Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 324: Taming Non-Work Tasks

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

We talk a lot on this show about how to organize your professional efforts. But what about all your obligations outside of work? The personal goals, the household repairs, the family tasks? In this episode, Cal discusses organizational strategies custom-fit to these types of obligations. He then answers listener questions and checks in on a hidden trend in the world of technology.  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: Taming Non-Work Tasks [4:48]  - How do you manage unexpected projects in your time management system? [26:57] - How can I implement lifestyle-centric planning if my life has been directed by other people? [29:36] - How do you figure out what your rare and valuable skill is? [33:57] - Should I return to social media to promote my new book? [37:30] - How can I do fewer things if I’m expected to bill 40 client hours every week? [46:23] - CALL: Hiring an administrative assistant [50:08]  CASE STUDY: A software developer’s “pull” system [57:35]  TECH CORNER: The Quiet Revolution [1:08:34]  Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-frightening-familiarity-of-late-nineties-office-photos youtube.com/watch?v=-lRkCbhABvo Thanks to our Sponsors:  blinkist.com/deepnotion.com/calzbiotics.com/caldrinklmnt.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 and a distracted world. So I'm hearing my deep work, HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. I'll tell you the other day, Jesse, there was a reporter, journalist, or podcast, I know, someone who was interviewing me was here in Tacoma Park. And they were excited to see Jesse Skeleton. And I had to tell them, Jesse Skelton is no longer at the DECLEAN. Deep Work HQ. I had to integrate them into my Halloween display. So I don't want to say that they were very disappointed, but yeah, they're very disappointed. It's on, you know, working duty in the month of October. It's got a lot to do. Yeah, it's got a lot that has to be done. What are you going to do?

Yeah. And that reporter was Bob Woodward. He's writing a whole book about it now. The missing bones. All right. When I briefly mentioned, I have a new New Yorker piece. I always like to tell the audience when there's the new New Yorker piece to read. This one was a little bit different, Jesse. It was art criticism. Because you were a minor in college, right? I was indeed. I was a minor in art history and college, almost a major.

I was just a course or two away. There's a feature at the New Yorker called Photo Booth, where its essays reacting to some sort of visual artifact, like a new art exhibit or a new art book. And then the thing is they have their different writers from their different topics, write, this. You rotate through. So they asked me to write it about the re-release of a photo book by Lars Turnbriork, turn biorke, I believe. He's Swedish. It was a photo book from the early 2000s about offices, kind of like a stark aesthetic look at office life. And so I wrote about it. And the essay is called The Frightening Familiarity of Late 90s Office photos. I compared the aesthetic of the Lars book to the aesthetic of Mike Judge's office space, which came out in 1999.

And said on the surface, they have a very similar sort of stark antagonistic, sort of anti-corporate visual aesthetic. But then I go out and I make a discernment and I say what's different between the aesthetic of office space versus Lars's photo book is that Mike Judge's theory about why the office was an antagonist at place focused on management. It was Lumberg, right? It was Gary Cole's character. It was the main character saying to the consultants, like I have eight different bosses that are all asking me do the same thing. So it was a very sort of Dilbert-esque critique. Whereas Lars's photos, I think, did a very good job of capturing technology.

People overwhelmed by cables, people surrounded by monitors, people kneeling looking like they're almost like supplicants praying at the altar of a CRT monitor that was above them. And I was saying this is what Lars was picking up, is that what changed about work in the late 90s, early 2000s, what made office work seem even grimmer and darker was not managers. Managers had been a problem for decades, but was the role of network technology. So anyways, I do my normal thing, but with a bunch of pictures.

And so if you're a New York subscriber, check that out the frightening familiarity of late 90s office photos. I think I have to start wearing much more complicated glasses. If I'm going to be doing arts criticism, this is my first problem. Two, I think, I don't know what I should wear, probably like an obscure reference concert t-shirt with a blazer. Yeah. So like a black flag t-shirt from like an actual D.C. concert from the late 90s. Plus like an interesting color blazer and glasses that are very round.

Yeah. If I can do arts criticism, I think I need that. I need the smoke, I think, too. A pipe from France. I need a pipe from France. So I will adopt all those aesthetics because now I'm an elitist art snob. We put the link in the show notes. Yeah, so check that out.

Always appreciate it. All right, we have a good episode. We're going to get into a technical topic in the deep dive. Something I actually was just dealing with my own life. Let's get nuts and bolts. I like to do that sometimes. So we got a bunch of good questions. We got a call.

We got a case study. And then we will be doing in the final segment, what I call my tech corner, where I like to react to something going on in the world of technology and how it infects our life. So we got ourselves a full show. Let's get started at the deep dive. So today I want to talk about all of the non-urgent but important stuff that you have to do in your life outside of work. This is a topic I've been struggling with recently myself. I've been thinking a lot about it. So I want to bring my thoughts what I've come up with to you right now. I'll start by explaining why these non-professional tasks can be particularly tricky to deal with.

And then I'll describe a approach for dealing with them. I have four different strategies that I want to recommend, all of which I'm currently experimenting with in my own life. The spoiler alert is how you deal with non-professional tasks can look quite different than how you deal with the obligations in your own job. All right, let's start by trying to better establish what the problem is here that we're trying to solve. When it comes to work, I'm very locked in, right? I'm ambitious. I'm a professor. I'm a writer and I'm a podcaster. I do all three of those things at a pretty high level. And I have a rule that all of that work has to happen within normal work hours. This requires me to be really on the ball. So I use, for example,

multi-scale planning. I have a plan for the whole semester. Here's what I'm working on. Here's a big initiatives. Then each week I do a weekly plan where I look at that semester plan and say which of these big initiatives am I making progress on, when am I going to make progress on them, I get things into the calendar, I clean up my calendar, I move things around, I cancel things. I see my weekly schedule like a chess board on which I'm moving pieces. And then I have slow productivity principles that act as back pressure. I'm always adjusting my workload, my ratio of execution to overhead. I try to keep this all pretty much in a line. I'm trying to make a differentiation I'm actively working on, non-actively working,

I'm taking things off my plate, adding things. I want to make sure that my work is sustainable and I'm not overloading myself. Now, here's the thing. That's a well-planned busy workday. So what happens once the workday ends? Well, first of all, I'm pretty exhausted because I've just executed the sort of productivity equivalent of the D-Day landing. It feels like that sometimes trying to make all these things work. and my time after the work day is over is often already heavily spoken for

with family stuff and personal stuff. I like to exercise most days that eats up time. I'm schlepping kids all over the place that eats up time. We have all sorts of non-professional obligations and events that are on the calendar. There's not a lot of time. So I'm tired and there's not a lot of time. Somehow all of the various non-professional things needs to fit into these leftover slivers of time. this is difficult.

