Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 41: Selling Your First Book, Shallow Spouses, and My Dream Schedule | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about selling your first book (and end up accidentally ranting about publishing industry misconceptions), going deep when your spouse is defiantly shallow, and day dreaming about my ideal schedule, among many other topics.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS * Planning unpredictable work [2:27] * On the supposed upsides of procrastination [12:02] * Cutting back on academic obligations [14:43] * Dropping out of grad school [18:02] * Publishing your first book (rant alert) [21:07] * Getting serious about personal productivity [30:35]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS * A look at my own phone usage [37:36] * On cannabis and deep work [40:16] * When your spouse is mad at you for reducing technology [47:12] * Rethinking education post-pandemic [53:09]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS  * Dream schedules for lovers of depth [1:01:01] * Staying motivated when school is online [1:03:51] * FIRE and the deep life [1:09:3]Links to Special Offers from our Sponsors: - blinkist.com/DEEP - magicspoon.com/CALThanks 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'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode with guest host David Epstein. I have a few more guest hosts lined up for later this fall. I do enjoy bringing on other areas of expertise. I also like picking the brain of these expert guest hosts to learn more about how they got where they got and how they actually do their work. I don't plan, however, to have too many of the guest host episodes, maybe at most once or occasionally twice a month. The core of this show remains me answering questions.

Of course, any feedback you have about the show or the format, please feel free to send it to interesting at calnewport.com. Speaking of the show, I also want to mention that I now have my video set up completely ready to go. The idea is I'm going to start recording a few of the interesting or key answers from these episodes so I can post them to be watched online. This way you can actually see my pleasant face as I talk with some of these answers and perhaps more importantly, be able to share some individual answers with people you think might be interested in hearing them without having to send them the entire episode.

Now, I could be doing that in today's episode. The only reason why I am not starting videotaping select questions today is just I don't have enough time today. But look out for that soon. Deep Questions video will be coming. All right, I don't want to delay. You know the drill on the administrative details. Calnewport.com is where you do my mailing list. That's where you are able to answer my bi-monthly survey where you can send in questions for the podcast.

is where you get my famous weekly articles. Also, reviews are good. I read them all. Subscriptions are great. I really appreciate it as are ratings. All right, enough of that. Let's get rolling with the questions this week, and we will start, as always, with queries about work.

Our first question is from Sam. He asks, do you have any advice for how to stay on track with a project timeline where the project involves a lot of undecidable tasks. He then elaborates that he is a songwriter and that he will have, for example, release deadlines he is trying to work towards, but really will miss them quite frequently because it's very difficult to figure out how long the creative process of writing a song is actually going to take. Well, Sam, first of all, I appreciate your reference to undecidable task. I think the hardcore study hacks readers among you will be the only people to get that reference.

I actually wrote an essay about this years ago. Undecidable is actually a computability theory term. So I teach computability and complexity theory to the grad students here at Georgetown in the study of computability theory, which is the study of what problems can and can't be solved by computers. There's a piece of terminology called Undecutored. undecidable. In a somewhat strained manner in that essay years ago, I connected this undecidable terminology from computability theory to planning for projects in which you do not

know in advance how long they are going to take. This was probably a time when I had spent maybe one too many weeks teaching lectures on Alan Turing and this type of theory. But anyway, Sam, I appreciate you going back into the old cuts there to make that reference. So congratulations for that. As for your question, creative work in which there really is a element that cannot be timed is its own sort of beast. Now, there's a lot of creative work where people kind of pretend like that's true, but it's not. I think the most famous example is novel writing. Novelists, sometimes especially aspiring novelists,

like to say, look, I'm waiting for the muse. I don't know how long it's going to take. It'll be ready when it's ready. But if you spend time with professional novelist, you see they put the butt in the seat and type. They say, well, the muse will come when the muse comes. I'm putting down words. Some might not be good.

Then it will get better. I can be pretty predictable about how long this is going to take, even if on a given day, I can't tell if that's going to be a good or bad day. artist can do the same things. It was actually an artist Chuck Close, who famously said inspiration is for amateurs. Artists like Chuck Close really just do the work,

and they find if you keep doing the work, you end up producing good things, some better than others, but they don't tend to sit around waiting for some sort of inspiration to strike before moving forward. There's a good book by this. Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art. It does really get into, some of these ideas about how actually just doing the effort day after day is where really

creative things come from, not, as is often thought, waiting for the inspiration to do something creative. So the question then, Sam, is, is songwriting in that category of things where it seems like you have to wait for inspiration, but actually just doing the work will produce things more consistently than you think? Or does it fall into another category? A category, a category, in which you can do the work, but you still don't know how long it's going to take. In fact, you can do the work and maybe never get an outcome. Now, that category definitely exists. In that original article in which I was making overly strained references to theoretical computer science,

one of the core examples I gave of work that's very hard to predict was what I do for a living, which is solving proofs. And when you're trying to solve a proof, you have to do. have a result you think is true. Here's the thing. It might not be true, which means there is no proof for it, which means no matter how much effort you put into that prove, you're never going to solve it. Or it could be the case that maybe the thing you're trying to prove is true, but the techniques that are going to unlock that result are techniques you do not know. And then again, no matter how much time you put into it, you really are never going to come up

with a solution. This is what makes those type of endeavors. So frustrating is that it's not just enough to throw time at it. It makes you jealous about novelists where they sort of know if they throw words on the page every day, some will be

better than others, but they know what they're doing. Those words will get shaped and eventually they'll have a pretty good novel. Can't do the same thing with proofs. Just ask the centuries worth of effort that was invested in Fermat's last theorem before it was finally solved by Andrew Wiles of Princeton during my childhood. People spent the long time on that one.

Nothing came of it. Ask Einstein, who after his triumphs, the theory of special relativity, followed by the theory of general relativity, spent the rest of his career working on a grand unified theory. And while he was working on this, he looked over at these strange,

fundamentally probabilistic models that were being developed by this new generation of what we're known as quantum theorists and said, that doesn't seem right. I don't think that's going to be the right answer. I'll find a right answer. He never could. So we have these two categories of hard creative tasks. Those that will yield to Chuck Close, novelist style, just put your butt in the chair, read Stephen Presfield, put your butt in the chair, and work will be produced, and these other types of things like solving hard theorems. So I don't know where songwriting falls. So Sam, you're going to have to figure that out for yourself.

If after some honest reflection, you think that songwriting really does fall on the novelist art side of things, then get the work done regularly. Don't be a perfectionist. Just trust yourself that if you push yourself to produce the best work you can while you're working and you work a lot, some days will be more frustrated than others, but you'll produce pretty good things, they'll occasionally be great, and that's better than waiting for the great thing to arrive. If on the other hand, honest reflection tells you that songwriting is like proof-solving, well, welcome to a frustrating professional world. I think we had jackets made.

So what do you do if you're in this second category? You've got to give things consistent effort, but you have to think of these efforts like attacks that are finite. I was talking about this. When was this? Earlier this week, I was talking with my friend Scott Young. We were talking about analogies for solving a proof. And I said, really, it is like you're seaging a castle. And so you're like, we're going to try this attack.

