Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 322: The Discipline Ladder

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Do you struggle to consistently make progress on hard things that are important to you? In today’s episode, Cal describes a way to improve this state of affairs: a systematic training regime called the discipline ladder. He then answers listener questions about their own struggles with discipline and reacts to an article claiming that professors are lazy (gasp!).  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: The Discipline Ladder [4:29]  - How can I overcome procrastination? [24:42] - How can I make my daily metrics more personal? [27:16] - How can I get my discipline back on track after a negative event? [32:47] - How can I be more disciplined to find time for my part-time project? [39:50] - How can my organization adopt slow productivity principles? [43:49] - CALL: Process centered emails [50:41]  CASE STUDY: Leveraging Career Capital [58:02]  CAL REACTS: Are Professor’s Lazy? [1:07:19]  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?city-journal.org/article/professor-mianewyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-kind-of-writer-is-chatgpt Thanks to our Sponsors:  mybodytutor.comexpressvpn.com/deeprhone.com/calcozyearth.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Life HQ, Tacoma Park, Maryland, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. I just don't know if you know, I had another New Yorker piece come out. I did not. Yeah, I should spread the word. It would have come out last week when you're listening to this. It was about artificial intelligence and how students. are using it to write.

Okay. So the title of the article is what type of writer is chat GPT? And I spend some time actually watching one student in particular, watching that student work on a paper with chat GPT. And I kind of get into like what he's actually doing. And then it's sort of a mystery piece you're trying to figure out like, well, what's actually going on here? Like what is this interaction?

What does it tell us about technology and the future of pedagogy? So it's a fun article. We'll include a link on the show notes. We'll include a link in the show notes. It really, it upsets someone. I think you emailed me or something. It upsets someone because the student was, he's in the UK. So in the UK, they refer to their big papers as exams.

You write your exam. But anyways, that threw someone off. Like, what are you talking about writing an exam? How do you write an exam? You don't write an exam. You answer questions on an exam. So we definitely had some UK-US translation issues there. So for all who are worried,

British people say exam when they talk about papers. So are you just observing him over, you know, like the Internet? Well, he had the whole transcript. Okay. So with Chat ChaptapT, you know, you saved the transcript of the conversation. So he gave me the whole transcripts. I could watch like every single thing he typed and everything that the Chat Chepti said back.

Yeah, it's interesting. The answer, I'll leave it as a mystery. You got to go read your New Yorker. but the answer of what it is students are actually doing with chat CPT in their papers might not be exactly what you think. So there you go. We got a good show today. We're going to talk about discipline. I just finished a chapter about this from my new book.

So it's on my mind. Then we got some questions, which are all pretty discipline-centric. So I think it's good. We really get in the weeds. We've got a call. We got a case study. And then we got a final segment where I'm going to react to an article that is claiming that professors are lazy. Gaspian and clutching my pearls of this.

this point. So we'll have to get into that at the end if I can muster the energy to get there because as a lazy professor I might not make it. One quick note is you should give the audience a heads up about the in-depth episodes. Oh, yeah. So you may have seen a couple weeks ago. We had an in-depth episode, an episode that came out on Thursday and it was labeled in-defeat in-depth colon and then had its own title. So what those are is on a semi-regular basis, meaning like when I have someone I want to talk to and get around with it, I am going to release an interview on Thursdays. Maybe once a month, maybe twice a month is depending on how things are going. The whole point of the series is to have interviews with people that helps us understand the deep life better.

So either people who have some idea or expertise that's relevant to cultivating a deep life or their life themselves, the life they live themselves is deep. So we can kind of learn from their example. So that's the idea of in-depth. And I want to present them with limited commercial interruptions, meaning either no ads or have a presenting sponsor so that we don't have any interruption to the interview itself. So we had Ryan Holiday. Was the first in-depth.

We did that a couple weeks ago. I'm actually talking to Oliver Berkman tomorrow morning. He's coming to the studio. It's going to be here at the HQ. So we'll have a good in-depth with him. And again, I'm going to do these at first. It's an experiment. It's sort of just as I get around to them.

but I think the ability to talk to people about their experiences and ideas with the deep life is useful. And it'll complement what we're doing here on the main episodes, which of course will continue as they always have. All right. So keep an eye out for the next in depth. It might be maybe next week. We'll see. That's when we get to it. All right.

Let's do a deep dive. So I want to talk today about discipline. I've been thinking a lot about this topic as I work on my new book about cultivating a deep dive. deep life in a distracted world. If you want to succeed with that goal, you need discipline. So it's worth looking closer at this concept. So here's my plan for today. I'll define more specifically what I mean by discipline.

I'll look closer at how it actually works. Then we will leverage this understanding to explore a new strategy, something I call the discipline ladder, or helping you improve your capacity for discipline in your own life. All right, so let's start with definitions. What do we mean when we say discipline and has a lot of different meanings? The way I want to pin it down for our discussion here is the ability to do something that's hard and important, even if you don't want to do it in the moment.

So a big mistake we often make is that we think about discipline as being an abstract binary trait, something you have or you don't. In this type of thinking, a quote-unquote disciplined person could just go and do hard things. And an undisciplined person can't do anything hard. This is not actually how it works. Discipline is not like eye color, an ascriptive trait that you just have or don't have. It's a capacity. It's a capacity that can vary between people and it can vary with the same person between

different times of their lives. So to simply say, I am disciplined, that's way too vague. It's like saying, I'm a runner. That doesn't mean much to me until I know how fast you can actually run. So the same holds for discipline. There's many different gradations of discipline capacity. And what matters is where exactly you are on that scale. So let's talk today about how we can actually increase your discipline capacity.

And to do so, I want to get technical. What happens inside your brain and your brain. body when you decide to take on a hard task, something to require discipline. Like, okay, I want to write a newsletter essay or go do a hard workout. There is a strong physiological response to this intention. Even as you just begin to consider doing the task, chemicals will spread throughout your body and your brain that will give you potentially a sense of aversion to that task. at the same time, easier alternative activities will suddenly emerge in your mind as being appealing, sort of increasingly appealing.

Think about this, right? Last time you've sat down at your computer to do something hard, while you had that instinct to rotate through a bunch of new sites or news feeds or social media sites. suddenly that became very appealing just as you're considering doing something hard. Let's give a name to this chemical reaction. I call it the chemical obstacle to focused reaction. So it's like this chemical obstacle is something that emerges as you consider doing something hard

and it persists even as you begin that hard action. Discipline then, we could say, requires you to overcome this chemical obstacle and continue through towards the action that you want to complete. Therefore, your discipline capacity, this is not abstract. It's not a character trait. It's not mysterious. We can describe it as a combination of two things.

The magnitude of the chemical obstacle to focused action that you face, so how intense is that aversion, and the size of such chemical obstacles that you are comfortable overcoming. The combination of those two things tells you how hard of something you can actually tackle. in your own life. All right, so how do we improve this capacity? There's a couple direct strategies that we already know about, right? Dedicated locations. So having a location that you only use for working on particular discipline requiring activities, that works because it reduces the distraction and therefore reduces the level of the chemical obstacle to focused reaction.

