Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 43: Unproductive Days, Content Fatigue, and Cultivating Character | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about dealing with unproductive days, avoiding curated content fatigue, and the importance of developing character, 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:OPENING: The terribleness of my recent experiment with constant online news consumption.WORK QUESTIONS* Dealing with unproductive days [11:50] * My system versus David Allen’s systems [15:16] * The timeline for developing deep habits [22:35]* Assessing your own career capital [31:17] * The road to academic superstardom [36:05] * Ideal number of working hours [45:28] * Building a reasonable schedule for an unreasonable workload [51:32]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* Avoiding curated content fatigue [53:41]* Capture technology [58:22]* The plan for this podcast [1:00:19]* Music and concentration [1:07:01]* Instant messaging and distraction [1:08:02] DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Essentialism versus the deep life [1:13:48] * Deep home life [1:16:57] * My ideal work environment [1:23:37]* Character and the deep life [1:27:58] 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'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I'm recording this episode on Friday, November 6th, and I have been doing something in the past few days that I don't normally do. I am checking online news because I'm interested in the 11th. election results. And this is information that is coming out here in the U.S. intermittently. So it is taking a sense of intermittent reinforcement and supercharging it. Every time you click or refresh a website or a feed, most of the time there's nothing there. Sometimes there's something there that is interesting. And sometimes there's really big news. And here's my assessment of this small multi-day experiment

with constant intermittently reinforced internet checking throughout my workday? It's terrible. I hate it. I have a sense of distraction that comes from all of the cognitive network shift and I can't easily maintain a good sense of focus. It takes a lot more work than it normally does for me.

Also, my nervous system feels exhausted, as if I've overloaded my autonomic nervous system with these, the surprise, the drama, the intermittent nature. It just leaves me feeling strung out. It leaves me feeling distracted. And I look forward to stopping doing this very soon. But here's the bigger point that this brings to mind. This is what every day is like for a lot of users of technology. See, I can, I can understand the severity. of the impact of this behavior because I can contrast it to just a few days ago in which I was in my normal life in which I do not check news online.

I'm time blocked, breaks are scheduled, and I do not entertain myself for the most part with the internet. So I have this transition. It's a natural experiment. Here's what it's like without this behavior. Let's switch over and see what it's like with this behavior. Better A, better B. better A, better B. And so I can see the magnitude of the terribleness of this type of behavior.

My concern is that for most people who, let's say, approach their work day with the LIS Reactive method where it's just I have my Zoom calls on my calendar, I have my inbox, I kind of try to just make things happen. I think for most people who approach their work that way, this might be a state of normalcy. I think for most people who have just casually signed up with and use various social media services and other attention economy apps just because why not or it's interesting or there's perhaps some small value to get out of it that just find themselves outside of work with their phone as an extension. Let me just check what's here. Let me look at it. And I just want to say,

speaking from a outsider perspective, if that is you like most people, you might not understand, you might not recognize the degree to which this behavior is making you unhappy, the degree to which is making you emotionally and physiologically strung out, the degree to which is taking your cognitive capacity and significantly impeding it. I mean, if I said, I have a pill to sell you, that's going to make you dumber, going to make you tired, and going to make you unhappy. You're not going to buy a lot of those pills. And what if I said, well, well, here's how it works. We also are going to take all of your data and monetize you at the same time. It's not a really great pitch, but I think that's what a lot of people are doing.

So anyways, that's been my observation of the last few days, my experiment with what's it like to actually just give yourself over to the intermittently reinforced innervating distractions of the attention economy. And I do not like what I experienced. I look forward to getting back to my more monastic approach to my attention. Well, there's two things I want to talk about real quick before we get in today's episodes. We have a lot of good questions. First, I would be remiss if I did not mention that on November 10th, that's this week that you're listening to this, my time block planner will be released. It will be available wherever you buy books. I just launched a really nice website, timeblockplanner.com. It explains the system. It shows you

how it works. It has a really nice video. So I went and had a really nice video produced, inspired by what writer Carol did for his bullet journal method. A very nice video produced. It's me explaining time block planning, showing me using the planner. So it's a great way to sort of understand how the planner works and how the philosophy works. The reason why I put up a dedicated website

is that I wanted to make it easy for people who maybe don't know me but have just heard the concept. They heard people talk about time blocking or they see you're holding this nice looking blue planner and they want to know what it is. I want to make it very easy for them to find out more. So I figure let's just have a standalone website,

timeblockplanner.com. I am doing next week, at the end of next week, a live event, the Time Block Academy. We are going to geek out on the nitty-gritty details of sophisticated time management with time blocking at its core. It's going to be a live event, but there will also be recordings available

for those who can't make it due to scheduling conflicts or time zones. to attend the event, you have to pre-order the planner. If you have already pre-ordered the planner but have not gotten access to the event or if you plan on ordering the planner soon, just go to my blog, caldeport.com slash blog. I wrote an article about this a few weeks ago, and it has the instructions for what you do.

There's basically just an email address at my publisher. You send them your receipt. They process it and they send you what you need to know to access the event. I think that'll be fun. I mean, we talk about time block. planning a lot on this show, but we cover a lot of different topics and we only have about an hour and a half, so we don't really get to go super deep into the productivity weeds always on the podcast. So I'm definitely looking forward to this event. I'm looking forward to everyone

getting their time block planners this week. I've been using mine for a couple months now. Very exciting. The final thing I want to do before we get to the questions is thank some of the sponsors that make this podcast possible. In particular, I want to talk about Optimize. You have heard me talk about Optimize several times on this podcast. The online media company run by the monastic philosopher CEO and my good friend Brian Johnson Optimize is a subscription service where you get these detailed philosopher notes summaries of some of the best self-development advice.

books ever written. You get access to the plus ones. You get access to the masterclass, including my masterclass on digital minimalism 101. But the thing I wanted to mention today is another program that Optimize Run, and that is Optimize Coach. Now Optimize Coach is a 300-day program. It's intensive. It is a program in which you are trained in how to completely transform your life using the type of timeless principles talked about on Brian Johnson's optimized, a combination of both the cutting edge science with ancient wisdom. Last year, a thousand people went through, roughly speaking, a thousand people went through this program.

I was one of the guest faculty members. It's a fantastic program. They're certified after they do this to actually teach this method to other people. but they also come out of the coaches come out of this program much optimized in terms of how they live. Anyway, it's an exciting program. If you want to find out more about it, Brian wrote a letter.

It's real candid. You posted it online that says, this is who this is for and here is who it is not for. So I would suggest reading that letter. If you're interested in a sort of hardcore boot camp in transforming your life into something deeper and maybe being certified to teach other people to do the same thing, read this letter,

www. Optimize. dot me slash coach dash letter. That's Optimize. Me slash coach dash letter. It's a fantastic program.

It starts. The next class starts January 1st, so you have a little bit of time left to sign up. Check it out. I also want to take a moment to talk about Grammarly, a longtime sponsor of the deep questions podcast and for good reason.

As you have heard me said, the ability to express yourself in a clear and compelling manner is crucial to essentially any endeavor. Not just professional endeavors, but even just forming your mind. The clearer you express yourself in writing, the clearer you actually structure and organize your mind. I think clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand.

It's why in my book, minimalism. I had a whole section talking about how historical figures of some note would write letters to themselves to organize their thoughts. Why would they do this? Because if you can write and express yourself clearly, you can organize thoughts. So if you get ahead in your career, stand out, and clarify your own thinking in a complicated time if you can write well. Grammarly premium. So their top-of-the-line product brings you this ability. It does not just correct grammar mistakes. You have the wrong possessive.

There's a punctuation issues. It can give you clarity suggestions and vocabulary suggestions. I do not know how the technology works, but it's eerily good. Hey, here's a clearer way of saying this. Here's a better word to use here. It's like having a machine learning-driven tutor for deeper, more careful thinking. And you get the bonus of everyone's going to be impressed by how clear you express yourself.

I love these type of products, the type of products that actually make your work better. It can actually make you better as a person. That is the way I think about Grammarly Premium. Look, you can access this thing wherever you write digitally. To work on your phone, can work on your tablet, can look on your computer. I recommend that you check it out. And if you're interested in checking it out, you can get 20% off. grammerly premium by signing up at grammarly.com slash deep.

That's 20% off grammarly premium at grammarly.com slash deep. G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash deep. My only caveat there is access that on your computer, not your phone. The browser on the phone for whatever reason does not play nicely with the offer code page. All right. So thanks to those sponsors. started, as always, with some work questions. Ollie asks, how do you deal with bad days?