So today I want to discuss some strategies for how to deal with this. All right. Strategy one, resist the urge to time block your time outside of work. During my workday, I give every minute a job. I survey the time I have available and I want to make the most out of it. Here's what I'm doing for this hour. Here's what I'm doing for these 30 minutes. In this gap between these two meetings is what I'm going to handle these small.

task. This time is all going to be focused on this big project. I'm a big believer in professional time blocking. I think it roughly doubles the amount of stuff you're able to get done with the same fixed amount of time. If you have a ambitious professional schedule, it's pretty much necessary or you're going to fall behind and get stressed out. It's also really hard. It's taxing because you have to keep forcing your mind to say, here's what we're doing now. Here's the time block we're in. Now let's just focus on execution. Now here's a time block run. Let's focus on that.

You'll have to constantly be on the ball. You're focused. You give your brain very little breaks. If you try to do this and your time outside of work, it's too much. Your brain needs a break from completely structured approaches the time. When you time block evenings, when you time block weekends, eventually your brain's going to cry, uncle. It needs flexibility. It needs a time to actually relax.

So resist the urge to time block whatever little time remains outside of your work. and outside of what's already spoken for. Strategy two, on the other hand, weekly plan. So time blocking each of your evenings and weekends is too much. But you should consider your non-professional tasks when you're working on your weekly plan. All right. So a couple things matter here. One, just reviewing the non-professional things on your calendar each week is useful.

You know what's coming. Oh, on Wednesday, I'm taking the kid the baseball practice, and then I have like a dinner after that. That's literally actually what I'm doing today, and I'm recording this on a Wednesday. It also allows you to coordinate. Maybe you and your partner have a relatively intricate dance of who's going to take who and how things are going to get dropped off on a particular day. It gives you a chance to make those plans to figure out in advance how that's all going to work. It also gives you time to make changes. You say, you know what?

I agreed to have drinks with a friend on Thursday. Thursday, this is going to blow up that whole day. It makes everything difficult. Let's move that to another week. You see the whole picture. So weekly planning matters. The other thing to do when weekly planning non-professional events is to get the time-sensitive stuff onto the calendar.

All right. So this is a chance for you to look at your task list. Look at the task list you have for your non-professional obligations. If you follow my system, you have boards and you have boards for your non-professional roles divided by status. If there's stuff that's time-sensitive. These forms have to get submitted by the end of the week. The kids have to get their flu shots this week because the deadline's coming up next week.

We have to go pick up the title and tags for our new car this week because the temporary license plate is going to expire at the end of the week or something. All of these, by the way, are like things I'm dealing with right now. You can get the time sensitive stuff on your calendar. So when are we going to do this? You schedule out time and now you'll treat it like any other event. or appointment. Crucially, you can take time away from your workday as needed. Like maybe you have to go out to the car dealership to get your title and tags. You can look at your calendar and so you know what? The way I need to do this is take a lunch

break on Thursday to go do that. Right. So it allows you to make sure the time sensitive stuff gets done. And you know about it. It's on the calendar. It won't be forgotten. And you can take time away from work where needed. All right. So far, so good. But strategy three is what you should do with the non-urgent but important non-professional paths that remain. This is the thing I've been struggling with recently, especially if you own a house or if you've got a family or own cars, you can build up a really big list of things that do not have deadlines. And there's no one looking over your shoulder saying this has to be done.

But they all eventually need to get done. If you don't do it in the future, it's going to cause problems. or until it is done, it is an increasing source of stress in your life. This is where things get difficult with your non-professional work. So what I actually did here is I just copied. I want to be concrete.

I copied a bunch of stuff from my actual list that fall under this category of non-urgent but important non-professional work. I'm going to read some of these. We need to repaint the siding on our house. We have what inciting needs. to be repainted. I don't even know where to start on that. There's a section of one of our

backyard fences that's broken needs to be fixed. Our patio ceiling needs to be washed. It's like dirty. We have a street facing fence that's white. It needs to be washed. I don't even really know how to do that. It needs to be done. I have four or five different

bathroom-related repairs. There's re-grouting that needs to be done. There's multiple towel racks that have been ripped off a wall, right? Like somehow the drywall has to be replaced and something has to be mounted on studs. There's a faucet somewhere that needs to be tightened, like it just flops back and forth. When you touch it, there's a shower in which the thing that you use to turn to water off and on, you can tell Jesse I'm like an extra plumber.

The water turn thing is like coming very loose at, so I have like four or five bathroom related things. The gutters need cleaning after the fall leaves fall. My filing cabinets need to be empty. They're too full. You got to pick up the tags for the new car. That's more time sensitive, I guess. There's three major rooms in our house that need a serious decluttering, including my library, which has built up probably about 500 books and piles that have to be severely sorted through. The kid's art station has to be severely sorted through. The home office is storing boxes, is needs to be completely cleaned out. There's a whole list of renovations we want to do here in the Deepark H.Q.

All queued up. It needs to be done. I'm working on my home gym, trying to bring in a barbell and squat bench. There's a lot of complexities around that. The garage itself or that goes need to be cleaned out. There's two different unfinished basement spaces that need to be completely decluttered and reorganized. I need a new primary care doctor. The list goes on.

None of these things have a deadline. All of them need to get on, get done. All right, so now we're in kind of a tough situation, right? Because we have this big list. We're not time blocking our days, our days outside of work. We're just putting time sensitive stuff on the calendar weekly planning. How do we get our arms around these crazy list of non-urgent but important household items that need to be done? Now, again, the temptation is to go back and try to time block them.

And I've tried this before where I say, I am going to look at my free time, whatever it is. and I'm going to specifically start scheduling evening time, this hour here, this half hour here, this 45 minutes here for specific things on this list. It doesn't work. You're too tired. Your schedule is too much in flux. Things change. Kids are sick. Things take longer. Evenings are unpredictable and your mind eventually says enough scheduling. So what can you do instead? Well, I want to introduce here the notion of what I call the generic household task. This is a single task, which you can define as like work on household stuff. And the goal is most days to spend some time, put aside some time as you're able to on the generic household task. Some days you only have 20 minutes.

You fit it in like right after dinner. Other days you have like an hour free. You spend an hour on it. But you simplify this huge list. Like most days, I want to do some work on the sort of like household stuff. And you can keep this tracked in your daily metrics if you want to. Did I spend any time on the generic household task today or not? So you can try to most days you want to do work on it.

Now, what do you actually do during the time you put aside each day on the fly? Like, let me go spend some time on the household task. Well, at the beginning of your week, you can make a sort of mini prioritized list of like, well, I want to start with this. And any time I have put aside for the generic household task. And if I finish that, move on to this. And if I finish that move on to this, it's like, sort of a mini list of some priorities, right? So maybe it's like, I want to find a fence repair person and see if I can set up an appointment.

I want to then work on my file cabinets. I'm going to order the desk for my office renovation and see if I can get the gutter cleaners called. This is an ordered list. So when you first have some time, you say, I'm just going to work on my generic household task. You're working on the first thing in that list. If you get done with that, next time you're working on the generic household task, you move on to the next thing. You just, you know, some weeks you'll get farther than others. but you've reduced this massive list to a simple heuristic.

