Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 318: Take a Break

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

One of the more viral suggestions from Cal’s recent book, SLOW PRODUCTIVITY, was to occasionally skip out of work to see a movie. In this episode, Cal dives deep into criticisms of this advice and decodes what this tells us about where knowledge work is faltering and how we can make things better. He then answers questions from listeners and reacts to some productivity advice given from a well-known CEO.  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:  [7:47]  - Can I work deeply in my chaotic job? [27:17] - Can I use my inbox as a task list? [31:36] - How do you look at travel within your plans for a deep life? [35:12] - How can I get my partner to stop talking about work? [41:14] - How do I practice slow productivity with health issues? [44:54] - CALL: How can I decide on what career path to pursue? [49:14]  CASE STUDY: Switching careers after a 20 year law stint [56:11]  CAL REACTS: The CEO Who Swears by Time Blocking [1:05:04]  Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?cnbc.com/2024/05/09/want-to-boost-your-productivity-hit-the-movies-during-work-expert-says.htmlcnbc.com/amp/2024/09/09/whole-foods-ceo-swears-by-time-blocking-to-boost-productivity.html Thanks to our Sponsors:  mybodytutor.comblinkist.com/deepcozyearth.com/deeprhone.com/cal 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 here in my Deep Work, H-Q, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, there are some news where we got more award news. So there's this organization I have it here, the S-A-B-E-W, the Society for Advancing Business, Editing, and Writing. been around 60 years. So they have this annual business writing awards that includes awards for the best business journalism of the year and awards for the best business books of the year where they divide them into three categories. They have this prestigious panel of judges. They give money to the winners, etc.

Anyways, they just announced the day that we're recording that slow productivity is on the short list for the best business book of 2024. awards in one of the three category. So it's in the career and financial development category. It's my book. It's Charles Duhigg's book, Super Communicators. It's Think Faster, Talk Smarter, and Fifteen Lives Women are Told About Work. So supposedly, according to my publicist, it's cool. This is a good news. So maybe we'll win, but at least we were a finalist. I feel good about that. Have you read any other books? Charles's book I've read, yeah. Yeah. It came out right around the same time as mine. We both write for the New Yorker. I've crossed paths with him before. It's a good book. So that's cool. You know, what's nice is, here's the way I see it with the slow productivity now that we're seven months out, eight months out of that book coming out. When it first came out, I think there was, from a review perspective, a little bit of confusion from some reviewers early on who sort of knew me from the New Yorker. Right. So they're thinking like, okay, here's a professor, a New Yorker writer writing a book about productivity in the workplace.

They had in mind what a book like that would be like. They weren't really used to the business space. They weren't used to the pragmatic nonfiction space. And they seemed surprised by the fact, for example, that the book has advice in it. Listeners of this podcast is not surprised. Readers of my previous book aren't surprised. Like, yeah, these practical ideas for people finding depth and distracted world. But these early reviewers were confused.

Like, what is going on here? He's telling people what to do. My God, like, how can you tell people what to do? like what about the nuance and just you know it's like a complete not knowing what to do with this thing then as time goes on we're getting evidence from people who are specifically in the space of this type of book so in the business book space as time went on this is where we're getting the good positive feedback so you know amazon chooses it number one business book of the first half of 24. Next big idea book comes along. One of the two best idea books of the quarter it came out,

you know, sitting at the thousand of their subscribers. The Society for Business Writing, you know, comes out, yeah, there's one of like the three or four best business books of its category of the entire year. So it's like once we actually had enough breathing room for people who know this space to take a look at the book, I think it's gotten some good recognition. Yeah. So it was interesting. Like early on, it was the, he's giving advice. You know, there's a lot of Pearl clutching. He's giving advice. Oh, my God. I think that's entirely, it's just a code switch. It's just a mismatch. I speak to different audiences. And the audience that's used to like a New Yorker piece is confused why I'm giving advice, much in the same way that, you know, an audience that knows us from this podcast and our advice might be confused by, you know, one of my academic pieces on what's going on with the dynamics of technology. So I feel good as what I'm trying to say is I feel better now that I did after that initial confusion. You kind of talk about how certain authors tiptoe around giving advice with pieces before, right? Yeah, for the most part, it's one of the things I did differently in my career.

For the most part, there was two schools of writers who were writing sort of in the space, idea. It's kind of like idea space, business space. There's two schools of writers that emerged in the late 90s, early 2000s. And I call them the New York School and the San Francisco School. The New York School, and I call it that because some of the big names here came out of East Coast journalism, want to give advice. So like Malcolm Gladwell was like the dean of the New York School at this type of writing. But you had many other writers. Do Higg is in this model as well.

You know, he comes out the New York Times background. Now he's at the New Yorker. And Adam Grant probably comes out of this school. I mean, he's from Penn, but, you know, East Coast. You don't give advice, right? That's like anathema. Then you had this West Coast school, this sort of San Francisco school that was coming more out of like the Silicon Valley scene. And then you had the Tim Ferriss's and the Ramit Sethi's.

And this was like life hacking and advice. And it's all systems and processes. And it was really far the other way. And it was like these kind of two schools, a professional journalist who were like never give advice. That's chicken soup for the soul stuff, right? That's the 1980s cheesy self-help. And then you had sort of this West Coast school that was over super technical, super process oriented or whatever. And I was willing to connect both worlds.

And my whole thing, and I called it smart self-help, was why not write like you would get from the East Coast school, but also be specific in there as well. Let's put both in there. Like, let's be smart, have smart ideas. You know, a lot of my books have a two-part structure. Part one is ideas. It's very East Coast. Part two is advice for acting on those ideas, and it has much more of a West Coast feel

to it. And I sort of put those two together. Like, why can't we have good writing? But also be very specific at some point about here is one way you might. might actually take action on what you just read about. And so that was a genre I sort of created. And now the thing was, that was great. It's a confusing genre if you're like a book reviewer,

but no one was reviewing my books because, like, the New York Times book review doesn't typically review business books, right? So it wasn't a problem. The problem that happened more recently and sort of careful what you wish for is, I got so well known that people are going to review my books. They had heard about me. And so it was like with slow productivity for the first time, This smart self-help format that I created over the last decade or so was getting sudden scrutiny and attention from like professional book reviewers, including book reviewers who I don't think have ever picked up an advice book in their life. Right. And that, so that was what was interesting. So anyways, this is all, so that was interesting. But I'm very glad now that we have like the kind of like the, the channels that we long know that really care about business books in general. Fortunately, for me and my own sanity, they're all saying,

Oh, yeah, this is a good book. Yeah. I mentioned east coast, west coast. All right, so anyways, we got a good show. I actually, in our deep dive, I'm going to speak in reactions. I'm going to talk about a piece of advice of mind for my book that has been publicized and publicly creating backlash. We're going to use this to look deeper at some issues in modern work in a high-tech world. We've got a good array of questions.

