Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 34: Habit Tune-Up: Productivity Chimeras, OmniFocus, and Finding Time to Write

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

In this mini-episode, I answer audio questions from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Productivity chimera's and processing captured tasks [9:53] * Thoughts on OmniFocus [16:37] * Taming a team's early email habit [21:39] * Finding time to write in a busy life [25:09] * Struggling to write even when you have the time [32:30] Special thanks to our sponsor Blinkist. For a 7-day free trial and 25% off a subscription, go to blinkist.com/DEEP.As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing or leaving a rating/review.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I find Omnifocus a very helpful tool, particularly with respect to configuration in my productivity management system. But I wonder why you prefer something like Trello over Omnifocus, particularly given you broadly support David Allen's getting things done philosophy on which Omnifocus is based. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, habit tune up mini episode. The format of these mini episodes is straightforward. I take voice questions from my listeners about how to tune up their productivity habits in this period in which our professional lives are, of course, increasingly disruptive. Now, before we dive into your questions, let's briefly pick up the thread that I have

been polling at the beginning of recent episodes, which has been my discussion of household productivity. So if you're just joining this discussion now, if you have not been listening recently, I was noting that there's not enough productivity thinking that goes into the details of how you keep track of, how you organize, how you execute the diverse myriad and often unexpected obligations required to run a household, to raise a family, to take care of cars and your own health, the stuff that you have to do outside of work. In the workplace, we have all sorts of sophisticated systems, the type of stuff that productivity geeks like me talk about.

Outside the workplace, there's just as much stuff, but we don't take it as seriously, and I think this is a problem, and I think it creates a serious amount of anxiety that is avoidable, or stress that is avoidable. So I've been playing around recently, borrowing ideas from different things I've been seeing, suggestions that you've been sending in in my own experimentation, to see if we can't cobble together here on the fly in these deep questions episodes, a... Let's call it tentative household productivity system, sort of a getting household things done.

G-T-H-D or something like this. It'll be G-H, getting household things done, G-H-T-D, except for we won't use that acronym. It'll probably get sued. So don't call it that. Okay, so let's try this. I was thinking earlier today, I had a long drive. I spent a day, hey, excitingly enough,

I was in a studio out in Virginia, filming videos, speaking of productivity, for my time block planner, which I'll probably next week start talking more about the planner. And when it's coming out, we're going to do some pre-orders. You'll hear about that soon. But there's going to be a video on the website

for the planner that just shows me showing people what time blocking is and how the planner works. And we filmed it today. That was fun. Nice like overhead camera that could make a really nice shot of the planner. Anyways, the studio I use is out in Virginia, out in Warrington. So I had Long Drive.

And so I was trying to think through if I had to reduce some of the ideas we've been talking about in these intros about household productivity to a New Portian-style system, sort of overly precise, superfluously rigid, what would it be? Here's my tentative approach. Let's try it. and then I'll be interested in your feedback, which you can send to interesting at calnewport.com. All right. So in the system I'm thinking about for household productivity, there are two major elements. The weekly plan and the collection box. Now the collection box, like I was talking about recently, I think should be a physical box.

I think there should be one. It should be relatively large so that you can put in papers and mail and things like this. next to it should be a stack of post-it notes or index cards with a pin as well. Okay, so throughout the week, as you come across things that you say, ah, here is a household-related thing that needs to get done or we need to figure out that we don't have a plan for. If you just have the thought in your head, jot it down on one of those notes and throw it in the box. If like a letter comes in, it represents something you have to deal with, put it in the box.

If your kid brings something home from school, you need to sign it, you need to do something with it, throw it in the box. That box has everything in it that is important for you running your household that right now is not planned for. And that's going to reduce stress. You have one location for all of this. Now for this to work, you must then have the discipline of the daily box sorting. Now this is the part that's going to be hard for me. Having that discipline to say every day at this time, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, you sit down, you go through what's in that box and you process it. And you go through it and the stuff in a David Allen style, the stuff that you can take care of right away,

well, I'll just sign this form now, I'll just send back this check now. And the stuff you can't goes into whatever systems you use long term to keep track of to-dos, long-term to keep track of your calendar. All right. So box collects everything. The box gets looked at every day. That's 80% of your stress gone. The second element of this system, and again, this is all still tentative, is the weekly plan. So the idea here is that you and your partner, if you're not single, sit down once a week, and a set time. See, let's figure out a plan for the week. And my plan for the week, what I'm talking about here is things that are going to get put onto the calendar for specific times.

