Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 335: On Morning Routines

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

One of the most popular and most derided topics in online productivity spaces are so-called morning routines. In this episode, Cal wades into this content, identifying three major categories of these routines. For each, he explores what’s good and what’s bad. In the end, he uses these lessons to update his own daily routines in some highly specific ways. He then answers reader questions and ends with a “tech corner” segment that builds on Cal’s latest essay for The New Yorker. 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: On Morning Routines [4:04] - How should I choose what podcasts to listen to? [41:49]- How does Cal track daily steps? [52:57]- Can I switch my office hours around? [57:23]- How long should I remain at a large marketing firm? [1:02:37]- How can I reject meetings? [1:10:02]- CALL: How to obsess over quality while researching [1:13:22] CASE STUDY: A career transition to become a pastor [1:18:57] TECH CORNER: YouTube and the Creative Middle Class [1:28:18] 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?x.com/jockowillinktiktok.com/@spartan/video/7259530421099056427nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/i-tried-miracle-morning-routine-month-here-s-what-happened-ncna981786youtube.com/watch?v=roK4g1e28mMnewyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/a-lesson-in-creativity-and-capitalism-from-two-zany-youtubers Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestionscozyearth.com/deep (Use code: DEEP)mybodytutor.combyloftie.com (Use code: DEEP20) 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. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I was just down at People's Book, our bookstore here into Going Park, signing a bunch more books. So I think the listeners have heeded my call to consider an autographed version of slow productivity as a what I'm calling a New Year's gift, a gift to yourself or someone else you know, who's looking to improve parts of their work life in the new year. So I'm always happy to go down there and sign more books. So if you all keep ordering at the people's book. Or I think it's people's book Tacoma.com.

Whatever. People's book in Tacoma. Go to their website. You can order the sign copies. I'll keep signing them. They'll keep sending them out. That's a people's book, Tacoma. People's book Tacoma.

com. Did you buy any books when you were down there? I don't know if I bought. Last time I was down, I don't know if I did. I just, a surgical strike came in, signed, of books. Always happy to do it. A shout out to make, actually, from friends of the show, Jesse, you know the the my body tutor guys. Yeah. And I've known Adam for a long time. He used to give fitness advice on the

study hacks blog back in the old days. Anyways, Adam, you know, he wrote me, I don't know, it's like a year ago now. And he's like, hey, we're building a new product that's similar to my body tutor in the sense that it's going to be, you're going to have like an online coach and daily accountability. But we want to do it around like productivity type stuff. Do you have any, like you have any thoughts? No, like, well, of course I have thoughts. Yeah. And so I had some conversations with them and gave some ideas.

Anyways, that service just launched. It's called done daily. So it's at donedaily.com. I think it's pretty cool. It's basically an executive coaching style service run entirely online on a multi-scale planning paradigm. So you have your quarterly plan. You then work with actual coach to review your week ahead in the week that just passed. Then you check in briefly with your coach every day.

So this is where the accountability part comes in. Okay, here's how it went. Here's where I'm falling behind. They give you some advice. There's a lot of sort of Cal Newport kind of infused in this. So I'm kind of excited. You know, high-level executives use executive coaches to help do this. But they're outrageously expensive.

So just like having a personal trainer come to your house every day is outrageously expensive. And my body tutor made that cheaper. I think this is a cool idea. And I'm wondering, here's my bigger question, is this done daily.com model going to become a wider model in the world of knowledge work? The idea of getting at this sort of sweet spot of you can barely make affordable having like an actual coach that's working with you and making sure you're executing not just what you're doing, but you're actually doing it. It worked for fitness. I'm curious if it'll work for productivity. As you check that out, I don't have a promo code or anything.

I just think it's cool what they're up to. So that's donedaily.com. If you do try it out, and I think they have like a 30-day probably thing, risk-free, send the note to me via Jesse at jessia at Kylenewport.com because I'm very curious about this model. Online coaching, moving that from fitness to productivity doesn't work. So keep me posted about what you find. But we have a big show today that we need to get to. We've got a cool deep dive that's going to deal with an issue.

that is a hot topic in the online productivity space, both among proponents and critics. We got a bunch of cool questions, just case studies and calls. And the tech corner, the in the show, the tech corner is going to be based on a new article I just published in The New Yorker. So we'll get a see my latest New Yorker essay and use that to get into a cool tech discussion. All right? So we got a crowded show, and I think we should get started with our deep dive. I want to talk today about morning routines.

This is a tricky topic for critics of online productivity culture. Overly complicated morning rituals that often seem to rely on confident citations of shaky science have come to represent a lot of what people dislike about online productivity spaces. But as I'll explain as a deep dive unfolds, you know, I feel like my morning. mornings recently have been getting off to a sort of a shaky start and I want to revamp what I'm doing. So with some trepidation, I recently waded into the online productivity world to read articles, social media feeds and YouTube channels about morning rituals. What is this thing that's happening online?

What I've done is I've broken them down into three categories. I'm going to go through these categories, tell you what I found, what's good about each of these categories, what's bad, what my takeaway lessons are. And then I'll end by saying what changes. did I make in my own life based on all that I discovered. All right. So let's get into it. First of all, why do I need this?

What I have been finding in my own morning. So my morning starts very predictably because I have three young kids. They all take the same school bus. We have to be out the door about 7.30 to make the walk to the bus stop. Bus stops about half to three quarters of a mile away. So our morning is very much like get up, wrangle, wrangle, wrangle, out the door, get the kids to the bus, walk back. Now, by the time we're back, it's 810, maybe 8.15. This is where I'm shaky.

I just eat up too much time between finishing the morning family ritual, getting the kids out the door and getting a sort of like tightly time block planned day unfolding. Just to get ready often takes me way too much time. I don't know why. I've talked to this before on the show. It's just some weird block I have. But just to like go get showering dressed. Like if I have to go to campus or come to the podcast studio, it just takes way too much time. I often find myself before my schedule really gets going.

I might actually, you know, get sucked into some sort of administrative chore or task that is enlist. And what ends up happening is by the time my day gets going, I'm cursing how much time has already passed. And when I look at face to productivity drag it and time block my day to follow, it's like, well, there's not enough time in here to do the things I really want to do. I'm almost to my first appointment of the day. So I want to tighten that up. And this is where I was hoping by looking at popular morning routines online, I would find some ideas. Okay. So as I mentioned, I've roughly categorized this content that's out there right now and popular into three categories.

So the first category, type one of the morning routine rituals, I'm going to call this. the embrace the suck videos. Embrace the suck being a term out of the special forces that basically says when going gets hard, the idea with that term is lean into the hardness. That's great. Hardness is good. So there's a certain type of person talking online that really pushes this for their morning routine, that the whole point should be do something really hard.

Here's a sort of classic example of that. This is probably the originator of the embrace the suck morning routine. Jocko Willink. So if you're watching instead of just listening, I've loaded up Jocko's Twitter feed here on the screen. His Twitter feed, he's been doing this for, God, I think he started doing this in 2015. But famously, like most of what he does on here, and I have it on the screen, is every morning he takes a picture of his watch when he wakes up. So here's a picture from four hours ago, and it says it's 428 in the morning. And what's his caption?

You know what you have to do. And caps do it. Here's the day before, 433. Caption, stay in the fight. And then he will accompany it with a video, a picture straightly later of like where he exercised. He does like brutal exercising. He's sort of a monster of a man.

So 428 picture of the watch right now. And then a picture of a Bulgarian bag, which is like a, was that just like a weighted bag you carry or something like that? Probably. Yeah, something terrible. And it says aftermath move. Right.

So that's like the originator of the embraces, get up really early and do something really hard. This has evolved. So if we look at, you know, online circles and we look at examples of the Embrace the Suck Morning Routine, a new aspect that's emerged in sort of like the post-Jaco world is a cold plunge. So here I have a clip that Jesse will play from TikTok of Joe Rogan, who helped popularize this, talking about his morning routine. See if we can play this year. I don't dress warm. I wear my fucking underwear. And I go outside.

It's 40 degrees this morning. And I walk out and I lift the lid on that Morosco cold plunge. And I see the fucking ice floating up in there. Every day, I climb in. That's brutal. And I just get in there for three minutes in the morning. And then I work out. So that's the hour start my day now.

Whereas before. All right. So that has also become popular. So I often feel like Rogan, because he's in comedy, so he's out late, is not going to wake up at 4.30 in the morning. So his equivalent of something that is over the top hard to get the day started is let's go into an ice encrusted outside cold plunge for three minutes.

There's a lot of people who talk about doing this in the morning as well. So this is all the same type of morning routine. Do something super hard first thing in the morning. All right. So let's do the bad and the good. The bad, one of the places we see a bit of a problem is when people try to justify some of this behavior through ill-sighted science. So, for example, I'm not a exercise medicine person, but my friends who are, I'm thinking

in particular, like my friend Brad Stolberg, will tell me that there's a lot of people citing science about cold plunges that try to justify that there's this really large therapeutic benefit. And he's read all of these studies. And he says, these effect sizes are teeny. It's like the same effect size you get from like having a cup of coffee. in terms of improvement to well-being in the moment or, like, seeing something funny. Like, there are these minor, like, therapeutically irrelevant impacts.

