can't, I don't have, for example, enough time to regularly work on my academic writing and my creative writing. When you try to figure out that time and you can't, there's just not enough consistently free time in your schedule for that to happen. Well, now you're confronting reality, what we call facing the productivity dragon. Oh, I'm not fooling myself. My schedule doesn't have enough time to do both.

Okay, something has to change. Either I have to put off the creative writing until I have like a sabbatical to just do that, or I have to loosen something else on my schedule. So again, the weekly template, this sort of thinking about like when this quarter do I want to work most weeks on academic writing, when this quarter am I going to work most weeks on creative writing, forces you to confront the reality of your workload at a scale that tells you something deep about your job. On a daily scale, it doesn't tell you much. No matter what your job is, you can have a busy day.

But on this scale of like, I'm trying to find a consistent schedule to do this writing, when you fail to do that, that's telling you something that is consistently true about your job. It's a very useful scale to interrogate what's working and what's not working. So that's what I would do. You should never be thinking. In my ideal world, you never will be thinking on a typical day, should I do this writing today? or when should I do this writing today? That answer should have been long since established and recorded and it's like autopilot at this point.

All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Ari. At my current job, I'm struggling to fit in deep work sessions. I have calls starting at 7.30 a.m., which can stretch until 12 p.m. I've tried shifting my deep work sessions to after lunch, but I've been unable because I'm already exhausted. Well, I can already tell this is like a time-zone thing probably. So if he's starting at 7.30 a.m., he's probably like West Coast, maybe working with East Coasters.

So, Ari, you're going to have to lean heavily into location and rituals to make afternoon deep work more effective for you. It is hard for a lot of people. I have a hard time with it. Most people, here's a reality. Most people, if you say, hey, first thing in the day, get some coffee and work deeply, can do it. Like, okay, yeah. I don't have too much other stuff in my head from work. Like, we're just getting started.

So my cognitive context is focused. My attention residue is minimal. I have energy in the morning. I'm having my first caffeine of the day. Like, great, let's do deep work in the morning. Most people can just do that without too much support. The afternoon's a different story. And I include myself in this.

If I just, like, after we record this podcast, like, Jesse, if I just after this podcast, you're like, you know what, I think I'm going to go do some writing and just took out my computer, that would be difficult. Mm-hmm. I would need ritual and location built around getting good deep work occurring in the afternoon. So, Ari, it's not unusual that that's the case for you as well. All right, so what might this mean? I have a bunch of ideas for this.

First of all, I would suggest a half-day shutdown routine after your calls end at noon. So give yourself a half hours to close up all of the open loops that were created by these calls. Make sure the stuff that needs to be on your calendar is on your calendar, the stuff that needs to go into your capture system is in your task management capture systems. The follow-ups are happening that there's not loose ends from these calls that are still floating around.

So you really want to sort of shut those things down, take the next step, schedule when things are going to happen, get that out of your head. Any deep work attempt with a bunch of open loops from the morning still open is going to be otherwise very difficult. I would then suggest having a physical interruption. So this could be like going on a long walk

on a set route. Our canonical example here is Darwin. That is a state outside of London, built the sandwalk, a very specific sand line path that went through the most scenic parts of his property, and he would do a set number of circuits on that path to prepare himself for writing. So it could be this. I'm walking, doing this particular walk, maybe to a coffee shop and back, or if you live near the woods, on a particular wooded trail. Exercise. I become a big believer in this. If you have some schedule here, go do some hard exercise. day. It really does reset your energy levels and your brain. Now you're ready to switch over to try deep work. Keep the deep work period reasonable most days. It is hard to be on calls from 730 to 12.

Like you are using a lot of energy. You cannot on a regular basis then say, great, I'll do 1230 to 530, you know, writing the Great American novel. You've used a lot of energy. So let's go with the slow productivity principle here of slow but steady. Deep work done really well. every single day, reasonable amount of time, that will add up to something good. And maybe it takes a little bit longer to add up to something good, but my schedule will be, if I keep my schedule sustainable, I can keep doing this. And over time, I'm going to produce lots of cool stuff. Consider chemical interruptions as well.