Bad days are the days when you know, you just know you can't follow your schedule or get things done for various reasons, such as you might be sick or just tired, or Ollie, I would add, maybe there are national events that are quite distracting that are transpiring. Well, the first thing I would do, Ollie, is I wouldn't call those days bad. I think the issue here is productive. I think you're thinking of the word productive as a lot of people do as being synonymous with the maximum amount possible of work output is produced. I use a broader notion of productive.

For me, a productive, or we can call it a good day is one in which you are intentional. You are devoting time to things that are. important to you or that you think matter and you are minimizing time to diversions that matter less. Focus on the big winds. Avoid the unnecessary sappers of time and attention and energy. Now what that looks like can be different for different days. I mean, if you are sick, what are the right things to focus on? It's probably going to be recharging recovery and rest.

You have a very productive day built around getting a lot of rest, for example. On the other hand, let's say you have something really important happening with work. There's a big project you're working on, a deadline's coming up. Well, what's important to you is probably going to be in that case, being organized, keeping your finger on the pulse of what's due when it's due, what needs to be done, and getting that work executed well. And that might be a time where good days or productive days have a lot of work being accomplished. But there might be other days, and I wrote about this on my blog last week. I wrote a blog post about this. There might also be days where let's say like there are, hypothetically, distracting national news events

going on, which you might just say, look, productive for me today is going to be some bare minimum touching in on here, here, here and here, you know, things where people need to hear for me. But I really, I need to focus on the news, or maybe I don't want to focus on the news, but it's so fraught today that I am going to go for a hike or I'm going to work on activities that are low, cognitively demanding I'm going to work on household tasks just to distract me. Like that might be on that day the thing that is most productive. That's focusing on what's important to you and knocking stuck and things that aren't. So what I'm trying to say, Ollie, is that you should have a broader definition of good and bad. Good is not just getting as much professional output as possible

dump. Now, the only coffee out I would give, of course, is that you don't want to use this as an excuse to not do work in general. I mean, if you give an honest assessment of what is important to you, what's the best return you can get on your day, you know, most work days will be getting a lot of effort done on important professional tasks, right? That will be the answer most of the time, but I don't want you to have the impression that that's the only answer,

or that that needs to be the answer all the time. Productive is more general than just getting through your to-do list. Think of bad days as strategic, intentional rest-recharge variety days. I think those are absolutely fine to have in your schedule. Scott asks, how does your approach to productivity compare to David Allen's system in getting things done? Well, as you know, Scott, my approach has three components,

capture, configure, control. David Allen's getting things done system is quite congruent. I can use another C alliteration there, is quite congruent with the capture component. That's the fifth alliteration. It is quite congruent with the capture component of my system. In fact, David Allen's getting things done system is basically what the capture component says.

It is heavily influenced by Allen's idea that obligations kept only in your head are a source of mental drain, a source of stress and anxiety. and reduces cognitive capacity. You do not want to keep any obligations only in your head. They have to be captured into a trusted system. Trusted means your brain actually trust that not only is it recorded there, but it won't be forgotten there. It will be looked at, it will be processed. I don't have to think about it in my brain.

I think that is a crucial idea. I think it was one of the last major original ideas in productivity thinking. That's why getting things done or GTD for short is such a popular system, because it is true. And I think people intuit that it's true, and I think people feel a huge benefit as soon as they put that consistently in the practice. Once their brain actually learns to trust,

if this goes into this capture system, it goes into this system, it won't be forgotten. Now, I have two more phases. So I have Configure and I have control. Configure somewhat overlaps with Allen's thinking. I think Allen does not spend as much time explicitly discussing how to make sense of what is on your plate once it is captured. Now, to be fair, he talks about this to some degree.

But basically what he says, if you study Allen carefully, is there's really two relevant components to his approach to configure. One is clarification. I think this is really important. It's also the sixth alliterative C, so I'm getting really excited about this. Clarification, that's an important Allen idea that do not let the obligation be recorded in your system as something vague. you have to transform it into a concrete action.

So what you might capture is plan for meeting next Friday. And Alan would say that's not clear enough. You know, if you actually want to take action on that, you have to at some point clarify that into something that is concrete. Like what is the, he used to the term next action. He actually got that from another consultant whose work was influential on Alan. What is the actual next action, which might be call,

the coffee caterer to order, you know, coffee crafts for meetings. Like something that's a concrete action that you know how to actually do. And I think that's important. He also talks about planning at various altitudes. So he'll talk about the 10,000 foot level and the 30,000 foot level. You should have some plans, but he doesn't really get too much to exactly what that means, but you should have something that maybe feels like my quarterly planning discipline. So he does talk about configure.

I'm a little bit more aggressive about configure. I think how you store your task and how you organize your task and really giving a lot of thought of what's on your plate and should it be on your plate and should you take things off and do you need more systems, you need more processes to handle some of the regular occurring tasks that are in your system, having planning at multiple different levels to think about what should and should not be on your system

to help put things into your system that haven't come in as input. So you look at a quarterly plan might generate some tasks. that didn't come in from someone else. You just thought of them because you look at your quarterly plan and they go into your system. This sort of maneuvering and moving around your task

like pieces on a chessboard I think is really important. I like to do this, as I talk about a lot, on this podcast in taskboard style systems like Trello, where you can have boards for roles, you can have columns for statuses,

and you can have cards for tasks. And those cards can have details on the back, they can have files attached, they can have notes attached. There's an organization, not just of what's on your plate, but a lot of the relevant information connected to the things on your plate. And so I spend a lot more time thinking about how you actually do this configure.

What's the format in which you store these things? Where do things get moved around? I think you should spend a lot of time at least weekly in this configure context. I guess my seventh alliterative see here. The clarifying your configure component means you need to think about the configure context. This is getting interesting. I like all the alliteration. But you need to spend some time, like really looking at these different boards and what's on my backburner, what am I working on this week, and what am I waiting to hear back on? And is this too much? Maybe I need to move this into the future. Maybe I need a process to handle this type of thing because I'm getting a lot of recurring tasks here. Maybe I need to clarify my role. Really confronting and spending critical time thinking about looking at and organizing what's on your plate, I think that's really important. So that my configure, it's not a new idea. And Alan has some configure ideas. I think I just get a little bit more concrete, a literative,

I get more concrete and push that a little bit further. Then I have my final step of capture configure control as control, which is where you do weekly planning, daily planning, and in particular at the daily level, you're doing something like time block planning, so you really are controlling your time. That really does deviate from Allen. Canonical Allen says you basically have these lists

that divide next actions into context, and your day is quote-unquote cranking widgets, which means you say, what's my context, what's on my list for that context, what do I want to do from that list, execute, repeat. And there's this promise that if you just crank widgets all day, at the end of the day, you'll look out and say, I have a good supply of whatever I needed to produce.

And this is where I think I most deviate from Allen, because I say, no, no, no, you need to look at your available time and attention all it wants for the day, and you really need to think hard about How do I get the most out of this? Not how do I get the most out of what's happening right now? How do I get the most out of the whole day?

And that's a different question. Because that's when you recognize like, oh, seeing what's coming up this afternoon, I should work on this this morning. I need to take advantage of that sliver of time here. That's the best time to do these errands because it's not enough time to do something else. When you try to optimize your entire day's worth

of available time and attention, I think you get a lot more control over what you produce, hence the term, then if you just go moment by moment and ask the question, what widget do I want to crank next? So basically, to summarize Scott, as you move through my capture, configure, control,

whatever we want to call these systems, phases of my system, you start highly congruent to Allen, and then the plan increasingly deviates into territory beyond or somewhat orthogonal to Allen as you move along. So by the time you get the control, you're talking about ideas

that are relatively far divorced from a GTD universe. So I hope we all can celebrate that convincing conversation. All right, moving on, Karen asks, I'm going to start my undergrad this year. I'm not a great student, thanks to shallow work. I'm going to assume she means their distraction. And there have been a lot of setbacks. So I just wanted to ask,

how long did it take you to cultivate deep work and how did you deal with bad grades as a student plus other setbacks? Well, there's two questions there, Karen, so I'll give you two answers. The first, how long does it take to transform your student habits? If you are disciplined about it, one to two semesters has been my experience. My transformation happened largely in the fall quarter of my sophomore year at Dartmouth. That's when I set out, you know, I laid this plan out in the summer ahead of time, but I set out during that fall quarter to systematically experiment with how I manage my time,

how I wrote papers, how I studied for test. And I tried a lot of things. I write about this in my 2006 book, which I wrote soon after that, called How to Become a Straight A Student. I wrote about it in that book, but I systematically experimented with different systems and techniques, seen what worked and what didn't. I ended up with a relatively stable set of ideas. It still evolved and more than that in a second, but a relatively stable set of ideas that worked really well,

and my grades dramatically improved starting that quarter. Now, the reason why I say one, the two semesters, is that I did not really have an issue with concentration, because that is another thing. When you say that you are having setbacks due to shallow work, I'm assuming in your role as a high school student coming into your undergrad career, you don't have an unusual amount of email or HR,

or bureaucratic nonsense to handle, which is what I normally think about when it comes to shallow work. So I think what you're talking about is distraction. So in addition to overhauling your systems, you also have to train your ability to concentrate. One of the core ideas from that book, Straight A student, is that for a student, work produced is the product of time spent and intensity of focus. If you can increase the intensity of focus, you can get the same amount of work done with much less time spent. if you're highly distracted, that intensity of focused operand really dramatically decreases. And then the amount of time required to get the work done really dramatically increases.