It's easy to oversell, you know, like, hey, there are, your body is you're going to live for 20 more years. It's easy to do that. I don't think the big players do, but a lot of the secondary people do. The other bad, I'd say with this is that, you know, look, not all of these activities are sustainable for all people. In particular, we know there's a small percent of the population. I don't know what the percent is. I think it's 10 percent or less who just don't need as much sleep. We don't know why, but it's like a small group of people that are like fine with four hours of sleep.

Jaco Willink is one of those people. And he talks about this. Like he will actually talk about it if you listen to him is that like he doesn't recommend that his kids wake up at 430 because they need more sleep than he does. You know, he's self-selected. As someone who doesn't need a lot of sleep made it easy for him to go. through easier for him to go through Navy SEAL training, etc. Like it kind of makes sense the successful Special Forces career. But that's not necessarily a sustainable model for everyone.

Both him and Joe Rogan do really intense like exercises in the morning as well. And like those routines are routines, you know, for someone there, they've been doing this for their decades. And so their body and they have trainers and they've been building up this sort of base or whatever. So, you know, it's not it's not all translatable. Right. But what's the good in the embrace the suck morning routines? I mean, I think the main advantage that we get with someone like Jock or Joe in their rituals is psychology, psychological. By doing something really hard, you are signaling to yourself that you're the type of person who does really hard things.

I'm elite in this way. Most people avoid discomfort. I'm bringing in crazy discomfort. I'm waking up at 4.30. I'm getting into an ice-encrusted bath. I don't know if there's like a physical therapeutic benefit, but what I'm telling myself is you are someone who does hard things. We've talked about this on this show before,

that discipline is largely an identity and not a trait that you have or don't have. So it's a good way to build. This is what I think they're doing here is maintaining a narrative of a self-narrative of exceptionality, which then fuels the other things you want to do during the day. You just have that more belief in yourself. All right, so the lesson I'm drawing from this first category of popular morning rituals online is that finding ways to signal to yourself that you're disciplined is probably a good thing. It doesn't, however, have to be in the guise of extreme physical acts. In fact, it probably does, it doesn't have to be physical at all.

I can imagine other ways that people could signal to themselves that they do extreme things and they're disciplined. Maybe it's nothing to do with physicality at all. It's an extreme intellectual endeavor, for example, or religious endeavor, et cetera. So I think that the general lesson here is there is power in reminding yourself you're able to do optional hard things, even if the thing is arbitrary, because that will put you in the right mindset to do non-arbitrary things that are also hard but not urgent as the day goes on. All right. The second category, broad category of these morning rituals I found online, I don't really know what they call this category, self-discovery or recentering your soul. I'm not quite sure what the right way to describe this category. but the canonical example of this category is Hal Elrod's 2012 bestselling book, The Miracle Morning.

This was very influential in how people were thinking about morning routines, especially in this sort of early social media period, 2012 to 2016 or so. And we see a lot of variations of what Hal suggests in that book online, especially in social media spaces. I'm going to pull up an article here from 2019 where a reporter, I think this is from NBC News, tried the miracle morning and kind of talks it for a month and talks about how it went. But it gives us a good summary of what actually this ritual means. So the article I'm polling here is titled, I tried the Miracle Morning productivity routine for a month. Here is what happened. This is by Locke Hughes from 2019. So what I'm going to do here is just scroll down.

What I like about this article is the reporter summarizes the six practices of Hell Elrod's Miracle Morning. So Elrod abbreviates the six practices as S-A-V-E-R-S acronym Savers. So the S stands for silence. When you wake up, the first thing you do is you sit silently. This could be, for example, doing a mindfulness meditation. the reporter use calm meditation app to sort of run through a morning meditation. All right. The second piece of the miracle morning is A for affirmations.

An affirmation is a sentence or two in alignment with what you want to accomplish and who you need to be to accomplishing it. The Elrod suggests your affirmation should make an impression on your subconscious mind. Transform how you think and feel so you can overcome your limiting beliefs. The reporter in this article's affirmation. was, I'm an accomplice successful writer, author, and speaker. My work helps others feel less alone and empowers them to make the choices and decisions that lead them to their best life. Say that to yourself a bunch of times.

Then in your miracle morning, you go to V for visualization. You train your brain to see things as you would like them to be instead of as they are, R. Elrod's suggesting this for five minutes, visualize living your ideal day, performing all tasks with ease, confidence, and enjoyment. Then comes E for exercise. So again, you're still in your morning ritual here. You don't need to run eight miles or even go to the gym unless you want to, but exercise can be something as simple as a 10-minute yoga routine or set of body weight exercise you do in the living room floor. You just need to get moving.

And the blood, oxygen, flowing to the brain. Then comes R for reading. This practice fast tax transformation at any part of your life, Elrod explained. Don't reinvent the wheel. He reminds us the fastest way to achieve everything you want is to model successful people who have already achieved it. read 10 pages per day. Finally, the final S is for scribing. Scribing just means writing, but a W would have ruined the acronym.

This means journaling, giant out ideas, making a gratitude list, putting whatever is on your mind on paper. All right. So that was the Miracle Morning. I see a lot of variations of this when I'm looking at morning routine content where people have a relatively, I would characterize it as like a relatively long list of morning checklist activities.

There's usually journaling involved. There's usually some sort of meditation involved, some sort of light exercise. All these things you do, they're sort of self-centered on yourself. Yourself, your understanding of yourself, like preparing for your day, rediscovering yourself. Any variation like that, I put that into that same category. All right. So let's go for the bad and the good of this sort of re-centered. morning recinering approach.

The bad is, well, first of all, it could be a lot of time each morning. You're sort of navel-gazing. You're thinking about yourself, but you're not, none of this is actually making traction. It's not making traction on something that I don't want to use the word productive here, but, you know, something that has like an output that, like, you need. So even like an exercise routine, like I need to, that exercise is part of like what I need to do for my body or work or whatever it is. There's kind of that sense of frustration of like I'm doing semi-arbitrary seeming activities and it takes a while.

You're going through this checklist. So what happens is I think a lot of people get impatient and you're like kind of fake meditating visual. It becomes a rote. Right. I'm scribing thoughts. I'm just going to jot something down. I'm visualizing my day. Like, come on, let's just roll past this.

I also think it's very personality driven. Right. If you told Jock Willink, all right, here's your six step thing you have to do in the morning and you're going to going to have to sit there quietly and then visualize your day being successful and then say positive affirmations about yourself. You know, he's going to throw a kettleball through the wall, right? It's just not his personality. He's like, I would rather, you know, do squats with a Bulgarian bag, whatever, whatever that is.

So it's also very personality driven. The good about this approach, because again, I think in each of these approaches, there's a hidden value. It might not be explicitly what they talk about, but it helps explain their popularity. here I think the good is our brain can be ungrounded in the morning. And by our brain, I mean in particular our conscious thoughts, they can go everywhere. Stressful, distracting, diverting, they can bring us into weird rabbit holes. If you pull out a phone early in the morning, like your brain and your thoughts can really get captured in weird places that takes a long time to escape from.

It gets harder and harder to ground it in something useful. Having this like immediate series of cognitive internal things you do grounds your brain in the morning. It prevents you from the alternative of an ungrounded brain just rattling off into like whatever thoughts, stressful or otherwise, I really think probably 80% of the value this approach generates for people right now is it prevents them from looking at their phone first thing. Having any alternative to looking at your phone first thing is probably positive regardless of the details. Like again, it could be just reorganizing your jaco approved Bulgarian bags in order. If you just have something to do that's not your phone.

I think that's, that is positive. So that's the lesson I'm pulling from that second category is that having some sort of cognitive plan in the morning matters, something where it directs what you're thinking about early in your day. So you don't start your day with your thoughts being ungrounded. There's probably real benefit in that. All right. The third category of morning routines, I call the MIT abbreviation for most

important thing style morning rituals. I think Andrew Huberman's rituals is a good example. He has some other stuff in it, but let's start there. My example here is I have a clip from the goal guys where one of the goal guys says, I'm going to try Andrew Huberman's routine and see what happens, but I think it's a good way of summarizing Huberman's routine. So here I'm going to play this on the screen for those who are watching. What is Andrew Huberman's morning routine?

For me, I tend to wake up sometime around 6 a.m. 6.30, and I write down the time in which I woke up. The second thing I do after I wake up is I make a B-line for sunlight. So getting outside for a 10-minute walk or a 15-minute walk is absolutely vital to mental and physical health. We get back, I start craving caffeine, but I purposely delay my caffeine intake to 90 minutes to 120 minutes after I wake up. So for me, I just drink water. I also put a little bit of sea salt in the water. And I also drink my athletic greens, which is compatible with fasting. So I don't eat anything until about 11 a.m. or 12 noon. Next, I would do a 90-minute bout of work.