Action. Neotropic drugs, like you would assign to someone who has attention deficit and hypertropic. activity disorder. They also directly help discipline capacity by increasing your ability to overcome the chemical obstacles that are there. So we have these types of solutions that directly help your discipline capacity that we can understand now more clearly when we understand what actually determines discipline capacity. Today I want to give you another technique that can help here, and it's what I call the discipline ladder. Now, the idea here is that you can practice overcoming these obstacles, that with practice, your discipline capacity can increase.

And this comes for two reasons. As you practice doing hard things and pushing through into those hard things are complete, two things happen. One, you become more comfortable with the physiological feeling of the chemical obstacle to focus activity. You just are used to it, just like an athlete gets used to the muscle burn of a particular athletic event. It doesn't scare them or push them off. They just know this is part of it. Or like, you know, it's baseball season. A relief pitcher just gets used to the nerves.

I'm going to feel really, really bad as I'm about to walk out, right, in game two of the NLDS. I'm going to feel really bad anxiety, right? It's going to feel really bad. I'm used to that. That's what it feels to be a pitcher. That's part. That's the job is can you throw this ball hard even when your body is in this really innervated state? The second thing that comes with practice of discipline activities is you become more familiar with the rewards of actually completing this work. Your reward circuits encode this. So your mind now has positive associations with the hard task you're considering taking

on. Therefore, the size of the chemical obstacle to focus active activity reduces, right? So with practice, we become more used to it and we reduce the obstacle we have to overcome. Doing hard things, in other words, makes it easier to do hard things. Now, the problem here is this is circular logic. I have to finish hard things so that I'll be able to finish hard things. Circular.

So how do we break that recursion? We systematically ladder up the difficulty of the hard things we do. You start with things that are pretty easy but still require discipline. And then as you get used to completing those, you move up to a slightly more difficult ask. Slightly more discipline is required. Once you accomplish those regularly, you move up to the next level. So you ladder yourself systematically up levels of difficulty. And you're systematic about this.

Just like if you're a weightlifter, you have to keep increasing the level of weight you're lifting for your muscle to continue to grow, but you have to be careful about how you do this. You can't just jump to the really heavy weight, but you also can't just stay on the weight that you're comfortable. You have to systematically and incrementally increase that weight a year later, you're now more. much stronger and much more comfortable with much bigger weights than you were at the beginning. So I want to argue that you should do something similar with discipline. So I'm going to give you here an example ladder and I'm going to walk you through the different levels, the different levels of this ladder. I recommend starting with a daily metric.

We've talked about this before on the show. A daily metric is something you can check off every day. For example, in the metric tracking space, if you use a time block planner, saying that you did this activity. You start with a daily metric. Now, the key thing of a lot of these daily metric activities, especially when you're getting started with a new pursuit, is that they can be very easy. And what you should be looking for when you're beginning on the discipline ladder is to find an activity that is not trivial, but still very comfortable in the array of what we would call the range of what we would call it attractable. These should be activities that don't require, for example, when you're first starting up the discipline ladder, that shouldn't require that you schedule time in advance.

It's just something you want to get around to doing each day when you can find time. So with the case of a case study, let's follow a sort of physical getting in better shape discipline ladder here. The daily metric you might start with here could be doing 25 push-ups a day. You know, you don't got to put this on your calendar. You don't got to make a big production about putting a side of a lot of, lot of time. It's just in the morning at lunchtime, oh, I didn't get to it. Let me just knock this off real quick before I get ready for bed. You can find time to do this. It's not trivial. Trivial would be touch your toes once, but you're actually doing something that requires, you know, it's exercise

and requires muscles, but it's tractable. It doesn't require that much extra planning. All right, so you start with a daily metric when you're going up the discipline ladder. You get used to that. You check it off. You do it every day. You see that you've done it. And now you kind of feel, okay, I can sort of do regular work towards this general initiative. I can do it regularly, even if I don't want to. This is important to me. The next step on the ladder, I would suggest, is a 15-minute project. 15 minutes, it doesn't have to be every day.

It should be at least three days a week. This requires a little scheduling. 15 minutes is enough time that you probably want to mark where you're going to do these 15 minutes. Oh, before I go to work, right after the workday is over, I'm going to take extra time on my lunch break, right? It's long enough that requires a little bit of scheduling, but it's not that much time. You don't have to do that much during this actual period. So returning to our case study here of getting in better shape, your 15-minute project might be, you get one of these like 10 or 15-minute.

I'm going to say 10-minute because it takes time to get changed or whatever. Do one of these 10-minute YouTube body weight workouts. Three or four times a week. maybe first thing in the morning or right after work I throw on my gym clothes at home load up on YouTube a 10 minute body weight workout

I do these sometimes we're on vacation just want to keep moving like yeah you can pushups it squats it situps or whatever this is not a huge ask

but now it's getting a little bit less trivial right like it's an actual workout you don't have to muster massive motivation because it doesn't take a super long time

but now like you actually are doing something on a semi regular basis that like in theory is getting you in better shape. All right. Once you're used to that, the next step on the discipline ladder

is going to be what I call the 60-minute easy project. Now you're putting aside, again, three plus times a week, a non-trivial block of time, somewhere between 45 to 90 minutes. You definitely have to schedule this. In fact, you probably want to autopilot schedule this,

have this time on your calendar in advance, just these times, these days, this is when I do this. But keep what you're doing during this time block easy. All right. So now you're getting used to putting aside the amount of time required to make serious progress on something. But you're keeping the actual work in this time block still pretty tractable. Because the difficulty you're getting used to here is putting aside the time.

That's what you're getting used to here. You don't want to compound that with the thing you're doing being really hard as well. So going back to our workout case study, maybe now you're running a real workout program. Not a hard one, but like an actual like 30, 40 minute work. workout that you're doing three times a week. And it could be on YouTube. When I was restarting my workout program back, this was back during COVID, I was using to get back into it.

My wife's Peloton has workouts on it as well. You're like, oh, I want to do like a lower body workout. I want to be 20 minutes or 30 minutes. And they're not too bad. They're not that hard. It's not an intense split program. It's not really pushing heavy weights. But it was more, so I didn't have the impact.

pediment of like, oh my God, this is going to be brutal. But it just got me sort of back up to speed with like I put aside time to exercise this non-trivial time. All right. And then finally, the final step up the ladder is not increasing the time, but increasing the hardness of what you're doing in that time. 60 minute plus projects successively harder. And I take that same time, but increase the intensity of what you're doing in there.

So to our workout example, now you're going to maybe sub in an actual pretty like intense split workout, real weights, maybe doing out of it. gym now, really kind of trying to push to build muscles, or if it's a cardio-oriented thing, I'm really doing real interval training, really trying to actually increase my capacity here. And then you can successively increase the hardness of what's in that 60-minute block. That's an example, discipline ladder. You start with something really easy. It's a checkmark for something that takes three minutes.

And you end up with like spending an hour plus three or four times a week doing something that's really hard. If you jumped straight to this final step and you're not used to doing these type of things, you might struggle. But if you work your way up the ladder, you'll get there in about six months. And no particular step will seem all that hard. Now, here's the key part about the discipline ladder. I think it's something that people get, they often get wrong. The goal is this is not a technique for everything hard you want to do.