On Thursday, you're ending work early and you're taking the car to the car wash. Saturday morning, we're mowing the yard. We need to put aside a half hour on Wednesday. Let's do it over our lunch break because we're both working from home to discuss what to do with the stain we have to choose for the new fence.

Whatever. It's all about generating things that you're going to get done that week. and not just generically writing them in a list, but putting them on a calendar for set times that you execute and trust just like you would having a doctor's appointment on the calendar. What do you look at when doing this weekly plan?

Well, this is where you would look at whatever that stable system is in which you are taking the to-dos that show up in that box that you haven't yet dealt with, like any of these type of information that's kept more stable. You review it all. And that's why you feel secure

that when you're doing box sorting, that if you put something into, if you put something into like your stable list software, whatever you use, it'll be looked at. It'll be looked at when you do the next weekly plan. I think those two things, that one box that's captured and looked at and gets a little bit of attention every single day, plus a real weekly plan where you confront everything on your page and actually put things that need to get done on the calendar, these two things, here's my conjecture, probably would reduce that background stress of household life management by a significant degree. Now, I don't know if it's true. This is not like time block planning, a tried and true system I've used for years and standby.

I'm just playing here. This is me just putting on my hat as a productivity system designer type person and saying this would be my first stab at a tractable but effective household productivity system. So there we go. I don't know what we need a good name for that. Maybe people can suggest a name, but that is my current suggestion. I'm open to feedback, interesting at calnewport.com. I think I might start trying this out soon as well, and if I do, I'll let you know how it goes. That's usually how I find the flaws, by the way, in these plans.

Once you actually try it, you say, like, oh, that was a good intention. Never happens. Or this system seems smart. You're missing this huge thing. So, you know, this has not been fire tested, but I'm just throwing it out there. And now before we get to your questions for the week, let's briefly do our Spotlight review. This is a five-star review from iTunes for the podcast. This one comes from Natalie. It is titled First Podcast Review. Natalie says, hi, Cal, I'm an avid podcast listener, but I've never

wrote a review until now. Thank you so much for your podcast. I look forward to every episode. I am a recent fan, having only discovered your book Deep Work several months ago, but I'm so glad I did. I have five kids, ages seven months to 11. Natalie, for your sake, I hope you mean 11 years and not 11 months because that would be, what comes after quadruplets? Pintuplets? That'd be rough. And work part time from home as a paralegal.

My husband also works from home and we are fortunate to have a sitter two or three days a week, for which I am very grateful. Nonetheless, before discovering your book and podcast, I struggled to complete my work during those hours when child care was available. Applying your principles and discipline to my work in life has had an enormous impact in quality time management, stress reduction, and overall happiness, thank you. Well, thank you, Natalie. I appreciate that five-star review.

Just like I appreciate all reviews and all ratings and subscriptions, all of that, of course, helps. If you want to contribute your own voice question for the habit tune up many episodes, you can do so at speakpipe. slash CalNewport. That's speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. All right, with that, let's get started with today's show. We'll kick things off with a question about capture, configure, control.

Hi, Cal, this is Ryan. I'm a software engineer in Portland, Oregon. I love your podcast. It's the only podcast where I listen to each episode in full the day it comes out. My question is about capture, configure, and control, which is something I've been working hard on mastering. For me right now, in Greek mythological terms, capture-configure control is a chimera, with three heads all breathing fire. In the Habit tune-up episode from September 17th, you went into detail about your capture system. You mentioned your notebook as your source of truth and that you'll use your working memory.

text file and later transfer items to your notebook. My question is about the configure step that comes next. How and when do you process or configure everything you've captured in your notebook? and what is the end state after you've configured everything? Is everything moved out of the notebook and into trello boards and your calendar? Thank you. Well, Ryan, first of all, I appreciate the chimera reference, but let's get technical here. When I think about a multi-headed hydra, I can believe that every head would be breathing fire. When I think of a chimera, I think of the lion's head as potentially breathing fire.

