Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 44: Habit Tune-Up: Prioritizing Tasks, Balancing My Many Endeavors, and Resisting Radicalization

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

In this mini-episode, I answer audio questions from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Prioritizing tasks when you have too much to do [9:28]* Making the most of the weekend [18:53]* Balancing my academic and writing obligations [26:42]* Improving reading habits [35:25]* Resisting radicalization (sermon alert) [41:07]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I find that by Friday, I'm very cognitively drained. And on Saturday and Sunday, I kind of want to shut my mind down. And I end up kind of winging the weekend and not really being goal-oriented when it comes to socializing. I'm Cal Newport. And this is a deep questions, habit tune up mini episode. The format for this episode is that I take live questions from my listeners about how how to tune up their productivity habits in this time where our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. The big news for me this week is the release of my time block planner. It is now available

for purchase at the normal places that you buy books online, both here in the U.S. and in the U.K. I'm excited. Later this week, I am doing an event called the Time Block Academy. It was open to people who pre-ordered the planner. We have close to 2,000 people signed up to come to this virtual event where I am going to answer question after question about deep in the weeds productivity geekery involving the planner. Anyways, I'm excited about it. If you want to find out more, I put together a website, a standalone website, Time Block, planner.com. It introduces the idea of time blocking, why it's different than standard methods, and it has a really nice video I had produced where I explain exactly how the planner works and show myself using it. Now, this is in part to help explain the system to those of you who maybe listen to my podcast and know about it but want to learn more. But one of the real reasons I put together that website is to make it easy for you to explain what time blocking is to other people. We live in a sort of weird, deep work, deep questions,

study hacks, Cal Newport universe here where there's a lot of productivity geekery that we all sort of understand. We all speak the same language. Most people don't. And so timeblockplanner.com is like the cliff notes. If you want to quickly explain to someone, oh, here's what this new blue planner with the orange ribbon

that I'm always writing in, here is what it is and how it works and why I use it. is an easy way to convey that information. So I hope you enjoy it. I hope all of you who have received your planners this week are enjoying time blocking with it. I also wanted to briefly say thanks to everyone who has been continuing to write reviews for this podcast or rate it.

I really appreciate it. I think it's really helping this audience grow. We launched this podcast in late May. my goal was a million downloads by the new year, and it looks like we are on track for that. We're at a quarter, three quarters of a million downloads right now and closing in on roughly 200,000 downloads a month. So I thank you for that support.

Let me do a quick spotlight review here, because I haven't done this segment in a while. This one is from Ms. Raelle, and it's titled, This Shouldn't Be Free. I feel like I'm stealing something every time I listen the Cal's podcast. He is ridiculously smart, and these episodes are full of actionable suggestions to improve productivity and quality of life in general. I can't believe I get free advice and tips from a Georgetown professor, author, MIT grad, et cetera, et cetera. His math computer nerd doesn't

show as much as you'd think. Hey, Cal seems to be a very humble down-to-earth guy, one of my favorite podcast. Ms. Raelle, I appreciate that review. I appreciate you recognizing the great effort I have to expend to hide my inner nerd them. Folks, it's not easy, but I try. And thank you to everyone else leaving ratings and reviews. All right, we've got some good questions today. We've got some questions about productive leisure, task prioritization when you have too much to do, getting more out of the reading you need to do, and how to work with managing large teams in a way that remains productive. So I'm excited to dive in. Before we do, let me briefly take a moment to thank some of the sponsors that make this podcast possible.

I've been talking recently about Optimize. Optimize is a subscription service in which you get access to detailed summaries of some of the most important books in the history of philosophy and self-development. you get access to master classes, including one I taught on digital minimalism, and a daily dose of wisdom called Plus Ons. As I mentioned earlier this week, they also have a coaching program. It's called Optimized Coach. It's virtual, and it takes you through a year-long program of how to optimize all aspects of your life and be certified as a coach who could then teach

the core principles are optimized to other people. Two interesting things I wanted to mention about the optimized coach program. First of all, over 2,000 people have gone through it. According to Optimize this data, half of them did it just for themselves. They didn't actually plan to use their certification to set up a practice. They actually just wanted to push their game, push the quality of their life to an extreme.