So the way you apply the discipline ladder is you don't say, okay, here's a new thing I want to do. I'm going to ladder my way up to doing it at the full level of difficulty. The discipline ladder is about practice with doing hard things. So if you complete this ladder here for fitness that we just talked about, now when it comes time to do something unrelated, you can just jump in at a much harder level and be much more comfortable because you've gotten practice doing hard things.

The ladder is something you do to get used to doing hard things. And then going forward, you're more comfortable, jumping straight into hard things. So you don't have to break up every hard thing you do into these multiple different steps. This is something that you do once or twice to get your capacity increased. Or if you've gone through a fallow period and you want to restart your energy for like a new year and I want to tackle hard things, do one ladder to get your comfort with the chemical obstacle to focused activity, to get that comfort higher to reduce those peaks.

And now you're ready to go on lots of different things. Right. So that's the discipline ladder. One way among many to increase your discipline capacity. So you basically probably did your ladder 20 years ago and now like your writing sessions or an example of hard things? Yeah. I mean, and sometimes I'll do modified ladders just to sort of get back into it, just to sort of get my energy back into it. Sometimes if it's a really different domain, you might ladder. Like I'm very used to writing. and the discipline required for writing. But when I was restarting my physical stuff, like during the pandemic, I felt like I had to ladder back up there. It was kind of different enough.

I wanted to get more used to the physical domain. So you could find yourself laddering to like re-energize yourself or if there's like a brand new area that you're not used to acting in, the ladder can help you get used to that area in your life and doing hard things that area in your life. And I think the physical intellectual is kind of a classic split. if you're not used to physical stuff, you've got to get used to it, right? Or if you're a physical person who isn't used to doing intellectual stuff, you might have to run a new ladder over there. There's an idea of modified ladders.

So even if you're used to doing something, if you have like a really hard endeavor to do a less hard version for a while and then to take one step up to the full hard version, that's a good strategy as well. You can kind of do that whenever. You're like, okay, I'm taking on like a really big project why don't I do an easier version of this for a few months

just to get my head space into this type of work and to get the time put aside. And then once I'm used to the time being put aside, let me increase the difficulty. That I'll sometimes do. Like get used to a schedule and then increase the intensity so I don't have to double up getting used to a new schedule and the increased intensity all at once.

Laddering in a lot of different ways could be useful. But the full ladder, yeah, you don't have to do that that often. All right, we got some good discipline-related questions coming up. But first, let's hear from a sponsor. And talk about our friends here at Cozy Earth. Longtime listeners know I am a Cozy Earth fanatic. My wife and I have a lot of Cozy Earth products because we love in particular their fabric, this sort of bamboo, premium viscous bamboo-based fabric we just love.

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If you get a post-purchase survey, take a moment to say you heard about Cozy Earth from my podcast, Deep Questions with Cal Newport. That makes a big difference for us here at the show. Speaking of comfortable fabric, I also want to talk about our friends at Rhone, and in particular, their commuter collection. Look, here's the thing.

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It is the right close if you want to look good, but you're getting after it and you want to be comfortable as well. Now, the commuter collection could get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. And to Rhone.com slash cow and use to promo code Cal, the save 20% off your entire order. That's 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E.com slash cal and use code Cal. it's time to find your corner office comfort. All right, Jesse. Let's get some questions. What we got first?

First questions from Sully. When I twinge of procrastination strikes, I distract myself away from the hard things I'm working on. Sometimes I can fight off the urge by pausing and recognizing the urge, but often I lose and end up distracting myself with useless websites and other easier tasks instead of just doing the hard thing. All right. Well, this is a discipline question.

right? I mean, this was our definition of discipline from the deep dive, the ability to do something hard that is important, but not like absolutely urgent, even when you don't want to do it in the moment. Are there's two things that helps with discipline, what we talked about today and what we talked about a few weeks ago in earlier episodes. So the thing we talked about a few weeks ago, and I'll just remind you of this, is that it really helps if your mind has a plan it believes on for what you're trying to do and is on board about the potential rewards.

Our mind is very good at simulating the future. If it does not have a clear simulation about what you're trying to do and where it's going to lead you, a simulation at trust, it's less likely to generate a sense of motivation. So if you're just coming at

one of these hard things you're talking about here somewhat blindly, I don't know, let's just write. Let's just like go to the gym with quotation marks and get in shape. Your mind is going to say, wait, what's the plan here? I don't see a clear plan with which I have experienced.

That's going to lead us likely to an outcome that I'm excited about. You don't get motivation. And those potential distractions are going to emerge as being much more appealing. So you want to make sure, first of all, that you really understand what it is you're trying to do and how it is that people actually succeed at what you're trying to do. Your mind has to trust your plan. You also need to expose yourself constantly to the rewards at stake here so that your mind has a very vivid, encoding of the rewards in your hippocampus, that's going to play a big role when the planning system is trying to figure out whether or not it bestows you motivation.

Now, the second thing that matters is what we just talked about in the deep dive. Are you comfortable with this level of discipline? That is, is your mind comfortable with facing the chemical obstacle to focus activity that you're faced with this particular work? And if it's not, if that chemical obstacle is too large or it's too skis. scary for you. Try a discipline ladder. Start on easier things and work your way up to get yourself more used to tackling things of that level of difficulty. Discipline is practice and you might need to practice discipline a little bit more. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from

Jess. How can I pick daily metrics that really move my life values forward? I have a toddler so implementing my daily metrics is tough. The different routines of Ferris and Huberman like looking at the sun in the first hour, five-minute journal, phone off for the first hour, cold plunge. They seem generic and not personal. Well, look, keep in mind, caring for a toddler is just as difficult as any of the routines that Andrew Huberman does, right? There's just different routines for different people, different routines for different life circumstances.

And I agree with you, you want to find the things that really matter for you, that are personal for you that are important for the things that you value. And it's perfectly fine if the things that really get you motivated are not the same things to get Andrew Huberman motivated. All right. So let's think about it. Daily metrics, let's define this for the audience first. I talk about this, that it's important that the things that are important to you that you have something you do on them regularly. When you're working on making your life deeper, I suggest keystone habits.

So these are daily metrics that are not hard. not trivial, but not tractable, in the areas of your life that are important, just so that you signal to yourself that you're willing to do non-urgent things on different areas of your life that are important. It's a good self-signaling mechanism.

When seeking these out, custom fit them to what matters to you in your life right now, right? Reading a book every day to your toddler. I definitely did this when my kids were babies, maybe a toddler age as well. Not long books. Like we're talking blue truck.

Which, by the way, I could probably still recite word for word if I needed to right now. I know more about Blue Truck than I know about almost any other topic. That's a really good daily metric. It's like, yeah, I want to read its connection. I want to just establish that like I'm exposing my kid to words. When you have young kids, you yourself reading a chapter of an interesting book about an idea that's interesting every day. That could be a very interesting daily metric, right?

because it's not about, oh, I want to finish a book every week. It's I want to make sure that even it missed all these other polls on my life, I'm still engaging in the world of ideas, even if it's minimal right now. Right. Like that could be a very meaningful daily metric. Getting outside, being outside and running a gratitude exercise. I used to do this a lot when my kids were young. It would be with the kid. I'd be pushing someone in a stroller or someone be strapped on.