But the other two heads are a little weird. Once a goat's head classically and the other is a snake's, head on the tail of the chimera, do they also breathe fire? I think we can all agree. That's what's most important about this question, is making sure that we have superfluous mythological references to productivity systems, 100% correct. Because that's the quality I guarantee to have a tune-up listers. All right, putting that discussion aside, about which I'm sure I will hear a lot in my email inbox, I would say, roughly what you propose is what I do. Things come out of my notebook and they go into

Trello or they go into my calendar. The distinction I want to make is ideas versus tasks. And I actually make this distinction in the planner that comes out of November. There's a capture page for every day so that you can do capture right there without having to touch your computer until you're ready. And I have it in two columns, tasks and ideas. So ideas are less formulated. They're maybe not action oriented. It's not something you have to do. It's just something you want to think about later, maybe come back to. Ideas, I tend to store those, so it depends where I first record them. If I capture them in my mullskin, which is where I capture ideas about my life, but typically outside of the professional context, I just review the mullskin about once a month.

If I capture an idea, let's say, in my planner, like an idea for my business or a research idea, when I process, I'm doing the configure step, it will go typically into Evernote. ever notice where I keep long-term idea stores about articles, about research, about my business, etc. Other things, things that are tasks, things that are obligations, you are absolutely right. It's pretty simple. They come out of my capture systems into the proper Trello board, into the proper column. So there's like a trial, I've mentioned this before.

I have a writer Trello board. I have a under professor. I have a teacher, do teacher slash admin Trello board, a researcher, professor, researcher, researcher, Trello Board. And until very recently, I had a Director of Graduate Studies Trello Board. I am no longer the Director of Graduate Studies. My term has ended. I couldn't be more excited to not have to go back to that Trello Board anymore. So you can all congratulate me later. Each of these boards has columns, Backburner, something that's happening this week, something that I don't know how to process this into a task yet, so it's on a list of things to process,

waiting to hear back from someone. That's one of the columns. It gets put on a card. in one of those trello boards on one of those columns. If there's a lot of information that's relevant, I put it on the back of the virtual card. If there's a file that's relevant, I attach it to the card. That's my process. And so my Trello boards get bigger.

My idea notebooks get bigger. And I am ready for shutdown complete at that point. I want to take a quick break from our questions to talk about our sponsor, Blinkist. Now Blinkets is one of the secrets to my success. This subscription service gives you access to summaries of thousands of nonfiction books, summaries that have been written by experts that can be condensed into just 15 minutes

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So good news for Deep Questions listeners. Right now for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for you. Go to Blinkist.com slash Deep, try it free for seven days, and save 25% off of your new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day. day trial, and you will also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at Blinkist.com slash deep. Moving on, we will now do a question about Omnifocus. Hi, Cal, my name is Leah.

I'm a postdoc in the UK. Your work has helped me so much over the years. I'm a big fan of the podcast. Thank you for all you do. I have two questions. The first is about Omnifocus. I find Omnifocus a very helpful tool, particularly with respect to configuration. in my productivity management system.

But I wonder why you prefer something like Trello over Omnifocus, particularly given you broadly support David Allen's getting things done philosophy on which Omnifocus is based. Well, I figure let's stop here and answer the first question before we move on with the second. For people who don't know, Omnifocus is a Macintosh-based productivity application that is tuned right in with David Allen's getting things done productivity system. You can think of it as a very advanced list keeping type of software, where you can have tasks,

but these tasks can have different contexts, and then you can generate different views. So you can say, show me all the tasks that are part of this context or all the tasks that have this property and are in this context, almost like you're doing database queries on the various things on your plate. Now, the short answer is, I don't mind OmniFocus. I mean, I think it's a cool tool. In fact, I spent some time talking with the person who created Omnifocus. His name is Ethan Schoenover.

What actually happened was he was a, I interviewed him, he was a getting things done fan. And there used to be a tool included free with every Mac called Omni Outliner. And so Ethan began using Apple scripting tools to essentially add extra, functionality to Omni Outliner. And this collection of scripts, he eventually called KGTD or Kinkless GTD. And you would get your free Omni Outliner and then you would put in all these scripts. He explained to me the coding behind it. It was quite clugy.