And that's typically phone off and out of the room. You'd be amazed how much you can get done in 90 minutes if you are focused. After I finish that cognitive work bout, I do some form of physical exercise for about an hour. Very last, but certainly. So now we're kind of in mid-morning now, so it's no longer talking about his morning routine. I was actually surprised looking up Huberman's routine because the sense I had gotten about the way people talk about Huberman's protocols is that they are always like overly complicated and super scientific, right? I actually was surprised. Like to me, you could simplify this routine.

Like basically there's two pieces to it. Piece one, wake up, get outside right away, and then do work right, something important right away. That's where the MIT or most important thing of the day acronym comes from. And then step two, there is like a nutritional piece on it. But the nutritional piece is really he fast until lunch, which is not a crazy nutritional strategy. Peter Atia talks about this in his book.

He's like, look, if you need to, there's different ways to control the calories you consume, the prevent over nutrition. And one of the easy ways to do it is like restrict the time in which you eat. So from just like a practical manner, getting going and waiting to lunch to have like your first food of the day is like a reasonable strategy for keeping the total calories in the day more reasonable. So like that's not like that crazy of a thing. The part that is crazy and I think this completely exposes Andrew Huberman as. the most dangerous worst type of charlatan, not drinking caffeine right away, I'm not on board with that.

Jesse, that's got to be wrong. He's got to be wrong on that. You got to get your coffee going right away. Okay, so that I've seen variations of this sort of Huberman plan, some variations that all over the place, the elements being, you get going on something important right away without doing anything else professionally.

And with some combination of like getting some sunlight or getting outside. that's what we'll call that the the MIT strategy i mean i've seen a different way some people use like sun lamps and some people do work and then go outside and they do work but just like getting going with something hard before you engage with the world and getting outside um and i guess from a nutrition standpoint waiting until that first block of work is done before you even think about like food or breakfast or something like this um okay so what's the good and the bad with this morning routine strategy. On the bad side, mornings can be tricky schedule-wise

if you have other people in your life. So this adds some complexity to MIT strategies because, you know, hey, you have to get the kids up. You've got to get the kids to school. And now if you really want to try to get up, go outside, and get something done before that, you're getting up so early that unless you have jocco-circating rhythms, you're going to be super tired.

So it can get kind of complicated. There's also a danger to the most important thing, methodology in general. It's a danger that I've talked often about, like, throughout sort of my history of dealing with these issues. And that is, it's easy to fall into the trap that, like, once you've worked on your quote-unquote most important thing of the day, that you then just fall into, like, reactive sludge for the rest of the day. Hey, that's my scheduling for the day. I worked for 90 minutes on X, and now it's like, whatever. Inbox is open. I'm kind of slacking. I had this debate with Oliver Berkman when he was on the show last fall. And where we landed is, if

you have a very autonomous, relatively non-crowded job. So like a writer like Oliver, that's probably fine. Like you get your pages in and in the morning and then you kind of do your best with some like reactive stuff, answer some emails, have some calls. Like you don't really have to be on point. You'll be fine. But for a lot of knowledge work jobs because of pseudo productivity, because of the issues I talk about on my book slow productivity where we have too much on our plates and we have inefficient communication protocols. That's not going to work for most people. If you just do one thing with focus and then just anything goes, list reactive method for the

rest of the day, you're going to fall behind, you're going to be stressed, you're going to exhaust your brain. You'll probably end up worse. So you don't want the most important thing of the day to be the only scheduling of the day. You probably still, if you have a sort of standard overloaded knowledge work style job, you still want to probably time blocked the rest of your day so that you're getting the most out without the work unduly taxing you or your brain are becoming unsustainable. All right.

So that would be the potential bad there. The good, I think Huberman and everyone else is right on track based on my own experience. Get outside right away matters. I mean, I do this because I walk my kids to the bus stop. I've been doing this forever. Even when my kids were young, I would take our, we had a dog at the time. I would take the dog out very early because my wife would, my wife would, go, she would go to work early.

We had a shifted thing. She would go to work on the early side so that I could like get the kids up and fed and wait until the nanny was there. And then she would come home on the earlier side or leave the nanny. And then I was going to work later and I'd come back later. But I had to walk the dog before she left for work early. So I got very used to like, oh, you're out there. And actually it's great.

Just seasons. It's cold. It's hot. It's somewhere in between. The sun is starting to come up now. I don't know. It really does ground you. I do think that's really great.

And yes, I do this. I fall out of it, but I've always experienced getting right into something deep is like the best way to aggregate a lot of deep work. That's just like a well-known heuristic from anyone who's had deep work being a regular part of their job responsibilities. Being able to just get into something deep right away before anything else. You get the clearest focus on your brain. Why? Because when you open up the neurological black box there, what you see is a. a minimum of conflicting cognitive semantic

networks activated. If I haven't looked at any emails yet, if I haven't looked at any other projects, this is the first thing relevant to my job I'm doing. There is very little cognitive conflict. So you have these abstract reasoning centers of your brain can so much quicker and so much more totally turn their focus to the task at hand. It's the purest deep work you can generate in the day

is that first time in the day. So to me, some way of like get outside and get after it and then deal with the rest of your day, that makes a lot of sense to my experience and experience of people I talk to. All right. So how did I draw lessons from this for my own life and for my own morning attention issues? When it comes to exactly what I'm doing in the morning, given my setup, the MIT Huberman style approach makes the most sense for me. What does this really mean for me? It just means a recommitment to the simple rule of as I walk in the door,

So I'm already getting the outside walking part because I'm going to the bus stop. As I walk back in the door, it is right to a desk and into deep work. Just that simplicity of that rule is what I need. A variation of that rule I've been considering, and I think this might be even better for getting the effects of it, is what I really should do is on the way back, don't come back to my house, come back to the coffee shop, Bevco, get my coffee from Bevco, walk down the block right up to the Deepark HQ.

So now it's not completely different cognitive context. I have an office two minutes from my house and next to a coffee shop. That's really what I should. That should be the routine. And I come in here and it's just right in the pre-stage. Here's what I'm doing. I'm writing Deepark like whatever it is. Then I start thinking about just like can walk you through like how I think

about these type of weekly template type scheduling rules. Now, the issue is, some days, you know, I try to keep my first half of my days as empty as possible. Some days, if it's like a non-teaching day, hopefully I've kept my morning clear till at least noon. And those days, I should just rock and roll for three hours plus during a semester. In the summer, I could do this like every day. On other days, if I have something scheduled in the morning, still do this even if it's symbolic. Like let's say I can't avoid a, you know, I have to get in for a 10 a.m. You know, meeting or something like that.

Still do like 20 minutes or 30 minutes of deep work so that that connection is strong. That's what I'm thinking about. I just do this every morning. Bus stop to my office, sit down, do something deep, even if it's symbolically 20 minutes and then I have to go and get ready to go, just so that my mind says that's what I always do. The goal should be on like every day possible, make that an hour to 90 minutes with the three to four hour blocks, you really want those,

like at least for my case, at least twice a week. So I'm just sort of walking you through. And then what I would do after that is like, as soon as that block is done, then I time block plan to rest of the day. And then for me, that's just like the juggling match

with my normal, you know, I have my five jobs. I want to finish my five. And now I need to make the most of the time that follows to be very careful. What about the other lessons, though, from the morning routine, the other morning routines content online.

I actually think those lessons can be integrated and to some degree I already do integrate them into my life, just not in the morning. So if we look at the embrace the suck type idea, that doesn't have to be first thing in the morning. If my analysis is correct, that what matters there is the psychology

of telling yourself on a regular basis and demonstrating yourself on a regular basis, I can do hard things. It's not so critical that's first thing in the morning. So for me, like I've typically exercise post work pre-dinner. That's a place to start, the embrace the suck methodology would say, yeah, start making that more brutal or interesting or crazy, you know.

It doesn't have to be in the morning, but you have one thing every day where you're doing something that's like really hard and optional, right? So that lesson would say upgrade or update or get more extreme in what I'm doing during my exercise block, even if that's not, doesn't happen to be first thing in the morning. that sort of self-reflection, that one advantage you get out of the hell Elrod sort of re-sintering your soul type morning ritual, that also doesn't have to happen in the morning. Again, I find my self-reflection is not good in the morning until I've warmed up my brain circus and have had some coffee.

And again, no offense to Andrew Huberman, but I'm not going to drink salted water instead of my first cup of coffee. I don't care what it's doing to my biochemistry. Come on. I would give up a couple years of life for that. I'm not good at self-reflection. End of the day, though, it can be better. In fact, what I like to do with the self-reflection is go for a walk to do it. And I find when a day is over and I've exercised, my brain can now reflect on myself better.