And now you're going to have to do all-nighters. And now you're going to have to do long sessions in the library. And that's tough, right? That's tough. For a lot of students, that's not sustainable. For a lot of students, you start to get up against, if my semester is just a little bit too hard, it just doesn't work. It can get you into a pretty bad place with your grades.

or can make your performance erratic. It's depending on how much energy you have or how well suited a class is for that type of study and you can have randomly really bad grades. Not a great way to go. So you have two things you have to do. Upgrade your habits, upgrade your ability to concentrate.

Now, as I mentioned before, I did not have to as an undergrad worry about concentration, but, you know, I arrived at college without a cell phone, without a laptop. There just wasn't the same attack on time and attention that a newly arriving undergraduate today has. And so that's why I said one to two semesters is you have to do both. So how do you train yourself to concentrate?

Well, we've talked about this a lot. There's a lot of different things you can do to train. I get into this in my book, deep work. But what you need to do in a nutshell is both passive and active training. So the passive training is getting your mind used to the idea that it doesn't always get diversion when it's bored, if your mind expects a shiny, distracting, algorithmically optimized treat every time it feels a little bit boredom, when it comes time to actually do something cognitively demanding such a study, it will not put up with it. It says, hey, I'm bored, where's my

distraction? I'm bored, where's my distraction? You're going to have a really hard time. So passive training in this instance means getting your mind used to this idea that sometimes you're bored and you're just bored. So this means do things on a regular basis without your phone. You will survive. Go on a hike, going a walk, going an errand, one to three times a day doing non-trivial length activity without your phone, where it's just you alone with your thoughts and observing the world around you. I'm not glorifying boredom for the sake of boredom. I'm just trying to get your mind used to the idea that boredom sometimes happens and that's okay. Active training on the other hand is where you actually push your ability to concentrate beyond where you're comfortable.

The thing I recommend most to students in particular is interval training. Get a timer. Give yourself an academic task like a chapter to read or a problem set to work on. Set the timer for 20 minutes. When that timer is running, concentrate has hard as you can on that task. If your attention is diverted even for a moment to an unrelated screen, email, phone, text messages, WhatsApp, TikTok, God forbid. You stop and reset the timer. Now what happens here is 20 minutes is not that long. And so when you feel that urge to, oh, I just need to see a distraction,

there's another part of your mind that says, you know, hey, Karen, come on. We have nine minutes left. We're going to have to reset the timer. We can make it nine minutes. And that muscle stretches a little bit. You stretch that muscle enough times. It's going to get stronger, just like if you were trying to get your bicep bigger. Once you're really comfortable with 20 minutes, once you're no longer having a battle with your own brain, go to 30 minutes. And once you're okay with 30 minutes, go to 40 minutes. When I used to work with students on this, we typically would upgrade those intervals once every two weeks. So roughly in a semester, you can reform your ability to concentrate so that you can do 90 minutes at a time. That's usually my target for students. You can do 90 minutes

without a break. And at the same time, you're experimenting with and working on your study habits to figure out what works and what does it. This will take one semester or so, another semester to work out the kinks, and you will be a much, much, much better student. So how do you deal with setbacks? You need a process-oriented mindset. You need to think if you get a bad grade. All right, time for a post-mortem. You know, how did I study for this test? How did I write this paper? Look back at the system you use, because at this point, if you're experimenting with your study systems, that means you are being specific.

This is how I study. This is how I prepare for papers. This is how I take notes in class. You cannot experiment if you're not clear about what you're experimenting with. So if you've gone through this process, you have a very clear set of ways you manage your time and study and write papers and take notes, etc. In fact, it probably should be written down somewhere. And now you can go back and say, okay, of these techniques I was using to prepare for this thing I did bad on,

what really was useful and what was a waste of time? You do a post-mortem. You're like, oh, I had this weird system where I put things on flashcards and, I don't know, shuffled the flashcards and looked at five at a time. And, you know, that didn't seem to really help. So let me get rid of that.

I don't want any dead weight. My time is precious. But there's active recall lecture and I was doing seems really important, so I want to keep that or maybe do more of it. And then you look at the test and say, but where I really got nailed was in this example,

maybe the multiple choice questions early on, those were straight memorization. I didn't really give enough time to that. Okay, now I know going forward for this class, I need a hardcore memorization thing I do. I need a hardcore strategy for memorization that locks those in, so I'm not going to miss a single one. That's what I was missing.

That's what's going to get me my grade back. So you go back and you study how you studied. What worked, what didn't, amplify the former, get rid of the ladder, what was missing, put that in. And then you take pride in the fact that, okay, now my process has been updated to a place where I think this new process would get me would have gotten me the grade I wanted. And now you're more confident going forward.

So to pull those pieces together, in one to two semesters, you can get well-trained and tested specific study habits to seem to work well for you together. I recommend starting with how to become a straight-A student if you can get your hands on it. And you can do a focus training so that you can actually minimize the total hours required

to produce work with those habits. And then two, when you have setbacks, process, process, process. Do a post-mortem, come out of the experience with an even better approach to how you're going to handle similar graded endeavors in the future. Evan asks,

how do you know you have become good enough that people shouldn't ignore you? Well, Evan, my short answer is money. Now, this is a concept that I elaborate in my book so good they can't ignore you. It was a concept that came from Derek Sivers. And he had this phrase. He said money is a, quote, neutral indicator of value, end quote.

Now what he meant by that is that when you're trying to assess how good am I or how good is my idea or how good is this startup I think I want to do or how good is this book idea that I have or this podcast I want to do, whatever it is. Just getting people's feedback is probably not enough because it doesn't, it's easy for people to say, yeah, that sounds great. You know, like Evan, what a good idea. I think this is really smart. Oh, you should do that.

Right. It's easy to get encouraging feedback because why not give someone encouraging feedback? You want to be nice and it would be socially awkward to say that is a dumb idea. Money on the other hand is a great neutralizer of these social niceties because people hate to give away their money. People do not like to take money that they have and give it to somebody else. So if they are doing that, they're not being nice, and they're not just trying to keep the social lubrication flowing. They actually value whatever it is that you are proverbially selling.

So what does that mean in different fields? Well, if you're working for a large company, the ability to get a raise, the ability that someone wants to hire you away, right? That's an indicator that you do have, you have built up value. me as a company is going to give you more money to get you to stay. That means whatever you can do is valuable. It's a good neutral indicator of value. You have a startup.

Can you get investors? Can you sell product? Forget the advice. Forget the encouraging conversations you had over coffee. Is someone writing a check? If someone's writing a check, then what you are doing has probably merit, has a good chance of success, or at least it's worth the dice roll. And if they're not, it's probably not there.

You want to make a living with a podcast. Okay, where's the advertising dollars? You know, if you are able to get money in the door, then there must be something there that's valuable. Now, the key thing about Sivers formulation is that Sivers doesn't really care about money. This is someone who sold a startup earlier in his life for millions and essentially gave it all away. He doesn't care about money, but he says, this is how you can figure out, okay, am I on the right track? And he had a really nice story about how he did this throughout his own life. I mean, he was someone who at some point, for example, left his career as an A&R executive to do music full-time in a band.