Cover a lot of good topics. It's got a case that we've got a call. And then in the final segment, there is a sort of a well-known figure is using some of my advice in a slightly different way. And so we're going to see how he's modified it and getting a sort of interesting case study of a famous person trying to find some more depth. All right. So we've got a lot to get to. So let's do so and start with our deep dive. So today I want to talk about an idea from my most recent book, Slow Productivity.

this is an idea that proved controversial. I'm going to argue that a lot of the negative reaction to this idea capture something crucially wrong about the way we think about knowledge work in our current digital moment. I will then use these insights to offer advice for how we might correct this wrong and how you might yourself find a little less burnout in your own professional existence. All right, so what is the piece of advice that we're going to base this deep dive on? I'm going to bring up an article on the screen here for those who are watching. This was from my book Slow Productivity, but I wrote about it in multiple venues after the book came out, including the New York Times.

Here is an article about it that was published at CNBC. Let me read you the headline of this article. Want to boost your productivity? Hit the movies during work, expert says. Spoiler alert, that expert is me. Let me read the opening to the article here. Want to get more done? Try stepping back, way back, and maybe out to the movie theater during the workday.

At least that's one productivity tip from Cal Newport, a Georgetown university professor and author of slow productivity. Okay. So I offered this advice. I lived this advice. In fact, and this is true, earlier the week that we are recording this, I did exactly this advice, more or less. I didn't go to a movie theater, but I did watch a movie during the day. here was the setup, just to contextualize this advice. I had some deadlines I was working on, two separate articles that were kind of both trying

to get moved on to production, and I've been working really hard on this during my writing hours. I write for the first half of most days, and I had to work on Sunday on this because deadlines are coming up, really worked hard on it. Monday, really worked hard on it. Tuesday, got everything in Tuesday. Wednesday morning did like the final tweaks, and I said to my stuff, You know what I'm going to do?

I'm not, as my plan for the week says, now move on to returning to my book today and writing. I'm going to watch a movie instead. And I did. And I got that locked in. And I watched, and I am not embarrassed to admit it, because I put this off for a long time. The 2016, I believe, Imnight Shyamalan movie split. The second movie in his post-after-earth comeback, a comeback that began with 2015. the visit.

I was interested. I was on a Shaman kick. I forgot why. I was reading about him for something. I forget why. And then I went back as like, what if I miss? What did I miss from Shaman during this period in which I was having young kids? And so I went back and I watched it with James McAvoy and it was fantastic and I really enjoyed it and have a lot of thoughts about it.

But it was great. And then today, so we're recording this on Thursday, back to my book writing. So like, I went and watched a movie. I took a break during the middle of the movie. of a day because I had judged, I need to take my foot temporarily off the gas pedal here. I need to regroup and recharge. And I was able to come back with more energy today. So that's like what I'm talking about when I say see a movie during the day. And I really detailed this and more with more gory details in my book, solar productivity. All right. So there was pushback to this idea.

I'm going to paraphrase here a common piece of pushback. If you work for a company, you are agreeing to give them eight hours of your labor per day. If you step out for two hours, you're essentially stealing. All right, so this was sort of the nature of the pushback I was getting on this idea. I couldn't imagine if one of my employees was gone for two hours, they would, you know, they would fire that employee. A lot of that sort of pushback. I think this is an important pushback because if we look deeper at what is the source of this objection,

what we are going to find is two different models for thinking about work. The first model that's implicitly at play here is what I call cranking. And I'm taking this from the phrase cranking widgets. And it describes the industrial era practice of using humans as part of a complex production machinery. So starting with mills and then with factories as the Industrial Revolution picked up steam, you would build these production processes to, to, you know, whatever it is you were doing, milling, cotton, producing cars. And for the parts of this process that you couldn't really build a mechanical way of doing it,

you would stick a human in there. You know, so we have a semi-automated loom, but we still need a human to move the, whatever the thing is that runs across the loom. They have to move that manually. There's a lot of parts of building the car that kind of happen automatically, but we still need someone to turn the bolt that connects the steering wheel because you kind of have to get in there and do that. Look, when it comes to cranking,

the owners of these factories or mills would prefer to replace the people with machinery if they could. They're just using the people where they just don't have machinery to do it. And then over time, as machinery has gotten better, we've needed less and less people in these procedures. From the cranking perspective, the critiques of seeing a movie occasionally during the workday makes a lot of sense.

When you see employees as crankers, them being there is critical to what you're doing. If the guy who attaches the steering wheel to the Model T's leaves the factory during the day to go watch a Charlie Chaplin movie, that's a really big problem because all the Model T's are going to come off the line without steering wheels or the whole assembly line is going to have to stop while we wait for that guy to get back. So from a cranking mindset, yes, you can't take it.

breaking breaks during the work day is a problem. There's another way to think about work, though, and this has been around for a long time as well, and it's what I call creating. So we're going from cranking to creating. Creating means that you are autonomously applying skill and decision-making over time to create something valuable. There's even a more formal definition that says, you know, add value to materials. You take in some material and you do something to it, and in the end you have something more valuable, whether it is you're carving something out of wood or producing written information that has become more

valuable because you've applied your brain to it. This could be an individual, not necessarily a solo act. Creating can also be a group of people working together to create something as well, right? So at Ford's factories, you were cranking on assembly lines, but at the Oldsmobile Ben's, the original Ben's car factory, it wasn't a factory, it was a group of craftsmen that would just sit around and produce a car from scratch, and they were doing more creating than they were cranking. So here's a key point.

When you're looking at creating, it's not a big deal that you have your foot going off and on the gas pedal, right? I know a fine woodworker, for example. This name is Gary. I wrote about him in digital minimalism. Takes him a couple weeks to finish a commission. Builds really beautiful stuff out of what. If on Thursday from 10 to 1230, he watches split. It doesn't matter.

Right? It doesn't matter. What matters is over this multi-week period, he's able to have. enough concentrated, skilled work that he produces the table. It doesn't really matter exactly when those hours happen or that they're contiguous. It's like, are you producing good tables in a reasonable amount of time? So for creators, this advice of seeing the moving the afternoon is not a problem. All right.

So here's what's happened in our economy writ large. The industrial revolution came along and turned more and more jobs into cranking jobs. We had a huge amount of cranking jobs. It used to be you had farmers and artisan craftspeople. the Industrial Revolution came along, and more and more of work was actually cranking. You were working as a human gear in a complicated production process. Then the knowledge economy became big in the 20th century, right? So we coined the term knowledge work in the 1950s, and by the time we get to the turn of the millennium,

this is something like 50% or more of the U.S. economy is coming out of knowledge work. And in knowledge work, where you have a lot of sort of well-educated white-collar workers, more and more of what they're doing is much closer to creating. Whether you're creating computer code or marketing campaigns or lectures for the classroom, diagnoses as a doctor or white paper reports on an industrial sector, it is creating more than it is cranking. There is no well-defined production process that you're a part of. So these are the people I'm really writing for in slower productivity, is the sort of knowledge workers who are creating. And this is who I'm offering this advice about seeing the movie as a larger metaphor for being able to,

to titrate up and down the intensity of your work to make sure that things are sustainable over time, that you're not just going all out all the time every day, and that for this type of complicated work, you need a little bit more give and pull. So once we understand these two groups and who I'm writing for, now we can see the problem that's facing our knowledge economy today. The people who are complaining about my advice are a symptom of this underlying problem that in the knowledge economy, we're treating creators as crankers.