Let's get the battering ram and try the front door. Oh, that didn't work. Okay, let's try digging a tunnel and exploding explosives under a weak point in the wall and see if that works. Oh, that didn't it work. Okay, for our next attack, let's try building a siege tower and pushing it up to the castle. So every attack, you try to make as hard as you can with as much skill as you can, but they're finite.

Here's the attack that either worked or it didn't. Okay, let's try another. And if you don't know what the next attack should be, they're like, let's step back and get some more information about what that could be. So in the world of proof-solving, let me read some more things. Let me talk to some more people. I need to figure out another new attack. So you're either doing an attack that's going to be finite, a week or two length, or you're trying to figure out your next attack.

And if you don't have an obvious next attack, it seems tractable, then your new problem is how do I figure out what the next attack is? And that's gathering new information, trying to bring in new tools, new categories, new sparks to your thinking. That's a useful way to think about these quote-unquote undecidable tasks. So if songwriting is like proof-solving, maybe something like that will work for you. Maybe something where you have these finite attacks.

Like I think there's something here, and what I'm going to try to do, and again, excuse my ignorance on how songwriting works, but what I'm going to try to do is get a basic chart here that I can then put in front of some people I trust, some other musicians I trust, and say, am I on to something? Or I'm going to get a track down here, and we're going to put aside some time to spend a weekend with this artist, and we're going to see if something comes of it, right? So you have these attacks that are finite. You think you have an idea for a song, attack, attack, attack, it's finite.

You can put all your energy into it. You can even take a break when you're done with the attack. I'm going to take a weekend off after this attack, so everything seems tractable. Eventually those castle walls, either they fall or you're pretty convinced, I don't think they're going to fall. Let's go find another castle. All right, so we have somehow mixed in theoretical computer science and medieval fortress-style warfare into the same answer. That is a sign that probably I am starting to go on too long. So Sam, I hope you find that useful. And I also hope, I'm telling you from experience, I hope that the answer is that songwriting

falls into that first category, that's a lot easier. But if it doesn't, don't give up, there's a reason why the age of castles no longer exist. Turns out, if you're pretty smart about it, those walls eventually fall. Marcella asks, is procrastination always bad if it increases the intensity of focus of productivity

for those panic days before a deadline? So I have heard this before. This is obviously a very common productivity, quote-unquote tactic, allow the fear of missing a deadline push you to work harder than you might otherwise work. There's a lot of people who rely on that deadline stress to get things done. So Marcellus is saying, hey, if it works, is it actually perhaps a good strategy? Well, my answer, Marcella, is that no, it is not a good strategy. First of all, those type of deadline-driven pushes to get things done are very stressful.

And I mean that in the complete physiological sense in terms of the cortisol in your body, it's not good for your body, it puts you in a state of inflammation, it brings down your emotional energy, it doesn't feel good, it's not healthy. Stress is not a good drug. And let me be more specific, the autonomic nervous system hormones involved in distress reaction is not a very good drug for getting things done. Second, if you are using procrastination to get things done, that means you're out of control.

And I don't mean that in some sort of figurative sense. I just mean literally you do not have control over what's on your plate, what needs to get done, and what you're going to do with your time and attention. Now, in a lot of different circumstances, if you were rolling down the proverbial hill out of control, you can do it for a while, but you eventually are going to hit a rock and it's not going to be good. nothing in the long run good comes from, let's just wing it, let's wait till we're frenzied,

let stress push us through. You're much better off from an emotional level, from a productivity level, from an effectiveness level. If you have control over your work, if you do something like my capture, configure control style productivity systems, you know what's on your plate, you face a productivity dragon, sometimes it's scary than others, you do the best with what you have, you're intentional about how you work and what you work on it and how you integrate that into other parts of your life and other things that are valuable to you, other parts of the whole deep life spectrum, living that way in the long term is much superior than living in a more frenzied approach. So I do agree with the premise of your question that procrastination does

spur in the short term work getting done, but do not use that as your long term solution to productivity. Roheet asks, I'm currently overwhelmed with academic and extracurricular work in my MBA program. Please advise on how to deal with multiple deadlines and responsibilities. Well, Rohit, the answer here is to cut back. I talked about this in depth in the Habit Tunup mini episode from last Thursday. where I said I had a philosophy that I used to tour the country giving talks about at college campuses,

where I basically was imploring students at various levels of education, including the graduate level, to do less, to not have a lot of extracurricular activities. They keep that very much under control, and they keep their classwork as reasonable as possible. Do not make unusually large or exaggeratedly difficult schedules. This idea that, hey, I had a really hard schedule is going to make me more impressive to the world is not true. This idea that I'm doing tons of extracurriculars

is going to make me more impressive to the job market. It's really not true. They want to know in the NBA, in the context of an NBA program, where did you go to school? How good was it? Did you get good grades? All right, that's about it.

They're not going to pour through your transcript and say, huh, that was an unusually hard schedule that Roheed had. But they're not really going to get into, huh, he did a lot of extracurriculars. He must be really good because he can do a lot of extracurriculars at the same time.

They're not going to look at that. So the solution is to cut back as much as possible. It used to be the slogan of my study hacks website was do less, do better, know why. But the first part of that slogan was do less.

And then do what you do much better. So be fantastic in the courses you take, but don't have a hard load. If you do one extracurricular, do it in a way that's notable, but don't have seven. So if you're doing all of that, Rohit, then you can throw time management into the perspective, into the scene here.

You need to be doing the type of things I talk about for professionals to sort of capture configure control. So everything you need to do gets captured. You configure your tasks so you understand their status and where they are and everything on your plate. Then you control your time at different scales of planning to make sure that you're making the most of what you have. When do I have to start working if I'm going to hit this deadline?

what type of academic responsibilities does this course give me? When should I do the work for this course? Maybe I should do it at the same time every week. Anyways, I've talked about that in depth in the professional context. Go listen to the Habit Tune Up mini episode from Thursday, and I talk more in depth about what this means in the student context, in a particular, I'll leverage this to avoid burning out. But that would be my big picture idea is,

if you're a student, you should not be overloaded. It can be unavoidable in some professional. circumstances now, and that's his whole other problem. But if you're a student, there's no reason for you to be overloaded. Cut back till you're not. No one on the outside will know the difference, but it means you're not only going to be happier, but you're going to be able to do the things that you do better. And quality trumps quantity when you're leaving the academic world and going into the world of work, and so you will be better off if that is your strategy. All right, let's roll with this theme of student questions for just one more query. This one comes from

Zachary. Here's what he asks. Should I drop out from grad school if I don't want an academic career? I'm a PhD candidate in the learning sciences with a background in computer science. I started my PhD in the beginning of the year. My reasoning for going to grad school was that I wanted an applied research career in industry. However, as I have since learned, it does not seem that such a job requires a PhD. There are software engineers in similar positions that do not have PhD degrees.

Should I drop out? Well, Zachary, not knowing any of the other details of your situation, so just based on the limited information I have right there in that paragraph, I would say, yeah, probably you should drop out.

Long-time listeners of this podcast know my theory on graduate school. Graduate school is not a holding pattern. Graduate school is not a time to just expose your yourself to interesting ideas and tools that might be useful at some point in the future. Grad school is not a grab bag where you say, huh, this will probably be interesting opportunities that this opens. I just will have to wait till I'm done with grad school to find out.