Like you got to get outside and you got to go. I had a particular gratitude exercise. I would do, or I'd predict, I would look into the future and think about some of the things that are hard right now with young kid child care will be easier at this point in the future, and I'm really looking forward to that. And I wanted to do it outside. I want to do it with sunlight. And that was like really important.

And that was a really important, you know, daily metric that I would do. If you're working right now as well outside of the home, you might want to have a really clear metric about, I'm tracking deep work hours to make sure that whatever windows of time I have which I'm not involved in child care. So if my kid is at daycare or something like this and I have, you know, here's my day when I can just be working at the officer at home and I'm not taking care of a kid, I want to make sure that I am getting in some protected hours and I'm insisting on that every day. Even if it's small, it's, again, signaling to yourself,

I'm not just an email answering machine. I'm not just a meeting attending machine. I'm a mind that could produce original value and I'm going to protect it, even if it's just an hour a day and I'm going to mark it every day. so I remember to do that. So what your daily metrics look like at this stage of life is going to be different than what it looked like 10 years ago. I can tell you on the other end of it,

all my kids are elementary middle school age. It'll look different than. And it'll look very different than what Andrew Huberman or Tim Ferriss care about. And they're all fine. Let me give you one extra hack to do the sick day hack. So if I'm sick, I write on my metric tracking space, my time block planner, sick, capital letters. I don't put any metrics down.

He's like, yeah, look, I'm sick. I'm not going to care about doing the metrics. Maybe I'll do some of them, but I'm not going to prioritize them. You can have a couple outs like that, right? Like, if you have young kids, you can have an out that just says chaos. You don't want to be using this all the time, but it's like, oh, my God, like my kids' daycare is closed. And I have to do these important meetings. and there's a new deadline that popped up.

We're not worrying about our daily metrics, like making sure you do this, this, this, each day, reading this chapter, doing this, whatever. I'm going to write chaos in my metric tracking space and just give myself permission to survive. And that's absolutely fine. Now, if you find yourself writing chaos again and again and again, week after week, month after month,

that's a useful signal that your life is too chaotic. It's not sustainable, what you're doing. But I think it's like a great way of not feeling guilty about I can't do this every time. Some days just get away from me. It's a way of just declaring metric bankruptcy for that day. It's like it's okay. I'll be back at it tomorrow.

All right. So Jess, I think you're doing great. Make the metrics work for you. Or alternatively, bring that toddler into the cold plunge with you. Because it's never too early to get hard. You got to get hard like David Goggin says. So there we go. All right.

What we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Virtue. I can work consistently and disappoint. without relying on external motivations towards a goal. However, when something negative happens like a rejection, my discipline starts to break down and I begin to focus more on the negative. In this situation, what would you recommend I do to get back to my routines? That's a great question.

And it's something I've thought a lot about. I mean, I face this a lot of my own life. I would say the period of my life where I really begin facing this consistently for the first time, where I actually had to think about systematically how do I deal with a, focused effort leading to a bad outcome. The time when I first started systematically thinking about this was actually as a graduate student and the event would be papers being rejected. I need to publish papers, right, they get a job.

I thought this was a good paper. It got rejected. Because in the life of a computer scientist, theoretical computer scientist, you submit a lot of papers to its conferences and they're incredibly competitive and they have low acceptance rates, 20% 15% acceptance rates and you're trying to be good enough to get accepted. So I developed some ideas. I'm going to share some of these ideas with you as well. If it's a serious negative event, and I'm assuming right now we're talking about something big enough to really throw you for a loop, not someone, you know, said something mean to you in passing, but like a real rejection or a failure of a project or not getting a promotion or not getting a job, right?

More major things. It's okay to give it a day or so to fester. don't immediately pretend like it doesn't exist. Be upset, commiserate, talk to friends or family, you know, you have a drink that night, that's okay.

Like lean into the emotion a little bit. Like I really wanted, I really wanted this to go well, and it didn't. And I'm kind of upset and worried that it didn't. Part of the advantage of doing this, especially around other people, is that it removes or,

reduces the ego defense, right? You might have this initial reaction of like, man, this looks negative for me and I want to kind of try to hide this and I want to try to convince everyone that I'm perfect and I only ever succeed. If you start commiserating, it's like a relief. You've taken down the ego defense. Like, okay, I can just admit like this. I wanted this to go well and it didn't.

And I'm embarrassed. It didn't go well. It takes that ego wall out of there. And this is going to make it much easier for you to actually move on. You're going to be much less defensive about the whole situation. So take a day or two and let it fester. Next, you need to figure out a plan for what comes next. This means you're going to have to do somewhat of a postmortem.

What went wrong here? And it's got to be an honest postmortem. You really want the real answer. And this might mean actually talking, getting an unvarnished opinion from someone else, talking to someone else. Why do you think I didn't get this? Or why was this paper rejected, right? Or it's just an honest self-assessment. Like, let's say you had a big exam and you did really pour on it.

you want to go back and say, what went wrong here? Like, how did I prepare for this? What worked? What didn't? What did I do too much of? What did I not do enough of? So you really want to understand what went wrong. And then make decisions.

Is there an adjustment needed? And sometimes the answer will be yes, right? If it's like a test you did really bad on and you do a post-mortem, you'll probably figure out, oh, there was a much better way I should have studied for this. So going forward, this is a, how I'm going to study for future tests like this.

I learned from that failure. Or if it was an academic paper that got rejected, you're like, okay, the quality is just not there. I need more results. The results have to be harder than the, whatever it is. You're figuring out, okay, I know what I need, right? I know what I need to succeed at this, the next time. Sometimes, however, it might be, there's nothing you did.

It's just the way it works. Hey, I'm doing something competitive. Sometimes it's going to work. Sometimes it's not. I threw my hat in the ring. It didn't work out. It was a long shot anyways. You know, there's nothing really to change. It just depends. But you want to figure out what went wrong. What adjustments need to be made? What's your plan going forward? Am I going to try again in this thing? Am I going to try to fix this paper? Am I going to overhaul the way I do my work? Am I going to take a corner of

career capital and I'm really going to try to amplify it very systematically? Make a plan going for it based on what you learned. Write that plan down. Make sure it's in whatever systems you use. And now you were done thinking about the failure. You festered, you analyzed. You adjusted, you made a plan.

Now you move on. If you find yourself having a hard time not snapping your attention back, which will happen especially if the thing was public or embarrassing. If you have a hard time not preventing your attention from continually snapping back to ruminating on the failure. You're going to deploy a modified version of cognitive behavioral therapy. You'll have a brief session in the morning before work and at the end of the work day

where you will confront the rumination, the thinking about the thing that went wrong. You will point out where in that thinking there is distortions. like okay here is the negative thought I'm going back to here are the distortions in that thinking and you can just Google cognitive behavioral therapy distortions you'll see a whole list and they have names you want to use the name when you're doing this it's black and white thinking it's predicting the future it's catastrophizing you point out here's the thought that's really bothering me here are the distortions here are their names I have a plan for how to deal with this I trust my plan and now I will shut down confronting this rumination until the next session the end of the workday or the next morning. When the thoughts come up again, you say, no, no, no, no, no. I did a CBT session on this this morning. I have one coming up in a few hours. I'll get back to you brain when we get to that next session.