So I get this special cup of coffee or I make my Monte tea or like something you do right at the beginning of the afternoon deep work session. Have a location interruption. Go somewhere different than where you did your calls to do. deep work. I think this is worth potentially even spending non-trivial money and having notable eccentricities in your day. It really makes a big difference to say, I'm going to this shed, I'm going to this library, going to this local university, I am going to my attic deep work room, I'm going to the cabin I built in the woods, whatever it is. Change locations for this

deep work. I've done, I've shut down, I've gone for a walk. I've made my special cup of T and now I'm going to the deep work only location and then have a fixed amount of time you're working. As I said, this is probably not going to be too long most days. You should be happy with 90 minutes to two hours. That's probably all the energy you have left. If this seems insufficient, choose one day at first where you end your calls earlier. Just when these calls are being set up, you're like, on this day, I'm actually only available to 11 or 1030, right? People like, whatever, you're just clear about it. Like, you're available. We're always doing calls. There's one day where you're not available for a couple hours at the end,

so we just work around it. You can do that one day a week, maybe two, and have a longer deep work session, but don't try to be a hero here. Your brain can only do so much work, especially when you have this kind of really mixed up demanding multi-role knowledge work type of things going on. All right.

Do those things regular afternoon deep work as possible. Just trust that 90 minutes to two hours, five days a week, four weeks a month, will produce really good stuff. even if it's not as fast as you would like to go, it's better that you have a sustainable pace you can slowly move on that over time gets you to the finish line

than it is that in the short term you're trying to go heroic. The closed-a-loop here, when you're done with this deep work session, then have like your final end-of-the-day session where you do your real shutdown. This is where you can have, like, okay, I have admin tasks I need to do.

I would do that after the deep work, non-trivial admin tasks. Like, I got to fill out this form. It's going to take 20 minutes. You have your hour and 9. minutes at the end of the deep work session to just shut down your day. I would leave that type of stuff, the non-trivial admin, to the other end of deep work if possible, so that you can get to it before it's too late. Again, adjust as needed. Different people have different preferences,

different rhythms work better, but that's probably how I would do it. All right, Jesse, what do we got next? Our next questions are corner. Ooh, slow productivity corner. You've missed me saying this for the last two weeks, but we like to have one question a week that's relevant to my new book slow productivity the art with the lost art of accomplishment I haven't said in a while Jesse the lost art of accomplishment without overload it really is like a source book

to God 75% of the stuff we talk about on the show if you haven't read slow productivity yet you got to go get it just go get it read it recommend it because we talk about the book so often on the show anyways here's our slow productivity question corner slow productivity corner question of the week Hi, the question comes from Finindra.

I got laid off recently and currently have a part-time job. I spent about four to five hours on that to keep up with the bills and rent. I have an interview with a big tech company coming up in a few weeks and I need to prepare. Is there a way to use the principles of slow productivity to strike a balance between my part-time job and interview prep? Well, let's go back to the principle we mentioned for Ari, a key idea from slow productivity, which is trusting slow but steady. So doing a reasonable amount of work on a regular basis, trusting that can get you where you need to go. This is like one of the most important heuristics from the slow productivity mindset is getting out of the idea of how busy or exhausted I am today is what matters.

How overloaded I am is what matters. And instead saying, I want to produce at the bigger scale stuff I'm proud of, how can I do that in a way that's sustainable, that's compatible with a richer life? and it's not going to make me completely fatigued. Slow but steady is the way. It's like how I write books. I write a little bit most days. I let it add up over a year, right? Slow but steady.

I want to drill in on this little bit, though, right? Because the details matter here for you because you don't have a ton of time. You have a few weeks. So you can't get this wrong. You don't have the ability, I'm looking at this. You're working four to five hours a day. You don't have the ability to just say, I'm going to take a week and just do nothing but prepare for the interview. I mean, it's not a bad idea, I guess, if you could take time off your part-time job.

but it's a part-time job, so you probably can't. But you don't have a lot of room for error here. If you're slow but steady, if you get off to, if it's not very effective, you're in trouble. You won't be prepared for this interview. You don't have a lot of time to course correct. So let me dive a little bit deeper. Another way to say slow but steady is relentless and deliberate. Now, I use this more specific terms to capture the following two important elements to doing the strategy properly in your situation.