The other thing I wanted to mention about this program is that after they went through their first class of a thousand optimizers from over 50 countries, they set out to do a research study of how effective their program was. And they did this study, they designed it with Sonia Leiberski, very famous positive psychologist. She wrote the how of happiness and the myths of happiness. Her team put together a detailed quantitative survey method to see, before and after did go into this program, take the optimized coaches and improve the quality of their life,

did it lead to lasting changes? The way their research lead described the results were, quote, massively positive. Another quote from the research team that the CEO of Optimized Ford in me said, the effect sizes were huge. They were all around Pearson correlations of 0.6. which is, quote, unheard of, end quote. Which is all to say, Optimize has the goods.

Their philosopher, monk, CEO, Brian Johnson, knows what he's talking about. And Optimize Coach is for those who want to push these ideas to an extreme in their life. The sign-up happens now. Go to Optimize.combe. slash coach dash letter to find out more about how to join

and what the program actually does. That's Optimized. Dot Me slash coach dash letter to find out more about Optimized Coach and let them know Cal sent you. Another longtime sponsor of the Deep Questions Podcast is Grammarly.

I have been enthusing recently about the Grammarly Premium product. And the reason why I am is that it will make you sound like a professional writer. Clear communication, of course, is essential, not just for expressing yourself to other people, but understanding even how you think on your own.

The clearer you're right, the clearer your understanding of your thoughts. Grammarly premium goes beyond just helping you correct grammar mistakes, which is important, by the way. Nothing is going to flag you as an amateur more than grammar mistakes, but it actually has the ability to improve the clarity and vocabulary of your writing. That type of close editing attention that most professional writers get from professional editors. Now you have access to it. Gramerly Premium runs on all of your various applications

and on all of your various devices. It sits back there like a professional copy editor, always looking over your shoulder. It's going to help you express yourself more clearly. it's going to help you think more clearly. So you should elevate your writing with 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off Grammarly Grammarly Premium at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep.

Accessed that URL on your desktop and not your phone for some reason that URL does not like your phone, but you will like the service. All right, let's dive into some questions. This first one is about prioritizing work when you have too much to do. Hi, Cal. My name's Linnae. Thank you for your work.

It's been really helpful to me. I'm a family lawyer, and I always have in a given day more tasks than I can complete. My question is about prioritizing, and if you have any tips on how to do that, So I have started time blocking and I found that to be really effective and helpful in my productivity. And often there are clear tasks and work that need to be done that I go to the top of the list because they have a deadline and they need to be done sooner rather than later.

But then I'll often have a surplus of work on various files that are all about equal in terms of urgency. and I have trouble deciding what to do and in what order when I have, I know I have more than I can do in a given day. And I find just that mental energy I spend trying to decide what to do next is draining. Well, Renee, this is a good question because this is a point that we don't always discuss that much, which is the cognitive toll of productivity overhead. That is what it cost us to actually do the organization of the work that we actually ultimately have to get done. Now, the cost of choosing what to work on next, this was somewhat famously a blind spot in David Allen's original Getting Things Done methodology. He had this notion where you had these long list of next actions, concrete actions with no ambiguity, ranged by context.

And then the idea was, when you're in a given context, you just look at the list of next actions for that context. Choose one and execute. Then choose another and execute. But what is missing there is that sometimes it can be quite difficult or, as you say, draining to make those decisions time and again. And it can often sometimes lead even to a bit of a mental gridlock in which your mind escapes to, well, let's just do email or look at online news or just take a break

because I don't want to confront that complexity. So what are some better ways of avoiding that gridlock, reducing the overhead of choosing these tasks? Well, I have two things to recommend. On the scale of individual days, I would dive deeper into time blocking. You mentioned that you're doing some time blocking, but if you're doing some time blocking, but if you're doing more of a full-throated time block approach, you are essentially trying to consolidate these decisions to the beginning of the day.