And I get into this in my book, Slow Productivity, how did this come to happen? It's because it's hard to manage people in knowledge work. Pre-industrial creating was autonomous. It was you're an individual. Shakespeare's dad made gloves. It was just him, right?

And he had a shop above, They lived above a shop and he made gloves. Knowledge work now you have a thousand people working in the same office, and we have managers above them, and that we have to connect what they're doing to, like, initiatives and resources, and so we have to manage a bunch of creators now, and it was complicated to do. It's much easier to manage cranking, so we decided we would treat creators like crankers. This gave rise to what I call in the book, Pseudoproductivity, which is the idea of using visible activity as your proxy for useful effort.

from this mindset, to see someone not giving effort or to take a break from giving effort is a problem. It's the steering wheel guy going out to see the Charlie Chaplin movie. This is a problem, however, at a larger scale, because it's a mismatch. We are managing creators as if they're crankers. This makes the manager's jobs easier, but it makes the creators miserable. Creating is best served by a mixture of autonomy with accountability. I know what I'm going to do, see what I did and see if it's good, but also leave me alone to get it done. That's how creating happens best.

And as I get into with example after example in slow productivity, one of the things this requires is, again, the careful titration of energy, that you're really focused on something and then you have to pull back a little bit to recharge or try to figure out a new angle of attack and then you put the energy back up again. the effort over time is a sort of jagged, unpredictable graph. It's not just a clear step function. I'm working. It's up. I'm done working and it's down. When we treat people who are trying to do this creating as crankers, I want to see you work at all times.

In fact, I'm going to throw a lot more kind of cranky-friendly stuff at you while you're trying to create emails to answers and meetings to attend. It's exhausting. You're taking something that is supposed to be more up and down and variable and say, just work all out all the time, and it exhausts people and it burns people out. So what I'm arguing here is that we need more clarity in the knowledge economy. When you're dealing with creators, that is people that you want to apply skill to create valuable things, treat them like creators. Give them autonomy, give them freedom, do this without excessive surveillance or interruption, and on the other end, hold them accountable.

So we're going to let you go and build the stuff we want you to build us. Now, if the stuff is not good, then we have a problem. If you can't show me the value you're creating, then I might have to show you to a different role or to a different job. But I'm not going to look over your shoulder like the supervisor at the Ford plant. I'm not going to get upset if I can't see visible activity at all times. I'm not going to demand that you do 100 other things as well. When you have a pseudo-productivity mindset, I don't care if I'm bombarding you with emails and meetings. You're going to be here for eight hours doing effort, you know, putting those proverbial steering wheels on at a really fast pace.

So who cares how much stuff I throw at you? You're going to be here doing stuff anyways. But when I have a creator mindset, it's like, no, no, that's getting in the way. Don't go bother Gary the woodworker with a bunch of administrative questions. He's trying to build the table. So that's what I think we need to do. And if you want people to be crankers, be clear that's what you want them to do. And don't expect them to also be creators.

Make it clear this is what the role is. Give them the right support for it. Let's put the right controls around it. But when we kind of mix these two things together, we take largely creator jobs, but we manage them as if they're cranking jobs, that is one of the key sources of exhaustion and burnout and frustration that we see in the modern knowledge economy. So in the reactions to the simple piece of advice,

every once in a while I'll go see a movie during the day, in the reactions to that simple piece of advice, we see a complicated problem. And it's a problem that we can only solve by being clear about what it is we're actually trying to do and evolve the way we actually manage people to reflect what's actually going to work. there we go jesse you gotta see a movie yeah you see split no i haven't yeah it's interesting you know so

shaman had uh he was put in movie jail because he had two flops in a row uh and they get out a movie jail so he had he did um the last air bender and after earth will smith sort of ill-conceived uh avatar competitor to get out of movie jail, he raised, he borrowed $5 million by mortgaging his house and said, I'm just going to do this low budget sort of comedy thriller. I'm going to film it myself. And he spent, he filmed it himself his own $5 million. And then went to find someone to distribute it. And no one, they're like, no, you're in movie jail.

Like, no one's going to distribute this thing. But then finally, Jason Blum from Blumhouse, Saul, it was like, you know, they did paranormal activity. they're the kings of like a $5 million movie that makes $100 million is like a very profitable thing. And I'm like, all right, we'll distribute it. And it was very successful. It would be like $100 million. But they spent nothing on it.

So that was like all profit. And then the second movie of his comeback was split. Okay. Which it's, but also $9 million. He filmed it on the cheap. Made like $257 million. It's a cool movie. I don't want to say too much about it.

I really like it. there's a third movie now I have to see. So if you've seen that movie, you know what I'm talking about, but I'm not going to spoil it for people. But the point is, it was really fun, just to be able to spend a couple hours, like reading reviews of this and watching this movie in the middle of the morning on a Wednesday. Made such a huge psychological difference for me. Oh, so you read a lot of the reviews, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. I read a lot about the movies I watch.

Sometimes I watch and read about it. Sometimes I read, like I'll take breaks and read and then keep watching some more. Yeah, I love doing that simultaneously. Interesting. Yeah. I thought about Shumbalam. Anyways, we've got some good questions to get to, but first, let's hear from one of our sponsors. I want to talk first about, man, it's one of my favorite sponsors, Cozy Earth.

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There's always last-minute request. Do you think there's hope for me being able to carve out time for deep work to contribute technically to these projects? Well, look, we've got to face the productivity drag in here. 15 simultaneous projects are going to create 15 times whatever amount of work managing one product would require. So this is going to be the meetings to check-ins and some level of interruptions. You multiply that by 15. it's probably every minute of your day. All right.

You can make this more sustainable, right? So if you're managing a bunch of things, you can make it more sustainable. And my best advice for that would come from my book, A World Without Email. And this book really gets into how collaboration should happen in a way that is more friendly for your brain. And that book would say, look, if you have all these things going on, you really have to start seeing unscheduled messages that require responses. You have to start seeing that as a productivity poison to kill. That's what's getting you having to just jump back and forth in context shift all day. So you can manage these projects better by having structured ways that you communicate with people,

that you see the status of things, that you hold on to things until you have times to talk about it, more real-time conversation, less asynchronous back and forth. There's a lot you can do to make this work more palatable, but it's still going to take up all your time. So if you want to do deep work, which we'll think of that as more of a creating activity where managing these products is more of a cranking activity, that's a separate role. And if you want that role, you have to be explicit about it and you have to essentially get hired into that new role. So either if you want to be doing deep work, you either say I don't want to be a manager, or you say, I have the second role I want to take on. I want to be hired into the second role of technically contributing to these two projects. And here's how much time this requires.