When I say relentless, like, it really has to be a very important. every day. A lot of people have a loose definition of what it means to do something regularly. All right. We can convince ourselves. Yeah, man, I'm practicing my guitar on a regular basis. But if you actually went through and measured it, you're like, well, I only really played twice this week. And the first time, you know, I was just sort of like jamming along to a song. And really, if I do the math, I had about 15 minutes of actual practicing in that week. But in your mind, like I picked it up on several occasions, right? We're easily diluted.

We can easily dilute ourselves in the thinking we're doing something all the time. So you have to defeat that by being relentless. No, no, I do this every single day. Here's the time I do it. Tired or not tired, you know, whatever it takes. Like, I do it every single day. So you have to be relentless. Otherwise, you're not going to have enough results to aggregate.

The second term I introduced there was deliberate. And I'm drawing here from the phrase deliberate practice, right? our best framework for understanding how people get good at complex activities. It's attributed to the late Anders Erickson. Deliberate practice says, okay, if you want to get better at something, you have to stretch yourself past where you're comfortable in a very specific targeted way. What is the thing that I need to do better? Let me design an activity to do right now that does nothing but push me on that

so that I'm stretching my ability to do that piece. This is particularly important for learning, which is what you're trying to do and preparing for the interviews. you cannot waste any of these sessions. They have to be designed to deliberately improve you exactly in the areas you need to improve. Do not waste an hour interview prep session kind of reading stuff on Reddit. You need to actually be on the Leak Code website, doing the exercises right now of a type that you're not quite comfortable with, giving it your full attention trying to figure out how to make them work.

If you don't have that sense of cognitive discomfort or stretch, you're wasting the time. So relentless and deliberate. every single day, not wasting a minute of those blocks. Now, now, like, the blocks don't have to be that long. It could be 45 minutes to an hour a day, five days a week. It's not that much time. And it's spread out over a few weeks. You will get really, really good.

And I think this is actually going to be long-term a great experience for you because after you nail this interview, which you will, if you're relentless and deliberate, and you get this other job. And now you have a senior development job. So you have this, you know, kind of big, flashy knowledge work job. You will remember how this went. And you will start thinking, what are all of the other things in my job now that I have this big, new fancy job where if I mastered this, it would be really useful.

It would give me a huge leg up. It'd be really impressive. It would open up more options. And you'll have this confidence of I can learn that without having to make some major change to my schedule. That if I just devote 45 minutes a day and maybe I just do this over lunch hour, five days a week, and I'm deliberate in terms of what I'm doing that time, there's no limit to what I can start picking up.

And now quarter after quarter, you're building up all these skills. You've mastered this new API. You've mastered this new programming language. And like, this stuff is going to add up. Your career capital is going to pile. You're going to start making some investments with that capital, and your life is going to get somewhere really cool. So, I mean, this is a great general tip.

If you're relentless and deliberate, a small amount of time each day can add up to something that I think is very impressive. And that is a key slow productivity principle. One I think that deserves hearing the slow productivity corner music one more time. All right. Do we have a call, Jesse? We do. Here we go.

Hello, Cal. I've resonated a lot on the topic of seasonality. I'm a writer and a producer for a football podcast. So February through July looks very different in my line of work than August through January. And I know for a lot of people that's similar in the academic world. in the off season, I found so much joy scheduling deep work hours in the morning, spending time with my family, implementing shutdown rituals, and ultimately giving myself space to think and write.

It was a joy. I gave myself some buffer over the last month, but how do you protect yourself in season from being reactionary and ultimately being a mile wide, but only one inch deep? Thanks, guys. All right, well, thanks, Kyle. Kyle has a football podcast. Is this Kyle Shanahan? Is that?