If I'm going to journal, if I'm going to, you know, maybe seek some meditation. I don't really have a monkey brain problem in the morning because I don't use social media. I don't, my phone isn't super attractive to me. Like, and I'm, my brain doesn't work until I get coffee. So I'm just sort of in a stupor until I'm like 20 minutes into my first deep work block. So I figure maybe I should be a little bit more systematic about the self-reflection. I've been working with single-purpose journals a lot more recently. I've been dealing with some, you know, recovering from an injury.

I've used that as an excuse to single-purpose journal on some like life planning stuff. And the more systematically get in thinking walks. And so again, I think the value of some of those morning routines can be spread to other types of your day. But the value of like doing deep work first thing in the morning and going outside first thing in the morning to wake up your body. That was the bit of everything I learned in this experiment. That was the bit that was actually anchored to morning. And that's the bit that I'm sort of leaning into and clarifying into my own life. And again, these type of weekly templates, it just depends on the season of life and the semester and what's going on.

And the summer is a completely different beast for me. I'm not going to the bus stop in the morning. I'm not teaching my schedule's empty. I'll rethink that. But right now, that's what I took away from my journey into the morning routines. And I will say, Jesse, that I was expecting more snake oil or more hustle culture stuff. And some of it was kind of hustle culturey, but like honestly, I was often pretty commonsensical with like a couple

random things and take this supplement here or something like there'll be a couple random things thrown in that are maybe they're out over their skis. I mean maybe the biggest example was like how Elrod stuff like that's a lot of stuff to do. Like those six different things like that's a long

morning. So maybe but it doesn't feel hustling to me. I don't know. I was expecting I was expecting worse. So did you start going to Bevco and then coming to the HQ? Well, I mean, I just figured this out this morning, so. Does Brad go on cold plunges or no, after his research?

Brad is not a, I don't want to speak on his behalf, but I think I can confidently speak on his half that he's not a fan of cold plunges. He's not against him, but he thinks it says arbitrary, if he was here, you'd probably tell you, it's as arbitrary as, you know, I'm going to do 20 somersaults in the morning. Like, that there's not a specific therapeutic mechanism from cold plunging that is non-trivially different than sort of any number of sort of like minor things you could do. I tried the cold showers for a little while.

Then I just didn't make sense. I'm like, we have hot water now. I think it's all about, I think all of these things are all about the, does a signaling to yourself about discipline. It's like, Rogan,

I don't think he does the cold plunges as much anymore. I think a lot of people move to saunas in part because I just think it's more reasonable. Like, is not as painful. Like, you're still, like, I'm in the sauna and it's really hot. And, um, but it's just not as terrible as to cold plunging. So, I mean, I think it's, I'm, I'm less of a cold plunge partisan because I never, I never listen to these scientific reasons anyways, right?

Um, you know, I think people got like a lot of motivation out. I think that's fine. I mean, they've had ice bass and professional sports locker runs for a long time. Yeah. From like an inflammation standpoint, it, it really works, right? like if you're everything's in flame because you're like always kind of injured it yeah um that's true though i don't think people are using them therapeutically in that way but i'm all for it i think if like if i had like i like sonnas if i if i had room for a sauna at my house i don't need the

science on it i'd be like this is great like it kind of resets you it makes you feel like okay you've you know you like shocked your body i think it's the same thing when people go for you know runs when it's cold outside it's like bracing and then you come back and everything feels sort of reset. So, you know, I'm not a partisan on it, but, yeah, Brad has taught me that the science of the benefits is not super impressive. All right, so we got some good questions coming up. But first, let's take a brief break to hear from one of our sponsors.

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Who do we have for our first question of the day? First questions from Joseph. I'm a big consumer of online content, podcast, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds. I'm trying to reduce my content consumption. I struggle with selecting which podcast episodes are worth my time. Most podcasters I follow are very interesting

and upload once a week. Do you have advice on how to determine which episodes are worth watching and which I should skip? Well, I mean, I think the preferred thing to do here is what you want to do is get at least four or five complete listens of deep questions with Cal Newport per day. But you want to use a different device for each of those listens so that it counts as a different listener. So all I'm suggesting here is you buy like 20 to 30 iPhones and spend most of your day just generating, you know, fresh downloads. Joseph, here's my bigger advice here.

The theme to my advice to you, first of all, is we can kind of chill out. the stakes here are low. Right. So we want to release this idea that there's some optimal way to listen to the podcast that you can miss out on. You're not going to get anything wrong here. The stakes here are very low. So then when we think about how we should think about podcast content, here's the way I like to think about it. There's two modes I'm normally in when I'm playing audio content.

either it's a high energy mode. You know, like it's early in the day. I'm out walking. I'm driving to work. My energy is high. In that type of mode, I want to hear something interesting or engaging. For me, I'm often looking for like an interview that is going to like spark ideas for me. Like, hey, there's something in here.

Maybe I could write about or it's a world I'm into or I want to learn about an interesting world or I'm looking for motivation. And then there is the second state, which is low energy. I'm doing the dishes. It's 9 o'clock at night. I'm tired. I'm stressed out by work. I do not have the energy or interest right now in getting like excited about ideas. And I want something just entertaining.

And so then you're looking at like I want something funny. I want to just kind of get lost in something. You know, I'm just doing something boring and I'm out of mental energy. So those are two modes. So your only goal is to have more than enough stuff the pull from. for both of those modes so that you're just avoiding the null situation of having nothing to listen to in those circumstances. And when you think about it that way, you're like, oh, it's fine.

There's an abundance of things I could pull from when I'm looking for like an idea-generating podcast. And there's an abundance of like fun or funny podcasts I can pull from when I'm low energy. And so I don't have to stress about it. So you subscribe to, you know, you discover podcasts the way you discover podcasts. You got 20 or 30 you subscribe to. And then you just see like which one's catching my attention. once you stop worrying about oh am I missing something

am I doing this suboptimely it just becomes a lot easier this is how I often engage with podcasts it's very random I kind of subscribe to things as I hear about them or I follow an author or a thinker to a podcast just to hear that author be interviewed I'm like oh I like this interviewer maybe I'll just subscribe to it and then I'm just I'm in this mode let me look at podcasts that match that mode first thing I catches my attention I go no regrets you know so I hear what I here like Jesse you're always asking me like hey did you hear so-and-so interview or that interview it's just random like sometimes I did sometimes you know I didn't so I don't especially like interview

podcasts I don't serially consume a lot of podcasts all right I then have the exception to all of this is what I think of as the like scheduled podcast like our podcast I know this sounds self-serving but our podcast our schedule is invented for this to come out at a certain time where it solves a certain problem where a Monday morning podcast, we're meant to be a part of your ritual, like Monday morning on your way to work. You listen to it to sort of get back into the mindset of deep work and the deep life. To come out of the weekend, start thinking again about being careful about how you navigate the modern digital environment, careful about how you're going to approach the morass that is your knowledge, work job, careful in how you think about

what's working and not working or changes you want to make. It's like a wake up for the week type podcast. There's a bunch of them out there that are that are tied to like a certain time to have a certain purpose. And so of course, those I think of as like I know when I consume those. That's like ritualistic podcast consumption. So we put these all together. You got your ritualistic podcast. Always listen to this day, this time, just every week. Because they like, it's just a nice part of my routine and they serve some purpose. Then you're just pulling from these two other pulls depending on your energy. Like I've got a whole for that second category, low energy. I love

comedy. In particular, it's not so much stand-up comedians. It's interesting. I like improv style comedians, doing like interview shows. It's like the obvious things. Conan, he was like an improv master. I like the smartless guys because Will Arnett and Jason Bateman

are actually like a fantastic like improv duo. Sometimes like when I'm in my lowest energy state, it's a little broie sometimes, but sometimes one of my lowest energy state, I love how does this get made, which is Paul Shear and Jason Manzoukis and June Diane Reefield, who are like all three like very famous accomplished improv comedy actors, and they just review movies basically.

I have to be in like a certain state for that, but when I'm in my certain state, like I was there the other day, and I was like, I just need to listen to them talk about con air. And it was like exactly what I needed. And it was exactly what you would expect. And it is a fantastic movie. And it all makes sense and it all checks out. The reason why I said it was broie, if they're not broie, but years ago, Julie and I went to see them live.

And they're at Constitution Hall, Jesse. That's a big venue. Oh, that is? Yeah. And the audience was very broie. That's what cost. Like, they're not. They're, you know, whatever, famous comedic actors from, like, the Hollywood left who were in their 50s.

But the audience was very, we're like, oh, this is a lot of. 24-year-olds who are like just still go back to their frat sometimes. It's like the audience abroad, but I love them. I think they're very funny. And then for the idea podcast, it's, I mean, it's often shows I've been on. This is not a replicatable strategy, but if I've been on a show and like the interviewer, I'll often subscribe to it. And there it's all like topic hunting.

There's very few of those shows I listen to everything. I see who they have on. Like, if I like who Sam Harris has on, on making sense, if I like the topic, I know Sam's going to give a really interesting, like, interview, you know, and I'll listen to that. I like, like, we like the acquired podcast. For me, it depends on, like, what the company is. But if I like the company sometimes, like, that's what, you know, that's what I really want to do. You know, all of the main interviewers, I'm going to subscribe to those podcasts.