He said, how did I know that we were good enough to do that when we were making as much from the band as I was making for my salary? And at some point, he left what he was doing in a full-time music career to start his startup CD baby that he eventually sold. And how did he know that it was time to give his full-time attention to the startup? He was generating as much money as he was making each year. playing in the band. And all along the way, it was not, oh, I just want more money. It's that it is a neutral indicator of value. Now I have confidence that people aren't just blowing smoke at me. This is a good idea I should put more time into it. High level athletes are the same way. I think non-professional athletes have a hard time understanding, you know, why a favored son

athlete would leave their hometown to go to another team when the difference was between a hundred million dollar deal and a hundred twenty million dollar deal. You say, well, who cares about that $20 million. Once you get to 100, don't you just want to optimize the town you live in and your fan base and these type of things? But what they don't understand is that athletes are very competitive. They find the money to be, along with their statistics, to be a very clear neutral indicator of value. A $120 million athlete is 20% better than $100 million athlete. That's the way they see it, and they've dedicated their life to this craft, and they want to be accurately tooted up on the scoreboard. they could care less about the actual dollars.

It's not like, well, I want to buy this boat and it costs $110 million. So if I don't get $120 million, I can't do it. It's that I think I'm better than this other third baseman who got paid $100 million and this is the score. And that's what makes it clear. So that's my advice, Evan. Let people's willingness to pay you be a pretty good data point for understanding is what I'm doing actually working for the market.

Our next question comes from Odysseus, who asks, what does the road to becoming a superstar and academia look like for a dormant undergraduate student? He elaborates his particular interests are in math and physics. Well, Odysseus, you can think about the path to academic superstardom as a series of trials, each one more difficult and competitive than the last. At each of these trials, you have to triumph.

There's not a lot of margin for error. So the first trial is the one that you're engaged and now is at the undergraduate level. On the path to academic superstardom, you need to be a superstar as an undergraduate in your department. On my blog study hacks, back in the days when I used to focus primarily on student issues, I had this notion of the A-star student, like a-a-astric student. And I said, this is a category that is above just an A-plus student, a student who gets good grades. It's a student who is wowing the faculty. Now, I actually took that name from a convention they had at Dartmouth, where I was an undergraduate,

where you could get an A-star in a class. Now, the star was actually like a footnote, like a citation next to your grade. It was a citation that said this student was exceptional in this class beyond what can be captured in just degrading scale. And I got a fair number of these in computer science classes, and my point is you need to be an A-star student, whether or not you actually have that particular convention at your school, if you want to maintain yourself on the track to academic stardom. From there, you can leverage this stardom to get to an elite graduate school in your topic. want to be a superstar academic, you have to start at an elite graduate institution for that topic. Your next trial is going to be becoming a star there as well. So you're going to have to be in this program one of the top students. Your dissertation needs to be nominated for the dissertation

award sort of at the university level in your field and maybe worldwide for, your field, at very least at the level that would be nominated for a dissertation award within your field at multiple levels. Anything less than that is still really hard and really great. You can have a great academic career, but if you want to be an academic superstar, you have to be one of the best. You then leverage that to get to an elite academic institution. And now your final trial is you have these fellow academics at your elite institution, but also just other junior faculty. around the world and you have to outshine them.

And you do this primarily with research producing high impact, beautiful papers that really push forward in a highly novel, cognitively demanding original way pushes forward the field. You make waves, people are trying to hire you away. Now you've reached academic stardom. The problem is each of these trials is harder than the last because the pool of people with which you're competing

is more selected and more skilled at each level. At the undergraduate level, most of the people in your major might not be very good. They're just kind of doing the major. They have terrible study habits. They want to get a job on Wall Street. They're only a math major

because they think it'll help them get a quant position. If you've got some horsepower and you have some discipline, you could probably a star right, you can get ahead of them. But now you get the MIT. I mean, everyone there in the math program

was a star in their program. So now it's a much more elite level of competition. There's less people you're competing with but it's more elite. then you get to your job as an assistant professor at Princeton in the theory department. Well, now there's less people maybe there you're competing with, but man, these are the very top people from the very top graduate schools, and these are really just the very best people in the world, and you've got to stand out among them. So the competition gets harder at every step.

So let's just focus briefly on the step where you are now, which is the undergrad step. The two things I can recommend for becoming an A-star student at the undergraduate level would be one, Do less. I used to write about this all the time, especially if you want an academic career. Get rid of the double major. Get rid of the triple major. Give yourself the easiest possible course load you can

outside of the core courses you have to take for your major. You want to have more than enough time to dedicate to the courses in your major. If you don't want to just do well, you want to dominate them. And time is a key ingredient. Be very wary of extracurriculars. have a ton of extracurricular activities. If you're in some sort of high school mindset of like,

well, if I do a lot of things, it's going to impress the admissions officers at graduate school. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. There are no admissions officers at graduate school for PhD programs. It's professors. It's professors that are evaluating your file. They're going to look at what you produced in research, what grades you got, how good is the school you went to. They could care less that you had a triple major. They could care less that you were the president of the outdoors club. So pare down anything in your extracurricular world that's going to be particularly time-consuming, keeping things that aren't time-consuming but maybe are relaxing and recharging. That's fine.

Be very wary about activities that have a lot of obligations on your time and invest that newly found time into the courses in your major. The second thing I recommend for becoming an A-Star student is you have to get your motivation, rock-solid, and the way to do that is you have to seek out engagement in your field that is outside of the context of academic evaluation, by which I mean that's not graded. So start attending talks. Start attending talks in your department with visiting scholars,

not because you have to, but because you want to. Take extra courses, not for graded, but just I want to go through and watch through open courseware, top faculty at MIT give lectures on subjects I'm interested in. I want to see Eric Demaine's lecture on amortized analysis. I want to see Mike Sipser's lecture on linear algebra. Whatever. I'm naming random computer science and mathematical faculty at MIT right now.

The actual names here are not that important. Except for Eric is a great lecture, so I do recommend looking up his videos on OpenCourseware. Eric, I don't mean to divert, by the way, Odysseus, but not to freak you out. about what academic stardom really takes. Eric DeMaine, he was a professor in the theory group at MIT. So, you know, when I was the theory group at MIT as a PhD student, he was one of the faculty there. He is an academic superstar, not to intimidate you, but he became a faculty at MIT

at 18, tenure, I think, before he could legally drink. One of a MacArthur Genius grant in his teens. So I'm just saying. If you're talking about math or physics or theoretical computer science, the real stars, those stars do shine quite brightly. But Eric is a great lecturer, and you can see some of his classes for free online through MIT Open Courseware. All right, diversion ended. Back to what I was saying. Invest in things, activities related to your field for no other reason but to show your interest, read books, read papers, keep up with the industry news.

You mentioned mathematics, Odysseus, so maybe you keep up. with Quanta Magazine, which is financed by the Simons Foundation and has some of the best science reporters in particular focusing on biology, mathematics, and theoretical computer science, some of the best reporters on those subjects in the world. And so you can keep up with breakthroughs and advances in the field. All of this activity signals to yourself that you are someone who likes the field and you take that field seriously. This in turn is going to move what the psychologist would call the locus of control towards the intrinsic end of the motivation spectrum and away from the extrinsic end of much more sustainable motivation this way.

And then finally, do all the stuff that you know you need to do as a student in terms of just getting your act together like I just talked about in a recent question. Get your act together with your study skills. Get your act together with your time management skills. Train your ability to focus like you're a track athlete training how fast you can run the mile. You need to relentlessly get that really, really high if you want to be a superstar. So you've got to do that background work as well. All right. So that's what you would need to do to have a shot of being an A-star student at the undergrad and get your way on to the next trial. The good news is Odysseus is that even if you don't make it to the top of that particular podium,

that path, you know, the lower steps on that podium, as I can tell you from experience, are also really interesting. When you can end up in academia, to go to school, working on interesting research, there's a lot of interesting places that path can take you, even if you don't make it to the very top. So if you feel like you have the ability to take a run at it, I think you should. And hopefully that advice will help you get through this particular trial in the many that are ahead. All right, here's an interesting one from Maxim. What do you see as the ideal average working hours for most knowledge jobs? Well, I don't know what the ideal amount of work is Maxim, but one thing I do strongly believe is that in most office work style

organizations, especially those where there's more autonomy, so the kind of classic, more creative knowledge worker fields where it's not just doing rote paperwork processing, but where you have more autonomy over what you work on and how you work on it. I am convinced that if you quantified exactly how much valuable output was being produced by the workers, that in most of these places with the right systems and the right investment and extra support and the right support for intellectual specialization, you could accomplish that same amount of output with about half the total hours. I think as a good heuristic, that's true, that we're probably spending about twice as long

as necessary to get the same things done. Now, I take this into account in part because I have watched time and again people who do this type of work on their own setup and their own systems and find that their output doubles. And so I'm just reversing this and saying you could probably cut the hours in half without hurting the output if you combined that hour reduction with actually tightening up the systems involved in the work. So what would actually matter just very briefly? I think if people had much more time over their time and attention, I mean much more control rather over their time and attention using something like time block planning. Two, if you actually did workload management.