I don't like Kyle Shannon has time for a football podcast. He probably goes on a podcast. He's not spending six months a year writing, just taking like deep work time in the morning. He probably does a lot of deep work, but there's a lot of film breakdown and stuff. I've dealt with a non-trivial number of professional sports franchises. They care about deep work,

but I will tell you the busiest people I've met have been professional sports GMs. Really? Yeah. Because the GMs in particular have all the concerns of like the product on the court or the field, but also like management concerns, staffing concerns, budget concerns. You know, it's, those are crazy jobs. I'm saying Mike Rizzo, I feel your pain. And I'm still waiting for my invite to come teach deep work principles to all those, the Hope Road to those young players. All right, Kyle, let's get into this. So look, I'm in the same place. Oh, man, I love my summers. I love my summers. I love my summers. schedule. My summer schedule just ended, you know, my, my wonderful summer schedule where I write a half day every day. I only have any scheduled appointments or meetings on my calendars Tuesday through Thursday afternoons. And, oh, man, those schedules are fantastic. It's painful to go back. You got to make sure, though, that you have just as much of a plan for your busy seasons as you do

for your easy seasons. It's fun and easy to make a plan for the easy seasons because you have a lot of time and not a lot to do. And like, you could just say, I want to write all day. All my meetings only on Tuesdays. Like, everything's possible. It's a pleasure to build those plans. It's way more stressful in the busy season because, like, your plans don't work. Like, I can't do this.

I can't write every morning. And I have to do this and this. And you see your schedule fall apart. And it can be really stressful. But you got to stick with it. And in particular, what should you be, what's probably missing from your brew here is what we talked about in the deep dive, a weekly template. Like, that's probably what's going to help you. you hear, if you're already doing, you know, multi-scale planning, et cetera, right? You're not

running around just completely reactive. You have capture systems. You're doing multi-scale planning. Your weekly templates where you're going to make your stand to gain back some autonomy over your time. All right. Okay, we got to do this, but here's the days we record the podcast. I'm treating those differently than days we don't. I'm consolidating all these meetings, like one big thing we're doing on Thursdays. I'm taking these two things off my plate because they're destroying my schedule and they're getting in the way. Like, this is where the weekly template is where you're able to exert some autonomy. I think it's really important.

I think that aspect of this is really important because what happens is you can be organized but also feel out of control. And what I mean by that is, you know, we talk about all the time on this show, contrary to the interpretation of the anti-productivity crowd that think that any interest in being organized is all about just being co-opted by late-stage capitalism, coercive influences. Like we say, no, no, no, to be non-organized, the not have your work captured in context-capture systems, to be doing no planning on your time, to be just sort of like stumbling through your days. That's what puts you at the mercy of other forces. It's going to make you miserable.

You're going to work harder than you want to work. Everything's going to be worse. Like you, the step from completely disorganized to organize is a big one. But it's not the full step. This gets to Kyle's issue, I think, because you can be completely organized. I know what's on my plate. I plan my time carefully. I get the most out of my time.

I've shut down routines. I don't let my work follow me home. You can be doing all the things and be really upset because you feel like your schedule's not yours. You're scheduling your time really well, but mainly what you're doing is just juggling all the balls that people are chucking at you. You're preventing them from falling, but it's way too many balls to be juggling. That's where the weekly template. This is where you can really gain some autonomy of your schedule. You begin saying, I'm not just going to say my goal is to juggle every ball that's throwing at me.

It's going to say, I only take two balls this day. and this day is three and this day I'm not juggling at all. It's where you begin to get some autonomy back over your schedule. It's where you step from being organized to also being somewhat in control over what these organized days feel like. So, Kyle, it's a pain after a light season to make a busy season work because it's so much harder. But it's worth doing and let the weekly template maybe be the main tool that you're adding to your toolkit this particular busy season. And I think that'll do much better. All right, we've got a case study here.