Here's what I'm doing with every hour of my day. I'm making those decisions once in the beginning. And then as I go through the day, I'm just executing. So I'm not having to keep saying, okay, well, what do I want to work on next? What do you want to work on next? You figured that all out at 8 in the morning or 9 in the morning when you built your time block plan for the day. Now, of course, if you get knocked off your plan, you'll have to next time you get a chance,

correct your time block schedule or build a new time block schedule for the time that remains in the day. And if you have to do this a lot, you may still end up having to make a fair amount of decisions throughout your day about what to work on. But there's ways to minimize schedule corrections, even if your work, as I think it often is with this type of law, even if your work is somewhat unpredictable. So in the introduction to my time block planner, I actually get into some strategies. This is like a little known thing. I haven't really emphasized it,

but the planner is more than a planner. It also has a mini-productivity guide in the beginning, which is leading to some really interesting. This is an aside, Blenay, it's leading to some really interesting things happening with the launch of this planner. So it's a planner, and yet we sold the first and second serial rights.

essentially excerpt writes for a planner. And so like the joke was, okay, are these publications going to, you know, publish the blank planner for week one and week two. And another publication will publish the blank pages for week four. But actually what was going on is I have a non-trivial productivity guide in the beginning of the planner. Similarly, the Financial Times put this planner on their list of sort of most interesting or business books to watch for this month,

and it's not a book, it's a planner. But I think what they're talking about is that introductory material. All right, that's an aside. What I mean to say is that one of the ideas in that introductory materials there's advice for how to build flexible time block schedules that will compensate for unpredictable work

without requiring a complete fix to the schedule. One of the ideas in there, for example, are conditional blocks, where you schedule the time, think a given task is going to take? And then you have a block afterwards. That's conditional that says, okay, if the task that proceeds this takes longer than I expected, this conditional block should be dedicated to finishing that task. If I finish, however, that task in the time allocated or somewhere in the middle of this conditional block, here's the fallback thing to do

with the remainder of the time. So now you don't have to nail exactly how long an unpredictable effort is going to take, you can have a relatively wide range and still have your various options pre-planned so that you don't have to actually change your corrected schedule if your original estimate is not exactly right. So Lenday, there's tips like that to keep your schedule pretty consistent, so you don't have to do too many changes. And if you're not having to do too many changes, you are now consolidating this thinking about what do I want to work on today to one point in the day. And I think the real problem with the cognitive overhead is not that it is radically draining in an absolute sense to think about what you want to work on next. I think it

just causes a pretty pronounced cognitive network switching effect. So if you keep having to go back and think about your schedule, you are causing a traffic jam in your brain. You're touching on all sorts of different work-related topics all at once, and then it's very hard to pull your concentration back to what you're going to work on next. So if you consolidate that thinking to the beginning of their day, you might have a hard time getting started, right, because of the network switching costs to get started after you do that thinking. But then once you've cleared that network switching cost, you're now good to go for the rest of the day. So I think that's why that's particularly effective. The second thing I would recommend is doing a little bit more work with your weekly plan.

So when you're doing a weekly plan, you're trying to get a sense of of what do I want to accomplish this week? But also, this is a good time to put in place some heuristics. You know, I often do things like this, and it's very ad hoc. It's not a set rule how I do this, but I'll often say, all right, here's a particular project I need to make progress on. So let me put in place a heuristic about when and how I'm going to do that this week. One hour every morning, my first hour of the day is going to be working on X.

Every day at lunch, I'm going to expand my lunch from 20 minutes to an hour. And during the lunch break, I'll be doing the background reading for why, et cetera, right? So you might want to, or might have some success deploying this approach with some of your work during the week. You see there are certain cases that you want to make progress on. There are certain background reading that has to be done. You don't want to have to keep figuring out every day. All right, when am I going to do this? How am I going to do this?