And here's what I'm going to do it. And that time is now protected. And we figured out how the other stuff should work. But if you're just thinking, I have all this stuff going on and I'm just hoping on my own to now fit deep work into there, you're not facing the dragon. You have 15 projects worth of management to do. There's no time. So make that work less onerous by getting rid of all the unscheduled interrupt. But it doesn't make the work go away.

If you want to do deep work, you've got to see how many hours do I have? You have to treat it like a second job. You have to say, when am I going to do that second job? You have to have a schedule to protect it. You've got to get permission from this from the people who are above. Don't take it lightly and don't think that it's something you can just casually do. This sort of goes back a little bit to what I was talking about in the deep dive, which is we sort of mixed together cranking and creating. And these are two separate things, and we can't just casually do both.

And we can't just casually think of ourselves as both. what we do to optimize one is different than what we would do to do the other thing well. Managing 15 projects well is a very different state to be in than making really good technical contributions to one thing. All right. So, you know, let's keep those separations clear. Let's keep the work sustainable. And then ask the question of do I want to try to add in a second role and not take lightly what that would actually require? I think we talked about this in old episodes, Jesse.

This might have even been before your time. I used to talk about when you have these split, if you have a real split role, like professors have this. You have all these service administrative roles and you got this really clear deep role of producing research. You treat them like two different part-time jobs that have different scheduled hours. And you have like different productivity systems for each and you don't mix them at all. It's like this is when I'm working at the gap and this is when I'm working at the banana stand. And they're in two different places and they're two different jobs. And I don't do both at the same time.

And I wear a different uniform here than I do over there, right? And so we had this whole philosophy I talked about in the early episodes about if you have two jobs, treat them like two jobs. Different systems, different times. When you're working on one, you're only working on one. When you're working on another, you're only working on another. What I fear for this question here, for Adam here, is, you know, he's at the gap so long there's no time for the banana stand, but he's still kind of diluting himself into thinking that there is. All right, what do we got next? Next question is from Axel.

I'm not a believer of zero inbox. I'd rather handle it as an unprocessed task list. However, the number of unwanted messages that come in is overwhelming. I currently have 20,000 unread emails and counting, and I'm beginning to miss some important emails. Can I use my inbox as a task list? I mean, Axel, when you say, like, I'm not a believer of, you know, cleaning out my inbox.

It's like saying, I'm not a believer that humans can't fly. So I'm going to go jump off this cliff. It doesn't matter what you believe or not. The truth is the truth. And the truth in this case is your inbox is a terrible task list and you can't use it as your task list. You see why. You have 20,000 unread emails. That's a terrible task list.

That's not working. You're going to have to process things out of your email. If you have any sort of non-trivial type modern digital error knowledge work job, your email has to be seen like your physical mailbox would have been seen 25 years ago. You wouldn't use your physical mailbox at your office 25 years ago as how you keep track of things. Just letting stuff pile up and there and just a few times a day you go to the mail room and start just looking through all the stuff in your mailbox and like, oh, there's a memo pulling something out and working on that, right? Your inbox is the same way.

I know there's more stuff that comes faster, so it's more of a pain to keep on top of, but you absolutely have to. What I suggest doing is role-based status list, right? So you have a different board or list for every role you have in your work. Each of these boards or lists are divided into different statuses, stuff I don't know what to do with. I need to clarify, stuff that's on the back burner that I've committed to but don't have a timeline, stuff I'm working on this week, stuff to discuss at our weekly meeting with this person, stuff I'm waiting to hear back from someone about and what I should do once I hear. here back. You've got to have these statuses. Everything that comes in your inbox has to move on

to one of these lists. You can copy text out your inbox and paste it if you're using a digital tool like Trello or a Google document. You can carve this into clay with a chisel. I don't care about what tools you're using, but the information has to get associated with a role, and within that role, it needs a particular status. And once you process something, you erase it from your inbox and that is a perfect indicator. Like, if it's in your inbox, it means you haven't got to it yet. And when you get to it, that's how you're processing it. It's a pain.

But it's the job. It's what you have to do, right? You are having a fire hose of information coming at you. It doesn't go away if you organize it poorly. It's not easier to execute if you ignore it. Your day does not become less stressful if you pretend like those 20,000 things don't exist. All right.

You got to process the information so you know what to do with it. So something like role-based status list is the thing to do. Now this means your email checking becomes more consolidated because you're processing stuff so you can spend an hour here and an hour there. It's not like a background activity. If you're going to start doing this, it's also going to push you to move more interaction out of your inbox because you're like, no, no, no, no, I don't want to be in my inbox so much anymore.

I'm trying to keep it empty. And that's good because that'll give you. pressure to have better collaboration strategies that aren't happening with back and forth unscheduled messages. Like I've written whole books about it, but you can't use your inbox. Here's the summary. You can't use your inbox as a to-do list. It's not a good to-do list. All right, who we got? Next question from Mandy. How do you look at travel within your plans for a deep life? We have found travel to be some of our most memorable experiences, but also quite disruptive and expensive, plus a whole new ballgame now that we have a toddler. We sometimes have trouble determining

when we should go somewhere and where, and there seems to be so many factors to weigh. So, Mandy, I think this really gets into our deep life discussion, and in particular the difference between working backwards from a lifestyle vision, working forwards towards a goal. Right. So, you know, I'm a big advocate of you have this clear vision for your lifestyle. What's important to us? What do we want our life to be like now? And in five years from now and 10 years from now, and then you work backwards from that vision, saying, given our circumstances and opportunities and obstacles right now, how do we move closer to this vision? This allows for sort of flexible, interesting thinking that reacts to the realities of your situation on the ground. So you like travel, but that means

there's elements of that are probably part of your lifestyle vision. Like we like to go to interesting places or be exposed to interesting people or experience awe in nature. Like there's the specific things you're getting out of travel can show up in that vision. How you get there just depends on what's going on. You have a toddler right now. So when you're figuring out how do we get closer to this lifestyle vision in the next few years, it's not going to involve we need to go to the Himalayas and spend three weeks because that doesn't make sense with a little kid.

That's not going to go well. So what I think might be happening here is instead of working backwards from your lifestyle vision, you're working forwards by committing to a more specific goal or activity that vaguely seems positive to you. So like, we like travel. We should travel a lot. That's working forward to a goal, hoping doing this thing will make our life better, as opposed to working backwards from where you're trying to get. And when it's, you know, if it's awe in nature or something, and before you had your kid, you were getting that by traveling, you know, to distance exotic locations.