It's just, I see what I'm in the mood for. All right. That's probably too much thinking about podcast listening. But there you go. I love the Conair's statement. It's a fantastic. Look, that's my, that's all. We were, we would have been like junior high high school.

In that Nicholas Cage era. Conair, the Rock. The Rock is a fantastic movie. Here's the thing about these movies. They're all rated R. Because I want to show my kids. Like, why were all these movies? They didn't have to be rated R.

Everything was rated R in the 90s. Like movies you would not think. I think this was a marketing thing. Like, think about the Harrison Ford movie Air Force One. remember this movie? Yeah. Like what's the guy named Rachinko?

Sepertists from Rachink, whatever. There's always like Eastern vaguely like Russian, ex-Russian sphere of influence terrorists taking things over in these movies. A great movie, right? It's the they take over Air Force One, terrorists take over Air Force One, Harrison Ford's the president fights back.

Perfect premise. It's a rated R movie. Like, why is it? It doesn't have to be a rated R movie, right? It's not like in the middle of this movie, there's like a gratuitous, you know, basic instinct style sexing or anything. It's just like they would just make these things R-rated.

Crimson Tide. Love that movie. The submarine one, right? Summarine one. That's awesome. Tony Scott. So like the camera's like always moving. By the way,

and I don't mean to rant about this, but my brother was in the submarine service and I had to ask him about this. There are, maybe I've talked to this on the show before, but there are several, it's crazy the things. Some of the,

some of the submarine stuff, I would say was not deeply researched. Let's say Tony Scott did not care. So, for example, and I'll leave it at this, but when it's time, they get the order to fire the missile. Spoiler alert, right? The whole job of these boomers is to be deadly silent, holes in the water. And so they can just come out of like nothingness and then suddenly fire their missiles. When they get to, and on these subs, my brother tells me about this, like you drop a wrench,

100 miles you can be heard, right? So they wear new balance tennis shoes and it's all like very careful. How does Tony Scott portray, okay, it's time to fire the missiles? In real life, what would it be? It'd be like, okay, that's what we're doing. It's what we trained for. Quiet, calm. He has clax and sirens go off in the submarine.

Clacks and sirens. Just like loom, like really loud sirens and everyone is running. Everyone's always running up and downstairs. Anyways, interesting thing about Crimson Tide, though. Uncredited screenwriting help for that movie came. from Quentin Tarantino. So you'll see that like where they have that weird sort of like racially charged conversation about the lipistallian stallions between Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington.

That's all Quentin Tarantino. You weren't happy about the nuclear sound stuff in that book too that came about the nuclear war book. Yeah. They had the same thing as so maybe they watched. So I'm thinking Annie Jacobson, who did tons of research for that book, when it came time to do the submarine scene, I think she just watched Crimson Tide. I love Tony Scott movie. My six-year-old loves Tony Scott's

because I show my kids. I love movies. Tony Scott's unstoppable. Chris Pine, Dinsall, Washington. Freight train full of deadly chemicals. It's an unmanned runaway train. If it hits the city, it's going to explode and kill like all these people.

70 miles per hour, the break is broken. And so how do you stop it? That's the whole movie. And it's just constantly swooping. by the train with Tony Scott helicopters. Awesome. It's great movie. But see, like, that's not R.

They stopped making all these movies R-rated at some point in the 2000. It's like, well, this is stupid. It's just, it's two guys in a train, you know? Just, we can, they'll curse a little bit and why, we don't have to make it R. All right, Joseph. Your kids will be old enough, soon enough to watch radar movies. I mean, I selectively show my 12-year-old, just because I know the movies really well. And sometimes I do some edits, but, yeah, the R rating does not stop.

me with him. All right. So Joseph, I hope that answers your question. Who do we got next? Next question is from Paula. How does Cal track daily steps? I imagine he doesn't use a smart watch. I have a love relationship with my Apple Watch. I've tried to turn off notifications, but I'm curious about alternative approaches. Yeah, I mean, everyone uses Apple Watches. I'm not a big Apple Watch fan. I remember writing about the Apple Watch when it first came out. So it's worth going back and finding this article at Cal Newport.com from when the Apple Watch first came out because it captures a reality about that product's launch, which is when the Apple Watch was released, they had no idea what it was for.

This was like one of Tim Cook's first move. It was a post-jobs after Steve Jobs died. One of the first big product deployments that Tim Cook oversaw, if I'm remembering this timeline history was the Apple Watch, and they had no use case for it. They're like, we have a watch. Like a lot of people bought it. And I remember writing an article saying it's not our job to figure out what the Apple Watch should be used for. That's Apple's job.

Like they have to tell us, like make a pitch. Here's how you're going to use it. After like a year or so, it kind of shook out. Like their planned work, people just used it and they said, what did people like about it? It shook out that people wanted it for like fitness stuff. And so then it became more of like a fitness aid. But no, I don't use an Apple Watch. I have my day-to-day watch is actually a Zen 105, which is a full automatic.

So there's no electricity or batteries in this beast. It's just a sort of German workhorse of a watch that harnesses my arms motion. And it says pretty accurate. I can stick within a few minutes. The movement, it's a Salito movement customized by Zen. I can get, I don't stay with some like three minutes per week without any winding. So cool watch. Steps.

All right. So what I did for a long time and I might go back to is I just bought a watch battery powered. pedometer that's you've seen it jesse it's like i don't know for those who are watching like that big so like kind of the size of like a lighter you know um and and all it did i love single purpose technologies all it does is you you have to press these buttons it's very hard to set the time but you set the time and then all it does is keep track of your steps just based on its motion and it resets at midnight just like pull out your pocket how many steps have i done today the problem is kept losing them because you forget to take it out of your pocket and then like they're in the

hamper. So then I ended up with like two or three of them and I would, I lost this one. I'd find another one. But I love the single use technology. It wasn't super accurate to be honest, but none of these technologies are. Michael Easter wrote about this last year, some research where they, it was actually pretty cool. They tested like all these pedometers and like none of them are accurate. But it doesn't really matter. It's all like kind of relative to itself. So I haven't used those recently. The batteries all died. And I haven't been step counting as much recently. I started step counting more as part of recovery, this injury recovery I'm doing.

And I just was using my phone is often in my pocket. And it just has, it just automatically tracks stuff in the fitness app. I don't know how accurate that is. But that's what I've been doing. I think I'm going to go back to a standalone pedometer again. I'm wondering if there's, I think there's better ones. I think there's really good. I think the best ones, you like clip on your belt.

And I think it's going to make me look awesome. Unless you're wearing sweatpants. Well, I am, which I am. I think what I'm going to do, and this is more reasonable and accurate, is you know, the wheel things? It's like a wheel on a stick. It's how you, like, accurately measure things. Yeah, yeah. Let's walk around with one of those.

They're constantly, like, pushing my wheel on a stick. Anyways, I love standalone pedometers. If someone knows of a really good one, small, it's very accurate. You don't have to use an iPhone. Tell Jesse, Jesse at calonyuport.com. I'm in the market. It's funny. I just finished the Michael Lewis SBF book and he was talking about when he was in high school.

He brought a roller bag to high school. You feel it everywhere? That's exactly what I was thinking when you were talking about. SBF did or Michael Lewis? SBF did. Yeah, Michael Lewis seems like a cool guy. Yeah. That tracks.

That tracks. Now, you know, now everyone has to carry, it's different than we were kids. Now you carry like in middle school these like briefcases basically. It's like a trapper keeper with a handle. It's like this thick. And like all the kids, you just. This is what you carry. And then you have a backpack.

So you don't need a roller. You carry this thing and you have your backpack. All right. Who we got next? All right. Next question is from Lindsay. Is it okay to have different office hours throughout the week depending on my schedule? Also, sometimes hire up scheduled meetings that I have to accept.

How should I manage office hours in those cases? Well, first of all, congrats for doing the office hour strategy for people who don't know very briefly. This is the strategy where you have set times on set days in which you are available for incoming communication. Office door open. Your phone is on. If there's a chat service your company uses like Slack, you're in a channel ready to chat. And you use this to defer as much as possible any sort of back and forth communication that requires more than you just responding to a message with a single message. You say, well, just grab me at my office hours. And this actually breaks up or eliminates a bunch of ad hoc back and forth exchanges. And those are the real killers.

So we always talk about the real killers of your energy and concentration is having to monitor your inboxes for these back and forth conversations. So you want to try to eliminate those with office hours. Okay, it's okay if your office hours shift a little bit, right? Because like typically what's happening is no one knows what your office hours are. So you're typically telling people when you were diffusing one of these back and forths. Like it's often, hey, Jesse, what do you think about like what should we do for the timing for the upcoming client conference? Like, oh, this is a back and forth.