So like they do in software development, where you actually look at what is everyone working on right now? And is this a reasonable amount of things on your plate? Is it too many things on your plate? And what specifically should you be doing today? Do you have the support for it? If we actually explicitly managed workflow instead of just throwing emails at people and building up these impossible workloads that then get accomplished sporadically and with low quality. So we do that as well, I think can greatly increase the quality. So you have less WIPs, less work in progress, let people do one.

thing at a time, let it do it very intensely. You get a lot more done. Three, you put more processes and systems into place. You find regularly occurring work activities and you build up processes or systems that allow that work to get done with a minimum of wasted overhead. And in particular, the overhead I worry most about is unstructured ad hoc interaction. I talk about this a lot in my new book, A World Without Email, which comes out in March. I really get into. to this, that what you're trying to optimize in a knowledge work environment really is how much do I have to interact with other people in an unstructured way to get this done. In a factory, and you're building cars, what you're trying to minimize is whatever, how many worker hours or how

much raw time does it take to get this car from the beginning of the assembly line to the end. But in cognitive work, what you're trying to minimize is if this process is going to require 10 back and forth emails that are going to happen in an ad hoc and sporadic fashion, that is a huge cost because I have to keep checking an inbox to keep up with that conversation. And every time I have to jump into that conversation, move it forward, I have to pay the price of a cognitive network shift, which reduces my cognitive capacity. And if I have five or six different processes, or projects, I should say, that each are going to generate five to ten ad hoc emails, you mix that all together.

And now your attention is purely divided, because now you have, whatever that is, 25 to 50 emails you're going to have to deal with throughout the day relatively promptly to keep it moving, and you don't know when they're going to come, and now you're just constantly checking and constantly sending emails. And if you have a process for each of these types of projects that minimize that to no email or just one email, it's a massive, massive win. You've gone from a day in which you have 50 emails spread out throughout the day that you have to keep checking and moving forward to a day where you have no emails, you're just doing these things one after another. You can get a lot more done. The final thing you would have to invest in to get this 2x increase, I think,

is a return to more intellectual specialization, which means this move towards moving more and more administrative work onto the plate of the frontline workers just because technological systems make it technically possible. That has been a disastrous movement, and we need to roll it back. There should be more dedicated support. Technology that reduces the friction required for administrative tasks is not properly applied

if how you apply it is to allow frontline workers to do that work on their own. The right application of friction-reducing administrative systems is to allow support staff to be more efficient. I think we got that wrong. The money-saving in intranet-based IT system should not be, oh, now we can fire assistance. It should be now the same assistant can support more people.

But what you don't want to do is actually diminish people's intellectual specialization or take time away from the high-value production activities to service low-value activities. Again, this is another concept I get into in great detail in that upcoming book. So if you do those four things, you get serious about your own time, you do workflow management,

you induce or introduce interaction, reduction systems and processes, and use technology to actually hypercharge support and return to intellectual specialization, I think we could get the same amount of work done in at least half the hours. Now, of course, the question is, does that mean we should double the amount of work produced? Or does it mean we should work half the hours? That's where it gets complicated, Maxim.

I don't know. I don't know the answers to that question. I just know what we're doing now is not particularly efficient. All right, let's do one more quick work question. George asked about how to effectively use the, quote, glorious 9 to 5 fixed schedule productivity system. when dealing with three hard projects at the same time. He elaborates. I'm an electrical engineer PhD student in my second year,

and I'm currently working on two research programs. Apart from my two research programs, I have also left an unfinished master's thesis, which needs some extra work. Well, George, I'll give you a very concrete answer in your academic scenario. What I would do is have regular blocks of time every morning, probably first thing in the morning, maybe even earlier than the 9 to 5 schedule if that's possible

for you in which you just work on that master's thesis. 90 minutes every morning, that's a background drip. Day, day, day, day, day, day, day, day, day. That type of rhythmic scheduling first thing in the morning works particularly well with thesises. Then for your other hard projects, your other two hard projects related to your PhD, I would work in batches of days. So, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm In my primary workday, after I begin this preamble in the morning, which I'm working on my thesis, maybe for the next four or five days, or even the next week or two, I'm working on just this one project, pushing it to a clear milestone. Now I might transition and work on the other project and push it to a clear milestone.

For these type of intense academic projects, you don't want to try to interleave them on the daily scale. That's too much cognitive shifting. They require a sort of obsessive immersion often to make the best progress. So work them in batches, have those batches aimed towards milestones, could be accomplished on the scale of days. It's like three to ten days. And that's what I would do. Every morning the master's thesis, you don't even think about it.

Then you have your real work day, time block plan, be very efficient about the shallow work. Stick with one thing till a milestone, then decide, okay, do I want to do the other thing for a milestone or maybe do another milestone with this, but group that work into multi-day milestones. So thanks for that, George. Let's do some technology questions. Deep asks, How do you avoid

curated content fatigue? I subscribe to many newsletters. Well, Deep, first of all, my hats off to you for focusing on curated content. I think that is much superior

to algorithmically optimized user-generated content delivered to you in an amorphous stream from a social media platform. I think you actually say, I'm going to subscribe to a newsletter that is written by this person because I like the way this person thinks and I respect them and know their background.

And I know there's places I agree with them and disagree with them, but I like to engage with their ideas. That is a fantastic leveraging of the potential of the social internet, much in the way that modern algorithmic social media I feel like is a undermining or perversion of that possibility.

So you're starting from the right place. So what do you do if you feel overwhelmed by these newsletters? There's two things I want to recommend. You know, first of all, be aggressive and unsubscriptions. If you find yourself not really wanting to read something, just unsubscribe. This is a non-trivial percentage of curated newsletter subscriptions for a lot of people where you typically subscribe because there is an article you heard about you wanted to read, or you saw this person, you saw them on TV, or you heard them on a podcast,

or you saw something they had written, and you said, oh, I might be interested in what this person has to say, or there was a particular event or issue going on in the world, and you liked her take, and then that event is over. You don't really care anymore. Or this person that sounded interesting on a podcast, you know, his articles are not so interesting once you get them. Just unsubscribe. You can always resubscribe later. It's not a big deal. The second thing I would point out is that oftentimes the issue here is not the sheer volume of content is actually not that much. It is the form in which you read it. So the form in which this content can be overwhelming is when you basically kind of read it as it comes in

or it kind of sits there in your inbox and you try to get around to it or you see it piling up. That can generate a sense of fatigue. The alternative is what I call a reading ritual. I talk about this sum in my book, digital minimalism. But the basic idea is that you batch together your curated collection of curated content and you read it all at once.

And so I talk about a Saturday morning ritual, for example, where you have a nice reader on your iPad. You say, okay, I take all the newsletters I like and when they come in, whatever, I put them into a particular folder or label in Gmail and then I load them all on my iPad on Saturday morning, I go sit outside on the porch or go to a coffee shop with a nice patio, and I spend an hour and I sort of read through these articles. You can get through, even if you subscribe to a lot of newsletters, you can get through everything that arrives in a week in

sort of one to two really good concentrated hours. And you get a lot more out of the experience because you are in a mindset. You're in a mindset during this consumption of I'm in the mood to engage with ideas. I'm drinking my first coffee of the day. I'm in somewhere that's aesthetically interesting or otherwise sort of intellectually motivating and you're engaging with the ideas and pulling out what you like and what you don't like. You've added a lot of value to your life. And it only took up one morning out of your weekend. So I think reading rituals can process a lot of curated content that might otherwise seem

overwhelming. It would otherwise seem overwhelming if you were just in a circumstance of looking in your inbox and seeing things piling up and reading things sporadically. as distraction or diversion. I would, of course, be remiss deep if I didn't also recommend my email newsletter, which you can subscribe to, subscribe to at calnewport.com. I've been writing weekly articles for that since 2007. It is also where every couple of months I send out the long anticipated survey link

in which my readers are able to submit questions for this podcast. So it is just dawning on me, of course, the fact that you submitted this question means that you must have filled out the survey, which means you must already be a subscriber to my newsletter. So actually, let me just say that as an advertisement for the other listeners who want to increase the quality of their curated content. You should check out my newsletter in particular. Nino asks, what trusted system do you use for your capture system?