Well, when you have your kid, you're like, okay, well, that's not a reasonable thing to do right now until they get a little bit older. But how can we get on nature right now with a toddler? Well, it's going to be more local. actually what we're going to do is you start to get creative. Now, we live in D.C., but we're going to rent for this year, this cabin up in, like, the Canaan Valley in West Virginia. It's like an hour and a half away or two hours away or something. We're going there on the weekends. Like, we don't, we have a kid yet that doesn't have activities.

So, and we're bored. We're stuck at home with the kids. So what if we had this cabin that we kind of rent, we're not going to buy it, but we're just going to rent it. It's like a seasonal rental. We're going to keep going up there. We have an Airbnb we do a lot. We're going to go up like twice a month. and just really get to know this one beautiful area.

And the Canaan Valley is a very beautiful area. Just don't go in the winter because it's, you know, roughly 10 times colder than Antarctica. But it's otherwise like a really nice area. And think about it. You're like we're up there. We're getting to know it. There's these paths we do with the pack. And like you're obtaining the thing that's important to you.

But in a way that makes sense for your current life. Because what's important was that thing that was important to you, not the particular idea you had in mind for how to do it, which was, you know, maybe we travel, we fly to, you know, we go down to Patagonia and do stuff like that. So, okay, let's say the thing you like, I'm just running through some experiments here. Let's say the thing you liked about travel, the actual lifestyle component you liked was going to interesting places and meeting interesting people. You have a toddler at home now. Like, okay, so how do we prioritize that? And we're like, well, maybe we live near this city.

So like, let's really get to know, like, these different neighborhoods in the city or the restaurant. It's over here or like what's going on with. There's this kids theater down at the Kennedy Center now. We're going to like get a subscription there and go there every summer. We can go there every weekend and see these shows. And you can find ways to satisfy that vision given your current constraints, opportunities and obstacles. That's lifestyle-centric planning.

So this type of thing happens all the time where when we work forward instead of backwards, we get stuck. We get stuck on like this particular thing is. important, even if it doesn't work anymore, and it's causing more trouble than harm. We're dragging a toddler on these long flights, and it's costing us a lot of money, and it's disrupting to our schedules, and we end up unhappy about it. That's what happens when you focus on, like, does activity or goal is going to save me, as opposed to this is what being saved looks like?

What's our best way to get there right now? That's at the essence of lifestyle-centric planning. I would also say, if you're frustrated about, you know, there's certain things that you with visions you like to get to that you can't get to right now with a toddler. This is a great time to do really forward thinking, right? Now you start thinking, like, you know what? We're really missing, maybe you really miss being overseas in certain places or like you're in love with Scandinavia.

You're like, yeah, it's hard with the toddler or something like that. Now you can start thinking, hey, this is being clarified for us. This piece of our vision is being clarified. How could we get to a life five years from now, 10 years from now, maybe like when our kid is in middle school or like even thinking to like when our kid goes to college where this is a much bigger part of our life because it's being clarified to us that this is important right now and now you start to think more creatively. Well, you know, if you moved over to consulting and I was able to make this fully remote,

I can't do that now, but let's think about how that could work. There might be a situation here where we could spend four months out of the year, you know, living on this glacier. It could open up some really interesting long-term thinking as well. So all this comes down to make your lifestyle vision clear, work backwards, flexibly, and creatively towards how do I get closer to this, given what I have available to right now? And it's going to open up lots of cool options. How can I find the most interestingness and happiness and subjective well-being right now?

It'll also clarify some of like more radical, longer-term things you might do as well. So it's an opportunity, Mandy. This is not, I would say, a problem. All right, moving right along. next up is Lisa how can I communicate that I've had heard enough of my partner's work issues without sounding like a jerk I feel like I'm an unpaid staff that is always available for event session I would say probably like a taser you know what I'm saying it's like if it gets past a certain threshold just right right down he goes boom I think it's like a Pavlovian thing there so like over time then he'll he'll sort of pull it back so Lisa actually I think what's interesting here is is probably what's going on with your partner. If he or she is venting a lot. So clearly they must be venting a lot.

Everyone vents a little bit like, oh, man, so-and-so is a pain at work today. But if they're venting to the place where, like, you're thinking about my taser solution, their relationship to their job's no good. Like, you need to get them listening to my podcast. In particular, here's what I would worry that's going on. When I hear someone who is an overventor, all they can think about is the negatives of their job, and you're talking about it all the time, it typically means like they're feeling as if they have a lack of autonomy or efficacy. I don't really have control over what I do. I don't feel like I'm doing, I'm able to do anything of any real value.

I'm, you know, I'm a widget cranker, and it feels nihilistic. I'm the Ron Livingston character in office space. And in that situation where you have no autonomy or efficacy, everything is a problem. And so you just see everything going on around you as a problem that is frustrating. This is corrosive over time. It's sort of corrosive to your soul. So how do you get out of this trap of feeling like you don't have autonomy or efficacy? You followed the advice from my book, so good they can't ignore you.

You build career capital. You invest career capital to move your work towards things to resonate and away from things that don't. The process alone of acquiring career capital, which means getting good at things that are unambiguously rare and valuable in your field, that process alone of seeking mastery already you're going to feel like you have autonomy. Like, I'm getting better. I have a plan. And then when you begin investing this career capitals, which means just using your skills as leverage to kind of control what your working existence is like, things get even better. You push it towards the stuff you like and away from the other stuff.

And it's not that so much that there's some magical configuration for your job that is going to make everything better. It's the fact that you have control over your job that's going to make things feel better. It's that autonomy, that efficacy. I'm getting better. People think I'm good. I'm using this to change how I do it. I'm respected for what I'm doing. I'm recognized for what I'm doing.

I use this as leverage to change the structure of my job. So I don't do this and I do this or whatever it is that you do. That's the sweet spot where it's not that the things that your partner is venting about now go away, but they don't seem so much as a threat. They're a nuisance. They're amusing. They're like, yeah, so-and-so's crazy. Who cares?

Yeah, the management. is, you know, blah, blah, blah, doesn't matter. I'm getting after it. As I get this skill, I'm about to go full remote. We're going to move to that, whatever, that glacier in Finland. Like, there's an excitement to it. So that's what I would say is really going on here. If they're venting all the time, they've got to change their relationship to their work.

And so, okay, get them listening to my podcast. Get them a copy of So Good They Can't Ignore You. Maybe what you should do for the near future is every time they vent past a certain threshold, just smack them with so good they can't ignore you. And eventually they'll be like an awesome. Or some of those ideas will just begin to seep through. But work, it shouldn't be a source of constant venting. And that typically is less about who you're working with, what you're doing, and more about your relationship to your job.

All right. What do we got next, Jesse? We have our corner. Slow productivity corner. Let's hear that theme music. So for those who are new, we have one question every week that specifically relates to my most recent book, Slow Productivity. We call it the Slow Productivity Corner. If you have not bought in red slow productivity yet, you need to.