I try to spend at least a little bit of time every day on these sort of like non-urgent but important household stuff. And that's it. And that's a heuristic. And that's all the planning that happens. You're not exhausting yourself. You're not overstructuring. Some days you have no time.

Some days you have a lot of time. Some days you have a little time. But you do like the pressure if I want to do at least a little bit most days. You check it off on a list to see. Here's what I've observed about the generic house. household task. We call it heuristic. A lot gets done over time. When you're just used to, like most days, I put in some time on these type of things, and it's clear, like, what to do if I have time, stuff adds up. A particular Tuesday might not be that exciting. You're like, I only

spent 20 minutes on something. But if you go Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday, you wrap around another week, stuff begins to pile up. Progress is made on this big list. And the list will keep growing as you up with new things. but the point is the amount of accomplished work gets big. Eventually those gutters do get clean and the fences do get repaired. And there's a day where finally someone comes in and fixes all those things in the bathroom. And it's like over time progress happens. It changes your mindset from I have this list I want to finish to I have a process where I always want to be making progress on those type of things.

we were discussing this. It came to mind the other day when I was talking to some board members from the school where my kids go. And they were talking about how with facilities, when you run a facility, you just have this ongoing budget. You assume stuff breaks on like a regular schedule.

You budget for that in advance. You just assume like every year there's like a certain number of things that break in the facilities that you repair. It's not seen as. we have a steady state and then something breaks when we go and fix it. It's like you just, this is just how you run a facility. You have a budget for, you know, the AC will break every 10 years, like the AV will break on

average, like every three years. So the goal is just to have the process you're constantly like fixing and repairing, not you have some list you want to finish and then you're done. So that has been useful to me. The generic household task heuristic, very little pressure, very little fatigue. very little over-structuring or burnout, but you keep on top of things. All right, final strategy I want to mention here.

Automation. As you go through these generic household task items, anything you get to that happens on a regular basis. Like you clean the gutters and you're like, you know what, this has to happen twice a year. It happens predictably, automate it. And that might mean the easiest sense that you just add a recurring event on your calendar

and in that event you have all the information you need. So when you get the gutter cleaning time again in the next season, this event pops up, call this number, set it up, here's how much it costs, and it just goes on your,

it's like a timed thing on your calendar. It's not something that you have to have on a task list and get to. Car washes can go on there. Cleaning, oh, I have to power wash the patio or whatever. Wait a second, just when does that happen? Let me put this on the calendar now.

So in the future, I don't have to wait for it on the list. It's always there. It takes things off of list and just make them happen when things happen. So the automation also reduces the pressure here over time. More and more things just happen when they need to happen without you having to remember to do them or have them on an intimidating looking list. All right. So that's my advice for non-work tasks. I'll summarize again.

resist the urge to time block everything, but do integrate non-work tasks into your weekly planning. For the non-urgent but important tasks, just have the generic household task heuristics. So progress is constantly being made without you having to do a lot of planning and finally automate everything

that can be automated as you get to it. And that again is going to relieve your stress and get things done with even less consideration. And so that's what I'm working on. now my list are endless, but these type of strategies help me keep on top of them without having to make every moment of my life be over-scheduled. The household task heuristic, just that list is getting long, by the way. A lot gets done over time is a common theme with a lot of your stuff, work related

and not work. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the key to a lot of things. Stuff gets done over time. It's, we had the 10-year rule episode a month or two ago. Like important projects in your professional life happen over. many years. That's when the cool stuff happens. Household stuff.

It's just like you have this background thing going on. It's not something that you ever want to be done. You just want a process that keeps you on top of it. Yeah, it's a different way of thinking about it as opposed to like I have a list of things I'm going to do and then I'm done with those things. I've accomplished something. Your list is only going to get longer when you buy your farm to write with your writing shed. Oh, man. I'm reading a book about a farmer right now.

There's a lot of work farmers do. A lot of equipment repair. I would be a terrible farmer. I would be, they repair a lot of stuff. Anyways, yeah, when I buy my farm

with my rider shed, I'm going to have like a staff at 30. You know how like rich people buy these like horse farms, these like show farms where they just... Yeah, in Middleburg, Virginia. Yeah, in Middleburg, Virginia. They have like these huge staffs.

They don't actually have to do anything. Yeah, I'm going to have a riding farm like that. There's a big huge staff just to make sure they, like, I have a good view from my riding cabin. Enough ink. Enough ink. probably people riding by on horses.

I feel like that would be inspiring. I look out the window. I just want people riding by on horses in colonial garb because... Yeah. Like a mini Westworld. I want to build a Westworld to help my concentration for writing. And I think this is only reasonable to build an entire fake world full of artificially intelligent cyborgs just to put you into the right mindset for deep work.

I think this is reasonable. All right. Well, anyways, we got some good questions coming up. But first, I'll hear from sponsor. All right, let's hear from our longtime sponsors and friends at Blinkist. You've heard me talk about Blinkis forever because I have been a loyal Blinkas user for a long time. It's an app that gives you over 6,500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides. You can read or listen to.

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You just have to make sure to go to drinkelement.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we got first? First questions from Jill. In your organization system with quarterly goals, weekly plans, and task boards, where you would place projects that arise, where do you place projects that arise unexpectedly but are necessary and take longer than a week, but aren't part of your quarterly goals?

example, being tax audited or buying a house? First thing is first. Mixing up a few things here. So you said quarterly goals, weekly plans, and task boards. So there's a couple different things going on here that are being mixed together. There's multi-scale planning, which is quarterly or semester plans, then weekly plans, then daily time block plans. That's multi-scale planning.

then you have task boards. That's just a tool for keeping track of obligations. You would review your task boards, for example, when doing your weekly plan. All right. So what you're talking about here, projects with some time sensitivity, like a tax audit or buying a house, like you're working on them during a certain time frame. That would probably, those would probably go on my quarterly plan. Like, hey, one of the things I'm working on like this November is house buying.

like we really want to try to hone in on, you know, a neighborhood and see if we can make an offer. Or I have a tax audit going on. So for the next two months, I need to be, here's what that means and here's what needs to get done and here's some milestones. That's perfectly fine to be in a quarterly plan or a semester plan, however you do it. Because then you'll see that each week when you're making your weekly plan and make sure if important that there's time, if possible, put aside to make progress on those goals. So that's where I would put it. I would put in the quarterly plan. They could also show up on your task board, right?

you could have the next step. If it's, you know, another way to deal with it is you could have like the next step, I need to get loan approval or I need to like ask the accountant these questions about the information I'm gathering. You could have those in your taskboard. Give them their own status list, you know, house project, tax project, where you can start building up the task. If you have a lot of tasks you want to keep track of with accompanying information, when you're

doing your weekly plan, you'll see those columns and sort of make sure time is put aside. So that's what I would say for time sensitive, but on kind of large projects, mention them in your quarterly or semester plans. And if they have a lot of non-trivial task involved with them, give them special columns and the relevant task board. That will help you make progress. Oh, this name's interesting. All right.