Well, there's two elements to that. There's the actual inboxes you use to capture in the moment and get new obligations out of your mind. And then there's the long-term system in which you eventually process and store and organize and configure and keep track of those tasks. For me, the two primary inboxes I use, one is my time block planner. So you have a two-page spread for every day. The right-hand page is a time-block grid for doing your time-block plan. on the left-hand side are capture pages. And so there's just a ton of space over there

for capturing with pin and paper. Obligations to show up, has to show up, things to come to mind. That's where I capture them. When I'm processing information on my computer, so in particular going through my inbox or if I'm in a meeting, I also use a text file, a plain text file.

I call it working memory.txte. It's on the desktop of all of my computers. And that's where I can rapidly capture. If I'm going through like my email inbox, I might generate a couple dozen tasks that come out of those emails. Because I do not think anything should exist long term in an email. The email is the envelope. You don't keep the envelope. You take the thing out that's inside of it and you put it somewhere.

Tas should not exist in an inbox. It should exist in a real system. And so I'll use that text file because I can type really quickly and move things around and copy and paste. And so I have this sort of text file on my computer for quickly capturing things while I'm going through information online. and then I have this sort of paper capture pages in my planner. In terms of long-term systems, I process those typically into some combination of Trello and workflowy. That is where task live.

The exception is deadlines or meetings or anything that's tied to a particular day or time. That will get processed into my calendar. Enid asks, Hi, Cal, I love your podcast. Is this podcast a quarantine project, or are you planning to continue with it after things go back? to normal. Well, I appreciate the question, though I would point out that we are not in a quarantine. I believe you are thinking to the shelter, thinking about the shelter in place orders that were

in place during the spring. Very few places right now, at least for the moment, have shelter in places. The only reason why I harp on that point, Enid, is that I think that when people are in the mindset of we are locked down until things are back to normal, you don't take advantage of what you can do. And the things that you can do might be crucial for your psychological health, might be crucial for your professional health, might be crucial for your happiness and satisfaction.

And so I'm a bit of a stickler for people who still refer to their current situation as a quarantine or lockdown and say, take advantage of what you have. So you don't know what you're going to have next, but you want to make sure that in a typical deep life fashion, you are trying to make the most out of what's available to you and do so with intention. So that is just a nitpick. Let's get to the actual question, this podcast.

Now, the plan is to keep doing this for the first. foreseeable future. The summer was a test. I felt if it seemed to work, if it caught on, I would do it. And if it didn't really seem to catch on, then I would have a summer season of the show, which would be interesting to some people. It does seem to have caught on. I posted my first episode with no fanfare, a sort of soft opening launch late in May. I'm recording this now early in November. We just crossed three-quarters of a million downloads. We should hit a million downloads by the New Year. So I think something about this format, something about this content, at least for now, is catching on. And I might mess with the formats. I have at least one other show in mind that at

some point I might introduce. So I'm actually, I'm going on leave. I'm on a senior research fellowship, senior faculty research fellowship starting in the new year. So I'm actually going to have, in some sense, more time on my hands in the future. And so I have a couple of ideas potentially for even a second show at some point I might introduce. But for now, I like this format because I feel like I'm able to interact more with you, my audience, interact more directly with my audience, cover a lot more ground than I can cover just in my writing.

And it's a lot of fun. Well, speaking about this podcast, by the way, and what it takes to support it, I think this might actually be an opportune time to take a quick break to thank a couple more of our sponsors. I want to talk to you here for a moment about Indeed. If you are like me, you have probably reacted to the economic uncertainty of this year by going into hustle mode.

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Myank asks, how does listening to different types of music while working affect your ability to think deeply? Well, my act, my general advice on music while working is that you have to practice working with the particular type of music. If you practice enough with that music, it can become a white noise-style blocker of other types of noises. It can be quite effective.

If you have not practiced, however, working with the music at first, it can be distracting. This will be particularly pronounced for lyrical music because sung lyrics are going to activate similar linguistic elements of your brain that are likely involved

in whatever deep thinking or deep work you're doing. but even specific genres of lyrical music, you can eventually learn to treat like white noise. It just takes practice. So I wouldn't worry too much about the particular type of music as much as just giving yourself some time to adjust to that music being in the background.

All right, Luca asks, how do you face the disruptive potential of instant massaging apps? All right, I'm going to assume you mean instant messaging apps there. I think the instant massaging apps are in a different corner of the app store, if you know what I mean. Luca goes on to say such as Telegram, WhatsApp, FaceTime, FaceTime, and so on. I'm evaluating the option to delete all of my accounts. I already decided to quit social media two years ago, and I'm doing great. Well, Luca, it's a good question.

I think instant messaging style applications, even if we're just talking about the basic text messaging app on your phone or something more sophisticated like telegram or WhatsApp, it's complicated. So one of the things that these applications have done is they have largely taken over a lot of the interaction with friends and family activities that for a little while had been conquered by social media. And this was the original pitch of the social media platforms was the network affects pitch. Everyone you know is on this platform. This platform makes it easy to talk to, interact with, and keep up with other people on the platform. Ergo, you need to be on this platform. And there can be no competitors because a competitor won't have your cousin on them.

And a competitor won't have your friend from high school on them. So it won't be that useful for connecting with people. But then around 2010 to 2012, when the social media platform sort of made their Faustian bargain with the devil to say, forget that, we need to make that. We need to make this into an algorithmically optimized distraction machine, it temporarily put their profits up, but it made them less useful as a place to keep up with people. And so people took this natural desire to take advantage of technological innovation to reduce the friction and interaction because interaction is something we crave. They took this and they moved it to things like group SMS chains and on the WhatsApp, which is why Facebook bought it. And on the FaceTime and on the

Zoom and the telegram and all these other technologies. But in particular, I think if you think about like group text messages or FaceTime, there's no one mining your data. There's no one that makes more money if you use it longer. It's just a straight up, easy, low friction internet-based interface for interaction. Now, I say this to point out, that means that often what's happening on these, I'm not going to call them platforms, just communication protocols, is meaningful.

You're talking to people you care about. And so quitting them is maybe not a complete answer. Because what if you do have a text chain, you know, this text chain with your friends and one with your family and one with your siblings? I don't know. There's some value in that, right? I mean, that's the internet, the social internet doing what the social internet promised to do well. The flip side of this coin, however, is that if you are constantly tending these chains and these threads, and these messenger clusters.

I mean, I don't know the terminology, but if you have to constantly service all of these conversations, it fragments your time to a degree that you can't enjoy anything else in your life. And that's a problem too. You don't suffer from the same danger as, let's say, social media platform

that's been engineered to snag your attention and to push your emotional buttons. You're not going to get that with an instant message conversation or a text thread, but still, you have the social obligation of, here's people I know,

they're expecting an answer. I don't want to keep them waiting. So it can still take up a lot of time. It can still fragment accidentally end up fragmenting your day. So my suggestion is not necessarily to quit all these services. Though I would recommend maybe curating down to the simplest possible services. Services that aren't owned by Facebook might be recommended as well. I don't trust them. So that means be very wary about WhatsApp. But then what you need to do with the tools you use to interact with friends and family is don't be the person who always responds. You have to essentially train your correspondence that you aren't always on there. And then their expectations will shift. And then once they don't have the expectation that, you know, Luca always answers, and they won't send you texts that are like, hey, Luca, what's going on? Why aren't you answering? They know that you'll see it sometimes and sometimes you won't. And then you can get away with, okay, there's certain times when I want to load up my phone

and I'm going to check what's going on with the messages. And it's going to be great. And I can see what's going on with my friends. But what I'm not going to be able to do is just be available all the time. and people will adjust and then they realize like, well, Luca is someone who's just not on his phone all the time and that's okay.

They just have to adjust in their mental model where you are. And now you still get the benefit of being able to see what your friends are up to and have some interaction throughout the day without a completely fragment in your time. So that's what I usually recommend to people. I think non-attention exploiting interaction apps like simple text messaging or instant messenger apps.