This is where people write in to talk about their experience, putting the type of things we talk about on this show into practice in their real lives. If you have a case study to share, you can just email it directly to jesse at calnewport.com. He's organizing those. All right, today's case study comes from Colton. Colton says, I have been a devout Newportonian since high school, and I followed your advice on time block planning, autopilot schedules, and deep work throughout college. Once I began my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, however, I encountered a lot of lot of problems. Transitioning from my cushy college life and into my first real job and the harsh living conditions of rural Zambia was brutal. I have no electricity, running water, toilets, or

stoves. It took a year for me to figure out how to get things in this part of the world. Surprisingly, get things done in this part of the world. Surprisingly, most of your advice about knowledge work applies to my work as a Peace Corps volunteer. Each morning, I read over my Google calendar and quarterly goal project list and use them to build a time-ploc plan for the day. I manage my recurring tasks with an autopilot schedule that blocks off specific times each morning to do my research and writing. I work for a remote cancer lab back in the U.S. I handle my non-recurring tasks with a project list that I can pull from each morning. Because I work on one task at a time and without any distractions, I can finish all of my work

by 1 p.m. and still accomplish a ton of projects in my village, like building a medical waste incinerator for my local clinic and publishing a few papers in medical journals. Well, Colton, I appreciate the case study and I appreciate your use of the word Newportonian, which I really hope to spread. Let me highlight something from this case study that I think is important. I mentioned this in the call as well. There is this sense out there that to care about personal productivity, again, is somehow a negative or maybe like a necessary evil of certain like super high-powered, like corporate high-paying jobs.

But for the most part, it's just internalized capitalism in its worst sort of form. And it's something that those of us who are more socially conscious and self-aware, we want it dirty ourselves with. This belies that belief. This is literally someone in the Peace Corps in Zambia building medical cinerators and working on cancer research. Being organized makes that possible. Being organized means he can, with complete focus and presence, starting at 1 p.m. every day, just be working in that village while also still making progress in the morning on the other things. It's making his ability to be effective, even under really harsh circumstances, possible. This is what I like to see personal productivity skills deployed towards.

It allows me to deploy the image of the ideal life that I have in mind. He doesn't use the word here optimize. He doesn't use the word here maximize output. He does not use the word here hustle. He does not use the word here like production machine. No, he has a vision of what would be a sustainable feeling meaningful vision for my life. And he realized if he cannot control the incoming streams of what needs to be done and information and task requests in his life, if he can't handle that, if he has no control over his time, he can't get to that vision. those visions don't have to be heartless.

Those visions don't have to be mechanistic. It doesn't have to be one of Blake's Mills rendered in flesh in the personal individual. It doesn't have to be Gordon Gecko, right? It's more neutral than that. You control yourself, you can control your life. What you do with your life is up to you, and most people actually want to do more interesting things than just try to optimize or maximize output. So, Colton, I love it.

It's a great case study. We're productive so that we can produce our ideal lie. not the highest possible production rate possible. All right, so we got a final segment coming up. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. I want to talk about our friends at Notion. You've heard me talk about Notion before. It combines your notes, your docs, and your projects in the one space that's simple and beautifully designed.

What I like about Notion, I've said this before, is you can build these sort of custom, really easily. basically like these custom information storage and retrieval systems that fit exactly the type of work you're doing. A big proponent of customized systems to get you away from the hyperactive hive mind of we're just like attaching word documents to emails and rock and rolling all day long. Systems allow structured collaboration, structured encounters with information. This allows much more sustainable effective work. And notion, I love the way they do it. We've worked before with like a really cool setup with our ad agency where we could see using a custom notion setup, all of the advertisers, and we could switch views of like, where's all the times we've done reads for this ad? Let's put in information about this particular read.

Now let's zoom out and see all the different reads happening this week. You can build fantastic things easily, whether it's for a complicated business or just organizing your own stuff as an individual. What they've been doing more, though, and I want to emphasize this in this read, is that they have been. and now integrating artificial intelligence into the product itself just to make it even easier to use. Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds, right? So we're talking about things like generative AI style text creation, like, hey, can you write a first draft? Can you summarize what I am saying here? you can automate tedious tasks like okay great summarize these meeting notes that we can enter it over here in this information and it can help you find things right because it understands your information and it makes it easier for you to find things

notion is used by over half surprised me half of fortune 500 companies right i didn't know that was true but now that i hear it i say a course makes work systems easy teams use notion sinless email they cancel more meetings they save time searching for their work and reducing spending on having a bunch of different types of tools. All of this helps keeps everyone on the same page. So try Notion for free when you go to Notion.com slash cow. Do this all in lowercase letters. Notion.com slash cow to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. When you use our link, you will be supporting our show.