It's like the Bible for, I would guess, 50% of what we talk about on this show. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week? Questions from Dan. I've owned an e-commerce business for 23 years and spent nearly all my time on the computer. How can I hear to the slow productivity principles with health issues that constantly interfere? Well, Dan, I would add an extra word to there. and I would say, you know, how could I possibly not adhere to the slow productivity principles with health issues that constantly interfere? In other words, you're exactly in a situation probably where you need slow productivity.

Because what is the opposite of slow productivity? If you don't have slow productivity, what are you probably facing? Pseudoproductivity. As we talked about in the deep dive of this episode, what is pseudo productivity? It's the equation of visible effort for usefulness. So in a pseudo-productivity regime, you have to just be rock and rolling visibly and busily all day long every day, up to here. Like you've got to have the thing pegged to tin all the time or you're seen as being unused or unproductive. That is a really hard state.

If you, for example, have health issues that means I can't have 100% energy all the time. You know, sometimes I can, sometimes I can. I maybe have appointments I have to go to or whatever it is, right? pseudor productivity is a disaster for anyone who doesn't have the privilege of being in a situation where you can just sort of crank it at 10 all day long. Why not? Suter productivity is a game for, you know, 24-year-olds without families and plenty of energy who can just like exist off of Red Bull. Slow productivity could be your savior here. Slow productivity says what matters is what you produce, not how you do it.

It's about sustainability. It's about keeping your workload reasonable, being able to have some balance back and forth in your energy depending on what's the the mandate of the moment, and then over time, saying, judge the quality of what I do, not the quantity. That in particular is good if you have sort of a non-traditional energy reserves or time availability, because it means as you get better, as you get better, as your quality goes up, you get more and more flexibility. Right.

One way to think about this is if you can barely make things work in your current situation at your current level of skill, like, okay, I have it. the amount of money I make for this or whatever, like it works, but it's very hard for me to produce this much stuff. You know, if you get twice as good, one of the options you have is to essentially like have the time you have to spend while keeping yourself in the same job position or earning situation, right? And that might be much better, right?

In other words, quality is one of the things you can trade quality for is much less actual total hours need to work. And for people who are in situations where they have huge time demands or health issues, having greatly reduced hours compared to someone else is important. And how do you do that without getting like part-time pay? You get really, really good. And instead of cashing in that skill to get more money, you cash it in to get more flexibility. That's a key slow productivity principle.

So I think slow productivity, you know, it's one of the advantages of this idea, is that we can't all succeed in the pseudo-productivity regime. We can't all just show up in the parking lot early, leave later, answer to every email chain as quickly as possible. always be there for the meeting in person. Not all of us can have that option as a means of sort of like getting ahead in the workplace. Slow productivity opens this up for so many more people. And it makes work sustainable. It makes work not a drag on your emotional life.

It makes work not a drag on your sort of like physical well-being. So, you know, Dan, I'm glad you found slow productivity. I think embracing those ideas might really be a positive thing for you. So I don't know if I explicitly made the connection between. slow productivity and sort of accessibility more generally in the book, but I should have because in the eight months as that book has come out, this connection has been made to me quite a bit. All right. Do we have a call this week, Jesse?

We do. Ooh, let's hear it. Okay. Hi, this is Sarah. I'm a psychologist. I'm very eager to apply the principles of deep work to my life. The strategies offered and the how-toes have been very helpful. However, I'm struggling with making a decision about what to choose.

I'm in my 30s and I work part-time. I've always had an inclination towards the arts, and now that I have the time, I would like to invest in it as a serious hobby and potentially turning it into a more serious endeavor. I'm torn between music and visual arts, particularly photography. I took lessons in playing classical music for a few years before I stopped practicing due to the demands of graduate school.

While I have more passion for me, music, I feel hopeless about becoming impressively good at it, given my age, but I see more opportunities in engaging with visual arts. Right now, I'm doing both, but my time is fragmented. I want to immerse myself in one and get really good at it. I would appreciate your guidance on this. All right, it's a good question. So let's generalize this question to be, how can I, not later in life, but like I'm in my 30s, right? I'm not just getting started. How can I have a like, transform like an interesting side hobby into like a bigger part of my life? Like in this case, like a creative pursuit. I got three things I want to suggest here that I think are going to be

useful. One, I would and I think you're picking this up in your question, avoid things that are notably win or take all in terms of their dynamics. So like professional music, let's say like classical music. That's very winner-take-all in their dynamics in the sense that there are like formal positions and orchestras that you can play these instruments. It is incredibly competitive and the best players are going to do it. Sports are very winner-take-all as well. Like you want to be an athlete.

It's like here are the teams. There's a ton of people who want these spots. The very best people get these spots. That's for obvious reasons. These are difficult targets to go towards a little later in life. It's hard starting in your 30s to become one of the best French horn players in your city. it's hard in your 30s to become, you know, one of the best baseball players in the state. So you want to avoid when you're coming to this a little later and transforming something on the side, there's something bigger.

Be worried about significant winner-take-all dynamics. So like businesses, small businesses don't have this. There's room for lots of different businesses to do lots of different things. Visual arts, I think you're picking up on this right. Like there's room in there for you to have an interesting visual art career because you are doing something unique that there's a big enough population who likes, you can make an interesting living doing that. It's not win or take all.

All right. Two, really lean into deliberate practice. Your time is limited, both in terms of how much you have available to work on the side pursuit because you have other things going on and in how much time you have to get good because you know, you're not 16 anymore.

Deliberate practice is the most efficient way to get better at things. It means like the time you spend trying to get better at something, things should be working on carefully designed activities that are designed to stretch you to get better at something that's critical in your field. It's like if you want to become a visual artist, don't just like I take a lot of photos. If you want to become a writer, don't just write your pages every day.

You've got to find a way now to get training. I want like every minute that I'm working on this right now to be stretching me to get better. Doing something I don't do well with guidance on how to do it better and then getting harsh feedback on whether or not I actually got there. So you've got to join things, work with people, get in the writers groups, work with, take classes, difficult classes like in photography, try to get exhibited in amateur minor things. You need that, you need the pressure, you need the training, you need to stretch. You don't want to waste the time. You want the time you're spending to be really high quality. And the final piece of advice that offer here, and this also comes

from my book, so good they can't ignore you, use money as a neutral indicator of value. you. So in particular when you're deciding, like, should I make this side hobby into my full-time job? Don't just guess I'm ready to do it. Don't just say, predict. I bet this would, I bet I could pull this off. Actually get people to give you money. And the reason why we use that term neutral indicator of value is that it means nothing for people to give you praise. people are happy to praise you. They're happy to say this is great. You should do this.

You should open a gallery. But people hate to give away their money unless they're really getting value for it. So if people are buying your photos, it's an indication they're good. If people are telling you we love your photos, it means nothing. If people are buying your albums, your music is good. If they're not, it's not ready yet for you to do full time. If you can sell your articles, if you've got a book deal for your book, then you're on to something with your writing.