And you consolidate your rumination to a couple times a day. During that time, you systematically point out distortions and confirm to yourself you have a plan. This works. Do this for a few days. If it's a really bad event, do it for a couple weeks. the urge to ruminate will dissipate. You'll be executing your plan, and you'll move on. So what's important is you can't just ignore rejection.

The negative feelings that rejection are a negative event create, they're real. And if you pretend like they don't exist, your mind's not going to believe you because you're wrong. They matter. You need to do something with it. But if you give yourself some time to revel in it, defester, and really make a good plan going forward,

your mind will then be ready to move on. Okay, we do have a plan. We got into this, what's next? And you can use CBT to help yourself get there a little bit quicker. I do that all the time with various things I face. It works like a charm. All right. What do we got?

Next question is from Anonymous. You often talk about how you allocate a half day per week to your podcast. I'm in a similar situation with my own part-time project. I can't seem to find the discipline to consistently find time to work on it every week. In weeks that you have lots going on, how do you still find out? find time to fit in that half day per week. Well, I mean, I think your answer is you just got to get Jesse to show up. I got to come do this because Jesse's going to be here.

And he would be here all alone. And that makes me sad. So then that motivates me like, okay, I guess I got to come do this podcast. If I don't, we're going to find Jesse here in like a long conversation with Jesse skeleton, just trying to stave off the loneliness, the boredom of being here all by myself. All right. No, seriously, okay, you have, you want to put regular work in on something. Logistically speaking, have a set time put on your calendar, treat it like any other appointment. So it's a big deal for you not to do it. Like, if you have an appointment on your calendar,

dentist, and you don't go, that's a big deal. You're saying, I am choosing not to do. I'm choosing to reject this appointment. So do that, schedule regular time so that if you're just trying to figure out, like, when do I, when do I want to do it this? week. How do I feel? Do I want to do it now? If you're giving yourself a choice, it's easier for your mind to talk yourself out of it. So that's step one. Step two, make sure what you're doing makes sense, like your mind is on board. It's easy to jump into the big, I want to put a lot of time aside. Let's just get into this. I want to be a writer, so let's put aside. Let's write all day Friday. But if you don't know what that means, your mind doesn't trust you have a plan to become a successful writer. It knows you don't know very much about it. It knows you don't even know what you're going to do on those days. You just want to put your earthenware coffee cup and Instagram it and write in your bullet journal or whatever. If it knows you don't really have a good plan, it's like, come on, buddy, what are we doing here? So make sure you know, like the time you're putting aside is serving a plan that you understand and trust.

Don't start with the time and then say if I put aside this time, this will somehow induce me to make progress. Your mind's not going to buy that plan. And then three, you might need to ladder up. So go back to the discipline ladder that we talked about during the deep dive. If you're going from zero to five hours a week on some big ambition, your mind might be like, I'm not used to doing something so hard that's optional and urgent. And this is weird and it feels indulgent. And let's not do it.

You might need to be laddering here, right? You might need to be starting with every day I'm doing a little thing relevant to this project. And then I move up to like the 15 minute, the 15 minute projects. And then it's 60 minutes, three times a week. I start with like an easy thing than a harder thing. And now this type of work I'm not used to doing, optional side hustle work, is now something I'm doing regular time on and the effort I'm giving to it's very hard. I'm very comfortable with the chemical obstacles to focus activity now in this particular

type of pursuit. Now I think I'm ready to consolidate this on like Friday mornings. So you might also need to ladder up if your mind is not used to giving really serious attention to something that is like not part of your job or something that someone is demanding that you actually do. Or you just hire Jesse. Jesse, you're available for like anyone who wants you just to come to their house just so they'll be motivated.

Let's drive my truck there. Just drive your truck there. You'll hear them coming. All right. Oh, we got slow productivity corner question. Yes, we do. All right. For those who aren't familiar every week, we like to do one question that's relevant to

my new book, slow productivity, the lost heart of accomplishment without burnout. About half of what we talk about on the show is directly or indirectly related to this book. So if you haven't bought it yet, you need to. It's like the Bible for the Deep Questions podcast. But the real reason we do the slow productivity corner question is so we can hear the segment theme music. Let's hear that music, Jesse. All right. What's our question today?

All right. Today's question is from JR. How can an organization adopt slow productivity principles? For example, how can an academic department or college do fewer things work in a natural pace and obsess over quality? There's often a fixed number of non-negotiable projects, service, teaching, with set deadlines that to track from deep work in other areas like research. So the reality about projects and obligations in most workplaces is that there are vastly more things that you could be doing than there is time to do them. We often tell ourselves a story. The story we tell ourselves is there's some ideal set of things.

things that people want us to do or that we want to do. And if we can just accomplish this collection, then we're doing our job and be successful. And if we don't do everything in this collection, we're not going to do our job or be successful. And so in this way, we imagine we feel very bad saying no to things you're trying to reduce because these are the things that need to be done. But the reality is, no, no, there's not some set of things that you need to do to be successful. there is a massive collection of things from which you are actually, whether you know it or not,

sampling what can actually fit into your schedule. And so what people do, they're implicitly saying no all the time because again, there's way more stuff than you could be doing. So what people do is they basically bring things into their professional life until they get sufficiently stressed that they have psychological cover to start saying no. But here's the thing.

The difference between having enough stuff that it makes you stressed and pulling that back 20% so that you're not so stressed by the overhead of all you have to do. To the outside world, that difference is very small. No one knows the difference. But to your psychological reality, it makes a huge difference. So our workloads are arbitrary.

That's what I want to say. Our workloads are arbitrary. We do 20% too much just because it's our heuristic for how we manage our load. When I'm stressed, I'll start saying no. This holds for professors as well. Yes, there are things you need to do. You have to teach your classes.

you have to work on your research. That does not take up all your time. The amount of service you take on, that is highly malleable. The amount of overhead you take on surrounding your research and your classes is often also highly malleable. Most professors, contrary to the article we're going to read in the third segment, just kind of pile this stuff on until they're stressed and they start saying no. So, like, what would an academic institution do, for example, to make workloads more reasonable? Like here are some very specific ideas.

I think there should be service budgets. Here's how many hours you can spend maximum working on service as a professor of a given rank at our university. And we track it and you can't go above it. So yeah, there's more service than you could possibly ever fit into your day. So we might as well be clear about how much you should do. Instead of it being 20% too much, let's make it a reasonable number. I think university should have service days. This day of the week and in particular this half of this day of the week is when all,

all meetings and calls, etc. related to the service happened. It's got to fit in there. It doesn't just

happen randomly throughout the week. This is when this stuff happens. Service should be something you're working on like one day a week and only

maybe half of that day actually gets used up by calls. The university would still function if you did this, but we don't. I think individuals

in the university setting should have quotas for important but unbounded request type, stuff they need to do but there's an unbounded number of

requests coming in. You need strict quotas. Here's how many peer reviews I do per semester. Here's how many non-departmental committees I sit on. If I'm being a journal area editor, here's what I take off of my plate to compensate.