That's notion.com slash cal. I also want to talk about our friends at Lad or L-A-D-D. E-E-R. Look, we've been saying fall as a time you get your act together, you get organized, you fix the stuff that needs to be fixed, you get ready for the new year, the new school year, the new post-summer vacation year. The one thing that you might be procrastinating on if you're like a lot of people is life insurance. If there's people who depend on you, you need life insurance, not just some life insurance, but enough that would actually take care of them if the unthinkable actually happened. So why do most people not have enough life insurance who know they need

it because they don't know how to do it. Where do you go? Who do you talk to? Is it hard? Is it too expensive? This is where Ladder enters the scene. Ladder is 100% digital. You need no doctors, no needles, and no paperwork when you are applying for $3 million in coverage or less. You just answer a few questions about your health in an application. You need just a few minutes and a phone or laptop to apply and then their smart algorithms work in real time. So you'll find out if you're instantly approved. We're talking no hidden fees. You can cancel it any time.

Get a full refund if you change your mind in the first 30 days. These are policies that are insured by insurers with long proven histories of paying claims. We're talking those that are rated A and A plus by A.M. Best. Look, insurance only gets more expensive as you age. So the right time to get more life insurance is right now. This is also the right time for me to have dropped my ad page on the ground, but I picked it up. See, in the way, and I'm going to do a good ad lip here, Jesse, much in the way that I was able to pick up this page from the ground, you can pick up your need to get more life insurance for the people you love with ladder. So go to ladderlife.com slash deep today to see if you're instantly approved.

that's L-A-D-D-R-Life.com slash deep, ladderlife.com slash deep. All right, let's do our final segment. All right, this is our first podcast of September. Oh, it makes me sort of sad. I mean, I like the school year because my kids are in school, but my summer schedule is so nice.

Oh, man. And Jesse, I've mentioned to you. I have like an administrative role. I know. You told the audience, too. Did I? Oh, my God. It's fine. I'm building systems, my weekly template. Man, I'm like Cal Newportine. The Newportonian vibes is strong, my friend. My Trelloes are smoking because they're being used so much. I'm on it. But man, I missed this summer.

All right. So it's first episode of September. So we'll talk about the books they read in August. Hey, before we do, though, a listener, was it Zach? Yeah. Sent us, me and Jesse, custom hats for the show. So I figured we'd do this final segment in the hats. If you're a listing instead of watching, you can check this out on. YouTube. There we go. There we go. Looks good. Yeah. Looking good here. All right. So for those who are listening, we have on stylish VBLCC trucker hats. Of course, we know what that means. Value-based, lifestyle-centric career planning. That is the way that we hear in the Deep Questions podcast, think about career choices. These hats are awesome. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a fashion guru, But I think these look pretty sharp. It does.

It kind of seems like we're probably, you know, these hats are from our time spent running like a state committee in the old Soviet Union. Just looking at these abbreviations that this is probably some sort of like Russian abbreviation for like the state crop distribution socialist republic, you know, advisory committee. But that's cool. It's kind of like a returiness to that. All right. So we're going to harness as VBLCCP energy as we do the books I read in August 24. All right. This first one's a little weird.

Jesse, I'm just going to preface this by saying, my wife, right, we're on vacation. She was reading it. We were in the woods somewhere. I was like, I'll read that. It was Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Ferry's written by Heather Fawcett. It's a fantasy book. I guess maybe like a little bit of a romance book, but not, I don't really know these genres very well. I actually like the first two-thirds in particular.

Like, it's a alternative timeline world. I couldn't really tell when this took place. I finally found some clues that it must have been 20th century or equivalent because they mentioned movies at some point. But it's kind of like a timeless. It's a professor, it posits a world where fairies exist. And it follows a professor who is like, who studies fairies. Like, this is just a subject to people study.