That is not how in most circumstances you should use grad school. Grad school should be applied in most circumstances to unlock a specific thing you want to do in your career for which you have clear evidence that getting the degree of the type you're getting at the caliber school you can get it at will unlock that opportunity. I want to do this. I have to get this type of degree to do it. And I have an opportunity to get that degree from a good enough place that it will unlock this thing that I want to do. If you want to be a professor, you need to get a PhD, and it needs to be from a really good school.

If you want to be leading a research and development team at Eli Lilly, developing new drugs, you're going to need a PhD. It's going to have to be from a school with a good biochemical program, etc. So going back to Zachary's case, it sounds like this was a casual decision. A PhD takes a long time to do. If you were doing four to six years of a PhD program, giving up all of that earning, not only earning potential in terms of what you could be making tomorrow, but also how much that salary is going to raise year after year, if you're going to give all that potential, you better know this is the job I want.

There are these research labs, they do this applied work. It's a fantastic job. I think it would be a great fit for me. And there's really no other way to get there except for getting a PhD in this topic from this type of school that I got into. And it does not sound like that's the case. It sounds like you don't actually know a ton

about this particular career field, but there's definitely ways into it that doesn't require the PhD. If that is the case, I would say, trust your instinct, follow my general advice here, and I would leave the PhD world and jump right into that career track

right away. All right, we're picking up some speed here, which I always enjoy. This next question comes from Brett. He says, For your first published book, did you have an agent? Did you contact Random House directly? Well, Brett, I did have an agent. Lori Abkemeyer, who is still my agent?

I signed with her when I was, I don't know if I was 20, or if it was right after I turned 21. At some point I found my original query that I had sent to Lori. And I sent it near the end of my junior spring. So I sent it in like May or early June, and my birthday is in late June. So anyways, I met her when I was 20 and signed right around the time I turned 21. And then she sold my first book, How to Win the College, to Random House later that summer. Brett, that's the way it works for nonfiction.

You do not contact the publishers directly. Here's the way they see it. It's easier to get an agent than it is to sell a book to a publisher. So if you can't do the first step, you're not going to succeed with the second step. Now, I've talked and written about the publishing process before. I would recommend, Brett, that searching my site, I think I had an article called something like the art of nonfiction writing or how to get a nonfiction book deal. I wrote this very early in my writing career after my third book while I was still a grad student.

I think I was like 25 at the time. But I detail here is how you sell a nonfiction book. And one of the first things I say in that article is get the agent first. That's just the way it works. How do you find an agent? Find a similar book to what you have in mind. Go to the acknowledgement sections. In the acknowledgement sections, the author will think their agent.

Now you can pitch that agent and say the reason why I'm reaching out to you is that you published book X. And book X is in the style or a format or whatever, the same genre has the same feel of what I have in mind. So I feel that you understand that type of title. That's usually what I recommend. One other thing I want to mention briefly, Brett, is as you're thinking about book publishing and thinking about do I really need an agent or maybe I can go straight to the publisher, the one thing I think is useful to dispel in your head is this myth of extreme gatekeeping. New writers like to get this story in their head

that there's these gatekeepers who are really a problem. They don't understand originality when they see it. They're stuck in the old ways, and we have to get around gatekeepers because gatekeepers are, that's what's preventing Brett's brilliant idea from being published. So maybe these agents just don't understand, but if you could get around,

the agents maybe write to the publisher, someone will recognize the brilliance of your work for what it is. My main point on this, and what I've observed in the publishing industry, is that everyone is desperate for content. Everyone wants things to buy. These consolidated publishing conglomerates, where all of these smaller publishing houses

have all been sucked up into two or three very large publishers, their business model depends on them having a very thick pipeline of newly published material. Agents are desperate to sign authors, publishers are desperate to get books that they can put into the pipeline. That's how the business model works. So how do they make their decisions on what to represent and then what to buy? well there's usually three things to want to see. One, that you can write at a professional level. There's just a certain level of professionality

that writing has to be at before it can be a published book. You can't have certain levels of amateurness in your prose if a book is going to be published by a serious publisher. So they need to make sure that you can actually write at a professional level. Two, they want to make sure that

there's an idea that is two things. One, clear. And two, has some audience. So the audience thing is a little bit obvious, right? Okay, there's got to be some non-trivial size group out there that is going to be potentially excited about this idea and buy a book about it. The clarity piece, that first piece, is actually the one I think more often people get wrong. And this is where your idea is not sufficiently sharp.

I would say when people are pitching me book ideas, 80% of the time, the issue they have is their idea is not sufficiently sharp. It's a vague idea. I want to write something about this area. You know, I just have a lot of thoughts on, you know, these type of topics, and I think I should write a book in this topic. I'm an academic maybe, and I overlap this area. Maybe I want to write a book about the area, but it's like about what in that area? Or, you know, I had this interesting childhood, and I want to write about my experiences and how it could help you overcome these issues. Well, what specifically is your approach? What is it you learned from your childhood and why was that unique to your childhood? Right? You need that type of specificity.

So yes, there needs to be an audience, but also you need to have a really clear pitch that makes sense. You hear it like, yeah, I get that. I get what you're writing, why it's different, why it might be interesting. And that's where most people have an issue. The third big thing they're looking for before an agent represents a book or a publisher buys a book is, are you the right person to write about that. So just because you feel strongly about something doesn't mean that you are the right person to write about it. I have had, for example, people pitch me books about their frustration with, let's say, the way the education system works today. Or the types of pressures that parents put on their kids and maybe they've discovered, you know, they've discovered through their own life

that, hey, these pressures are kind of bogus and life is more complicated and rich than that. These are all great things, and they're great insights to have. But you're not going to really be able to sell a book on those unless you have some sort of particular expertise on those topics, or you had a unique and compelling experience that makes you well suited to write on those topics. And if you've had neither, it's hard to sell. So those are the three things they're looking for, Brett. Now the good news is, once you know, those are the three things you need. Those are the bars you have to get yourself over to enter the world of professional writing, those aren't so bad. Now, if you don't know those are the bars and you're just flailing around randomly,

or just following your intuition about how you think the publishing world should work, yeah, you're going to trip over them. But if you know those are the three bars you are trying to hurdle, the systematic application of effort to each of those bars should yield success. And I really like to emphasize that. I think the biggest misnomer people have about the publishing industry is that they are incredibly selective on the idea itself. So I think this is this big misnomer that like, no, no, no, the idea, they're really, really picky about the idea. And if it's not like really just right, they're not going to publish the book. And then the problem is people realize it's like, yeah, but these gatekeepers don't understand.

this idea might be more important than they think, and they're just missing it. They're too close-minded. They're not original. It's too narrow group of a people trying to hold down the fortress. There's all these other big ideas and interesting things we could be publishing, but these gatekeepers, they're so picky and so selective and so stuck and whatever their mindset is they're missing this whole world. And so I'm going to go self-publish, or I'm going to do an in-run around elements of the industry. I'll do an in run around the agents, because the agents just don't understand the brilliance of my idea and try to find my way in by using a special. package that's attention-catching and I'll send at the random house and the editor, like, wow, what's this? And that's going to kick off my career. And so I think what's important about those three criteria that I gave you is that they're not particularly picky. Not particularly picky. Again, agents are desperate to sign writers, publishers are desperate to get more content into their pipeline. They just need things that can clear these basic bars. It's not amateurly written. you have a clear idea. Again, it doesn't have to be the best idea.