So it's not about not doing things. It's about having a reasonable quota for the number of important things that you do. I want to do reviews. I want to sit on committees. I want to take my turn as a journal editor. But I don't want to do too many reviews. I don't want to be on too many committees.

I don't want to be an editor while I'm trying to do three other major thing. So quotas, I think, make a really big difference. I also think academic institutions could do a good job of putting it more administrative support. We'll get into this more in the final segment. Universities are happy to bring in more administrators, but they don't invest as much in administrative support. So everything you take on your plate brings with it overhead, administrative overhead. It is the increase of that overhead. Past a certain point that makes work very unsustainable and stressful. So if you can reduce the overhead that comes with obligations, you increase the sustainability of professors' workloads.

In general, if we move beyond academia, the thing organization should care about is the ratio of administrative overhead to actual execution. Time spent supporting work, emails, meetings, discussions versus time spent actually doing the work that has a clear value for the organization. If the ratio of overhead to work gets too high, your employees become much less useful. They also burn out. They also get exhausted. It is not the case. This is not a linear dose function.

You cannot just keep increasing the amount of things you ask people to do and have an increase in the amount of work that they produce. it's a non-linear equation. What actually happens here is that I think of it's like for going to be nerdy. It's probably more like a quadratic shape going on here. As you get past a certain amount of work, the ratio of overhead to work gets high enough that there's not enough time left

to actually make consistent progress on work and the amount of work accomplished starts to go back down. So this is how institutions more generally can support slow productivity is recognizing this reality. You cannot just endlessly give more work to people. It does not give you more and more actual work done. There's a sweet spot of overhead to execution in that ratio.

And to hit that sweet spot, you got to be explicit about workload management. So I just don't like this idea that we're like, look, this is somehow like the happiness of employees versus work getting done. No, no, this is about is work getting done or not. You put too much work on people's plates, less gets done. So I think the slow productivity principles are not just possible in organizations. because they're imperative if you want to do better as an organization, be it academic or otherwise. All right, I feel like, Jesse, that means we should get a little bit more theme music.

All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear it. Okay. Hi, Cal, this is Jonathan from Winnipeg. You talk a lot about process-centered emails, and it's all great. I love it, but here's the problem. Nobody reads their email.

I've been sending these emails. You know, I send long detailed, very specific, very precise emails, you know, not necessarily overlong, but, you know, it's got the information that people need. But they don't read them, Cal, they don't read them. What am I going to do? What do I do about this? Oh, yeah, it's a real problem, especially, I'll tell you this, that problem has gotten worse since I first introduced the idea of process-centric emails in my book, Deep Work.

All right. So for the listener who doesn't know what we're talking about here, process-centric email is a method for reducing the number of unscheduled back-and-forth messaging required to accomplish a project or objective. So the default way people get things done in the knowledge or context is we just sort of shoot emails back and forth or Slack messages. We kind of figure it out on the fly. This is a problem because if completing an objective requires that we get through an unscheduled back and forth interaction, I have to parry those messages back to you pretty

quickly, right? Like if we're going to figure this out, it's going to take 10 back and forth messages, and we're going to figure it out today, I got to see your next message probably within like 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving, just so that we have time for this conversation to play out. Now, the problem with this is if I have to see your message within the next 10 or 15 minutes, I have to keep checking my inbox. This is where the bulk of chronic inbox checking comes from, not a failure or will or bad productivity habits,

but because we have these ongoing unscheduled conversations, we have to service. So with process-centric emailing, what you do is when you initiate via email one of these projects, we need to work on this together, you describe in your first email the process by which you're going to collaborate on this project to get it done, and the process you describe should hopefully prevent for you to have to use unscheduled messaging.

So like the classic example here is where you say like, okay, here's what we're going to do. We got to get this report back to the client by Thursday. And you lay out the process. You say, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk to the team during our status meeting today. And then I'll edit this document. And I will put my edits into this shared folder by the end of business today. please look at it some point tomorrow. I'm going to take it back, annotate it with any questions, make any edits you want.

Have that done by 3 o'clock tomorrow and put the new version in the shared folder. I am going to pick it up and do a final edit and send it to the designer tomorrow afternoon. The designer will have this done by noon the next day. any final comments have to me by like three o'clock. You just annotate the document and I'll do the final submittal that afternoon. That's a process-centric email because you've described using shared locations and time deadlines, how the collaboration is going to happen. No more emails need to be sent.

So this project will now get executed without you having to receive a single unscheduled message and reply to it. the caller is pointing out correctly that increasingly people don't read those emails and they don't read those emails because this hyperactive hive mind we're constantly communicating mode of work has gotten worse since 2016 when I first published that book we have a lot more slack than we had back then slack was even around I think I talked about in deep work and we'll have to check this Jesse but I think the the instant messenger service I talked about was hip chat I don't if you remember hip chat but like, yeah, it was like one of the early instant messengers.

It was mainly used among developers. Okay. Yeah, it was even before Slack. We're so hyperactive now that, yeah, people don't even read the emails because they have so much messaging that now it's like they are being bombarded. And you're just trying to knock these things back as quick as possible. You're just typing as fast as you can type to get a message temporarily off of your plate. me like Talk Soon Send

It's like just Caveman emailing Just trying to Get things off your plate As quickly as possible No one's reading them So it is a problem The solution is to

The walk through the process Real time Right I think that that tends to work better Let me just talk to you About how we should do this And when you're talking to someone Real time

They actually have to listen They're going to hear it So if you're at the office Grab them in the hallway Grab them in their office grab them at the end of a meeting, hey, let me just talk to you for five minutes. You can do, if your relative ranks make this possible,

you can just tell them in your response to email, like, yeah, let's make a plan for this. I have some ideas. Stop by my next office hours when you can. Hopefully you have office hours. Or if you don't, just say, yeah, give me a call when you can and we'll walk through a process for this. You probably just have to move the process.

description to synchronous. It has to be real-time conversation. And then they'll get on board with it. Hidden benefit, 50% of the things will disappear because people don't want to do that little bit of friction. It's not an urgent project,

but they want to get it out of their inbox. We do this good, right? Question mark emoji, send, right? They're trying to get it off their plate. Like, yeah, we should do this. Like, technically I've made progress on this. And when they get called back with like an actual friction point,

like, oh, I have to actually call this person or stop by their office at some point and talk about this. You're like, you know what? I like option B, which is we don't really need to do this. So 50% of your projects will go away. My old department chair was really good at this. It's like, call me, we'll talk about it. And it would filter out.

That would filter out a lot of things. I think his other trick, which I really liked was like if you just blurted out a complaint in a faculty meeting. Just like, this is terrible. You know, faculty meeting stuff. people like, yeah, we have a very simple process. We're happy to talk about any topic. You just have to submit it in writing two weeks before the next faculty meeting. I'll disseminate it for comment and then we'll put it on the agenda for the faculty meeting.