And it would allow you to use Omni Outliner in this way where you could add task and have context and then say things like, just show me the task in this context. It became very popular among officinados. and at some point the Omni Corporation, I think that's their name. But the company that made Omni Outliner hired Ethan. And they basically implemented what he was doing in scripts. They implemented it as a native project or product rather called Omni Outliner. Merlin Mann from 43 Folders, who had also been talking to recently for an article project.

He got involved as a consultant. Ethan told me the story of him and Merlin. heading down the Ohi to present Omni Outliner to David Allen's company. So there's a whole interesting rich history, which is all to say, I know a lot about it, and I like it. The main reason I don't use it is it probably has too much friction for my needs. So I'm all about figuring out what you need out of a productivity system, be it software or be it analog, and then try to get that functionality with as little as simple as.

friction as possible. The less things you have to click, the less things you have to type, the less things you have to format, the more likely you are to use it. And the less cognitive energy you burn organizing your work that you could be focusing on actually executing the work. On the outlier, really, this comes out of sort of Mac geek culture, and it's not for the feign of heart. I mean, you're essentially running a relational database on your tasks. Now, if you are tech oriented, you can be pretty fast with this and it can do some pretty cool things. I know a lot of people back in the original K GTD day has got a little bit of a boost out of the complexity of the system. Look at these great views I was able to generate very quickly and that would give them some

motivation so I get that. But for me, I just want to know, okay, I'm doing some work now as a writer, what's on my plate and what status is it in? Trello just gives me that all at once. I don't have to type in some sort of query. I don't have to use a pre-saved view. and also, I don't know, the graphics are kind of cute. So little cards, you know, they're kind of easy to see. So it's a little bit easier. So I would say if you are tech-focused, if you like databases, if you like having some fiddily options on your tools,

if that motivates you, like if that's going to get you more excited about using the tool, than something simpler like Trello, then use Omni Outliner. If you're not like that, if you don't like fiddily options, if you find a thing that keeps you from productivity systems is just the overhead of using the systems, the outliner is probably a little bit more complex than what you need. So it really comes down to taste. So it's a fine option.

It just depends if that fits your personality. Okay, so with that, let's move on to the second part of this question. And my second question is about how often and to what extent you check email, and what you think, for example, of the never-check email in the morning mantra, my colleagues are excellent. We don't do much of our email. I think we're smart about how we use it, but generally there is an expectation that everybody checks their email at least once around 8 or 9 a.m. in the morning. I wonder if you've ever found a way that organizations get away from this expectation or approach. Thank you very much.

The key here is not to get caught up thinking about email norms or email etiquette. norms and etiquette are not the issue. The issue is the underlying workflows. So there is some sort of implicit underlying workflow in your organization that says, we use emails in the morning. So maybe things that we send overnight, but we use the checking of email in the morning as a way to do something, synchronize the team, make sure everyone's on the same page, make sure that there is a set time during the day when we know for sure we can ask for something and get it on the record, whatever it is, you have a workflow here. Now, if email is not the right way to implement this workflow, if there's other issues about going into your inbox first thing in the morning,

the solution is not going to be saying, hey, guys, let's just have a new norm where we don't check email in the morning. It's going to be, what problem was that solving? How else do we want to solve it? What's a different way to solve that problem without using email? Do we need to use a project management system that we could check in on the projects and see what it? it is. Do we need an agile methodology style synchronous scrum where we all get on the same call? It's only five minutes long, but we know it's going to happen every morning we're going to sink. Maybe that should be at the end of the day and the midday. And at the end of the day, we set up what's going to happen for the next morning because maybe a lot of the people on your team, including

yourself or morning people, and you want to hit the ground running, and you want to hit the ground doing deep work. And so you don't want to start your day planning. You want to end your day planning for the next day or whatever. But what I'm getting at here, figure out what problem this behavior is solving. What is this workflow, this implicit workflow? What is it doing? And then say, is there a better workflow for getting these same things done? I mean, this is the vision I'm laying out of my book that comes out in March, a world without email. I don't care about email as a tool. It's a great. It's a good protocol. I'd rather use that protocol. a fax machine to send you a message. I don't care about habits and etiquette. That's the icing on the

cake that you don't even taste anymore. I care about what processes, what are the underlying workflows that right now are being implemented in email? When is that causing more harm than good? What do you replace them with? And so you might actually have a great opportunity here to actually do some re-engineering of your team or your organization's workflow in a way that's going to allow everyone to get more done and maybe be more satisfied or be less stressed. So you're asking the right, questions, move past etiquette, move past tips, say, what are we doing with these morning emails? And is there a better way to get this same objective met? All right, so I got some interesting, I'm getting some interesting feedback from writers.