It doesn't have to be just the right idea. It's clear, oh, here's what this is about, and there's an audience for it, and you have to be the right person to write about it. They'll publish that. No one's trying to stop you from publishing. They want you to be publishable. When an agent reads a query,

they really want that to be someone they can sign. They really hope they read this thing and say, oh, here's someone who can write, and they have an idea that is easy for me to explain to someone, they've thought about it, they've worked through the details. Makes sense they're writing it. Let's go. We'll get a deal.

Well, you accidentally triggered a rant here, Brett, but I think this was a optimistic rant because basically what I'm saying is if you want to publish a book, you can. And there's a lot of people in the industry that want Brett to be successful at publishing a book. So just give them what they need to be able to say yes.

All right, let's do one more work question. Jack asked the following. This is kind of a long question, but it's interesting. He says, I quit my full-time job in March to prepare my application for a master's degree. The job in the field I want to get needs it explicitly in the requirements. Ah, good. So as an aside, Jack has heard my prior rants about when you should and should not go to graduate school. So well done, Jack.

All right, back to his question. I found myself having a lot of work to do and a family to take care of. I took your advice and started to time block capture configure control for a month now, but it doesn't seem to work. I did some post-mortem and found that, one, I am spreading myself too thin to enhance my grad application. Two, I don't have a fixed schedule every day or every week. And three, I'm curious about a lot of things, but I lack solid commitment. I don't have any solution for this.

Please help me out. Well, Jack, my suggestion is to do capture, configure, control. You said you took my advice and tried it, but it didn't work. But what I'm getting from your question is that you didn't do it. And so, yes, if you are not actually doing capture configure control, you can find yourself doing too many activities, not getting to the things that are important but not urgent like your grad application. You can find yourself following a lot of rabbit holes and going down a lot of trails

and feeling very busy and realizing that the things you want to get done aren't getting done, you can find yourself seemingly constantly overwhelmed by non-professional obligations, family-related obligations, and the whole thing is a frenzied mess. Everything you describe is what life is like before you successfully apply, capture, configure, control. So what I'm going to suggest is that we return to that attempt, but we're more careful about it. The system works, this philosophy for productivity works, but it's non-trivial. It's a non-trivial ask

to get a system like this up and running and it might take a few attempts before you finally get a collection of your own tweaks and heuristics and just familiarity with its components that's necessary to really have Capture Configure Control operating in your life but if you do, Jack,

these issues you're talking about will be much, much better. So Capture is a great place to start. Have a notebook with you at all times where you can jot down everything that needs to get done for your family-related things, you might also want a physical collection inbox,

put a stack of index cards in a pencil or a legal pad in a pencil right next to it so you can actually write things down that come up just in your brain and throw them into that box. So you have a notebook in which you're capturing things and a box in which you're capturing things if there's mail you need to deal with,

you put it in the box. If a form comes home from your kid with your kid from school that needs to get filled out, you put it in the box, everything is captured. Then you go to configure. This stuff has to get moved in the permanent systems that allow you to move things around. It allows you to mess with your work and understand your work and see what a status is and what categories is and everything you need to face the productivity dragon.

You can use like a word document for this. You can use a text file for this. I use as you probably know Jack Trello. I have different Trello boards for different roles in my personal and professional lives. I use the columns for the statuses or categories. And then individual things on my plate show up as cards. Details about that task go on the back of the card, files related to that task go on the back of the card.

And now I have a place where I can see everything on my plate for the different roles and I can move things around between the different columns to represent their status. This might be something that I need to elaborate. Like, here is something I need to do, but I don't even know how to get started. So I'm going to put this in a column of things where I need to sit down and just process this obligation and figure out what it means. things where I'm waiting to hear back from someone. Here's things that are on the back burner. I know I need to do this, but it's not urgent. I'm not doing it this week. Here's a list of

things maybe I'm doing this week, etc. Right? So this takes time, but it's going to gain back time 10x. 10x what you put into it's going to come back, right? And I don't mean that precisely. But what I mean by that is you spend a little time here, you're going to get a lot more back in return and get a lot more control, a lot more satisfaction, a lot more things done. It's like the old entrepreneurial adage, you have to spend money to make money. Well, in productivity, you have to invest time to make time to get things done. And then control, actually do the time blocking. Don't time block your personal life. Just time block your work time. Now, you said you quit your job. So what you need to do is say, when are my work

hours during the day when I'm working on my grad application or things that are relevant to my career? And it might not be a lot of hours right now, because maybe your wife is working and you have the kids at home. and so there's only so many hours you can get because someone has to watch them, but you find out when they are. And you time block that time, and you make the most out of it. And then you do weekly planning.

Okay, what am I trying to do this week? Both with household tasks, et cetera, what's going with my family, but with your work, what do I need to do for my grad application? I only have this much time probably available. I'm looking at my week here. Maybe I have a little bit of time on the weekend.

What's the best thing to do big picture with the chunks of time I have this week? You make a weekly plan, and then you have a quarterly plan beyond that. This stuff works, Jack. It's just hard to get right. If you're not investing a non-trivial amount of time each day just towards organizing your day, you're not really doing it.

Your situation is exactly a situation where systematic productivity of the type I talk about, but there's other systems too, where systematic productivity where you're capturing everything, for example, where you're configuring things, where you're controlling your time, it really can make a big difference. And it can make a difference in situations that otherwise seem really overwhelming.

It can't make an overwhelming amount of work go away, but it can make it clear what it is and give you a clear line of attack. It can make sure that the urgent things, you find a way to get it done. If you have to make sacrifices, it lets you be intentional about what to sacrifice. So anyways, I'm doing a bit of tough love here, Jack, because I think you're sort of looking for it and it would be useful for you. And that's why I chose to do that here. Go back to capture, configure, control.

Be a little more disciplined about it, be a little bit more specific, specific about it. If you have to try it three times, you have to try it three times. If you try it four times, you have to try it four times. But when you get that configuration that works, it's going to be night and day. It's going to be night and day. All right. Thanks, Jack. I always appreciate a chance to do just a little bit of tough love. Let's do some technology questions. Joran asks, what's your screen time and most used apps on your phone? And what phone do you use?

Well, Joran, I use an iPhone. I don't know what the model is. I usually describe it as one of the small ones they don't make anymore. In terms of your question about my screen time and the most used apps, I don't know. I don't use the screen time feature. I do not like people collecting my data. I don't trust people with my data, but also it would be boring. I don't use my phone that much.

If I had to guess what the most used apps are on my phone, I mean, I listen to podcast when I'm doing housework, so maybe the podcast listener. I've been using the Spotify app in particular, so that would be up there. Sometimes I listen to books on tape instead. of podcast while I do household chores, so I guess Audible would be up there. I get a fair number of text messages from my family. I'm not very good at answering them.