You know, put in place some heuristics, some regular rules for how, how, how, and when you're going to work on certain things that you can just put in place and say, I just follow that real blindly for this week, and it will ensure extra progress. Like, for example, a heuristic I have been using this week is I have some regularly scheduled meetings with my research collaborators on several projects I'm working on at Georgetown, a theoretical computer science papers. I have a simple meeting where I add an hour to every meeting. So after each meeting, there'll be an hour immediately following it or an hour immediately preceding it

when I just do deep work on the problem discussed in the meeting. It's a simple heuristic, but because I have a lot of those meetings this week, it's making sure that I get a automatically a lot more deep work done without me having to actually fight for it every day in my schedule. So those are my recommendations, Linnae. The overhead is killing you because of the context switching costs, so you want to consolidate it. So do more serious time blocking where you're making all those decisions as much as possible

in the beginning of the day. Use heuristics in your weekly plan to also reduce the amount of thinking you have to do in the moment about what should I do and how am I going to get it done. Our next question is about what happens when you're done with work. Hey, Cal, this is Charlie from Atlanta, Georgia. I've often heard you use the analogy that someone that cares deeply about their physical fitness would not eat healthy and work out for six days and then binge on the seventh. For me, as a public school teacher, here in Atlanta, I find that by Friday, I'm very cognitively drained,

and on Saturday and Sunday, I kind of want to shut my mind down, and I end up kind of of winging the weekend and not really being goal-oriented when it comes to socializing. I'm wondering if you have any tips for me to somewhat structure my weekend so I can have goals as far as leisure time and socializing, but also still not time block and still have a somewhat non-work-feeling environment. Thank you. So Charlie, let's first talk about the analogy with which you opened your question. I don't know that I commonly use that exact formulation. There are two somewhat similar analogies I use between the world of athletics and physical health and the world of cognitive health.

And maybe it's worth clarifying what they are. The first one that I used as similar to that is this notion that you don't typically see people who are serious, let's say, athletes. train very hard when they're training during the day, and then when they go home, eating terribly and drinking a lot, knocking a lot of sleep. The idea being that athletes realize what they do even outside of their athletic endeavors matters because general physical fitness matters to do well in that world.

The analogy is to the world of cognitively demanding work. If during the day, you're very locked in, you're very scheduled, you're doing deep work, that's great. But if you go home and then use, let's say, like social media on your phone without restriction, not the slightest hint of boredom, you're glancing at screens, you're letting algorithms select things that are hyper palatable and pleasing and distracting. That is sort of the cognitive equivalent of smoking and eating junk food after a hard day in the gym.

The other related analogy I use, and this might be one of the ones you have in mind, is that in other types of behaviors, when we look at other types of behaviors where people unhappy with the impact of that behavior in their life, let's say overeating or too much alcohol consumption, you're never going to hear someone say, oh, here's my plan. On Saturday, I'm going to eat real healthy. On Saturday, I'm not going to drink. Like, that's not going to solve the problem. If the other six days you are taking one day off, like, what is that going to help? And I use that analogy to push back against some of these digital Shabbat-style pieces of advice where people say, I'm so exhausted from my devices, they make me feel miserable.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a day off each week. And it's not going to solve the problem. That's crazy. If something is a source of misery in your life, if something is a source of unhappiness, taking a short break on a regular basis is not going to solve the problem anymore than eating salads on Saturday. is going to cure your chronic overeating or taking a night off from drinking is going to be helpful for your alcoholism.

So I don't know, those are two analogies I do use and they might be what you have in mind. All right, so let's look at your particular problem making the most out of the weekend without the weekend feeling too much like work. Well, it's true, I do recommend do not time block your time outside of work and in particular, do not time block your weekend.