95% of things that people are complaining about, they're not going to do that for. And it really cut down. So give people a little bit of friction and you'll be surprised by. You can reverse this. So if they're at a higher rank, offer to do more work, It's like, yeah, I think we should talk to us through briefly how best to do it. You know, let me know when I can call you or stop by your office and I'll come find you and figure this out. That'll work as well.

You're working the relative ranks while you're not trying to give work. You're actually saying, I'm willing to do work on your behalf. I will come find you. I will call you. Bosses are so busy that, again, like five times out of ten, they'll just not respond to that and the things off your plate. Friction is great. I believe we have a case study here. This is where people write in with examples of putting the type of things we talk about

on this show in the action in their own life. Good way to see what this advice looks like in the wild. Today's case study comes from Mike. Mike says, recently I leveraged my career capital completely by accident. I was a freelancer at a small professional services firm, working in a role I already had 10 years of experience in. things were going great until they were purchased by a large conglomerate. The new conglomerate offered to keep me as a freelancer on the condition that I transitioned

to a different role. I gave the new role a good try for six months, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. Plus, I was wanting to take a break from work altogether to focus on some personal things. My spouse and I both have aging parents. We have a ton of renovations we need to do to our house. My plan was to take a year off work to focus on those things and then come back and find work in my original specialization. So I put in my notice.

But I was surprised by the reaction. They said they loved my work in the original position, and if I was willing, they would switch me back to that. They knew I wanted to focus on my personal life, but they still didn't want to lose me altogether. So they offered to increase my hourly rate and let me focus only on projects I specialized in all on a part-time basis. I didn't ask for this flexibility, but they recognized my career capital better than I did. As a result, I now work three days a week in the role I specifically. specialize in, and I have nothing to do with the task that I was bad at. I make almost as much money as I previously did. I use my extra time to take care of my parents and my spouse's parents,

work on house repairs, and I've even joined an adult sports league. From time to time, I have taken on an extra short-term consulting client for some extra money if it fits my schedule. My life is deeper, my work hours are spent where I provide the most value, and I have more non-work hours devoted to things that are important for my marriage and family. My only regret is not a lot of the money. I'm not taking the lessons of career capital sooner. Mike, that's a great case study. Here's the thing about career capital, which is our term for your rare and valuable skills,

the main leverage you have for shaping your career. One of the most important types of career capital you can build is just be someone who is reliable and gets things done. That's why I tell young people all the time. I know it's not sexy, but the thing you need to care about, especially early in your job, is you're organized.

You do the things you're going to do. You say you're going to do, and you get them done on time. Nothing falls through the cracks, and you do work at a reasonable level of quality, right? Like, okay, there's an issue here. I'm going to solve this issue. If people trust you're going to do work, you're going to get it done on time, and you're not going to be a problem, and the work's going to be good quality, you don't have to be a superstar.

That is incredibly valuable. Now, here's the thing, from the employer perspective, they are desperate to find people who meet those traits. They're reliable. They get things done. They do it well. They do it on time. I can trust them.

They're desperate for people like that. And they do not want to see people like that go. It is the easiest, most powerful type of career capital that you can build. So, yeah, sometimes when we talk about career capital, we kind of get into the exciting territory of your deliberately practicing some sort of 10x skill that makes you such a superstar that you can just say, I'm going to work from a boat and I'm going to work one. day a week, three weeks a year, and you're going to pay me a million dollars.

It's like the exciting scenarios of becoming like the superstar. You don't have to become a superstar like Mike showed to gain the leverage needed to craft a really deep life. He was good at what he did. He did it well. He was reliable. He was dependable. His employer's like, we don't want you to go.

And when you're in that situation, you can craft really interesting things. And like from their point of view, him working three days a week versus five, like it's fine. It's all pretty similar to them. but for Mike it makes a really big difference. I like it. That's a great example of career capital in action. You don't have to become LeBron James. If you're someone who can just consistently guard against the jump stop

and get a good number of boards per game, team's happy to keep you on the floor. How did my basketball analogy go there, Jesse? Not bad. I was kind of stretching there. Yesterday, LeBron and his son played in a preseason game together. Oh, yeah? Okay, here's a naive question.

Is LeBron's son play professional basketball? Who is he? Yeah, he got drafted by the Lakers, but. Was he the same age as his dad when he got? I remember his dad got dressed. No, he's a little bit older, but there was a little bit of... Did he play college ball? Yeah.

Was he one of the best players in college basketball? No. I mean, LeBron got drafted at 16. Out of high school, right? At a high school, yeah. See, I know a lot about basketball. If anybody has any case studies, I can email me at Jesse at Calnewport.com. Yes, we love them.

So Jesse at Calnewport.com, send them in. All right, we got a cool final segment here. I can put myself on trial. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. Going online without ExpressVPN is like driving a car without car insurance. Like, you might be a great driver. And a lot of times you'll get away with it. There's a lot of crazy people on the road these days.

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I also want to talk 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, calmness for my blog back in the early days. His company My Body Tudor has been a big success because it solves the number one problem in getting healthy, which is consistency. It's not hard to figure out what you should be doing. It's hard to actually do it. And so what My Body Tudor offers is a online coach who works with you to develop your plan about nutrition and exercise, and then you check in with this coach every day using

the My Body Tudor app, and that gives you that accountability is what gives you consistency. Knowing you need to talk to your coach every day and report how it went is what gives you that extra push you need to actually follow through on the plan you put together. In addition, having a coach means you have someone who's on your team when you need to make changes or adjust. Maybe you have like a holiday coming up and you want to change, like, how am I going to exercise? We're going to be traveling. I worry about what's going to happen with my diet.

The coach can work with you to make a plan. for your specific needs. So if you want to get in better shape, I suggest My Body Tudor. If you mention deep questions when you sign up, you will get $50 off your first month. So please remember to do that. So go to MyBodytutor.com, that's T-U-T-O-R,

my-Bodytutor.com, and mention deep questions when you signed up to get $50 off. All right, let's do our final segment. All right, we haven't done a good reaction segment in a while. This is where we react to something that has been sent to us from the internet. I got an article right now from City Journal. I'm going to load this up on the screen for people who are watching instead of listening.

All right. The headline is Professor M.I.A. And it shows someone reading a book. I don't know. It looks like the Caribbean overlooking the water. I think it's a problem, Jesse, that like immediately on seeing that picture, my reaction is like, oh, I want to do that. That guy's got to figure it out.

I'm going to read a little bit about this. The article starts, I mean, I could really read the whole article. I could try to be selective here. It starts by saying it's no secret that a lot of students are coming to campus, unfamiliar with skills, habits, behaviors that are necessary to succeed at college level work. Basic things like, I'm alighting some of the article here. Basic things like the importance of meeting deadlines, paying attention

of being respectful in the classroom and more complicated skills like knowing how to annotate readings and cope with time management problems. Many of the faculty is kind of quoting someone here. I'm sorry, I'm kind of alighting this. Many of the faculty

are uninterested in this kind of instruction because it departs sharply from the role many instructors prefer that of a knowledge expert who leads learners through the course content. All right. As this goes on, at more elite schools, these issues are also evident.