If you have it, you have it. So let money be the neutral judge. finally that tells you, okay, this stuff is at a good enough level. In my book, this phrase comes from Derek Sivers, who talked about using this when he quit his job to become a full-time musician. He waited until he was making roughly his salary as a musician on the side to quit his job. And then when he started his company CD baby, he didn't go full-time to doing that company until the money it was making was more or less what he was making from his music.

And he's like, great, now I can move over to that. and he introduced this phrase. He's like, I used money as a neutral indicator of value. That's how I knew something was good enough for me to now trust this to be like my full-time thing. All right? So avoid things with significant winner-take-all dynamics. You want to find things. There's lots of little niches in which you could find an interesting home.

Deliberate practice as much as possible. The time you have the spend on the side thing, make that time useful. And three, if you're going to make something side into your full-time thing, make sure you're using money as your neutral indicator of value. everyone will tell you that your kid really looks good, but if they don't hire them for the modeling contract, you know, don't take them out of school. You know what I'm saying?

So same thing sort of here. Money, people don't lie with that. You know, Jesse, people often misunderstand Derek's quote. And so they think when he says money is a neutral indicator of value, that it means the amount of money you have tells people how valuable you are as like a person or something, which is like the opposite. gave away all the money he made when he sold the CD baby.

He just said, no, no, it's a neutral indicator of the value of what you're doing so you know whether or not that's it's working or not. Right. All right, we got a case study here. This is where people send in their own experiences, putting the type of advice we talk about on this show in the practice in their own life. You have a case study. You can send it to Jesse at calnewport.com. Today's case study is from Felipe, who writes,

I was a lawyer for 20 years, but never really enjoyed it for the obvious reasons. I'm also a single mother of three teens. Nevertheless, I put in the hours and I was eventually promoted to equity partnership. I was actually able to change some of the culture over a five-year period. I bought lots of copies of deep work. Oh, I actually bought lots of copies of deep work. The next step was to apply to become CEO so that I could continue educating my firm about the benefits of your messages. I talked about that stuff in my interview while the other candidates focused on profits,

bonus systems, and billable hours. I didn't get the CEO job, however, and I didn't make any sudden moves. A little time passed and I was offered to consultancy jobs. My law firm allowed me to work there one day per week. As per your advice, I wanted to first find out if there was a desire for my skills outside of law. The other element which was essential to me being able to take these steps was having a brilliant financial planner.

He was able to help me manage my finances to ensure that I planned out my savings and expenditures with a goal in mind. It turned out there was, there was, and 18 months later, I was able to hand my notice to the law firm and walk away. I have now been offered the CEO role of one of the firm started in 2025. This gave me 12 months to take some time with my daughters and to work on a book. Over the summer, I took my kids around Europe for a month, something I could never have found the time for it, nor the mental energy to do when I was working all the hours as a lawyer. The firm I will join is a financial advice firm with a totally different culture. You're sage advice has led me to a place where I honestly wake up excited for the day.

All right, there's some great examples here of various things we've talked about on the show, including in today's episode. One is lifestyle-centric planning, working backwards from what do I want my life to be like, and then looking for a flexible way forward to get there. I can assure you, if we go back 10 years, right, and say to Filippa, what is your, what do you want to do. What's your strategy? Where she is now is not something that you would just naturally come up with. Well, what I'm going to do is be the CEO of a financial advising firm. It's not like an obvious thing to do, but working backwards from her lifestyle vision, she worked her way through

what was available in the moment to get closer and closer, and these opportunities were excavated as she proceeded. People who work backwards from lifestyle visions end up in deep lives in ways they never could have predicted the full path of in advance. So I really like to see that example. Now, when you do this, when you're working backwards from a lifestyle vision, I said, look, I often talk in generalities. I say, yeah, you've got to work with like what are your opportunities, obstacles, what are your opportunities and obstacles that you face right now? And how do you make the most, given that, how do you find flexible ways forward or something like that? We get some specifics in here of what that might mean. It's like, what are a couple things that were tried here? Well,

one thing she tried was doing this one day a week in a different type of work. Right? That is an interesting move when you're trying to explore. I'm trying to get close to this lifestyle. This type of work might get me there. I don't know how. So let me dedicate one day a week to this work and see what I learn. I think that's going to open up options than it did.

The other thing I really want to underscore here is financial planning. I've actually added this to the Deep Life book I'm working on now. I talk about lifestyle-centric planning, working backwards from your lifestyle, not forward towards a ground goal. And I have this chapter I'm adding where I'm like, here's three kind of like really useful things to keep in mind when you're coming up with these plans working backwards, and one of them is financial. This can open up so many interesting paths that would otherwise be unavailable. When you get careful about your money and transparent about your money, I know how much we make and how much we spend, when you can create a lot of give in there. hey, I got promoted to equity partner, but we're still living what I was on as a fourth-year associate, right?

We have all this flexibility and give. Our lifestyle is not too inflated. We're careful with our investments. I can turn the money and expenses up and down. Being careful with your finances just really expands the options you have when you're trying to explore different ways to get closer to your lifestyle. And we see exactly this here. It allowed Felipe to take a year off and then the move to this other position.

I'm sure it's probably not as well paid as being an equity partner. So it's financial planning. is like one of these tools you can use when you're trying to feel your way towards this lifestyle vision you have, the more control and flexibility you have in your finances, the more paths that are actually open to you. So I think there's a lot of cool on-the-ground concrete tactics captured in this one story. All right, we've got a final segment coming up, but before we do, let's hear from another sponsor. I want to talk in particular about our friends at My Body Tutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, My Body Tutor's founder for many years. He used to be the fitness advice expert for my blog in the early days.

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When you sign up, they connect you to a coach. And this coach helps you come up with, hey, here's what we're doing with nutrition. Here's what we're doing with exercise. And then here's the key thing. You check in every day. It's not time consuming. They have this, it's an app.

It's simple. You press a few buttons. Here's what I ate. Here's what I did for exercise. But you have the accountability of checking in with your coach every day. And that makes all the difference, knowing there's someone who cares about you in your health and it's going to see what you did that day makes you actually consistent.

It helps you actually act on the things you know you should be doing. And because you have this coach, they can also help you adapt. Oh, my God, I'm traveling for the holidays. I'm not going to have access to my gym. I'm worried about the food. What should I do? They can help you adapt, but you get that accountability. And because the coaches are online, you're connected via the internet.

It's not a physical trainer coming to your house or nutrition is coming to your house. It's a fraction of the cost of what it would be to actually do this. the old-fashioned way with people in your house. So if you want to get healthier, this is how you do it. My Body Tudor. So the good news is Adam is giving Deep Questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention the Deep Questions podcast when you sign up. So go to MyBodytutor.com, sign up and mention that you came from the Deep Questions podcast.