It's usually you're replying to that. Like, that's a good question. We should get into this. If you can, just like swing by, you know, call me during one of my officers this week and we can figure it out. Paste what those are. Like, just have a text file on your desktop with here's where they are this week and you just like paste that in. Right. And then they just like, okay, great, I'll call them one of those times.

So if you see something that's scheduled and you're kind of shifting them around, it doesn't really matter because people are hearing about your office hours sort of on demand. So that's one thing to keep in mind. A second thing to keep in mind is protect the office hours like other meetings. So like especially if there's a shared calendar system, more and more companies do this because we over meet. Why do we over meet? Because we have workloads. They're too high. But more and more companies like Georgetown will do this, for example, you'll have a shared calendar that's communal so that when a higher up, like a fancy person in your company wants to set up a meeting with people, more and more of what will happen at these companies is they'll have one of their assistance.

look at everyone's calendar, find a time that it works, and then send out an invitation. This has become like the new way that higher ups deal with calendars, right? Because a higher up is not going to waste his or her time with like, well, when are you available? What about this or what about that? And so there's like more and more of this is going on. So all you have to do is your office hours just go on your calendar like any other meeting. So when these meetings are being set up automatically, those times just aren't considered. So you have to like show respect to your office hours.

treat it like if you already had a meeting with like your team lead and then your your boss is like hey can we meet at blah blah blah time you're like well no I'm already have a meeting then but I'm free after before and like give all the other times you're like we're kind of used to that convention so it's okay if your office hours have to shift because most people are finding out about them as they need them and two treat the office hours like a meeting that's already on your calendar and then you can kind of protect that time like you would protect any other meeting that was on your calendar then just follow the same conventions like let's say that's say like the CEO of your major company, you know, chief of staff is like, she needs to meet you

at three on Monday. You know, I get these summons sometimes, not summons, but like at the university level, this will be typically like the provost or the president. If the provost or the president wants to talk to me, typically they're just telling you, hey, can you come by like blah, blah, blah, because their schedule is so full, it's like this is the slot. Okay. So if it's something where you would, you would override or reschedule an existing meeting

with someone else, then you would override it and cancel your office hours. If it's something where you want it, you would say, no, no, I'm already busy then, then, then and then, but here's what I'm available. Then don't reschedule your office hours. So just treat it like you would any other meeting on your schedule. I get burned with this shared calendar thing all the time, Jesse, because I have multiple calendars, right? You know, I have my Georgetown calendar, but like so much of my life has run.

My writing life has all this other obligations, and I don't keep that on my Georgetown calendar. So what will happen is with higher-ups, they'll often just get this media invite, we'll just show up. And they'll be like, yeah, we looked at your calendar. And so as far as they're concerned, these assistants must think I'm so lazy because I don't, there's nothing on my Georgetown calendar. Otherwise, you'd have to go through your Georgetown calendar and put fake things in that codes like for your other calendar. Yeah, which would be like, yeah. So instead what happens, I'm just constantly having to be like, I'm sorry, like I don't actually use this Georgetown calendar, but I'm not available any of these times. Maybe I should consolidate my calendar.

But the issue is it's complicated. because I share my calendar with my wife and she doesn't need to see all the Georgetown things. And I have things I don't want. I use three calendars. It's the moral of the story. You probably could spend like two to three minutes and put in those like blocks of meetings, you know, as just like fake code. There's probably a way too I can import my other calendar to my Georgetown calendar and have a show up automatically. But yeah, I don't.

It's annoying people. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Luke. I'm 25 and a post-production producer at a large marketing agency. My long-term goal is to make feature films, but I took this job to build career capital and expand my experience beyond my video production skills. My role involves no creative work, just managing emails, coordinating teams, and ensuring client deliverables.

How do you know if I'm staying in this role is worth it for career capital? Or it's time to quit and pivot towards something more aligned with my aspiration. Well, I think there's a couple things going on here, Luke. The one is your specific aspiration for feature films, and two, is just a more general question of how do you decide, like, is this job right for me? And whether, despite the specifics of the job. When it comes to feature films, I was actually just, you know, I like movies. I read a lot of books about movies. I was just reading or listening to a book.

Maybe this was in the book we talked about from December books on the 1989, the sci-fi movies from 1989. And maybe it was Ridley Scott. I don't quite remember which director was talking about this. But basically, they had this advice which stuck out to me that I think is relevant here as well. They said when it comes to like feature film directing, there's not a ladder. Like so this idea of like, well, let me just get my foot in the door in like that industry. And then I'll slowly kind of like move my way up and work my way up. He's like, that's not how it works.

You have to just start directing. This might have been Chris Nolan who was talking. about this. Like, you got to just as quickly as possible find a way to make a movie and make it good. Like, I got the money from here and there. It's small. It's a short, but like makes, you got to be making movies. Like, the directors just come in directing. Like, I'm a director. I'm directing. You know, here's a movie I did. Here's a short. Sometimes this could be commercial directing. Like, Ridley Scott came out of commercial directing. Like, that's where you could get work. You know, okay, but I'm directing stuff and now I want to do movies. Don't, they're saying there's not,

don't become an AD and then work your way up to be an assistant director. and like that doesn't work. There's a talent mindset in Hollywood that says like if you're meant to be a good director, you should just come on to the scene guns blazing, like directing cool stuff. Oh, look at all this talent. Let's like give them a bigger movie to try. It's not a like you worked your way up type of thing. So no, post-production producing at large market agency,

when it comes to your aspiration to be a feature film director, I mean, you might as well be at like a computer software firm or a truck driver or something. It's just not related. It's not going to make a difference. The bigger question here, though, is like, how do you know in general if staying in a place is worth your career cap? Is it worth it? Are you acquiring enough career capital? Should you be switching to another job?

Is this not going to support a vision you have? You know, how do you actually do that? There's two things that matter. Lifestyle-centric planning and evidence-based planning. Right. So lifestyle-centric planning means you know what it is you're aiming towards. And it's not a specific job so much as like here's all the aspects of the life I want to have in five years and 15 years.

That type of specificity now allows you to say, am I acquiring the right type of career capital at this particular job that I see how, like I have the path in mind. If I get better at this, I'll be able to change my position to be this and this position will be compatible with this and that's going to match like a lot of the stuff I want of my lifestyle. You're working towards a particular goal. Now you can get very clear about specifically what you're doing. It's specifically what I'm doing going to help me get there.

evidence-based planning says when it comes to like particular stuff you're doing as part of these lifestyle plans, do you have evidence from real people who know what they're talking about that the thing you're doing will work? Like lifestyle-centric planning is how you figure out like this is what I'm aiming towards and I'm working backwards from that and building plans of like how do I get closer to that giving my unique opportunities and obstacles. The evidence-based component is making sure you're not telling yourself stories as part of that effort. Make sure you haven't written your own story about what you. you think matters, as opposed to learning from people what really matters. Like the advice I gave you earlier in my answer about how people become feature film directors, that's like an example of evidence-based planning. You might want the story to be doing production at a marketing company, which will lead to this,

which will lead to this, and then finally I'll get my shot as being a director. You might want that to be the right story, but then you talk to real people who know what's going on, and you get you sandy check your plan, they say, that's not going to get you anywhere near where you want to go. Now, evidence-based planning, you say, why would people avoid this step? Well, they avoid this step because you sometimes get an answer that is not what you want to hear. Sometimes you get the answer of like, oh, that's how people do this. I'm not going to be able to do that. Or I tried that and it didn't go well.

Right. So there can be some reality checks that happen with evidence-based planning. I may want to get to this place. I may want this plan, this piece of my plan, to work. But what I'm doing is not going to work and what I would have to do. I'm not capable of doing or I tried and I failed. I don't have that talent. I don't have that access.

It's too late. So evidence-based planning can be pretty scary because it reality checks you. But those reality checks are often liberating because you say, okay, well, what's next? And the thing you want to fall back to is your lifestyle-centric vision. And you say, okay, there's other ways to get to that. That's why I love about lifestyle-centric planning. You might have a whole lifestyle, creative lifestyle vision that your plan to get there is built around being a director. And maybe you find that that's not reasonable.

Well, you still have that lifestyle image. Oh, so I just moved your camera, Jesse. all good speaking of directors that was like a you know what they called out what I just did there Jesse so people who were watching

I had to um laterally move the camera back on Jesse's head that's called a swish pan is it? Yeah there you go I just swish pan Jesse

what I'm trying to say is I should be a director but when you have lifestyle centric planning we're like okay this I had this way of getting to this lifestyle that's built on like you know directing

for whatever reason that's not I got some evidence based reality check that's not going to work. Well, what were the aspects of this lifestyle I really liked? You know, I could still capture those with this other way. Okay, maybe I'm not going to be a feature film director, but I could be X, Y, and Z because actually this is what was important to me, and you find other ways to get there. It's the most flexible planning methodology I know because you have all

of these possible routes forward in your life. Your life forward is all of these branching trees that exponentially grow and covers all this land. You see each of those as paths. There's so many paths to navigate there. You always have so many more options. It's so much more freeing than grand goal-based planning in which you're just fixated on a particular path. And if that path doesn't work, you're out of luck. And if that path does work and you discover it doesn't fix everything, you're even more out of luck. So embrace the flexibility of lifestyle-centric planning and then use evidence-based planning to make sure that your ideas for how you're going to move forward actually makes sense. All right. What do we got next, Jesse? We have our corner. Ooh, this is where each week we take a question related to my new book. I can't say new book anymore, Jesse. It's been out for 10 months now. Yeah, we came up with some good rules all last episode.