But, you know, off and on throughout the day, I will send some text messages to my family or my wife will text me something or send me a photo. So I guess I use that some. I mean, that's about it. I mean, I'm trying to think here. If I'm traveling, I'll use the map. I do use the map, but, you know, I haven't been traveling a lot recently. And what else is there? Baseball, the MLB app, but the season's over. So that would get some more use, I suppose, during the season, because I like to check in.

I want to check in on the scores, or if I want to listen to the game, the audio over the app instead of over my radio, that might get some more app in the season. But that's about it. In other words, Jordan, what I'm trying to say is things like screen time, tools like screen time, can help be a reality check.

Oh, wow, I'm using my phone a lot. and here's how I'm using it. And that can be a useful data point. But the goal is to get to the place where you don't need that data point because it's not interesting. You get to the point where your phone is deployed for specific intentional purposes, and that's it. It is not a default activity. It is not a way of numbing yourself. It's not a general purpose distraction from all boredom in life.

It is a tool like a screwdriver or a hammer that does a great job when you have a screw that needs to be turned or nail that needs to get knocked in, but otherwise it's not something that plays a big role in your life. So that's what I would recommend, Joram, is get to the point where even if you have screen time turned on, it has nothing interesting to tell you. Sunday Smoker asks, the smoking cannabis improve or hurt your ability to do deep work. Well, Sunday Smoker, I'm not an expert on cannabis, but based on just my lay knowledge, I would say I'm assuming in the moment it would hurt. And if you are actually trying to do deep work concurrently with sort of any mind-altering chemical ingestion is probably not the best idea.

Does it have a long-term effect? Does as your name implies, smoking cannabis on Sunday? Is that going to eventually start to affect your deep work ability on Mondays? I don't know. I mean, I assume probably not, but again, I'm not an expert. I would assume that the right way to think about cannabis with respect to deep work is like you would think about alcohol. You don't want to be taking shots while you're trying to write your book. I mean, unless you are Hemingway, that's probably going to reduce your ability to actually concentrate or do good work. But being out on the bar Friday night might not have a big effect on your ability to concentrate Monday morning.

So that's my best guess. I want to take a moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible. And I am talking about Blinkist. You have heard me talking about Blinkist quite a bit recently, and it's because I am both a user and a fan. It is like a cheat code to rapid intellectual development. Here's the idea with Blinkist. they have summaries of popular nonfiction books.

They are condensed down to what are called blinks. And these blinks can be quickly condensed and give you the key ideas of that book. I have read the blinks for my books that are up there on the service and they are very well done. Not surprisingly, Blinkist has over 12 million users. They have thousands of books condensed into their blinks. You can use it on your phone.

You can use it on your web browser. You can use it on your tablet. I use Blinkist as a way of quickly coming into a subject area that I need increased expertise on. My strategy is usually to say, what are five or six books that all orbit this general topic area that I'm trying to learn more about? I will then read the blinks of those five or six books. Now this alone gives me the vocabulary, the key ideas, the key theories that I need to know just to even converse intelligently about that area, to even know who else to talk to, to even know where else to look, what other types of books, what other types of resources? So that alone is invaluable.

But then what I do is I use those blink consumptions to figure out, okay, in those five or six books, what's the one or two that seems like it's going to really move the needle on my understanding here? And then I buy those books. So it's a way of taking a literature, a bunch of books surrounding a topic, getting very familiar with it, understanding the lay of the land, and then figuring out where you're going to go particularly deep. Right.

So it's a strategic strike on intellectual endeavor. So Blinkist is great. I mean, let's look right now. I'm looking right now at what is popular in their technology and future section. and I see books like tools and weapons to promise and peril of the digital age. I see the robots are coming.

I see the reality game. I see James Bridal's new book, The New Dark Age. In one afternoon, and I'm talking about like a two hours next Thursday or something like this, you could have the main ideas of all four of those books and probably have at least one of them coming now for you to read more deeply.

And when you read that book, you'll have this huge context of, oh, I saw the main ideas from all these related books, and so you're going to be able to read that book with confidence. I'm just saying Blinkist is one of the cheat codes that people who do a lot of thinking in writing use, and I recommend

it for you. So the details are that with Blinkist, you're going to get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books. It's all the books you want for one low price. Right now, for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to blinkist.com slash deep.

Try it free for seven days and save 20 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial. You'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkist.com slash deep. I also want to mention Magic Spoon. You have heard me recently raving about Magic Spoon,

and I'll tell you why it's hard times there's a lot going on in the world there's a lot going on on our plate and sometimes you need just a moment of escape and you can get that escape by what you put in your bowl and what you put in your bowl should be magic spoon which is, and there's no other way to describe this,

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11 grams of protein, and only three net grams of carbs in each serving. There are four different flavors. Each of these should peak your childhood nostalgia, cocoa, fruity, frosted, and blueberry. Look, it tastes good. It tastes really good. And it is not the junk that used to be in those cereals we ate as a kid.

Sometimes you have to just sigh loudly and eat a bowl of, cocoa-flavored cereal because that is where we are, ladies and gentlemen. This cereal is keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carb, and GMO-free. If you go to magic spoon.com slash cow, you can grab a variety pack and try it today. Be sure to use this promo code Cal at checkout to get free shipping. So MagicSpoon is so confident about their product that they have this thing called the 100%

happiness guarantee. If you don't like the cereal for any reason, maybe your heart is darkened or you have lost all spark of childhood joy from your life. In that case, they will refund your money, no questions asked. So that's magic spoon.com slash cow. Use to code Cal for free shipping. Paul asks, have you heard of others who have faced resistance from their spouses to their efforts to dump social media. In Paul's elaboration, he noted that he was struck by how his wife fought back when he began to eliminate social media from his life. He says that she claimed, I was leaving the duty of social connection entirely on her because

of my refusal to, quote, just go on Facebook, end quote. Well, Paul, this does come up a lot. In fact, I was given a talk at an event even earlier this week, two days before I was recording this, and this same question, in essence, was asked. I hear it a lot. It's touchy territory. It's touchy territory. In general, if you are in a romantic or family partnership and someone in that pair is making major changes to their life, style, it can be tricky. This certainly happens with health and fitness. You know, suddenly you start to get careful about your diet or you start to exercise and now your husband is thinking, hmm, I don't know about this.

You know, like what is to say about me? You're no fun anymore. We definitely hear this a lot about alcohol consumption. This might be more with friends than with, let's say, your spouse or partner, but this happens a lot where when people cut back on drinking. The friends don't like it. And they give them a lot of pressure. What are you doing?

Come on, you got to drink. You got to drink. And in these cases, what's going on is that the other parties are feeling implicitly accused. If you are making these changes, that means this behavior must be bad. I am not making changes. This must mean that I am doing bad behavior. That is a very tricky psychology, and you do have to be careful about it. Fortunately, if you're trying to do this with social media, you can look to what we've learned

about people struggling with this for health and fitness. We can look at what we've learned from people who struggle with this with cutting back on things like alcohol. And we can learn from the lessons of those who came before us. And we know one, compassion is important. You certainly do not want to be judgmental. You certainly don't want to be haughty.