You will burn out. it's too much structure you do need some break from that type of structure so I think you're right about that on the other hand this idea of having no plan or no structure I think is overrated

our mind gets excited by this notion of like well I'm glad I have nothing scheduled for tomorrow I like this idea that I can just wake up and just do what I want to do and it's going to be great to just wing it

The problem is when we wing a day, we rarely end up happy. Our mind, our physiology, our psychology, enjoys doing meaningful, useful activity. And so if we just sit around, let me watch some Netflix and look at my phone, and maybe I'll eat some junk, and then maybe I'll look at my phone some more, have some drinks, like you end the day just feeling, ugh, you do not feel better. So we have to find a middle ground where you don't have your time block planner out,

you know, Saturday afternoon while you're mowing the yard, uh, using conditional blocks in case the weed whacking takes longer than planned. Like, we don't want to be there. But on the other hand, you don't want to just have your feet up, having afternoon beers on hour seven of mindless Netflix binging. So what's the middle ground between there?

Well, I think it's useful to figure out for your day, what's my big rock? Like, what's the big thing I want to do today? It's enough to be productive. It could be a social, thing, right? Like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm hanging out with my friends. We're going to go mountain biking or whatever, or we're going to have drinks or whatever it is, right? You have some sort of big rock or two planned. I'm going to go on a hike and going to paint the garage, like, whatever it is. And then you can have more of like an old-fashioned to do list style list of like, and here's a bunch of little things that like this would be nice to make progress on some of these things. And if maybe if one of them or two of them is crucial, like I have to go drop this thing off. And on the store today, then you might put a star by, but you have some sense of like,

yeah, here's the type of things I'd like to get done. And then you go through your day with some structure. You have your big rock plans. You're given some thought that, like, what's one or two big things I can do that's going to be impactful or meaningful or interesting or intentional? And then you have some smaller things you want to make progress on. And you can kind of choose which ones you want to work on and you can take some breaks. You don't have to overly schedule it, but you have some structure.

That, I think, is the right middle ground. The thing I think that exhaust us about time blocking is the time process. pressure. This is also what makes time blocking very effective from a productivity standpoint, but this sense of I got to stay focused on what I'm doing. Ooh, I'm running out of time. I got to step it up. Got to get this done. All right, I got it done. Oh, no, I'm out of time on this. That is demanding. And it's something that you do need a break from. It's why you don't time block your evenings. That's why you don't time block your weekend. So by going to something like I'm suggesting here where you have one or two big rocks identified and a loose list of other

things you might want to try to get done and use that as a guide to your day. What you're avoiding is having actual time limits on things. What you're avoiding is any sort of time pressure, any sort of sense of this has to get done or I'm behind on my schedule. Again, that's the pressure that can induce a huge amount of productivity when deployed strategically during your workday, but you don't need that at night and you don't need that on the weekend. So I think that balance, will work. I think you will find that your weekends are meaningful, but also a bit of a relief from your everyday work, which will be a lot more focused. All right, this next question is about how I balance my academic and non-academic work. Hi, Cal, this is Rhone from Las Vegas. I'm a fellow

university professor with 72 jobs and my own business interests on the side. And I was wondering if you could speak to how you utilize your productivity system specifically in the case of balancing your academic work with your business interests and your entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks. Well, Roan, this is something that I'm very careful about. Well, first of all, I want to emphasize that unlike some academics with other initiatives going on, I do not run anything that remotely looks like a standard business. I have no staff, there is no payroll I pay, and I'm fanatical more generally about trying to get the ratio

of time spent producing things to overhead as large as possible. I'm happy, for example, to give up money in exchange for reducing overhead. When I do speaking, I have a speaking agency that handles all of the details. The advertisement, on this podcast. I have an advertising agency. They find the advertisers. They figure everything out.

They get all the information to me. They organize it for me. I'm happy to give a cut of the revenue, so I don't have to think about that. My time block planner, this was published by my publisher, because I had no interest in the overhead required to try to, let's say, generate that as a product that was being produced by a company that I owned where I would have to handle more of the work. So I'm always looking for ways to keep the overhead low so I can spend more time actually producing. I also automate as much as possible. And by automate, I mean a scheduling perspective.