I like that they are taking back this core network effect. advantage from social media because it destabilizes the social media platforms that makes them more precarious. When they're precarious, they're going to be easier to tip over, culturally speaking. Just don't be the person who people learn answers all the time. There's a little bit of growing pains and making that transition, but those pains are worth doing because nothing else is possible, really, in terms of living a deep life if you have to constantly be tapping a screen with your thumbs. All right, that's enough technology for today. Let's get on to some queries

about the deep life. Fernando asks, Since I ran out of Cal Newport's books to read, and I'm looking forward to the next one, I read one of your recommendations, Greg McEwen's Essentialism. What do you think are the similarities and differences between an essentialist life and a deep life?

Well, Fernando, that's a timely question. As you now have probably heard, the preceding episode of this podcast was actually a rebroadcast of an interview I did on Greg's podcast from earlier in the summer. I rebroadcast that because I thought it was a good conversation, and Greg and I think a lot alike. It's not surprising that he gave a very generous endorsement blurb on the jacket of digital minimalism. Essentialism and the deep life have a lot of overlap.

In particular, they overlap at this idea that you were going to get the most return, You are going to get the most satisfaction and meaning by focusing on the things that really matter and not diverting or dispersing too much of your time and energy on things that don't really matter. Business is not a virtue. Doing more does not get you an extra bite at the table. What matters are the high value activities and the more time you can spend doing the high value activities to better. That's a key idea in essentialism. that is an idea that I also think runs through the notion of a deep life.

My whole idea of a deep life, you break things down into categories, and each of those categories you basically try to essentialize. Now, where does the deep life add on to that? Well, you know, I go beyond just saying, here are the main categories in your life, focus on what's important, don't waste too much time on what's not important. I also try to operationalize that a little bit more.

That's why I talk about the systems you put in the place, the keystone habits at the foundation of each your categories, the metrics you track to keep yourself disciplined on the track towards prioritizing the important and downplaying the unimportant. And there's a lot of operationalizing of this essentialist mindset that I get into in my discussions of the deep life. The underlying DNA is the same. Focus on what matters.

Don't get too caught up and what doesn't. The phrase I used to use, this was before essentialism came out, The phrase I used to use way back when on my blog, it was actually the tag phrase of the tagline of the study hacks blog was, do less, do better, know why. And I still really believe that that trio of imperatives is the answer to a meaningful, meaningful, satisfying life in all of the different buckets. You know, do less things, focus on what's important. Do them better.

Give them attention. Give them your presence. give them your energy and make sure the things you are choosing comes from a deep foundation of understanding who you are, your values, and what you care about. That's the foundation of a deep life. Anyone who has read essentialism

will recognize a lot of those ideas. Matt asks, Can you expand on any methods you and your family used to make sure your home life is rich and full? I'm a 38-year-old professional and newlywed and I want to apply deep work and deep life habits to married life. Thank you.

Well, Matt, let me give you the obvious caveat that marital advice is not a specialty of mine, so I'm coming up with what I'm about to say largely off the top of my head, but maybe you'll find it useful. What I tend to think about this topic is that there's two things that are important for helping a marriage succeed. One, you must sacrifice for the other person. You must be willing to make sacrifices in terms of your time. time and in terms of your energy, in terms of the things and objectives and vision you had of your individual life, you must be willing to make sacrifices on behalf of another person. You should think of yourself as you're committed to your wife and that relationship, but also just her in

general, is going to get a non-trivial amount of your energy, just like if you, if and when you have a child. You don't just have a child around. You're going to have to invest, right? You are investing a non-trivial time of your emotional and physical and cognitive energy in this member of your family. You have to see your spouse that way. Two, I typically recommend in this type of situation, you need to work together to build the next version of your life. You need to work together with your wife and have a vision for how you want your life to be like. What's work going to be like? Where are you going to live? What's the family situation going to be like? How busy? or not busy you're going to be,

what types of activities, what's going to be important, what's going to be your foundation, what importantly is going to be what provides you resilience during the inevitable hard times that are going to come and go throughout your relationship.

You come up with this vision together, you make a plan for it together, you execute that plan for it together. It is a shared vision that you're both working towards. The alternative to those two things, which is something that happens a lot and is a problem,

is instead thinking about, your spouse like a cool roommate. Like, oh, I really like this person. And it's cool I have someone to hang out with. So I'm not lonely and I'm not bored. And we go on like trips and stuff and it's fun and someone to go to dinner with me or something like this. But I'm going to otherwise, like I'm doing my thing and she's doing her thing. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. Because then inevitably, inevitably, something's going to get in the way of your thing or something you want to do gets in the way of their thing. And then you begin to get resentful. And then it's like, well, wait a second.

Why do I have to, whatever, miss this trip with my friends I want to do? Why do I have to give up golf? Why do I have to more crucially put the breaks on maybe this initiative that could be good for my career because we're moving to this city because it's good for your career and it's closer to the family, but I don't have the same opportunity there. If you come at it from, I'm just living my life with a cool roommate. You're going to start to get resentful when that roommate gets in the way of things you want to do. is when you live with roommates,

you're not likely to allow your roommate to shift your career. When you live with roommates, you get annoyed when that roommate asks you to whatever, borrow your truck and help them move three weekends in a row, and you miss your links time, right? But a spouse is not a roommate, and that doesn't work. That's not a sustainable foundation. You get resentful, and when the hard things come,

there's no foundation there to get through the hard things. Now, you might have a harder time of this math than let's say someone in my situation had, and that just has to do with the age at which you are getting married. So you're 38, I'm 38. We're the same age. You're a newlywed, and I've been married for, oh, God, what's it been now? 14 years.

I got married very young. And there's an advantage to that, because when you get married very young, pretty soon out of school, you're not established yet. You don't already have an established adult life. You don't have an established career. you don't have an established, this is what I do, and this is my routine, and here's what I care about, and here's what I'm doing in my job.

We built that all together. We were just dumb kids. There's nothing for us to be impressed about ourselves about, because we hadn't done anything impressive. There is no ego involved because we knew each other before there was anything to have an ego about. And we built up a vision of our lives that we sort of worked on and modified and executed over time, but we've always been in it together because we got started really early on.

It's harder when you get started later because you are already established. And I point that out only to emphasize that you might need to give this a little bit more gas than you might have otherwise to make sure the relationship gets up those initial hills. So just to summarize, among the many things are important, I'm not mentioning them all because I'm not an expert on marital advice. Of the many things that are important, to summarize, you need to be sacrificing non-trivial time and energy on behalf of this person. you need to be committed in serving this person. I know that sounds weird, but I came across this a lot, actually, in my research for digital minimalism about relationships in general. And it was one of the core ideas is that it's the actual sacrificing of time and energy

that tells your brain that this is a serious social connection. It's one of the problems when people engage in friendships only through low friction digital means. There's not enough sacrifice and time and attention if you're just doing emojis or comments on Instagram. And this is why people can feel paradoxically lonely, even though they're spending lots of time on quote-unquote social media tools. So I went deep on this research for that book,

and it applies doubly for a marriage relationship. It is in the sacrifice and in the commitment that it actually begins to feel like a serious, strong relationship, and then to build a shared vision of a life together. You've got to communicate about that. You've got to figure it out. And it has to involve where you live, how you work, what work looks like, what your free time looks like,

what is a shared vision of the deep life, what's our plan to get there, let's start executing together. You do those two things, Matt, I think you will do pretty well. Just don't mention that you got this advice for me. I do not think a 38-year-old computer science nerd with a podcast is the first thing

that comes to a lot of women's mind when they think about reliable sources of relationship guidance. Now, here's a fun one. Jennifer asked if you could design the ideal deep workspace anywhere in the world, what would it be like? Well, Jennifer, I love this question. I'm actually a sort of connoisseur slash collector of really interesting writer workspaces. I'm somewhat obsessed with full-time writers who move to really interesting places just for the aesthetic or cognitive inspiration they get from the location.

And so I don't know if I have a number one favorite, but I'll just mention, let me mention three writers set up in particular that I really love. One is David McCola's farm in Martha's Vineyard. I've mentioned this before on the podcast. They actually had the move a few years ago. He's very old now. And so they moved into an apartment into Back Bay in Boston to be near to family and to be on the mainland. But for most of his writing career, McCola lived on a farm. that had been passed down through his wife's family.