Yeah, what did we decide? One year mark. One year mark. Okay. So I'm going to call it my new book until we stopped doing the corner. So my new book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Heart of a Compton Without Burnout. Every week we do a question relating to it and we do it so that we have an excuse to play the official theme music for the segment, which we'll hear now.

All right. What's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? It's from Christy, and it's about office hours again. So he says, I'm a software engineer and recently read slow productivity. I set up office hours twice a week. I've also blocked off Wednesdays as meeting-free days. However, people disregard these and still schedule meetings on Wednesdays. I'm fed up.

How can I politely and effectively communicate, reject meetings on these days? Again, I think this goes back to an office hours, I should say, is disgusted more length than slow productivity because, principle one, doing fewer things. Part of that principle talks about how you reduce just the load of what you're juggling at any one moment. And office hours is a fantastic strategy in there, along with many others, including like polling versus pushing, et cetera, et cetera. All right, this goes back to do not treat office hours differently than other meetings.

It lives on your calendar in the same way that, you know, meet with Bob from marketing lives on your calendar. And deal with meeting requests the same way you deal with meeting. It's all homogenous now. Hey, let's beat on Wednesday. How about two? You're like, no, I'm busy from one to three, but I'm free from three to five. I'm free from two to whatever.

You just deal with it like the way you would deal with any other meeting. And again, the rules I talked about before apply here. You would only preempt that meeting, your office hours for another meeting, if you would have preempted a meeting with Bob for marketing for that new meeting. So if it's, again, if it's super urgent and a higher up and you would normally cancel another meeting that was already in place to do this new meeting, then do the same for office hours. But if you would not cancel an existing meeting, right, for this new meeting for post,

don't do that for office hours either. Treat it with parity to how you would treat existing meetings. If you're struggling, it might be the case that your officers are too long. That's like a common issue is that people will say, I'm going to have three hours on Wednesday afternoons and that's office hours and then people can come in that might be too much time to consistently have blocked off right because if someone if bob from marketing said we should have a three hour meeting every Wednesday you'd be like that's too many meetings right so that could be the other problem here is that your office hours are too long make them shorter make it an

hour people can come in and out you can get a lot done in an hour and then it won't be so hard it won't step on on people's toes too much time right so just whatever you would do with a normal meeting do that with your office hours I like office hours I'm back I have some teaching again this semester. So I have like legitimate office hours again. It's really nice. Call me in my office hours. All right.

What do we got? We got a call this week. Normally the last episode you said you wanted the theme music twice. Do you want to hear it again? Oh, I forgot the rules. Yeah, let's hear it one more time. I'm going to miss it when we get to the one year, two more months. Wait, four times.

Because your book came out early March, right? Early March. Yeah. You basically have two months from today. Yeah. Yeah, we're getting there. I can put it on MP3. You can listen it on your walks.

I'm just going to... With your new pedometer. I'm going to look so... Yeah, we're wheeling my pedometer wheel and listening to slow productivity music on a walkman. It'll be fantastic. All right. We got a call this week.

We do. All right. Hi, Cal. My name is Emilio Fulino, and I've been a lecture within computer science, a Swedish higher education institute for the past eight-plus years. I've used some of your approaches to deep work and time management. to become great at teaching and was promoted to expert lecturer a couple of years ago. I have now invested some of my career capital and will start doctoral studies in general,

but with my lecturer's salary. To be able to obsessive quality, I will need to develop a new set of skills related to research. As an experienced researcher, what general and specific skills would you recommend that I hone in on? All right, it's a good question. All right, so this is someone who knows the first. field well, they've been doing lecturing, it's going back to doctoral work while maintaining their lecturer position or salary, which is well played by the way, right? That's a good move. What do you need to know to do computer science research at a doctoral level or above really

well? Here, I usually come back to a couple things. One, it is, it's really hard to find good problems. There's like a real skill to that. Like, this is, this is the right problem. to look at next. Like, people have been looking at this, and this is like a natural follow-up that applies some special skill our group has. Like, there's, like, a pattern to this. It's usually in the, the adjacent possible. So when you're a doctoral student, defer to more senior people for problem selection. So if you're in a group that research is often done with your advisor, that's your, you know, your advisor's going to have that six cents you don't have yet, right? If you're working with other research groups, you kind of defer to more senior people.

Like, let them find or suggest like what the problem, like what the really interesting problem is. You can be kind of selective here. Like maybe people are, hey, do you want to work on this? You want to work on that? Be wary of people just sort of like spitballing. Like, this could be interesting. That could be interesting. I would tie my ship closer to ideas that are coming out of existing research that's catching attention.

Good place to be in your doctoral program. There's some heat going on over here with this issue. There's been a couple big papers on it. Like what are the natural follow-up papers on this topic? What's the natural next step? Like get in where there's already some heat while you're still a doctoral student. The second thing I would say is more important than anything else is understanding existing research. You've got to read the relevant papers and take the time to really understand them.

The most valuable doctoral students and most computer science groups are those who are reading and understand the literature relevant to the problems that they're supposed to be working on. If you want to make yourself really useful to your advisor, you come back and you're like, I spent the week. reading these three award-winning papers from the conference that's relevant to our field. And here's what's going on. And here's what they did. And here's what they found. And here's what their questions. Like, you want to be, you want to be an expert.

I mean, I remember this when I was post-stalking. So I'm a theoretician, but I post-doc at MIT in a systems group, network and mobile systems group, Harry Balochristian's group. And I remember, like, one of the students, so they were doing a lot of work on wireless because I was doing theory about wireless. because I was doing theory about wireless, distributed algorithm theory and sort of wireless environments. And so I was going back to a systems group to bring some theory know-how, but also to bring back some more systems know-how back to theory,

it was, etc., etc. I remember one of the students in this group when the new 802.1N standard came out, which was new at the time. This would have been 2009, 2010. They just disappeared and came back like a week later. Okay, I have mastered. I've read all this, the impossible. obtuse,

opaque, I should say, technical documentation and read the early papers on it. I now know exactly how this works and what the options are and what's happening here. And I'm an expert on this now. And then we were able to, or my advisor was able to harness that to say, great, now let's find an interesting problem to look at.

This new standard came out. Let's really understand it. What is like an experiment we can run or an interesting thing we can follow? So like that student had made himself very useful. by mastering that knowledge. In theory, this is even more clear. The best papers come out of understanding the already good papers. And it's really hard to understand papers in theory because, again, they're complicated

proofs and only some of the steps are shown. I mean, it's really, it's one of the hardest things I ever do intellectually is really understanding existing proofs in existing papers because you have to fill in a lot of gaps on your own. But when you teach yourself the mathematics and the logic and understand a really complicated proof and you really internalize it, it opens up all of these options. you take that same mechanics and you apply them over here. You see a natural way to follow up.

Well, their results were here. I really understand this. I'm also good at this like, I can bring in like whatever, like Martin Gale analysis, which they probably didn't know much about. But if we can get away from being dependent on churnoffs and throw in some like martingale bounds, we can actually deal with these troublesome dependencies over here and lose that log factor. Great. I'm going to take that hammer.

I'm going to apply it over to this nail. And now you have a follow-up paper and it's technical and it moves the state of the art forward. all of this comes back to understanding papers. So defer to the experts on like what are the good problems when you're still new and make yourself useful by reading what's already good and spending the time to understand what's already good. It's all about the reading. All right.

Let's see. We got a case study here. We could, Jesse, instead discuss Martin Gale bounds instead of the case study. I don't know what people would prefer. My misspent youth doing probabilistic analysis. We got a case study here. this one comes from Justin. This is where people write in the Jesse at Calhneepard.com and talk about how they use the advice

we discuss on the show in their own lives. So Justin says, most of my career has been in people work. Adults with disabilities, trauma-informed work with teens, and now as a pastor and a church. The transition to pastoring was a significant adjustment and was hugely helped by your books deep work and so good they can't ignore you. I was in my late 20s with a second kid on the way when I decided I did some to do some lifestyle-centric planning that included no more shift work and the chance to be more open about my faith in my work with my people. My intention was to be a pastor with time and energy for my wife

and kids living close to my family and the mountains here in Alberta, Canada. So I quit my highly demanding youth and family counselor role to do a MA in seminary, but working half-time as a church youth ministry director. My undergrad five years earlier was really challenging, with a little more prefrontal cortex and a lot more awareness of autopilot scheduling and deep work blocking. I was able to do well in seminary, become licensed as a minister,

grow my position at the church into a full-time role, get back into CrossFit and back country camping and be a present father and husband. Pastoring has a ton of variety and flexibility and infinite opportunity. So your MSP teaching has been huge and taming

what could have been overwhelming. MSP, he means multi-scale planning, by the way. And weekly templates are helping me grow in specific areas of study, keep up with administrative demands, grow our church and plan, family and personal rhythms that are life-giving

and make me glad I made the switch five and a half years ago. Justin, I appreciate that case study. Two things I want to point out. One, for all the students out there, notice how Justin said,

he found his undergraduate education to be challenging, but when he returned half a decade later with a little bit more prefrontal cortex, a little bit more systematic, approach to his time and efforts, it wasn't so hard.