I've been talking some about the productivity habits surrounding writing, both in the habit tune up mini episodes and the full-length episodes of deep questions. So I thought it might be interesting to do a couple writer questions to wrap up today's show. Hi, Cal. I've been reading your books for a few years, but I've only recently discovered your podcast, which I now listen to every day on my 6 a.m. walk. So thank you for that. I'm a project manager with two kids homeschooling at the moment. So my days are quite full and long. I'm also aspiring to write a fiction book, and I've got a couple of book ideas that I'm really excited about. I had a couple of questions. Firstly, how would you recommend I go about

researching and expanding on my ideas for a fiction book. And secondly, how should I structure my day to balance my health, family, and work responsibilities and still find time to write? Well, first of all, you mentioned that you were homeschooling your kids for the moment. So that could mean a couple different things. Now, if homeschooling is something that you had always planned to do, and you have set things up to do the home. homeschooling, maybe like your partner is at home full time to work on the homeschooling. You have a curriculum and you're part of a community and this is something you intended to do. That's one thing.

But you said for the moment. So if you're like me, if you're homeschooling because the pandemic shut down your schools, well, this is probably not a time to be writing a book. I like to emphasize this because for some reason we're not in our broader culture that from a productivity standpoint for parents right now, especially parents who do not have their kids in school, or do not have their kids physically in school, they're doing whatever we call that staring at Zoom. It's a dumpster fire. And everyone's pretending like the dumpster's not on fire because they don't have the right things to put it out. And so they're like, let's just not talk about the dumpster.

And maybe we can like yell at each other for wearing our mask wrong or something. But this is a huge dumpster fire. And it makes work really difficult. And it's a problem. And it's an emergency. and even though no one's treating it like an emergency, you should internally treat it like an emergency. Pull back where you can pull back, get hyperproductive in the work that you still have to do. You need to be doing something like my time block planning. You need to be doing something like capture, configure control.

You have to be on your game so that with way less hours than you normally spend working, you're getting enough done for it not to be a problem for your employer. Go to the side of the dumpster that's not as much on fire. We've got to just get through it. It's going to get better soon. So I just want to throw that thing out there. Don't be down on yourself if you're unable to find the energy or time to write a novel right now

if you are suddenly taking care of your kids simultaneously while working and no one seems to care. So I'm just sort of throwing that out as a mini rant. All right, but that's really of the moment. Things are getting better. This will get better. As I said, all you have to do is just stop reading the newspaper or listening to the news for a couple of weeks and you'll feel better. So let's talk about the writing stuff. Let's talk about the writing stuff.

I'm going to recommend two things. One, you're asking about how do I find ideas, how do I make progress? Talk to writers. Talk to writers who do the type of fiction writing that you want to do. If it's literary fiction, talk to literary fiction writers. If it's middle grades, children's fiction, talk to middle grades, children's fiction's writers. If it's genre fiction, find a genre fiction writer. And what you need to do here is get to the reality of how do you do you,

you get to a skill level where you can actually publish something is worth publishing, what's the process like, what is it that distinguishes amateur from professional, what do I have to do to get there? Is it something I can do solitary with practice? Is it something that I need some training? Do I need to hire a freelance editor and do chapters with them back and forth, back and forth until they say, okay, now this is tight? I mean, what I want you to do here, what I want you to do here is to make sure that you avoid the common trap of aspiring writers, which is to write your own story about how people should become writers, to write a story in your head about what you want to be true.