His wife was a longstanding family on Martha's Vineyard, and they had a farm on this island, and it was like 19th century or earlier, and you would walk this path through a gate in a stone wall, and he had a ridershed in a field, overlooking fields. I love the idea of farm fields and overlooking farm fields and just seeing trees beyond them as a location for writing. So that resonates.

nights. Another farm-based writer setup that I am impressed by is the nonfiction writer Simon Winchester's farm. It's in either central, I think it's maybe in western Massachusetts. And so Winchester, like a lot of these professional writers, he lives in the city. I think he lives in Manhattan during the winter months, and then during the summer months, he retreats to a farm where he does his writing. Again, like McCullough's farm, it's incredibly scenic vistas. He got a historical barn on his property, which he repurposed and refurbished. He goes out there to work. I think there's a woodburning stove in there. That's my ideal. Again, I don't know why. I just imagine the trees in the distance over the farm field coated with snow as I'm in my writer's barn,

and there is a woodburning stove going into writer's barn, and there's no internet in the barn, and the only thing I have to do that day is write and nap. That's a dream. The final farm work environment from an author, rather, that I really enjoy, is John Grisham's property in Charlottesville, Virginia. It's got a beautiful farmland there in Charlottesville, and there's

this outbuilding. It was the old kitchens. I mean, I guess it's a former plantation or something like this, but it had a, back then, you know, you would have separate buildings for the kitchens because you didn't want to burn down the house because you had all the fire in the kitchens. And he renovated that outbuilding, no internet.

and he did period renovations. That seems kind of cool. So he's in a sort of period room, and it's just him and his computer, and he goes there just to work. Those are probably three of my favorite, so I guess I am attracted to farmland for some reason when I think about deep working.

I have a bunch of runners up. I like Gothic or Victorian. So who am I thinking about here? Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman had a really cool Victorian house sort of with a lot of property in Minnesota. And he had a gazebo that he would ride in sometimes in a cool library that he had built into the house. That I really enjoy. I think he might have moved.

I mean, he has a position in residence, I think, at Bard College in New York. So he may have moved more permanently to New York. And then Stephen King had the cool, he had the cool Gothic Victorian house and Bangor Man. I guess he still has that. and I like that too. So like old and Gothic and Victorian, that's kind of interesting as well. I mean, I live in a Victorian house now,

so I sort of have tried to replicate that just at a sort of 10x less price point. So there you go, Jennifer. I love the daydream. I daydream so much about this that I don't have a single answer of this is the best, but there's few things that make me happier on a crowded day than enjoying a day

that is the exact opposite and a day that involves a hundred percent more farm fields in barns than my typical day does here in suburban D.C. All right. I think we have time for one more question here. This final one comes from Steve, who says, how can your strategies about deep work be used in character building? I recognize that living the deep life is a basic form of character building, but I am referring to things more specific, like working on one's temperament, relationships, integrity, etc. Do you think the strategies you write and talk about can be applied to those areas as well? and what would that look like practically?

Well, Steve, I think, yes, I think the deep life is enhanced by a systematic work at improving your character. The idea that character is something that has to be shaped and formed and optimized as an old one that goes back through multiple, both philosophical and theological traditions. the idea that a well-honed character then becomes the foundation for a life that is both resilient to bad events out of your control, but also a source of real impact and meaning. That is also an old idea that goes back through many threads inside theology and philosophy. If you want a modern secular take on this idea, I recommend David Brooks's book The Road to Character. and this book did surprisingly well for him, but it really shouldn't be a surprise.

I think there is a lot of hunger for this topic. The core idea in the road to character, which I found compelling, is this notion that character is something that you work hard at, that your life's work in some sense is to work hard at honing and optimizing and polishing your character. He does so through multiple, he elaborates that points through multiple historical case studies.

One quick aside about Brooks's book, You should probably also read that with his follow-up book, The Second Mountain, which he writes as a sort of reaction to the road to character. And it says sort of in addition to trying to just inwardly focus on yourself and your character and improve it, you also need to give of yourself to other people. That's the key also to a satisfying life. And that's true. There's more than just character. I think he's right to say that the focus exclusively on your character is a little bit inward. So maybe read a second mountain or the second mounted as a companion to that book.

But the underlying idea, I think, is key. you should be working on your character as part of the deep life. There's a couple different things you can do here that is relevant. One is habits and reflection on the daily scale. So at a particular point, you might be saying this is what I'm working on in terms of my character. And you see that every day and you remind yourself of that day. You know, I want to work on my temper. or I want to be, I want to have more conversations with people I care about that are listening

and not just me monologuing or talking about myself or whatever it is, right? You've identified aspects through reflection of your character and you identify that's what you want to work on. So you remind yourself, this is what I'm working on right now. In the Jewish Musar tradition, which I believe is a medieval Jewish tradition, which I'm fascinated by, they would identify, I think it was one or two character traits per month, and you would work on it for just the month. I don't have that exactly right, so I'm saying this off the top of my head, but basically they had different areas of character, and they would rotate through these different areas of character on the monthly scale. And I think, I forgot how many there were.

Maybe there's like four areas, so you would rotate through them three times per year. And when you got to a certain area, so when you're in a month dedicated to a particular category, category of character, then you would have specific action-based behaviors you would work on. And it was a constant training purpose, a constant training practice, rather, I think there's something to it. I actually do this myself. There's a component to my weekly plan that I call the value plan, or a VP for short. It is a component of my weekly plan every single week I put together. It says, here is what I'm working on this week from the perspective of trying to live to or to my values and improve my character.

The second thing that's important for inducing more character as a foundation for a deep life is you actually have to do the reflection. So you have to have time alone with your own thoughts in the world around you to just process what's happened in your life, to build a structure around it, to clarify what's important to you and what's not,

to clarify the intimations you feel from deep within about particular character traits. You feel that intimation of correctness or resonance, that little hint of inspiration when you think of an example of a particular trait being displayed. That's important.

You can't hear that inner voice if social media is yelling in your ear. You can't hear that inner voice if you're too impatient for the next episode button to auto fill on Netflix and you have to hit it forward. You can't hear that voice if your Slack channel is rock and rolling back and forth at all hours.

So you have to put aside time for reflection. It takes hard work. One of the ideas I had in digital minimalism was the importance of writing. I mentioned this earlier in the episode, writing letters to yourself as a way of structuring and organizing your thoughts. The written language has a lot more structure to it. And it helps you actually structure otherwise inco-hate intimations, inspirations, and feelings. it helps you take those and put them into some sort of coherent structure.

So you understand what matters, what character traits resonate, what you're trying to go for. So I recommend that. And that could be a journaling exercise. It could be something you do on a computer. It could be something that you go to the woods once a week and spend an hour. But you need that reflection component. Otherwise, you don't know what you are trying to develop.

Right. So we have habits. So you have specific habits. And daily, like I'm working on this. This is what I'm working on. You have reflection to figure out what you're working on. The third component, I would say, say is metrics. I talk about metric tracking all the time. There's a space in my time block planner

just for daily metric planning. Mainly we think about professional relevant metrics like sales calls made or number of hours of deep work accomplished, but you should also have character related metrics there. They should sync up with whatever character trait you're working on in the moment. So in the morning when you reflect, like this is what I've been working on recently. I'm working on having these better conversations. I'm working on my temper. Have something you can track. Did I have one of those calls today? How many outbursts did I have?

Or was there a moment today, how many diverted outbursts that I have today where I felt chemicals swell and I left the situation diffused it? Let me track that. So you make what you're trying to do concrete. You track it every day. The final thing you have to do

is you have to actually engage critically with examples and the world so that you can add more sophistication and nuance to your notion of what character means and why it's important and what it could entail. And that means you have to engage

with long-form content and in particular biography, for sure. Well-written biographies of people whose lives are rich with character. You need to expose and infuse that into your life until it gets down into your marrow. It allows you to actually more accurately articulate exactly what all of these

otherwise ambiguous intimations are. This is what resonates. And here is someone who represents what it's like to have that character. But also philosophy, also theology. You got to grapple with these things. You've got to do long-form content consumption. It's got to be a priority,

something that you're often doing some reading on. That is the grist to the mill of a fulfilling life. So Steve, that's a good question. My summary, I'll just summarize everything I just said, make it a priority, always have written down somewhere and some sort of character value plan

this is what I'm working on right now and that can rotate have particular metrics to track to make sure that hey I am actually keeping myself accountable am I practicing this particular character trade I want to get better at give yourself the solitude and time for reflection required to actually understand

what you want to improve and what's important to you and then supercharge that process by engaging with quality long form content consumption your life should be infused with examples of motivating character. That really matters. All right, so that's all the time we have for today's episode.

But thank you, everyone who sent in those questions. And thank you to this week's sponsors. Remember, my time block planner is available this week. You can find out more at timeblockplanner.com. Should be back on Thursday with the next habit tune-up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.