Being a student is not that hard as long as you don't approach your work like a student. When people come back to school later in life, they often have a much easier time doing well because it's not that hard of a job if you're good at managing your time and being sort of reasonable about when you get things done. So just keep that in mind if you're stressed out as a student. I also love the example of lifestyle-centric planning. He figured out the attributes he was looking for in his life. and some of this had to do with who he was around,

what he was around in terms of physical features, the mountains, etc., but also some characteristics of his work, in particular that he was open about his faith and that the hours weren't crazy, that he had lots of time with his family. Then he worked backwards with opportunities and obstacles and said, okay, I could go back and get this in May,

this timing works out. If I keep this job over here, that'll pay for that. Youth Ministry Director will help keep the lights on while I'm getting this in May, but it'll also be the foot in the door to move to a pastor role and it's at the right type of church. And I throw the right sort of Cal Newport style organizational strategies at my work. I can keep it tamed enough to have the time with my family. There's an opportunity to do this near where I want to beat.

You see how all these pieces fit together. Now, the final point I want to make here is notice how he was deploying the sort of quote-unquote productivity strategies we talk about like multi-scale planning, weekly templates, and autopilot scheduling. He was deploying them to help execute his vision of having a job that had a spiritual meaning to it but had a reasonable time footprint so he could do other stuff. He could be present for his family and spend time in nature. It's why I get frustrated when people take what we do here, for example, and somehow lump it into some sort of undifferentiated hustle culture. When people say talk about organization and productivity is somehow the embodiment of some sort of bourgeois embrace of, you know, capitalist dynamics, as if there's some better alternative world in which, like, we all sit around and do nothing and just sit down pithy substacks and are lauded or

something like this and work is all sort of contrived. How are people in the real world using these type of ideas? Often they're using them so that they can, like, keep their work contained. The same way I use them. I get super stressed with, with crowded calendars. I get super stressed if I have to work outside of a nine to five, an eight to five, an sort of consistent basis. I get super stressed if I don't get seasonality,

times that are low key to offset times that are hierarchy. And the only way I know how to sort of keep my work reasonable is to deploy these type of ideas. Multi-scale planning, weekly templates, autopilot scheduling. So I love the shift in thinking. You deploy these tools to make your life more sustainable, not as a means to make it more stressful. Because what is the reality?

Like I talk about it on my book, slow productivity. Most of like the knowledge work sector right now is dominated by this broken notion a pseudo-productivity where visible activity is used as a proxy for useful effort. So if what you want to do is hustle, if what you want to do is like keep getting more and keep getting more recognition, you could just work really hard, just work all hours, answer emails all the time, just be visibly busy all the time. You don't need. Why would you need careful planning of your time?

Why would you need weekly templates or autopilot schedules or multi-scale planning? If you're in the pseudo-productivity regime trying to get attention, just like be on your email all the time. That's what's rewarded right now. If anything, the stuff we talk about is sort of counterproductive to the things that get people in a superficial sense noticed and moved ahead, you know, especially early in their career. So anyways, I use that, Justin is an excuse for a bit of a rant. I think of the type, what we call productivity.

I think about that, you know, if you increase what you can produce per unit time, you can now reduce the unit time and keep the production the same and work less. That is the flip side to I can increase how much I produce. You can also decrease how much you work in a way that is sustainable. So we've got two sides of the coin there. All right. We've got a quick tech corner coming up. But first I want to talk about another sponsor.

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short of actually having a nutritionist and physical trainer come to your house like the Hollywood stars do. But that costs all the dollars in the world. My Body Tutor, because it's delivered online, you get that same sort of concierge daily service, but you get it at a much more affordable price. So go to My Body Tutor to you, TOR, to learn more. If you mention you came from the Deep Questions podcast, they will give you $50 off your first month. So mybiotutor.com and mention deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's do our last segment.

So we're going to do a tech corner is where we talk about some sort of interesting element or idea from the world of technology. Today I want to talk about what I'm going to conservatively assess to be the most important article the last decade. You see that's fair, Jesse? Yeah. Most important article. I haven't ready yet, though. Well, you know. I think we know.

It's the most important. What I'm talking about is my latest article for the New Yorker. I've loaded this up on the screen here for those who are watching. The article is called A Lesson and Creativity and Capitalism from two Zany YouTubers. So here's the point of this article is I spent time with two DIY maker YouTube YouTubers. So the people who build, they build sort of crazy contraptions on YouTube. One of them was James Hobson who runs a channel called The Hacksmith. And they do a lot of like taking things from Marvel movies and then building real life versions of them.

Wolverine's Clause or Captain American Shield or they built the bulletproof suit from the John Wick movies. And then I also looked at Colin Furze, who also builds crazy things. Right now his current project is he's digging out a secret underground garage in front of his otherwise non-descript suburban English. and it's going to have a DeLorean. It'll be a button he presses that summons this DeLorean from underground and the front yard opens and it's going to come out. He's working on that right now. So I spent time with both of them.

I recommend you read the article if you have a New Yorker's description. But here's like the point from the article that I want to emphasize here. They started the same way, both James and Colin, right? Early YouTube, they got started. They started doing these type of videos. They built up an audience, found sponsors. suddenly they could do this full time. Then their paths diverged,

creating an interesting natural experiment. James decided, I want to get big. Now, it turns out, like, what he was really motivated by here is he just loved the idea of having a giant space with all these people. He just had this, I want to get big. So he began aggressively investing money in the channel.

He went from his garage to a 13,000 square foot warehouse that they were leasing, and then he took out a multi-million dollar. mortgage to go to like an 18,000 square foot warehouse on this large corporate campus. And they remodeled the whole thing. And it's called the hacksmith something like research center at Herc. And he modeled it after Stark Industries from Ironman, 30 employees, a burn rate of a quarter million dollars a month. He really blew this thing out big.

Colin Furze did none of that. He just filmed some edits to videos on his own. Sometimes his wife, like, holds the camera for him. just like does it in his own. He has a barn. It's not air-conditioned, which horrifies James. He's like, why aren't you air-conditioning your barn? Your barn.

And then Colin's like, oh, whatever. It's too hot. I'll just work in my garage. It's fine. I went through. So I tell you two stories. You go through Collins video, they're making the same type of videos. Collins channel's doing just as well.

Actually, it did more views than James. James's channel did in 2024. And so I get into why in this article. And the short summary is that I point out that there is like a specific type of media that's happening in some online. parts of YouTube and podcasting in substack newsletters where the typical dictum that you should just keep growing doesn't necessarily apply and that there's a sweet spot where trying to grow bigger you're not going to there's an authentic sweet spot where you can make a very good living

for yourself i'm talking probably like doctor or lawyer money you're not Elon Musk but you're making more money than like a computer programmer there's like this sweet spot you can get into in podcasting and substack and in certain corners of YouTube where it's low overhead, you do really well, but you don't have a lot of other people your pain. And actually, it's not easy to break out of it. And I get into why James's approach to scale that it work and why these type of media are resistant to like throwing in a lot of money and scaling really big. My conclusion is this is like a cool reality of the current internet.

It's a good counterpoint, I think, the sort of consolidated social media culture where Everyone is just a digital sharecropper for a small number of big companies and just creating free content so they can make a lot of money so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy bigger chains. It's like a counterpoint to all of that where you can have a non-trivial size creative middle class of people who make a really good living creating interesting stuff. And it's not part of a massive company and it's not a winner take all. Only six of these people exist in the end. So I get into the details in this article. but the creative middle class is something I've been following. And I think as social media's cultural grip has begun to become more shaking the last few years,

the opportunities for this creative middle class, these genres that can support a large number of people doing well, not starting massive companies, but individually doing well. The opportunities for this is growing and it's a trend to follow. I think it's a very positive trend for the internet. And it's a very positive trend to follow for just the state of the creative arts in general. So anyways, check out this article.

I'm actually writing like four articles in a row for The New Yorker. I'm sort of taking over Kyle Chakra's column for a month. So we'll have more to talk about. I'm writing one about TikTok right now. So I'm kind of doing a bunch of tech thinking right now. But anyways, check out this article if you have a New Yorker's description because it illustrates a cool point that I think is worth keeping track of. All right.

Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. 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.

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