You certainly don't want to make it seem like you are now better than because you are experimenting with these particular. changes. You know, you're focusing on you and something that was not working for you and you're trying to adjust your life. You do not want to make it come off like you are making an accusation about someone else. So that's important. Two, you cannot push your change on another person. It just doesn't work. You can't force someone to eat healthier. You can't force someone to stop drinking. You can't force someone to be more careful about their finances. We

instinctually get resistance to that. We'll come up with reasons for why we shouldn't do it or why it's not necessary. We'll come up with things like your spouse did about, well, if you're not on Facebook, I'm going to have to do more work on Facebook. There's got to be something in there. You've got to translate that sense of accusation into a grievment in the frustration. It's not going to go well. So you cannot be pushing these changes on people. You just have to make the changes in your own life you think are important. Do what you can to make your life? Do you think you're important? do what you can to make your life better. Allow your example to radiate.

Now here's the thing. Let's say that someone you live with or your friends, they might be interested at some point. They see that your life looks a lot better because you're not on your phone all the time. You're more present. You're more calm. You're getting more things done.

You're reading more. Your life seems better. Now you're in kind of a tough spot because especially if you were some friction about when you initially made these changes, pride will prevent them from coming to and saying, how did you do this? I want to do this too. How did you do this? Pride might make that impossible. So what you can do here, what is effective here, is that when it does come up, you mention the other people you read or studied who impress you. You don't say, yeah, here's what I'm doing

and it's great because your spouse might say, look, I just, I can't swallow my pride and have you tell me how to do this. But if you say, I've been really inspired by Cal Newport. I am, you know, I'm a third party here. I'm a neutral observer. I don't know you. Your spouse doesn't know me. There's no emotion in the game. And so they might go and read my books or listen to my podcast, because that's a third party person that they have no emotional investment in. There's no prior history there. Or at least I hope not, Paul. I mean, I don't know who your spouse is. But for most people, there's not going to be any history there. And so that's someone they can go and actually learn from and get some information from. So you're going to have a hard time teaching someone else

who you live with how to do these things because they're not going to want to hear it from you, especially if there was friction early on. So I think those are three pretty timeless lessons that work for these type of general transformations in cohabitation scenarios. And just to summarize them real quickly, do it with compassion. You're focused on your yourself, you're not focused on other people. Doesn't make you better than other people. Everyone has their own thing going on. Two, do not try to push your change on anyone. People will make changes when they're ready for changes. And three, when your spouse or your partner or your friends start to show a little bit of interest, point them towards the people that inspired you, they will

listen to a third party. They probably won't listen to you. All right. So good luck, Paul. I know that's not easy. All right, let's do one more technology question. John asks, given the pandemic, do you think that the delivery of education needs to be rethought? Can virtual learning be made to work? That's a good question, John. I think early in the pandemic, there was this idea that, huh, maybe people are going to be

exposed to virtual learning in a way they might not have otherwise. they will learn that it is a viable alternative and all of education will be revolutionized. We'll realize why do we need to go to buildings in the first place? There's so much overhead. This is so expensive. We could just do this online. I think this is a tendency we have.

Whenever there is a disruption, we tend to, and I'm paraphrasing, I heard this somewhere else, but I don't remember where. This might have been Scott Galloway who said this, but I'm not 100% sure. but we have a tendency to underestimate the difficulty of big transformation and how we do things and what's really required to spark that, and we tend to overestimate how resistant to change entrenched parts of our culture really are.

Now, applying this idea to education, I think now that we are much farther into this pandemic, not only is it not going to spark an overnight transformation of how learning happens, I think it is going to help people feel even more fondly and be more excited about the quote-unquote old-fashioned ways in which we learn. Very few people are having a good experience with virtual learning right now. For young kids, it's a disaster. college kids can manage it better, but they're starting to struggle. They're starting the struggle.

There's only so much time they can spend staring at a screen. It feels really disconnected. It makes them depressed. A couple months? Sure. You want to do this for a year? It's hard, right? So no one is coming away from this experience right now saying, that's great.

That's great. Now, the exception might be the actual professors and the teachers, because it is easier not to have to commute to school. It's easier not to have to actually be in front of a classroom. But the actual students themselves, I think, are not enjoying this. I do not necessarily see a big shift towards revolutionizing education. Because here's the thing. Obviously, the need to have to do education this way is a short, live thing.

We have had many pandemics. There's a 1918 flu. the 1957 flu, there's the 1968 flu, there's this, the coronavirus pandemic we're going on, going through now. We go back to prior centuries. We obviously had a lot more. They come. They take 12 to 16 months. When you're in the middle of it, you say this will never go away. This is the worst it's ever been. There will never be a time when things go back to normal. And then after 12 to 16 months, it becomes endemic, and it does. It's a good article in the New Yorker a few months ago that was looking at the presidential

election that happened to right after the Spanish flu died down after it had done its 18-month cycle. It's like right after, like World War I had happened and the Spanish flu had happened, and there was an election right after that, and we were desperately and rapidly as possible going back to normalcy. We had the roaring 20s for the next 10 years. We're just like, not only we would go back to normal, we're going to party. But that election that was happening right after these two terrible calamities was 100% we're back to, we got back to normal.

Let's go. That's what we wanted. So anyways, what I'm trying to say there is that this moment in which we're going to be forced to do virtual education, you're in the middle of it. You're like, things will never change. Of course, they'll change. 12 to 16 months will be back to the way things were. So the question was, in this period of 12 to 16 months, will we spark some sort of lasting change. And again, I think not because people don't like it. There's a lot of promise in

virtual education, but if you're forced to do it without any preparation, you're not going to do it that well, and you're going to put a bad taste in people's mouth. So actually, though there's been some technological advancement spurred by this push into forced virtual education, I think it may have caused more harm than good for those who want to see this type of innovation. John, the other thing I will say is that education is surprisingly resistant to innovation, and I think we should take that seriously. I often hear from ed tech types, this same line, where they'll say, look at this. We could look at a school in the 21st century, and we can look at, you know, an old university from the late medieval period, and it looks the same. There's like 20 to 50 people

in a room and someone at the front of the room and they're talking to them. Isn't that crazy we haven't innovated? And their conclusion will be like, so obviously, this should be really different soon. We should really innovate, but I think we should also take seriously, huh, why have we not? There must be something pretty fundamental about the basic way we teach, the basics of tractable crowd sizes doing analog in-person engagement with a single well-educated on the topic instructor. There's something about that. We've been doing it since Plato and Socrates in the Grove, there's something about that that seems to work.

And so instead of looking at the durability of that model and be like, wow, we've been really dumb up to now, but now that we have Prometheus boards, we're going to really make the change, right? Like everyone else has been dumb. They haven't been able to innovate this basic model, but, you know, we're going to use Chromebooks now, and now everything will change.

There's a little bit of hubris in that. I think we should take seriously the fact that there has been a lot of stability in the traditional modes of education, that probably means there's something there. And we don't know quite what it is, but there's something there that works. And alternatives don't. As the 65% of schools

who are still not open right now in the United States at the primary and secondary level, as their students are learning, it just doesn't quite work when you don't have that. So, John, I've gone in a few different directions from what was otherwise a really simple question. So let me just give you the really simple answer again in summary. though it feels interminable, the pandemic will not be long enough to force long-term changes to how we do education.