And she goes to like this small town in a country that doesn't really exist. up in Scandinavia somewhere, like in stuff ensues. I actually kind of like the world building because I'm a professor of there being a whole academic discipline that studies like these beings. And it's a little bit dark and a little bit whatever. I thought it went a little bit. Look, I'm not a big novel reader, so take this with a grain of salt. Once it actually got past, like, you know, we see hints of this, we're kind of studying

this. Once they're actually like we're in a fairy world, I felt like it was just whatever, anything goes and everything's magic. and whatever, right? Like, you know, then that kind of lost me, right? That world building lost me. But I thought it was a... I enjoyed it.

I don't read a lot of books like this. I didn't realize all these books always have like a romance core or two. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. So she's her fellow professor who, spoiler alert, is part magic or something. They, you know, I love it. I thought it was good, though.

I thought it was good. All right. Then I read Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War. Man, there's a book right there. I love when nonfiction writers do something different with form and format. And what Jacobson did, and this is a compelling book, it's a hard to put down book. She basically did a bunch of research, a nonfiction book. I think Amazon chose that, you know, they have their best of the best books of the year so far.

And slow productivity was chosen as the best business and leadership book of 2024 so far. I think this was chosen as the best just overall nonfiction book of 2024. so far. What she did is a lot of research on what is the U.S.'s actual nuclear war plans and procedures and protocols. Like, how does this work? Who makes the decisions? Where are the various people? What happens if this gets blown up? Where are the missiles? And then the book just walks through, it takes place largely in like 12 minutes. It walks through global thermonuclear war breaking out from the point of view of like the American. Okay, so this person, we see this on the radar and the goes here and then these get blown and then this happens and we fire these missiles and and

the whole world gets blown up in the end so it's like a really kind of scary book but she's really trying to nail the detail straight of like here's how this would work here's how this would work here's you pull out this caper you would type in these things these people at this base underground here would be involved in this and she works the whole thing out spoiler alert it does not go well for us in Washington DC so we get hit by a thermonuclear warhead early on in the book and where we are right now we're not going to do well our skin would catch on fire. So this would not be good for us.

There was one, I got a nitpick. There's one nitpick where I was like, this doesn't seem, well, okay, I have two nitpicks. Let's hear. Okay. By the way, my family did terribly in this.

So the first two missiles hit Washington, D.C., where me and my two sisters live. The second missile hit the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in Central California coast. My brother works

that nuclear power plant. So the first two missiles killed my whole family. We didn't do well in that book. All right, here's my two nitpicks. So it's mainly very well researched, but I can tell the parts where she glossed over. One, when she went to the boomer class

to missile subs, so our missile subs fired missiles at the end, right? So these would be like an Ohio class probably missile subs. I know a lot about subs. My brother was on subs. She talks about when the order comes in for firing the missiles that alarm bells start wailing on the sub. That's missile launch time. It's missile launch time.

They don't do alarm bells on subs. The whole point is that the sub is supposed to be as quiet as possible. They wear sneakers on these things just to try to make sure that like their footsteps make sound. They're not going to have a claxon bell sound. to tell the submariners it's time to fire missiles. Because the whole point is you fire these missiles and are supposed to go back under and not being detected. So that was not true. And the other thing I didn't understand is the president's on Marine 2, right?

So it's on the, or Marine 1, the helicopter, right? And they're rushing away from the White House to try to get to Mount Storm because they know the missiles coming for the White House. And there's a particular secret service team that's with him, that's responsible for getting them there. And they're doing the math and be like, we're not going to get, I don't think we're, we're going to get far enough away from the explosion for at least electromagnetic pulse that's going to might take out this helicopter. So what do they do? Like we're going to put a parachute on the president and one of the Secret Service members

and we'll jump, we'll parachute out over Maryland. But here's my nitpick. Why not just land a helicopter? Why not just like, what we'll do is we'll just land a helicopter on a field and if it does disable us, it's better that we landed the helicopter than we parachuted the president out. and if it doesn't, we can take off again and keep going. Like, why would you parachute out of the helicopter because you were worried that,

why not just land a helicopter? So I didn't, that part. But anyways, I read this book in one day, so it's a... I'll have to borrow it. Yeah, I'll own it to. It's a cool nonfiction experience. All right, a less good experience. Oh, oh, Crichton estate.