Like I do this podcast, but I have it down to a science. I know when I record it, how long it's going to take what steps are required to get ready to do it. I've minimized unnecessary overhead and I just execute when the time comes. is not a major footprint on my schedule. When I know it advanced, I leave this much hours for the primary episode

and this much time for the secondary episode, and I've got the whole process of researching and prepping down to a minimum of wasted effort. It ends up as a small footprint in my schedule. The goal I was going for with this podcast, which I probably came pretty close to meeting, is that in the spring I was teaching two courses, but in the fall, this fall I'm only teaching one course,

and I wanted essentially the time required to produce this podcast to fall into basically what a single course would take, as if I was just replacing one course worth of teaching with the podcast. So I had a goal. I want to get the footprint small. And there's decisions I made in this podcast that kept the footprint small. The other thing I'm doing, Roan, is that I have been finding and exploiting more conciliants between my different endeavors. So yes, I'm a writer and yes, I'm a professor. But what I write about is relevant to my academic work. I am a computer scientist, which means I'm an academic technologist. As a writer, I often write about the intersection between technology and culture. That makes a lot of sense. I do academic work on technology. I do public-facing work about the

impact of these technologies. I give speeches about this information at my university, to alumni, to parents, to various groups on. campus. I've talked about all these issues with various administration officials at the university who are very interested. They see it as part of my academic work. So that is important to me as well. So while it's true, I do produce a lot as a writer that's not exactly core computer science research. I've done what I've can to make that not a problem. And so to summarize, there is no complicated business I run. There is not a lot of overhead I'm doing. I am spending a lot of my time just creating, writing, thinking, writing as much as possible,

or recording in the context of the podcast. A lot of what I'm doing overlaps what I'm doing as an academic, and I'm increasingly trying to solidify those bonds. So all this is to say, Rome, that you have to be very wary here. If you do want to start something that looks more like a traditional business, where you have staff, where you're on sales calls, where you're dealing with advertisers or investors. That is a huge time commitment. And it is something that would be difficult to do while a full-time academic. And I recognize that and have worked backwards from that to make sure that

all the different work I do, all 72 of those jobs, to the extent that it is possible actually stays well enough automated, well enough optimized and well enough related, that it is still tractable. I want to step briefly away from the questions to talk about purple. Makers of the world famous purple mattress and purple pillow. As I emphasize on this podcast, I am a sleep nerd. I care a lot about mattress technology because, A, I'm a hot sleeper. So whether or not a mattress is good at wicking away heat matters, I'm also, as my wife says,

a zombie sleeper. When I fall asleep, I will stay in that position without moving till the morning, which means if the mattress is not giving me the right support, I will be sore. And I have sent back mattresses because of this issue. This is why I pay attention to mattress technology, and it is why I love purple. Their purple grid technology solves both those problems. It is like an open cell, I don't know what you would call it, some sort of space age rubber grid.

And it works. It has over 1,800 open air channels that helps with a hot sleeping. It has give, but not too much give. So it helps with my zombie sleeping. You order it right on the internet. It couldn't be simpler. You return it. No questions asked if you don't like it.

It's mattress shopping made easy with a mattress technology that gets the job done. So to experience the Purple Grid and sleep like you never have before, go to purple.com slash deep 10 and use promo code deep 10, the number 10, not the letters. For a limited time, you'll get 10% off any order of $200 or more. That's purple.com slash deep 10. promo code deep 10, the numbers 1.0. For 10% off any order of $200 or more terms apply. I also want to talk briefly about Indeed.