Yeah. We got an interesting. Arga. Arga. Arga. Yeah. Argy. Yeah.

All right. It's not so bad. All right. What's the question here? I'm about to go into my final year of college. I've been building my career capital by studying programming. I'll probably work as a software developer. How can I implement lifestyle-centric planning if my life has been laid down by my parents, teachers, and professors?

Well, we've got to be careful about terminology here. What is being laid down by our parents, teachers, and professors? If it's a particular skill development path, right, learning computer programming, I'm not so worried about that, right? Lifestyle-centric planning. You establish your vision of the ideal lifestyle, and then you work backwards and move closer to that, taking advantage of your skills and opportunities and looking for ways around obstacles. Having learned something like computer programming, whether it was your ideas or your parents,

is just another skill you have in your basket when you're trying to figure out this plan. It's another orientering tool in your backpack as you make this journey across the landscape of possible lifestyle. It's great. It's something that has some value. You can figure out how to use it. On the other hand, if you're getting pressure from your parents about what your lifestyle should look like, you need to live in this type of neighborhood. You need to have this type of working life. You need to be sending your kids to this schools. Like, we get a lot of this pressure if you maybe have a parents that come from a very specific upper middle class lifestyle. Like this is our expectation is that you should follow this very specific same upper middle class lifestyle.

which might require pretty narrow paths you have to go through. That's where you could get a class with lifestyle-centric planning. But when it's like, hey, my parents kind of pressured me to study this in school, just see that as a skill you have to work with as you construct your own lifestyle-centric plan. And like with programming, God, there's any number of ways you can build interesting lifestyles with that. In slow productivity, for example, I do a nice profile of a web developer designer who let left, he was on a track of building a pretty big business around his skill. He was living in Vancouver. He's very expensive to live there. And he said, you know what? I'm going to use this skill to pursue a different lifestyle vision, one that is slower, has more nature, tons more autonomy. So he moved with his wife outside of the small town of Tolfino on Vancouver Island, which is sort of a rural place out there in the bay. Tolfino has a surf break. His wife was a surfer. He did not. He did not. not grow out a big development business, but just sort of kept his hourly rate high and his

expenses low. So now he could live in this cool place with a very reasonable amount of work because their expenses were very low. As he said, there's not a lot of opportunities where they live to spend money. And he used that skill in a really original innovative way that was specific to the lifestyle plan that he devised. His name was Paul Jarvis. Anyways, that's what I want to say here.

It's not a big deal because, look, if a parent's like, I'm going to help you figure out what the study, you might have not known what the study. And it's good to have valuable skills. But where you need to have autonomy is in figuring out what the lifestyle is you're moving backwards from. And so focus on that. You know, this is more of a problem, Jesse, this like parental pressure. It's actually more of a problem, not for lifestyle-centric planners, but for people who's described to the passion hypothesis. Mm-hmm. Right.

So if you, and this comes from my book, So Good, they can't ignore you. If you subscribe to the idea that you're meant to do one thing, if you don't find your true passion, you're going to be miserable. That's where the parental influence psychologically becomes a real issue because you really worry what if the things they're encouraging me to learn? What if the classes of jobs they're encouraging me to pursue are not my one true passion? I'll be miserable. So the passion hypothesis believers are much more sensitive to pressure than lifestyle-centric planners who just sees something. skills as tools. Great. These are more tools in my toolbox for building the life I want. So I've used three different metaphors here, by the way. You put them in your basket, use them as

orientering tools that are in your backpack, and now it's tool in your toolbox for assembling your ideal lifestyle. So there you go, guys. Metaphor. That's how you know I'm a writer. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Ben. I want to start building career capital, but I'm not sure what rare and valuable skills to pursue. I'm worried about investing years, developing a skill and having a turnout to be not as lucrative or align with my lifestyle vision as I hoped. Yeah, this is partially a hard question and partially an easy question. So the hard thing about finding skills is it can sometimes be difficult to even identify

what's valuable. And some fields this is obvious. In other fields, it really takes work. right? Like let's say you get involved in political campaigns. You get started as like an intern in college. You get a position on a campaign. You're trying to figure out this world of politics. It might not be obvious at first. What are the things I could master that would make me invaluable in this world of political campaigning? And to figure that out, you actually have to talk to people and observe. Right. Who's getting ahead? Who's in demand? Who's influential? Why? What are the particular skills that they have that's in demand? So, right. So it can be tricky sometimes to figure out what actually matters. On the other hand, it's not too difficult to sidestep the trap of a dead-in skill, just bias towards skills that in a general sense have a long track record, and in a specific sense are very adaptable.

Right. So computer programming. In a general sense, computer programming has been and will continue to be valuable because we program computers to do lots of things. things in our lives. In the specific or small-scale sense, you might have to adapt along the way what language you're using. But that's okay.

If you're good at computer programming, you can change to a different language when it emerges pretty quickly. So that's a pretty safe skill. Dead-in skills are skills that are tied to a particular cultural trend, business moment, or technological device. They're tied to that. and if that goes away, they have no other value. So, for example, I would be very wary right now if you said what I'm going to specialize

in is TikTok videos for certain types of marketing. You're going to get really good at what works and doesn't work on TikTok and how to build videos for like my political candidates or for brands that are going to do well on TikTok. What happens if TikTok's banned in the U.S. or more likely just another tool rises and there's like guys and that one goes away. That skill is hyper-specific. And now, you know, you tied your horse to a wagon that looked attractive in the moment, but the wheels are going to come off pretty soon.

So you do want to be careful. I mean, think about it. There's probably a lot of people out there that, like, specialized in vines. Or, you know, hey, Instagram stories is my thing. I know exactly what works on Instagram stories. The problem is once people stop using that, you have to start from scratch from skills. So look for the summarize here. Do to work to figure out what actually matters in your field.

It might not be what you think. It might be non-obvious. Two, bias towards skills that are, in a general sense, have a long track record, are going to be around for a while, even if it requires that you adapt exactly how you're applying that skill in the short term. And three, be wary of more fattest skills, skills that are tied to a trend or technology, that if that goes away, the skill itself is dead. You do those things, I think you'll be okay.

All right, who we got. Next question is from Margaret. I'm a mother of three and a writer. I had success with my first book, but needed to quit social media to write my second. It's set to be published next year. Should I go back on social media for promotion now that it's finished? I don't think my presence on social media moves the needle at all in terms of sales, but it can be important for connections and driving attendance at events that occur with publication.

Well, look, you're right. In the long term, it doesn't matter. It doesn't move the needle on sales in any sort of meaningful way. It's not going to be what stands between you having a successful career as a writer or not. And I'm completely fine with you not using social media. If you feel like for the relationship with your publisher, you need to be doing something new media, I think that's completely fine. If you don't really care about it, you can set these things up in a way that has very limited impact on your life. So what I've seen fiction writers do, and I think this is a perfectly fine template, their ultimate goal is to get people onto an email list, an email list where they can send updates about events, what's going on with their books, email lists convert very highly when it comes to book sales, much more so than almost any other type of metric of online following that you can have. So they have an emailing list. Now, how do you get people onto that mailing list? have some sort of regular content that's low-lift but interesting. And it really could be like updates on your writing or your writing progress. It could be, here's the book I read that, here's the books I read this month. This is a good one.