I also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist. Blinkus is an app that gives you more than $6,500. book summaries and expert-led audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best in class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology, and more on to go, and get entertained at the same time. I think reading is very important. I talk about it all the time on this show. And as I've mentioned, Jesse and I use Blinkist as part of our reading ritual.

What we do is if there's a book that interests us, we add that. to our Blinkist queue, and then we get a chance. We listen to the blink or read the blink. It takes 15 minutes, and that's how we figure out, oh, should I buy this book or not? There's other ways you can do this as well. The summaries are entertaining on their own. It's a quick way to survey a field,

but I find it to be like a great sort of assistant for helping to triage possible books and figure out what it is you want to read. There's a good feature I want to mention right now called Blinkus Connect. So right now with Blinkis, you can give another person unlimited access for free, basically get a two-for-one deal, so you don't want to miss that.

All right. So let's talk deals here. Right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial, and you will get 40% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 40% off, and a seven-day free trial. that's blinkus.com slash deep.

And remember, now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkus Connect to share your premium account. You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment. I want to react today in our final segment to an interesting piece of news

that someone sent to my interesting at calnewport.com email list. I have this article up on the screen for those who are listening instead of, I mean watching, instead of just, listening. All right, this is from CNBC. Here is the headline of the article.

Whole Food CEO swears by one productivity boosting strategy, quote, I don't get stuck in meeting after meeting. All right, I'm intrigued. What is the one productivity boosting strategy that prevents him from getting stuck in meeting after meeting? Let's go down to the article

body here. All right. And I'm going to read the first couple of paragraphs. Whole Foods Market CEO, Jason Buckel, has one primary tactic that keeps him productive, he says, time blocking. It's important that I time block my schedule so I don't get stuck in meeting after meeting and I can focus on Whole Food Markets, longer term vision and strategy. The time blocking method involves carving out specific windows of time for high priority work tasks. spending time in physical stores is a big priority for Bucal, for example. So he reserves time his calendar each Friday to visit at least one location.

All right. Let's stop right there. He's using the term time blocking. More or less how I use it. When I talk about time blocking, I do mean giving every minute of the day a job so that you're executing a plan for your time as opposed to just deciding as the day goes on, what should I work on next? Where we differ here a little bit is typically when I talk about. talk about time blocking, I talk about time blocking to current day. It's hard to build a detailed

time block plan for more than one day at a time. Now, what the Whole Food CEO here is talking about is time blocking out in advance. So how do we rectify this with my type of advice? I'm not sure if I would use the term time blocking, but what he's capturing here is a mixture of weekly planning and autopilot scheduling. All right. So in my cosmology of personal productivity, weekly planning is where at the beginning of the week, you survey what's on your calendar and say, what is it, what is my week, what are my priorities, so I want to shift anything around, or I want to cancel anything. And one of the things you do during your weekly plan is say, what are my big goals?

Do I want to protect some time this week, which I will treat like any other meeting or appointment, to make progress on my big goals? It makes sense to do that at the beginning of the week. So that's time blocking in the sense of you're blocking off time, but you're doing it at the beginning of your week. So let's say the CEO had some priority of like we really am trying to, I'm really working on understanding our market demographics. We really have to change things around.

He might then, when he's doing his weekly plan, find a couple blocks to block off the focus on like reading through those reports or something. The other thing this is relevant to is autopilot scheduling, which is actually what I think he's doing in the specific example he gives here. That's where you have something you know you need to do on a regular basis. so you set it up on your calendar to appear on a regular basis. So the CEO of Whole Foods wants to spend Fridays going to a location. That's an autopilot schedule right there.

The Fridays are all blocked off or certain times that are blocked off in advance going to locations, right? So stuff you know you need to do that's important that happens on a regular schedule. Just get that on your schedule in advance. So if you're doing these things, weekly planning and autopilot scheduling, Now when you get to a particular day and your time blocking that day, there might already be quite a few things on there that have already been placed in advance that are important. You might not actually have that much free time left to block. All right. Now there's another little tip that's given in here, which I really like.

This is a in the trenches tactical tip around meetings coming from someone who gets a lot of meetings. So let me read this for you here because I like this idea. getting calendar bombed by unproductive meetings can derail his day. He recently told LinkedIn's This Is Working Podcast and Video Series. Buchal's daily time block schedule, though, means he's only going to meetings that I really need to be there for and that are only as long as they need to be. On a typical day, Buchal can have 10 meetings or more, he tells make it. The company encourages staff to hold 20 and 50-minute meetings to free up 10-minute intervals in

between during which they can work on any action items discussed. He uses these 10-minute windows for running ad hoc meetings with my direct reports or dealing with a pressing issue that might pop up. This is a fantastic idea. Again, it's not time block planning, but the post-meeting block is something that I regularly recommend. It's something that plays a big role in my book, slow productivity. The idea is when you schedule a meeting, you have to schedule 10 or 15 minutes immediately

following the meeting for processing and taking action on what was just discussed. Otherwise, if you stack meetings without an air gap on your schedule, what's going to happen is you're going to get a bunch of stuff in this meeting that needs to be done, you have to think through, new obligations are now on your plate, and they're going to be right there in your brain as you move right into the next meeting. Completely different context, completely different demands. And now you're trying to remember these while new things are coming. coming up. And then you go to your next meeting. If there's no cognitive air gap, then that's going

to begin piling up. And it's exhausting and it's stressful and you're going to forget things. We have 15 minutes or 10 minutes after each meeting. You say, great. All right, let me figure out what this meant. Let me go to my role-based status list and put tasks on here. Let me update my calendar. Let me send out the emails that I promised, like, okay, I'm going to follow up on this. Let me send that email now. Hey, Jesse, we just had a meeting about it. Here's what we discussed. We want you to be involved. Here's the feedback we need. Let me give you a bit of a process here because I do process-centric emailing.

I created a shared document. Please put your thoughts in there. You can wait until Friday. If you have any questions, like grab me at my next office hours. Let me send that off. You're closing all the loops from the meeting. So you can go to the meeting with a fresh start. And what I like about this particular way that the CEO talked about it is because he's in big meetings with big teams.

He brings his direct reports with him. to the post-meeting block. That's pretty clever, right? Now that I think about this, I do this at my faculty meetings. After a big faculty meeting at my department, you have a quick, impromptu post-meeting with, like, two people from the department to figure out the thing that involves both of you or all of you, right? So I like this idea that he will bring his direct reports into the after-action meeting,

and together they make sense of, okay, what are we doing next, if anything, because of this meeting. All right, so we get a couple good ideas here. plan important stuff on your calendar in advance, whether this is in daily time block planning, weekly planning, or autopilot scheduling. And when you're scheduling meetings, add an after meeting blog for you or you and your most closest collaborators to make sense of and close every loop about what you just discussed. There we go. Real productivity advice from the wild.

All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in your questions or calls. We'll be back next week. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast,

you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers. get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict

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