Faculty devote less and less time to teaching, leaving students to fin for themselves. Quote, quote, quote, quote, quote. All right, they're talking about how, like, students are just doing less stuff in the classroom and more stuff on their own. All right. The conclusion here is professors aren't doing enough. So the article person does some math here, the author, a three-course load of the span of a year, year is the maximum required for faculty members at these institutions, with a total of 28 weeks of classes, and each class requiring two hours of classroom instruction, the third hours

often conducted by a teaching assistant. That amounts to about 125 hours of classroom time or about 15 to 16, eight-hour days. Let's add that to the three hours a week that professors spend in office hours, and let's add another full day per week that they spend preparing for classes. Let's also add some time spent grading. You still wind up with just over 40 full-time days per year. Even many faculty administrative duties seem to have disappeared. Professors were once responsible not only for chairing a department and advising students, but also for running entire programs. They would advise students about studying abroad, combining majors or enrolling in other interdisciplinary initiatives. Now because of ballooning college administrations, faculty have been relieved in many of these roles.

This has the effect not only as separating many student programs for intellectual pursuits, but also fostering fewer interactions between students and professors. the client and faculty classroom of student time has coincided with an explosion in academic publishing no matter what the discipline faculty are expected to publish their research is it more worthwhile to impart knowledge to undergraduates or to write articles for sociology and literature journals? All right, so the idea here is professors are lazy

that if we add up the time we spend teaching in the classroom, it's not that much compared to a full-time job. And so what are we doing? We must be reading on the beach. what we should be doing is spending much more time, I guess, teaching more classes and teaching students that quote this earlier, skills like how to read and deal with time management.

Well, first of all, I'll say, with this podcast, I think I'm single-handedly taken on for all of my faculty brethren around the world here, the obligation that teach our students how to do time management and read and organize their lives. So you can say thank you. I'm taking on all that time for you.

Let's step out to the bigger question here. There is a fundamental misunderstanding, I think, in this article about what it is that professors are meant to do, especially at what she calls or he calls elite institutions in the U.S. I think it's probably worth clarifying here. Elite institutions of the U.S. follow the German research university model. This is something that was kind of innovated in the late 1800s, and we picked up here in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and has been at the core of the U. the U.S. is sort of dominant position in science and technology that we've had over the last 100 years. The German model is a model in which the professor's goal, broadly speaking, is to advance cutting-edge knowledge in an area of expertise. This means research, and this means supervising the next generation of scholars to sort of continue the promulgation of the body of knowledge,

an effort that is mainly captured in doctoral student supervision. So you're training future professors and researchers and expanding a body of knowledge. Now, in the U.S. system, we marry that research German model. We marry that with the college model, right? We have this sort of like classic college model in the U.S., which is about preparing undergraduates. So we say, you know, what we should do is these professors. They should also teach a lot of the classes that the undergraduates are taking so that they can be exposed. The undergraduates, as part of their broader training and experience, intellectual, and otherwise, can be exposed to, like, leading minds on things.

They can hear about these topics from the leading subject matter experts. And that's kind of like a more inspiring way of learning it. it like connects you to the trajectory of the field and and that's an important thing. And so teaching undergraduates is an important piece of academic life and research institutions. It is far from the core though. So it is somewhat absurd to be counting the time

that like world class subject matter experts at research universities spend teaching undergraduates and say somehow that should be the thing you do that matters. It's an important piece. It's a good compliment to what a professor does at a research university. We take teaching undergraduate seriously. But the idea that this is what the bulk of our time should be actually is not compatible with the model of these universities.

The focus on which promotion happens at U.S. research university, so promotion to associate professor a tenure and subsequent promotion to full professor, those promotions are based almost entirely on intellectual contribution to the role of ideas. Teaching is involved in these cases, but only as a disqualifier. If you are bad in the classroom, that can and should hold you back from being promoted, we do not want a professor at one of these institutions who cannot teach well, but you cannot get promoted on being a good teacher.

The thing that gets you promoted is confidential letters solicited from subject matter experts in your field, that starkly and frankly assess the intellectual caliber of your work. How good is his or her work? What is its impact on the field? What institutions would this person be promoted at? What institutions would they not be promoted at? Who in their similar rank are they comparable to? Who at their similar rank is better?

These are really kind of frank and somewhat brutal letters. So the promotion process emphasizes, advancing the world of ideas. And I think this is actually a very good model. This focus on trying to induce top minds to become subject matter experts does push forward knowledge. And again, it's the U.S.'s embrace

of this research institution model is why on so many different fields we lead in the world. And it makes a really big difference. So it is a good model. And I like the aspect of the model that says, okay, you should spend time with undergraduates teaching some classes.

This article says, you know, people teach three. Actually, at the real elite universities, they teach two or less, right? That is not a problem. Having a world-class physicist, you know, spend most of their time in the classroom doesn't make as much sense

as having a world-class physicist teaching some of the physics classes so that students can be exposed and excited, but also spending a lot of time trying to advance her understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. So whatever, this is not particularly relevant, I guess, to people's day to day here,

but I want to give a little bit of defensive professoredom. We take undergraduate teaching seriously. We are not primarily teachers. And it's interesting, I think, for a lot of undergraduates or parents of undergraduates who are used to having this,

like, employer-employee relationship with universities. Everyone works for me and my kids. It's a little bit different to see. Like, oh, there's a whole model and purpose for these universities that goes beyond just the experience of the 18 and 22 year olds who are there,

who are the future, and we want to have a good experience, but it's not the whole orientation university, it's not just entirely, entirely about serving that population. So I don't know, there we go. Professors aren't lazy. It's a hard job. It's hard to advance knowledge in your field. It's hard to have a job where you're fired

unless you can prove to, like, experts in your field that you have significantly moved a needle. It's one of the few jobs. You can't just keep it by doing good work and being reliable and getting things done. It's a job you have to keep earning to keep. It's a very difficult job and it's an exciting job. And I think it's a good system.

And we love undergrads, but we shouldn't be teaching more. Are you still writing a lot of papers? Yeah, I'm doing more now. Yes. Though more, I'm working on some papers right now that are more in the digital ethics realm realm and less than theory I call computer science. So I'm sort of exploring the academic world surrounding technology and society. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. It's a lot of fun. I'm teaching. Teaching math in the spring. Looking forward to it. But give me four more classes. I don't know who that's helping because I couldn't do anything else. Any of the research I'm doing, any of the papers, any of the programs.

Oh, and by the way, all the things you say professors don't do anymore, all the things you say you would, like advising students on majors and study abroad programs, that's all I do. I'm the director of undergraduate studies. That's all we do. it is true that administrators, there's many more administrators at college campuses than before. Those administrators are not serving professors that take stuff off their plate. They largely generate new work for the professors. They're running programs and new initiatives. The increase at administrators on campuses does not reduce the administrative work that professors do.

I think it only increases it. So I just want to push back on that. So there we go. A little apologia, as they say, for the academic life. All right. Well, thank you everyone for listening. I think my voice barely held out. One day I will have my voice back, but I think we made it through, so I'm happy about that. We'll be back next week with another episode. 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 of about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007,

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