I'm just going to go through what I read this month. You only have to write this once a month. And here's the books I read and quick summary of them. People love book recommendations, especially if you're in the fiction world. So you have some value on there, but it's a very low lift. then you can have some sort of algorithmic presence to try to drive people to it. So by algorithmic presence, I mean somewhere where you are out there in the world of new media and recommendation algorithms could drive audiences to you that you otherwise wouldn't have direct access to.

The key here is whatever you pick to automate it and not spend much time on it. So maybe it's an Instagram thing. If it's an Instagram thing, though, again, I don't want you on Instagram. I don't want you looking at Instagram posts. I don't want you reading comments on Instagram. It's I post a quote. I post a book I like. I post a writing update.

Maybe I even have someone do it for me. It's not on my phone. It's done for my desktop. It's the schedule, as much of a schedule as watering my plants. And I think about it when I'm not outside of those moments. I think about it just about as much as I think about watering my plants when I'm not watering. It's just not a big part of my life, but I do it and the plants stay alive. So maybe you're doing Instagram.

Maybe you're doing TikTok, though that can be pretty difficult. Maybe you're doing YouTube. Brandon Sanderson, who if you're not familiar with Brandon Sanderson, he wrote Name of the Wind. And if you have any comments about that, you can send them to Jesse at Calnewport.com. He loves to see him. I should clarify, every time I make this joke, a new listener gets really upset. We know Brandon Sanderson did not write Name of the Wind. This is an insider joke on the show, okay?

Patrick Rufius fans can. It's okay. We can chill. Brandon has really leaned into YouTube and like one of the things he does is have these writers updates on YouTube where he's like here's how many pages I wrote this week

here's what's going on with this project here's what's going on with that project like people love that and that that's a way for audiences to potentially find them and so sure have an algorithmic presence if you care about this again I don't think it doesn't make a matter long long term doesn't matter what matters is the book rate

but I get it in the short term you want your public you're happy, it's anxiety reducing, and you want people to show up to your book signings. I get it. So have something that is in the algorithmic media world that you post to intentionally and on a regular basis, but otherwise completely ignore the technology, and always be driving towards a mailing list where you have some sort of value on it. I think that's probably the sweet spot right now for writers. So you're taking your intentional swing in algorithmic space, but not letting it be a part of

your life. and then you have a mailing list. You know, it probably will do nothing, but that setup's not going to hurt you. If something catches on, though, it does give you the chance of, like, riding that wave or taking advantage of it. But again, with books,

what matters is the book being great. Like, ultimately, that matters. Most of the writers who are killing it right now, no one cares about their online presence, right? Like, no one cares about Kristen Hanna's Twitter account. Like, her book says, because they get passed around. Hey, I love this.

I love the women. Like, you should read this novel. You know, lessons in chemistry sold all the copies in the world, not because of TikTok, but because people started passing it around. You got to read this book at book groups, right? Deep work sold a ton of copies, not because of my blog. People just, hey, I like this book. You should read this book.

So, you know, ultimately it doesn't matter. But that's what I would recommend if you're an author and you want to be doing something. That's probably right now, I think, just sweet. spot. Don't podcast, by the way, unless, like, you really want to do podcasting as a business, right? Like, podcasting is very hard. It takes up time and money, and it's not worth it unless you're making a real run and having a real business.

And so don't do that unless, like, it's actually a part of your business plan. That's not casual. Sound quality is big, too. Sound quality is big. YouTube, you have to be careful about. YouTube is hard. Like, Justin and I have learned this. It can't just record yourself and put it up there.

say people will find it. It's like pretty difficult. Thumbails, titles, exactly like how you cut into these videos. So you have to be super specific and intentional. And the stuff you think that will do well probably won't. But, you know, it's not a bad idea. If you find something that clicks, a format that works, like Brandon Sanderson's here's how much I wrote this week. Like, if you find a format that works, it could be good. So that's my recommendation.

So Brandon does it from the layer? He does it from the layer. Yeah. So he does, we should bring it up. Can I bring it up on here? Yeah. I'm actually curious. Let's look. I still want to get out there and see the layer. Justin, I got an invite, but we just have not been able to make that work. All right. So what I'm going to do, should I go to the YouTube app or the web? Go to the web. All right. So I'm loading up here. YouTube. Let me Don't switch to it yet

All of Jesse's video recommendations are about Popa rearrangements Interesting, I didn't realize Let me type in Brandon Sanderson All right All right

So here's his channel I have it on the screen now It's not huge 600,000 subscribers There's like double our channel Yeah but he sold a lot of books. Let me look at his videos chronologically.

All right. So what's he up to? Weekly update. 50,000 views. Last week's 58,000 views, weeks before 65,000 views. So that's like his very consistent thing. He's a base of like 50 to 60,000 people who watch the weekly updates. Let me put one up here.

This is in his layer. So I'm sure it's filmed. Yeah. So he's a very nice setup with a bookshelf and professional writing. I don't know why YouTube. I guess it defaults to close captions now for international audiences. All right. So here we go.

See that? See on the screen, that graphic? Yeah. That's like what percent of the book he's done with. So like this is his most popular thing he does. He's tried other things. So he has this podcast intentionally blank. These do half the traffic.

So this is like him talking with the co-host. They do like half the traffic. And then that's more for him. I think the weekly updates keeps his fans engaged. I don't know that the video podcast, this is more, it's just him with someone else and they chat about things, but it's not nearly as popular. And then he does one-off things on here as well, like a fan event. Like, let me put up a video of me doing a fan event, et cetera. And those don't do it as well either.

So anyways, I think it's kind of cool, right? Like he has a very specific strategy. He does these weekly updates. That's his relationship with his fans. that's what you know he got this set up once but but notice these aren't huge views for someone that famous with 600,000 subscribers, you know, all of that work. It's still going to be like a core group of people. Yep. So there's an example. All right. Let's uh, what do we got next? We have our slow productivity corner. Oh, excellent. Let's hear some theme music. For those who

are new, we like to have one question each week that relates to my most recent book. Slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. If you have not read or listened to this book yet, you should. I estimate about half of what we talk about on the show actually references ideas from that book. So it's sort of like the source guide to the Deep Questions podcast. All right, Jesse, what's today's slow productivity question? It's from Rachel. How can I do fewer things if I'm expected to bill 40 client hours every week?