The story in your head where what matters is that you go to your writer's shed and you just have the courage to write and you do it an hour every morning and six months later, you're JK rolling. Riders, aspiring writers more than almost any other field, like to invent their own reality about how people become writers, but there's really good information. there and if you know it, you can greatly increase your chances of succeeding here, and when your mind knows that you have talked to the pros, when it understands, oh, here is how someone would succeed in this field. Here is a plan. This plan's got a pretty reasonable

chance of success. Guess what? Procrastination is going to diminish. You're much less likely to delay because when your brain is on board with your plan, you do the plan more consistently. So that's what I'm going to suggest. I'm going to suggest talk to writers in your genre and find out the truth, not what you want to be true, but the truth about what is required do become a published writer in that field. Now that's something you can do. So if we are in a scenario where like your homeschooling is the dumpster fire scenario, this is actually a great time for the brainstorming and the planning. This is a great time to talk to authors and think about it, make a plan and think about how, what changes am I going to have to

make in my life, when am I going to find time, etc. This is a great time to do that aspirational planning, to be looking to the future and to have a good plan. You just might not be able to execute it right now. And then once you have that plan, and once you know what you need to do, well, then you find the time. Let's think about it this way. If you're homeschooling your kids right now while working and everyone's pretending like you're not, like that's not a problem. And so you're getting super productive because you have to get 80% of what used to get done in 50% of the time. Guess what's going to happen when the pandemic ends, as every pandemic in history ever has? Guess what's going to happen when the kids are back at school? Which more and more kids are.

You are going to have free time. You're going to be a productivity beast. And you're going to have these muscles to flex and nothing to do with it. Like, man, I'm getting my work done. I feel like I'm in a Tim Ferriss chapter. It's, you know, 11 a.m. and I'm done because I'm so efficient and I'm so on it and I'm whatever, getting after it and crushing it. Yeah, I have some time to write. So actually, I think this could all, I'm bringing us all together. This could all work out. So right now, when we're in the dumpster and we're trying to get away from the fire and wondering why everyone's pretending like the dumpster's not on fire, you research how writing works in the genre you care about.

You become an expert on how people do that well. You convince your brain, you know what you're talking about, you can succeed. You're not just going to do National Novel Writing Month or go to your shed and write 100 words a day and just hope it works out. Okay, good. Once you leave the dumpster, you're going to have free time, use it. Put that knowledge to work. Be looking forward to that day coming soon where you can pull the trigger and get that book starting to be written. All right, well, I hope you find that useful. I have one more question I want to do here as long as I am pontificating writing. Let's do one more question among that theme. Hey, Cal, this is Nathan, a seminar student and pastor in the Twin Cities area. Appreciate your podcast and all your work. I'm listening to episode number 27.

About 13 minutes in and you're commenting on writer's block. That writer's block is what amateur writers feel when they're trying to do the hard work of writing. And that's helpful. It helps me understand what to expect when I do hard writing. But I think your analogy of the athlete it needs to get taken one step further. Sometimes athletes enjoy lifting weights. And it's not that the weights are lighter. It's that they have the motivation to lift them. The same thing happens in writing.

Even when I've time blocked a time to write and I believe in the project, a particular time I sit down, I'm just not motivated to write. The weights feel heavier because I don't particularly want to write. Well, the way I might put it, it's not that the athletes like lifting weights. They like winning the games. And they know that lifting the weights, though heavy, and though straining their arms, is what one does to win the games. And they take pride in the fact that they're the type of person who does that hard thing

because they want to win games. I mean, I'm starting to stretch this metaphor probably too far. And I'm being a little bit flip. So let me step back and try to add a little bit of nuance into what I'm trying to say here. So let's go back to that quote you mentioned about writer's block. And I want to correct it a little bit because I think it matters. I think you paraphrased a quote as saying, the amateur writer, writer's block is what the amateur writer feels.

And actually, I think that what I actually said, and I think this distinction is crucial, is that writers block, what amateurs call writers block, is what professional writers call writing. Now, that distinction is important because what it tells us is that, yeah, everyone feels it. The professionals feel, the amateurs feel it. It's just they think about it differently. Just like the professional athlete, they feel the strain on their muscle the same way that the amateur gym dweller who just got a membership feels the strain.