Two, most people are not having a really good experience with the online learning they're doing right now. So the pandemic is probably not going to usher in a big cultural change to how we think about online learning in such a way that makes us much more positive about it. And we get this consumer demand for more of it, if anything, it's actually going to perhaps impede the progress of that movement for a little while until we kind of shake off, we kind of shake off our zoom fatigue in the period ahead. And three, and I made this more general point that the durability of certain modes of educational instruction is not necessarily an indication of our lack of innovative thinking and the ripeness for major change, it might instead be an indication of something fundamentally hard to

replicate and valuable in those modes, and we should take that seriously. All right, John, thanks for that question. Let's shift now to some questions about the deep life. Jorgon asks, how would you structure your time if you had the possibility to do deep work almost exclusively. Well, Jorgon, I have had this daydream a lot, so I can tell you very specifically what my dream schedule would be. I would, you know, after breakfast with the family,

I would do a deep work until 1 or 2 p.m. Then I would have a very brief administrative, professional administrative section. And on every other day, it might just be 20 minutes long. And in this daydream, I would probably have some sort of chief of staff-style assistant.

So it would be talking to them on the phone. What do I need to know? Do you need some decisions? And maybe every other day, there would be a longer thing that has to happen. A meeting or a longer phone call or some non-trivial administrative wrangling. You have to sit down with your web team

for some project and go over some design. So working until one to two, depth unbroken, before anything else happens in the day, three days a week, then like 30 minutes later, you're done with work. Two days a week, maybe you have an hour, maybe 90 minutes. Either way, by the time you're at three to four, completely done with work, hard shut down,

family time, personal time, community time, projects, building things, household things, adventures with my kids. I don't know. I'd probably get hobbies at that point. And I really love this idea that on some days of the week, it's like deep work till two. And there's like a little sliver of shutdown work in like 2.30 you're done. And weekends would be completely free. So, anyways, that's in my daydream, Jorgon would be.

So let me count that up, like nine to ten. Five to six hours of deep work every day. Minimal shallow work. Lots of non-professional time. I mean, at least right now I would say that is what I am craving. And so now I just have to. figure out, okay, how does one make that happen? And I'm discovering, unfortunately, the answer is probably become a successful fiction writer. So successful fiction writers are the only people I know

who actually run a schedule like that. They're the only people I know who really believe if they have too much to do that it's going to make their primary work not function. They're superstitious in this way. Fiction writers really are the only people I know who really do get away with. I work really deeply and aesthetically really interesting places, and that's all I do is write books. And I don't want to do anything else because it'll get in the way of writing books. They have it right.

I think I went into the wrong genre of writing. I wonder if it's too late to start pinning techno-thrillers. Valera asks, how do you stay, or how can I stay motivated and focused as a university student when all classes are online and there's a lack of outside stimuli? So Valeria, there's some advice I have been giving to college students recently because there is a problem I have been observing more consistently, and it might be the problem that you are facing as well right now.

I think for a lot of college students, if and when their school went online, the instinct was, okay, this is somewhat temporary. So I am basically going to be living my same life I was doing in college, but now mediated through the computer. or I'm going to go to my classes, and I'm going to interact with my friends over social media or through text message. It was just taking what they were doing on campus, and so I guess we're going to do this digitally now. The issue is, if your university is still closed, it's now been a while that you have had what was a vibrant and energetic analog life

completely executing into digital. And that doesn't work. It just doesn't work. It is not, it is an impoverished simulacrum of what real world analog life is, and I think what's happening is that students are starting to get depressed. So my suggestion, the answer I've been giving to people is that if you're a college student and your university is still closed, you actually now have to create from scratch where you are in the world, where you happen to be living, whatever town or city you're in as you're doing this remote learning, you have to temporarily create from scratch,

an alternative vibrant analog life that is going to give you those fulfilling psychological nutriments that you used to get on campus and you're not getting right now. You might be suffering from a deprivation. You're not getting enough contact with people. You're not enough adventure.

You're not getting enough challenge. You're not getting enough exposure even just to the fresh air and sunlight. Community. all these type of things, you're not getting these nutriments because you don't get them online. Again, that's impoverous. And now you're starting to get a deprivation syndrome. And it's going to lead you being unhappy.

It's going to lead to some mild depression. So instead of just waiting for when can I go back to campus and get those things again, you need to get them in your life right now. Just like the sailors who are starting to feel the scurvy coming on need some lime juice right now. This is what I think is happening with a lot of online-only college kids. All right? So basically what you have to do is wherever you live, you have to look around and say, great, let me understand the obvious things.

What are the COVID restrictions that are in place? What are the best practices? What are my risk tolerances? Let me put those parameters into my model and then figure out, given those parameters, what is the most fulfilling, satisfying analog life I can build right now. And Valera, for a lot of people like you, who are young and our students, it's not like you are in a situation

where if you leave the house, you are putting you and people you know into some sort of massive risk. You have a little bit of flexibility here. So as I always say, of course, you don't want to go down to the underground rave being held down by the docks, but you don't need me to tell you that.

Figure out what you can do that you're comfortable with, but that you intentionally are putting it into your life to get back those things you're missing from campus. I think a lot of students just don't realize the degree to which they miss those things. So you need to spend more time with people. You just got to keep enough distance and keep it outside.

You can make the actual infection risk zero or effectively zero. But it takes effort to set those things up, to be around people, to spend time with people on a regular occasion. You need to shake up where you do work. Do it outside. I've talked about this before on the podcast. Do it in the woods. Bring a notebook with you. Do it at cafes or coffee shops.

shake things up. You need new locations. You need to be surrounded by people. You need to be surrounded by nature. Focus a lot on your high quality leisure. You probably need to inject new activities and hobbies and pursuits into your life right now. You need that challenge. You need things that you can do where maybe you can talk to other people about them. You know, if you're bike riding, you can get with a bike riding club. If you're trying to learn how to knit, you can find other kniters and learn from them. You can make a fire pit in your parents patio in their backyard. and other kniters can come over. You guys have young eyes. You can still knit by firelight. I couldn't do that, but you probably could. Whatever. You don't need too many suggestions from you. But what I'm saying is you need to make an effort

to put into your life right now the things you are missing because your college experience is digital. And then once you go back to your college experience, so a college will take care of that again for you once you're back on a dorm and living in campus and not as locked down. But don't underestimate right now how important these things are that you're missing.

It's been long enough that you have to get some lime juice. You've been away from shore too long. You are starting to get some psychological scurvy. So that's my suggestion, Valera. Avoid the underground rave down by the docks. Be safe, be smart, but be intentional and be aggressive about building a life right now where you happen to be in the world that is exciting and satisfying and connected. And I think you will be surprised by how much better that will make you feel.