Well, I think this is one of the more common questions I hear about the philosophy of slow productivity. there's three principles to this philosophy that I outline in the book, Do Fewer Things, So What the Question's About, Work at a Natural Pace and Obsess Over Quality. The concern people have about do fewer things tends to be based on a misunderstanding of what's being proposed. They read Do Fewer Things as Work Fewer Hours or Accomplish Fewer Things. That's not actually what it means. I think we've become used to over the last few hours. five years. We've become used to a sort of anti-work rhetoric that really focuses on an antagonistic

relationship with work and therefore to repair our existing issues with burnout. We need to reduce the amount of work we're doing. So there's a that homogenizes all work is work and what it measures is how much you're doing. And it says, look, there's these pressures, be them capitalistic or cultural, that's pushing you too much and you need to do less. Right. This would be at the core of books with do nothing in the title or the quiet quitting movement, etc. Slow productivity is coming at this from another angle. When it says do fewer things, what it really means is do fewer things at once. And it's actually a very practical argument.

Everything you agree to do has two components with it. There's the actual execution of the work itself and there's the administrative overhead that comes along with collaborating with other people and gathering the information you need to do the work. The amount of administrative overhead per task is fixed. So as you say yes to more and more things, the total amount of administrative overhead in your calendar goes up. But administrative overhead is highly distractive and highly inflexible because it's not just you deciding to do it. You've got to send a message.

You've got to wait for a response. You've got to get on a call. You've got to go into a meeting. So as you have more and more administrative overhead, more and more of your day is spent servicing the administrative overhead leaves you less time to actually execute to work. Quality of your life goes down. Exhaustion goes up. and the rate at which you finish things goes down as well. So do fewer things means do fewer things it wants.

It has nothing to do with the total hours of work that you do. And if anything, it'll increase what you accomplish. So in the context of billing hours, it would mean, look, work on less clients at a time. But you'll be able to give each of those clients more consecutive time. And we'll probably finish or get the major milestones with these clients faster and a higher level of quality. All of this against the same backdrop if I bill 40 hours. It's like, what are you doing with that? your 40 hours. What's the ratio of deep work execution versus administrative overhead in those 40 hours?

As you make the former larger, your work will be of a higher quality and it'll also become more sustainable. All right. So that is our slow productivity corner question of the week. Let's hear that theme music one more time. All right. Do we have a call this week, Jesse? We do. All right. Let's hear it. Hi, Kyle. My name is Anna and I work in campus ministry at a college campus. My deep work ministry is definitely focusing on relationships and events that we have. So I love your idea of simulating my own support staff to sort of get the administrative tasks done so I can focus on what's most important. I have a student worker that I use to take care of some of the administrative recurring tasks and one-off tasks, but I actually do get to hire a new

administrative assistant. So I'm wondering if you have any advice on how to integrate them into a Newportian kind of system without having to spend a ton of time creating tasks for them. Cool. Thank you. Well, that's great. The fact that you get a hired administrative assistant, I think, is great. The fact that you have autonomy over what this assistant's going to do is also great. So how do we get a Newportonian setup here? Well, I have a couple notes here. First, I want to just start by underscoring something you mentioned in passing, this idea of treating admin work like a different job. Let me just briefly elaborate that for listeners who are unfamiliar.

I'm a big believer if you have a sort of autonomous role like this that has some major deep work requirements but also some major administrative requirements is to treat those two roles as two part-time jobs. I have my admin job where I am in charge of the logistics and budget of running a particular campus ministry. And I have my minister job where I'm forming connections, I'm thinking big thoughts, I'm writing, I'm on stage or in the room with other students and helping them feel secure in their spiritual community, right? Treating as different part-time jobs that have different schedules. This is when my administrative job, this is when I do it. My deep work pastoral job, this is when I do that.

And so you're not mixing the two together. you're still giving the same amount of time to each that you would if you're if you were doing them in a more haphazard style but you're not mixing them together so when you're doing admin work and maybe that's like what the afternoons are like or the first hour of the day and from three to five is like that's all you're doing and in the other hours all you're doing is your office is open students are coming in your writing you're thinking you're inspiring you're not context shifting constantly back and forth between these two worlds is a good way of handling what's increasingly common in non-entry level positions of the knowledge economy which are these multi-role jobs. Treat the role separately. All right. Your administrative assistant, it will be helpful if you keep this in mind, right? What you want to avoid is the administrative assistant having a hive mind style collaboration relationship with you where you're just constantly going back and forth about things.

Hey, what about this? I'm working on this. What about this? You do not want to sort of meld your minds into a hive mind because that essentially assistant then is not going to save you from context shifts and distraction, but we'll actually amplify them. Because when it's just you, at least you have some control over, I'm writing now. So I'm not going to work on getting the catering order right for this event staff. But when there's someone else involved, they don't know that. They're working on the catering

order. They're going to come interrupt you right then. So it can actually be worse if you don't do this right. So what does work is processes. You have to do the hard. work of figuring out what are the regular things that we do? What are our systems and processes for dealing with them? And then the admin can be plugged into that existing system. The admins can't come up with the systems and processes because you know the role and you know what's important. So for example, let's be specific. I'm guessing here, but maybe one of the things you have to do is meet with students, right? Students will come to you and say, whatever, I just want to talk to someone on campus from my spiritual background. And these are one, you don't know when

students are going to make these requests and it's a big important part of your job. Have a scheduling process that you can then plug an admin assistant into. Oh, you want to set up a chat with me. Send the note to the admin, right? The admin then knows we've set aside specific times for student meetings maybe that he or she can schedule them directly into. Or maybe we have on Mondays, you sit down with the admin, you have a list of students who want to meet with you, and you figure out where you want to put those meetings in the week, and then they go back and tell the students, right? Maybe when the student writes in, the rule is the admin says, okay, what is your class schedule next week? What are generally the times you're available? We'll get back to you with meeting times on Monday morning, right? Whatever it is, have a system that you're then plugging the admin into. The other thing you want to do, in addition to process and systems, is have a communication protocol. All of these ideas, by the way, are in my book or rolled without email if you want to look

deeper into this, but have a communication protocol so that the default does not become, as the admin thinks of something or needs feedback, they just ping you and need an answer quickly so they don't have to keep track of it. Real time, but regular is the right way to do it with an admin. At some point in the morning, you should check in on the day, what's going on, what's open some time in the afternoon, you should do the same. In between those times, they can consolidate everything that they need to talk to with you. So I think frequent but pre-scheduled real-time conversation is the right way to actually

communicate with an admin. It's very nuanced things get done, but it prevents, it prevents, rather, unscheduled distractions and interruptions. And make sure that everything you have the admin doing, that you have some sort of well-defined process and system that surrounds it, write these things down. right you do those things and admin can be very uh effective if you don't it can actually make things worse if it's just i'm just going to be we'll just be talking throughout the day i'll give you work you'll check in with me with what questions you have about that um you're going to find the admin

is actually adding more work than they're saving so it's a good question you're in a good situation if you handle it carefully and i think that based on your call i think you probably will yeah admins are interesting jessey i always i always think of joe rogan's advice which we talk about on the show a lot, which was, at least in Hollywood, entertainment, if you need an assistant, do less things. So that's like where I start. If you need an assistant, you're doing too much. But in some roles, like, no, no, the role is really well-defined, like being in campus

ministry, they're a well-deployed assistant can really make your life easier. Yeah. It should be more support staff in general, I think, and like most jobs. It's crazy the way we do this. to have so many roles on individuals. We think that this is somehow more economically efficient, but it's not. A campus minister that also has to be the administrator of like a complex campus ministry is very bad. It doesn't do as much ministering, right?