But it just means something different to the professional athlete. They just, they're used to that. That's part of what they do. That's part of what's needed to accomplish what they want to accomplish. And so that's where you want to get with writing. I don't want to demonize that feeling of cognitive frustration. I don't want to put words on the page. I don't know what words to put on the page.

That is completely normal. Everyone feels it. I feel it. The prose feel it. It's an unavoidable part of writing. As I said, you know, of course, the curse of writers is that you occasionally get visited by the muses, just like the amateur duffer occasionally hits that sweet tea shot and then they're ruined forever. So chasing after it.

You know, sometimes you do get into a flow state, but it's way more haphazard than people realize what conditions put you into that flow state. A lot of times writing is just hard. That level of concentration is not really natural to our species. It's something that we train. It's artificial, just like reading is artificial, writing is artificial. We're hijacking portions of our brain that were meant for other uses in our deep historical patterns. asked for hijacking parts of our brain to do something that's a little bit less natural, like writing, just like reading. So it's difficult. It's going to feel difficult. We have to

build rituals around it. That helps. But we're just going to feel it and everyone feels it. So it's all now about how do we conceptualize that bad feeling. And then that's where the difference is made. So the professional says, yeah, that's the feeling of what I do. And actually, I have learned to associate pride with my will. willingness to feel that feeling and keep going. So, how do we get you there? Well, I think hopefully this conceptual shift will help. Once you no longer see the feeling as something that is not normal or a mark that you're not at a certain level of writing, once you just say like, oh yeah, that's just what writing feels like. I think that's going to help. As you talked about,

believing in the project helps. I think also understanding the type of writing you're doing, I mean, as I talked about in the previous answer, you know how to do that writing, you know how to do it well, you know what the process is for doing that type of writing. You not only believe in the project, but you believe in your ability to do the project, right? Like if I sat down tomorrow and it's like, man, I am going to write a Pulitzer Prize winning play. I believe that would be important. My mind was not going to be on board because I have no idea how to write theater. especially at the Pulitzer level. But if I spent a lot of time and I trained and learned what was involved,

then it would be a completely different story. So I throw that out there as well. You believe in your project, but you believe in yourself to be able to actually execute that project. And then once you've done all of that, and once you've realized, like, it's going to feel hard, that's just what it feels like you're doing something unnatural with your brain, but it's worthwhile and just get used to it, get ready for it. That weight's going to be heavy.

That's great. That heavy is what's going to create the strain. That strains what's going to create the muscle. The muscle is what's going to create the victory. once you have that mindset, and there's really nothing left to do but get after it. And if you really think it's important, it's really important for you to do,

take pride that you do something that's hard even though it feels bad. And then you just sort of get after it, you know? There's nothing left beyond it. So, I mean, it's a complicated subject. Writing is a complicated subject for all of these reasons. It is sometimes not hard. It often is hard.

Some people think Block is something that should stop them. Other people think that's just writing. Some people don't believe in what they're doing. They kind of wanted to write a novel, but not really. It's hard to have motivation. Some people believe in what they're doing, but there's a deeper part of their brain that says, yeah, but you don't know how to do this.

And I think National Novel Writing Month is not our ticket to become the next John Grisham. I think there's probably more to writing than just like, let's put aside the hours, right? So there's all of these factors that are involved. Once you've dealt with all those factors, then yeah, you're left in the end with just riding. And it is really hard, and I would say it's almost uniquely hard.

I don't know. It's a cognitive equivalent in the sporting world, I think, of those endurance athletes. The guys like Scott Jurek or David Goggins to do the feats of extreme endurance, like I'm going to break the pull-up record or I'm going to run for 100 miles. It's kind of like that. It's really a mind game. It can be really difficult. It is unnatural.

really feels great. Sometimes it does, but often it does it. So that's what I would say. I'm going to say, yeah, embrace the suck. Make sure you know why you're doing it. You know how to do it. And then you just get after it. All right, I think that's all the time we have for today. You're not going to know this just listening to the episode, but about halfway through this recording, I actually had to take a break to go do an interview with Larry King and Tristan Harris, if you can believe it, and then come back to finish recording this episode. So I've probably pushed my brain about as far as I should today. So thank you everyone for listening.

Thank you for the questions. Speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. If you want to submit your own audio questions, I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.