I read, I regret to inform you, eruption by, I'm putting big quotation, marked round list by Michael Crichton and James Patterson. Michael Crichton has been dead for like 20 years now. They're still miraculously discovering books he started and other people are finishing. So James Patterson ended this book. This would have been an awesome Michael Crichton book in his prime. It's about a volcano on Hawaii is going to have this big explosion and like they're dealing

with the volcano science. And supposedly Crichton had started working, like interviewing volcanologists, like he really was trying to understand it. But in the hands of James Patterson, which means in the hands of the people that James Patterson has anonymously write his books, it was just terrible.

Really? Oh, just terrible. The science was incoherent. The space was incoherent. You couldn't understand what was going on. It didn't matter. Nothing made sense.

I didn't know who the characters were. I didn't care. It was some of the most, like, wooden, like old-fashioned, like weirdly like paternalistic, misogynistic characters. It's like all the women just loved this guy

for no real reason. It was just a really poorly written book. Now, I have to read it because I'm a Crichton completist. And I decided long ago that his post-death books, posthumous books, I would count those as trying to read every Crichton book. Because I thought there would be like two. They keep finding these things. They keep finding. I read the pirate book.

No one else read the pirate book that he supposedly started writing. Like, they're not, anyways, it was not a good book. Do you ever go on, like, Reddit threads about this? I should. I'm thinking about, I don't know if I mention this to you, I'm thinking about putting on the wall as we renovate the MakerLab portion of the HQ, putting first edition Crichton's on the wall. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's like motivation. All right.

So I had to get the taste of that out of my mouth. So I picked up literally out of a grocery store book rack in upstate New York. I grabbed the latest Lincoln Child thriller, Diablo Mesa, because they know what they're doing. Lincoln and Child together, they write, it's just good thrillers, right? not necessarily innovative, but just good thrillers. Diablam made it was great. It was like, this is just what I wanted, well-constructed, took the bad taste of eruption out of my mouth.

And then I finished by reading Gwendolyn Bounds' book Not Too Late. There's a book, it's good for us, Jesse. It's about she got heavily into adventure obstacle course racing starting in her mid-40s. And it's now like podium places in her age group, like is really good at it. And the book is about, like, this middle age is not too late to actually get, like, heavily involved in, like, a really involving potentially even physical activity. Golf. Yeah.

And not as rare is obstacle racing. I liked it, though. I know it. I liked it because it's, like, written for me, right? She's, like, a couple years older than us when she started this. She's in her 50s now. I was like, yeah, I should, I should, because, you know, partial, like, anyways, I, I thought it was good. She's a good writer.

And it was inspiring. Like, yeah, you should. Yeah. I have a good buddy who got really into that, too. He's a little older than us, but younger than her. Got really into obstacle racing, right? Because it's something you can kind of get into if you really train. Like, they have age groups.

It's not so professionalized, too, that it's like the genetic freaks are going to win it, right? Like, you have a chance. And he built all the obstacles on his property. and had installed in his office the grip-related hanging things on his ceiling. So he could just practice. He got really good, too, but then had, like, a gnarly injury. Like, I don't know what. He sent me the photos.

Don't send me this compound fracture. Like, just, ugh, gnarly. And I think he never got back to it. He fell off something. And who knows, I'm reading a book about rowing right now. So I'm flirting with maybe that's a good midlife move. I just saw boys in the boat. Yeah.

George Clooney, director. that. Oh, he did? Yeah. I'm reading David Halberstams the amateurs about the Olympic hopeful American scholars in the 84 Olympics. Reminds me of my halcyon days as a Dartmouth rower. Except for these guys are in better shaped than I am. All right. Anyways, that's all the time we have for today.

Thank you, Zach, for these awesome hats. I might wear this a couple places. You think it's too declarative? Like, people are going to like, well, if it was smaller, you might be more willing to wear it more often, but it was just declarative. You're kind of putting in people's faces. I think it's kind of what you say about the Russian, you know, corn farmers. Right, because the CCP are the final letters of the Russian name for the Soviet Union. Soviet Union, yeah. I still appreciate it. Thank you, Zach. All right, we'll be back next week with another normal episode of this podcast. Summer's over. We're back in it. We will see you then. And until then,

And 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.

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