An executive that has to spend all this time, like emailing back and forth with HR and booking flights or this or that, it's just way worse at being an executive. We don't always think about that. All right. It looks like we have a case study. So what we try to do is people send in to jessie at Cald-Newport.com. There are stories of using the type of advice we talk about on this show in their own life. So we can see what it looks like in practice.

Today we have a case study from Hanna. Hannah says I'm a software developer. In software development, we have this process called pull request review. when your work is put in a pull request and it must be approved by one of your peers before it can be considered done and merged into the code base. All right.

This is a technical thing, but programmers know about it. This is me talking now. Just think about pull requests as you basically saying, I change some code from this complicated system that I want to now add back to the system and a pull request says someone is going to check it

before it gets added back in. So it ensures that someone doesn't like mess up something about the system. All right. I joined the team as a more junior developer, and I used to feel like a big part of my job is to immediately check the pull request from the senior developers. And if there's no serious bug, I should give a quick stamp of approval so their work can move on and be merged. I was partly too nice and scared of blocking the process and partly chose to be visibly busy. By participating in the poll request review as soon as the notification came in,

I felt like people can see me working, stepping away again. This is a classic example of what I call on my book, Slow Productivity, Sudo-Predactivity, which is the use of visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. All right, back to the case study. This approach, however, requires constant context switching and turns me into a zombie, checking slack and emails all the time, hunting for visible work.

After reading deep work, I decided this has to change. I started with time block recording just to have an account of how my time was spent and was appalled to find out how much went into checking Slack and getting distracted. After seeing this pattern for one week, I started to actually do daily time block planning. In addition, I also plan for the coming week and retrospectively review the previous week to understand myself better. I now try to start today with at least an hour block of coding work without opening Slack or emails, which is a game changer when it comes to setting the mood for the day. Then I schedule all poll request reviews for 10 a.m.

after the team's daily meeting and again at 3 p.m. after my afternoon walk, each review time block lasts at most one hour, usually less than I move on with my own tasks. I thought my coworkers would notice and be mad, but it seems like waiting a few hours for review doesn't bother them at all in most cases. With this new system, I've become more effective and happier with my own work. My deep, the shallow work ratio went from 20% to 40%. I was able to complete a complicated project and got a lot of positive feedback from the team. When the project is done, I feel I've earned more trust from others and a lot more confidence in myself to keep optimizing my schedule to fit my vision, like skipping irrelevant meetings to get more deep work done.

It's a classic example of the type of principles we talk about here on the show in action. Souter productivity convinces us. We talk about this all the time on the show. It convinces us that there's these committee meetings where our peers and bosses are studying our every response. They have bar charts of the average latency between pull requests and completions, and they're looking for anything different.

And as soon as they see a change, hmm, I've noticed that, see, this was from Hannah. Hannah seems to be waiting until 10 a.m. to handle their poll request. This won't stand at all and they're getting really upset about this. People don't care. They're busy. They finish something. They move on to something else.

What they notice is if you're negligent, if you skipped poll request, if you would often have a day or two go by, that would flag negatively and people would notice. But the fact that you've batched these at 10 and 3, no one cares. They get done, right? But you've made your life more easier. The other thing that happens, as we see in this case study, is that as you move away from pseudo-productivity, you begin to obsess over quality, one of the principles of slow productivity. I like doing deep work. I like producing stuff that matters.

I get good feedback when I do stuff that matters. Suddenly, pseudo-productivity and all the performance of busyness seems less appealing. The more you care about quality, the more likely, as we see in this case study, you are to say, I'm not going to that meeting. or I'm not going to even look at my slack until 10 a.m. Because you get addicted to the rewards and positive feeling of doing good work. And that's why obsess over quality, I say, is the glue for the slow productivity philosophy. If you don't do that part, everything else becomes just like an antagonistic relationship with your work.

You don't obsess over quality, but you're still trying to reduce the number of things you work on concurrently and work at a more natural pace. It's just like, I don't like work. I want to do less of it. I want to be less hard. When you obsess over quality, you start doing those things because it lets you do better work. When you obsess over quality, you gain more freedom to do those things because you're doing better work. So I see this as a great case study of what happens when you leave pseudo productivity and you embrace the type of ideas I talk about in slow productivity. All right, we have a final segment coming up at Tech Corner.

Talk about a trend in the world of technology that is critical. but you are not paying enough attention to. First, however, let's hear from a sponsor. I want to talk about Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. And now with the new Notion AI, you have the capabilities of multiple AI tools built in

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I also want to talk about our friends at Z biotics. Jesse and I are old men. Let's be honest. We're in our 40s now. It's not likely we were when we were in college. And what that means is, like if we're going out with some friends, Like tonight I'm having dinner with three friends. We'll probably have like a drink or two because it's a nice dinner.

That could be enough for us old men. Like knock us out the next day to get us off to a more sluggist start. This is not the way it was in college. My memory of Dartmouth and maybe I have this little wrong, Jesse. My memory of Dartmouth is that Natty Light came out of the water fountains. I think it was just like part of our student fees went to you could just like the spigots, right? It's not the case when we're forwarding anymore. Okay, so enter in Z biotics, which is a pre-alcohol prebiotic drink.

It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's the blame for your right. off next day. So pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this by-product down. You remember to take Zibiotics, make that your first drink of the night, drink responsible and you feel your best tomorrow, right? So it's something you actually take before

you go out and meet your friends and then those couple drinks you have won't feel quite so bad the next morning. Kind of a cool idea, especially for those of us who aren't that young anymore. So go to Zbiotics.com slash Cal to learn more and get 15% off your first order. When you use Cal at checkout, Zbiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked. Remember to head to Zbiotics.com slash Cal and use that code Cal at checkout to get 15% off. All right.

Jesse, let's do our final segment. I want to do something, and maybe we should get, eventually, I think we need theme music for this, Jesse. But I want to add something I call Tech Corner occasionally to the end of the episode. Look, I'm a technologist. I'm a computer scientist of founding faculty member of Georgetown Center for Digital Ethics. I'm the director of the computer science, ethics and society academic program at Georgetown. I think a lot about technology and its impact. Everything in the show is vaguely about that, right?

the deep life is something that we're often establishing as a bulwark against a distracted life of those distractions come from the electronic world, but sometimes I want to get geeky about specific technologies. Today I want to briefly talk about advances in a trend that I think is one of the most important trends in technology that most people are ignoring, and it has nothing to do with AI.