If like me your reaction to the uncertainty of the last year has been to go into hustle mode. And if you run a traditional style business, hustling means hiring. And hiring is not easy, especially during these uncertain times. That's why you need Indeed.com. It is the number one job site in the world. It has more total visits than any other jobs. site according to ComScore. Unlike other sites, it will give you full control and payment flexibility over your hiring. You only pay for what you need. You can pause your account at any time. There's no

long-term contracts. Trust me, as someone who has had to temporarily hire people before, I know the frustrations of a lot of job sites. That is a big deal that you have that control and flexibility. They have now introduced a new way of matching you with candidates that instantly delivers a short-list list of quality candidates who resumes on Indeed match your job criteria, and you are able to contact them the moment you sponsor your job. This is the only job site that will give you results that fast. So right now, Indeed is offering our listeners a free $75 credit to boost your job post, which means more quality candidates. We'll see it. Try Indeed out with a free $75 credit at Indeed.com slash questions. This is their best offer.

available anywhere. Go right now to Indeed.com slash questions. This offer is valid through December 31st. Terms and conditions apply. Let's move on now with a question about getting the most out of reading. Hi, Cal. My name is Tran and I work as a data scientist. Now I want to learn more about a system you use to maximize what you can get out of reading or listening to books. What I'm referring to here could be things like how do you schedule reading sessions in your day, how much time do you investing this, and at what time in a day do you typically read? Well, I have to be somewhat careful in answering this question because my approach to reading probably doesn't generalize too broadly. I mean, as a professional nonfiction writer whose style is characterized by synthesizing many disparate sources of information ideas and philosophy into contrarian or unexpected takes on issues of concern, I have to read a lot. I mean, basically, it is a big part of my job to read a lot.

So I want to be a little bit careful in answering because if you were talking, for example, to a professional athlete and said, well, what's your workout? What's your workout routine like? Because you seem really strong. And I want to be in better shape. It would be, my answer would probably be, well, my workout routine might not be that relevant because being very, very strong is sort of at the core what I do for a living. So what I think I'm going to do, instead of talking too much about how I read, which is all the time,

I'm going to talk about how I think in general someone who wants to foster a good personal and professional reading habit should do so. Typically, I recommend for a personal reading habit two chapters a day. You should track this. If you use my time block planner, there's a metric space on the daily pages for every day.

Have a metric where you write down every day how many chapters you read. I think two chapters a day is enough to be useful, enough to require you to actually expend some effort, but tractable enough that you can actually do it. Having regular general times when you read helps. Lunch hour reading is a good hack. You get a half hour or a chapter in surrounding lunch.

I think that's a really good way also to reset all of the cognitive residue in your brain from whatever you were working on before lunch so that when you return to a problem after lunch, your mind is more fresh. Evening reading is good. you know, make that part of your evening routine. A particular place you go, a particular chair you sit in, a particular drink, be it tea or alcoholic or whatever, you know, whatever your poison happens to be, but it's something that you associate with relaxing. If you're up early, early morning reading is good. I've seen some interest recently in basically commute reading.

People who are temporarily working at home because of the pandemic, basically being able to repurpose the time they would have normally spent commuting to reading someplace restful, like out on their porch or if it's in winter and whatever their equivalent is of my big leather chair. I think that works well. It's simple, but it's enough to really inculcate that habit. Now, when it comes to professional reading, to keep this question appropriate for the habit tune-up mini-episode format, when it's professional reading, things you need to read that is directly relevant to your job.

It's going to make you better at your job. Treat that seriously. When I say treat it seriously, I mean it should have time blocks in your time block schedule. You need to put aside time for doing the reading. I think too often because we think of reading as a leisure pursuit, when it comes to professional reading, we just sort of think, well, I'll get that done at some point. Like that's not real work. I'm not actually writing an email that someone's going to read. I'm not writing a report that I'm going to have to submit.

There's no direct artifact generated from this effort that other people are going to be. to see, so it's not something I'm going to put time aside for. It's just something I'll magically hope gets done. You need to resist that urge for professional-related reading. Schedule time like you would for a meeting, like you would for an appointment, find a location that's going to be conducive to concentration, maybe different than the location where you check email, maybe have a ritual you do before you start reading to clear out attention residue and to switch your mind into focus mode. But treat it seriously. It is a cognitively demanding task, especially in the professional context. It needs time. It needs attention. It needs cognitive isolation. So make it a tier one

activity. So to summarize, those are my two pieces of advice. In your personal life, you should be hitting two chapters a day. Having regular times and locations will help. In your professional life, you need to treat professional relevant reading as seriously as any other professional activity. give it set times, protect that time, treat that time seriously when you get there. I'm going to do one more question. This will be a little bit of a deviation from the standard format here. It's not really a work-related question. Usually in the habit Tuneutmini episode, we focus on productivity specifically.