All right, let's do one more question on the deep life. This one comes from Matt. He asks, how do your philosophies regarding the deep life compare and contrast to those of the fire community? For those who are not familiar, fire is an acronym for financial independence, retire early. Now, this is a really interesting movement

that I've been following for a long time that emerged online, though they also have quite a few in-person meetups. I write about the fire movement in my book, Digital Minimalism. In that book, I profile two well-known members of that movement, Liz Thames, from the Frugal Woods blog and Pete Adney,

otherwise known as Mr. Money Mustache, who's one of the real leaders of the movement, of the movement, he was actually profiled in the New Yorker a couple years ago. And so I profiled both of them in my book. Pete actually gave a blurb for the book. So you'll see a quote from Pete on the back of the book. So I know a lot about the fire community. I'm inspired by them and very interested in them. So before we answer Matt's question about the intersection of the deep life and this community, we should briefly say what they are all about. And my appellate, to those in the community for I might butcher this a little bit.

But the goal of that community is reaching a state of financial independence, or what they call FI, early in your life. And by financial independence, they typically mean you have enough passive income coming, primarily from, let's say, investment returns, but also maybe from real estate. You have enough passive income coming to cover your expenses, to cover how much it cost for you to live. Therefore, you don't have to work a particular job or for a particular amount of time to pay the bills

or to put food on the table. So any work you do is by choice. And so that's the RE or retire early part of the fire acronym. It doesn't necessarily mean that you do no work, but that you are doing work completely on your own terms because you do not need the money to support. yourself or your family. So you do the type of work you want to do on the schedule and on the terms that most resonate. So that's a very, I think, compelling idea. Now, what made them really

popular is that they hacked the process of doing this. Most people have this idea that if you want to be financially independent, you either have to be rich. So have a ton of resources. Maybe you inherit them or maybe you just, you sell a business or have some other type of win. And or you have to save your whole life. So maybe when you're 70 and you officially retire, you've been saving since you're 20, you finally have enough for those final 15 to 20 years. You finally have enough money that you can live off that for the remaining years of your life. The fire community says, how can we hack this?

How can we become financially independent by, let's say, 35, and without having to have a windfall and without having to inherit money? And basically, they figured out frugality was the way. way to get there. And again, go to Mr. Money Mustache's blog, and he has a very famous post called the surprisingly simple math of early retirement. Go read that. But basically the idea is, if you're making good money, but you learn how to live pretty cheap, you end up saving most of the money you make. So now you're saving faster. But because you're living really cheap, the amount of money you have to save to cover your lifestyle is drastically smaller.

So just to use really simple math, let's say you make $100,000 a year. Now, if you live on $90,000 a year, that's how much it takes for you to live comfortably. And so you save the surplus, you save the extra $10,000 a year. It's going to take you a long time to save enough money that you don't have to work. So to save enough money that the returns will cover your $90,000 a year expenses,

you would have to save somewhere between, I don't know, two to two and a half million dollars. But if you're only putting aside $10,000 a year, it's going to take you a long time to save $2 or $2.5 million. In fact, it's not going to happen. It's probably not going to happen in the scope of your working life. Now, you take that same person, and through frugality, they manage to get their expenses down to $20,000 a year.

Well, now they're saving. $80,000 a year. They only need $500,000 a year roughly to be able to support their $20,000 a year expenses, and they're saving $80,000 a year. So they're going to get there in, what would that be, somewhere between five to six years? Right. So, I don't know, anyways, those are rough numbers, whatever. The point is, these are interesting people. So how do they intersect with Deep Life? well, we should start by talking about why I wrote about them in digital minimalism. I wrote about Liz and I wrote about Pete because they seem to have really embraced the flexibility given to them by financial independence.

These were people who are obviously very intentional. They're obviously very intentional because this is not an easy thing to do to save enough money to retire in your 30s like they both did. they're also both very disciplined because it's very hard. You know, you have to live in very specific ways to be able to save enough money quickly. And three, they had a lot of free time because they're financially independent. So I said, well, we can study. What are these disciplined, intentional people who have a lot of free time and have the energy of being in their 30s?

What do they do with their time? We can learn from that about what might be important in a deep life. And what I talked about in digital minimalism is that they do a lot of high quality. leisure activities. And in Pete and Liz's case, those activities are largely outside. They spend a lot of time outside. They spend a lot of time building things or in Liz's case. They live on 60 acres in Vermont clearing trails.

They set up a maple syrup tapping system where you put the taps in their maple trees and you have the plastic tubing that carries the sap to a collection point. And then they have a sap evaporator. They also have an apple press. They make their own apple cider. They can food. Pete likes to build things. I talked about that in the book.

He bought a building in downtown Longmont, Colorado, where he lives. He bought it for cheap because it was broken down. He fixed it up really nice because he likes doing that. He likes renovating things. He likes repairing drywall. And he learned how to weld. I talked about that in the book so he could do custom welding projects. So he's out there building things with his hands.

So I thought that was interesting. Here are people who are very disciplined and very intentional, who are suddenly given a lot of free time, what do they do, high quality leisure, pretty manual, off and outside. And I think there's a lesson in that for the deep life is that

that's something that we must crave. And if we don't have a lot of that in our life, that's kind of a problem, we're probably not going to end up financially independent anytime soon, but there are probably things we can do in the near future to have more of that Pete or Liz style, high-quality, outdoor analog manual leisure in our life. So I think that was an interesting data point.

But Matt, the other thing I would mention about the fire community is that a lot of people in that community who look up to Pete and look up to Liz are not Pete and are not Liz. A common problem in that community, which I think we can generalize from to life in general, is that they put all of their energy into reaching FI and then once they get there,

and they don't know what to do with themselves. There's a very common complaint in the fire community, the difficulty of actually building a meaningful, satisfying, productive life when you no longer have to work. And I think we can generalize from that because what it tells us is that the deep life is really important. So to understand what's important in your life and to focus on things that really matter and to avoid things that don't is really important, but it's also not obvious. It requires effort. And if like the frustrated fire practitioner, you put all your energy on how do I get to this place? How do I make this money? How do I get this freedom?

And not on what you want to do with that freedom. When you get there, you're not happier. It takes a lot of work. It takes experimentation and it takes reflection. It takes a lot of both to figure out what you're all about, what you really get rewards from, and what you could do without in your life. I think that's a great lesson from the fire community. We can use them as this interesting living, natural experiment,

and they teach us that the deep life can be incredibly rewarding, that the deep life should have a lot of high-quality leisure in it, preferably outside, probably manual. We underestimate the importance of the analog, but man, it's not just going to fall into your lap. If I give you the next week off, and you haven't really thought about what you want to do, you probably won't do something worthwhile.

And so right now we all need to be doing these exercises. We all need to be doing the reflection. We all need to be doing the experimentation. What matters? What do I want to spend my time on? What are the big win activities in these buckets? And let me focus on those and not dissipate my energy for all the other distractions. For the just lounging around and numbing myself with a screen.

For the excessive drinking. For the workaholism. Because it's like, I don't know, I get some. pleasure out of like pleasing these people at work, but I don't even know why. Really figure out the questions, the answers to those big questions. And one of the big things can learn from the fire community, it's not obvious, but when you get the answer right, the rewards are rich. All right.

So that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want a chance to submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Thank you to our sponsors, Blinkist and Magic Spoon. We will be back on Thursday with the next Habit Tuneup mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.