I'm putting a video on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. What you're going to see here is a video from a company, called Emmerced. You see a man holding up what looks like like a smaller version of Apple Vision Pro Kind looks like ski goggles. These are important.

All right. Here's someone wearing them. All right. So, Jesse, what do you think about these guys? These are, these still aren't casual. You would notice if someone was wearing these. Right. But they're like small ski goggles with a cable coming off of them.

All right. So what do these do? I'm going to zoom ahead here to them in progress. All right. We see on the screen what the person wearing the Viser sees, which is their computer screens, but floating in space against a sort of scenic background. You can also use these with pass-through.

I'll fast forward to that, where you see your actual space around you, but with these computer screens floating. Here's what's important about this particular product. It's called Viser. It's from a company called Immersed, a company that I actually profiled in New Yorker. back in 2021.

It's about a third the price of Apple Vision Pro. Right? Why is it about a third to price? They have specialized in one particular use case, which is when I put on these augmented reality goggles,

the only thing I want to do is have virtual computer monitors. I want to take the screens from my computer I'm using right here, make them big, and put them in virtual space. If that's all you're doing,

it simplifies a lot of the hard problems about augmented reality. When you don't need like the whale to come out of the floor of the gymnasium like we see in the famous Magic Leap demo, when you don't need the ability to be walking through a building and have a Jar Jar,

Jhar Bing's character walking alongside of you, when you don't need the ability to walk 360 around a carefully rendered 3D Minecraft map that's getting the lighting right from all directions. When you don't need any of that, all you need is I want screens floating in space

and they stay fixed in one space. And in fact, my laptop will be there in the scene so I can anchor them to where my laptop is. The challenge of augmented reality gets much easier so the price can go way down. The reason why I think this is important is because the particular use case that immerses focusing on with the visor

is the killer app. It is the thing we should be paying attention to, virtual monitors. this is the big change. I've talked about this before, but now we're making progress for it. This is the big change that is coming. I do not need a TV.

I do not need to buy a desktop. I don't need to have multiple laptop computers. Screens will be virtual. When you think about this, it makes a lot of sense, right? What I bring with me is a pair of glasses. When I put on those glasses, I get a big monitor computer.

computer screen. Or I get four computer screens. Or I get a TV on my wall, whatever wall I happen to be in, and I can watch a movie there. I can watch a TV show there. This makes so much more sense when we think about it than having to have all of these pieces of glass on top of LED light-emitting diodes that we hang and put on hinges and put in all of our spaces and that we use to sort of see things. why not just make all these screens virtual, then I don't have to buy all these different things. I need one powerful competing device in this pair of glasses. This is the future for everyone who is making fun of the Apple Vision Pro. This is what Apple has in mind. The demos are weird and people do all sorts of crazy stuff with them. What they have in mind is their whole hardware business is going to go away

when this technology advances and they want to be at the forefront. So why I think this announcement is important is because the price is coming down. When you acknowledge this is what we're trying to do, you begin to get competition in the space. When you get the form factor for these glasses to be more or less normal glasses form factor, and you get the price sub thousand, the race is on. Now you're in a killer app space where you're going to start to begin to see widespread adoption. So is there going to be a future in which everyone has on just walking on the street? on the subway, at their chairs at Starbucks at their offices, where everyone has on basically

what looks like thick rayband glasses. Is that going to be the future where everyone has on glasses? I say the answer is yes. And I think that that feels weird to us right now. Could you imagine? Just everyone you see has these glasses on that can just put screens in front of them when they need it. But is it really any weirder to someone in the 1980s if you talked about a world in which

everyone was going to be carrying around a small rectangle with a piece of glass and just looking at it everywhere, like holding this thing up in front of their head. Like this looks pretty weird. And yet now we're completely used to that. That you walk into almost any public space and everyone is looking at this thing in their hand. If you, in 1982 when I was born, if you told people that's what we're going to see 40 years from now in the future. They'd be like, you mean like Star Trek? like the thing Commander Kirk looks at when they beam them down to the surface of the planet, come on, you're crazy.

And now we're completely used to it. I think 10 years from now, everyone's going to have on glasses. Everyone's going to have on glasses. It just makes too much sense. There'll be some computing device as well. It'll be like a phone, maybe a little bit thicker. It's going to have like most of your computation. Your data is going to be in the cloud.

It's going to make, we're going to see this. There'll be first adopters. but companies are going to be quick to this once the price is right. Because you can just look at a budget, an IT budget for a company, right? Man, we have to buy all of these computers. We have to replace them every three years. We have all these projectors in the conference rooms and these TV projectors and those break and we have to replace them.

We have like the phones people use and those have to be updated and then we have to keep the software updated and we have to force people to update the software and all these different devices. And to say, what if we just bought everyone at $500, pair of glasses, right? And now every conference room, every desk, like we just have all the screens they need. It's all there virtual. Everything is software based. We can update it in the back end as needed. It just makes a lot of sense. For individuals, like, yes, I want five monitors or three monitors. Or I want my email over here and the thing I'm writing over here and the chat,

Slack chat over here. Yes, I want multiple monitors. People are going to get used to that. And if putting down the glasses gives that to you at home, at the office, when you're hot swapping desks on the seat in front of you on the Delta flight, people will want that. The ability to shut off the world and replace it with a virtual reality world, I think that will be useful as well when people want to focus. Hey, I want to focus. I want just one screen where I'm writing and I want to be, you know, in Mordor or whatever. Like, that's going to be important as well. So anyways, I have been pitching this future, this end of reality and what screens become virtual. I've been pitching this for a long time.

This is a key milestone. Other OEMs figuring out, oh, if all we need to do is screens, we can make these things cheaper. This is the beginning of the end for screens. Now that it's no longer the super high-end products, it's not Meta's Quest doing some of this, but also doing games. It's not Applevision Pro trying to do all possible augmented reality things for $3,000. It's a smaller pair of glasses that just does screens for $1,000. That's going to lead to a smaller pair of glasses that just does screens for $500. That's then going to lead to smaller glasses that does the same thing.

And then we're going to have a real change. So, anyways, that's my tech corner for this week. Keep an eye on augmented reality. Forget the crazy stuff. This is all about having three screens at your desk at Starbucks. We're getting closer to that future. I heard however their event didn't go well. Oh, really?

Yeah, they had a big event this summer. They invited me, but I think the demos weren't ready yet. So a lot of people came and they didn't have the visor ready. But anyways, I think this direction, I mean, immersive is going to do well. Apple's going to have a lower end product. Everyone else, meta is working on the frames. So meta has the right size frames with limited functionality. And they're working backwards from the frames to the technology.

People are working on this. And again, I think we're so distracted by generative AI. We don't realize that this is a technology that's going to have a bigger day-to-day footprint probably on our life. So there you go. My tech corner obligation of the day is spreading the word about that. All right. But for now, we will shut down our old-fashioned screens because that's all we have to talk about in today's episode. Thank you, everyone for listening.

We'll be back next week with another episode of the podcast. 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.

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