But I thought this question seemed very relevant for the current time, and there's something useful or powerful to hear the actual voice of the person asking it. So though I would typically tackle a question like this during the normal full-length deep questions podcast format, because it came in as a voice question, I thought I would throw it in to today's episode. Hi, Cal, my name is Laura, and I do not have a productivity question. I have a radicalization question. In episode 35, you talked about the difference between knowledge and information, and I was hoping you could expand on that difference a bit more and give some advice to people who are trying to either de-radicalize themselves, deprogram themselves, or prevent themselves from becoming radicalized. That last part of Episode 35 resonated particularly deeply with me because I recently cut off contact with some close family members who have become more and more radicalized in their political and religious beliefs over the past few years.

And I'm trying to identify where I have also fallen victim to that and just be more self-aware about it and try to remedy it. Well, Laura, this is certainly a timely question. Given all of the things happening in the national landscape here in the U.S., in recent weeks and in recent months, there is clearly a lot of heated debate. There is a lot of entrenchment. There is a lot like you are experiencing in your own life right now of people cutting off ties with those who used to be close to them. So it is a good time, I think, to talk about things, such as the difference between information and knowledge, as I mentioned in an earlier episode. So let me just briefly elaborate as you requested.

The difference between information and knowledge is information is stuff you've heard or learned about an issue. Knowledge is a deep understanding of that issue as a whole. So if you have information about a topic, you know some things about it. If you have knowledge of a topic, you understand the topic as a whole really well, and you have a very confident intellectual foundation on which to approach that topic. Now, the way you get knowledge, the way you get knowledge, at least in my opinion, is that you have to apply the Socratic dialectical type approach. you have to, first of all, read broadly on the topic.

You have to read the best things written on the topic. So you understand all the different relevant information. So you have a particular view on something. You have a particular philosophy, something that seems maybe right to you. You want to read and make sure you understand the thing that you support. Don't use the tweet size condensed version. Actually get the information you need to understand what is this thing that feels right to me. What is this thing I think I support?

Then comes the dot. dialectical part, which is the difficult part. You have to go find and encounter the best possible counter argument, the best attack, the best good faith attack on that point of view. And then if possible, also find the best possible alternative approach to whatever the issue is, the best alternative philosophy, the best alternative take on an issue and study that as well. When these three things collide, what happens is your roots of understanding start to spread deeper. It is in that dialectical collision that you really come to understand an issue from all sides. You really understand deep down why it's right, where the challenges are, where the weak spots are, but how you get around

it or why it's worth moving past those weak spots to get at some sort of fundamental equality core. You get confidence in your belief. You have sophistication and nuance in your belief, allowing you to apply it to complex or unforeseen or novel situations. Knowledge is the basis on which you actually take action on an important issue in your life. Now, two things I want to say about it. One, the notion of knowledge can make people uncomfortable. If the issue at hand is one in which you feel very strongly, you have a very strong, let's say moral intuition about what's You have a very strong moral intuition that this particular way of understanding, this particular philosophy, this is right.

To then confront, to then confront an alternative. And not a straw man sort of polemical, easily dismissed type alternative, but a really well thought through alternative. Something that's really critiquing or trying to undermine or take down the particular thing that feels so right to, it can feel at first as if this is somehow a betrayal. that you are betraying the underlying moral principles at play here, by even engaging with or giving oxygen to an alternative approach, it is if you are signaling to yourself that you don't take these moral principles seriously. And I want to say, Lord, that that is not the reality.

It is actually the ultimate sign of respect for a given issue or understanding or philosophy that you are willing and able to encounter and engage the best possible counterarguments. because you know that is going to deepen your knowledge. It's going to strengthen your foundation. It's going to make you a stronger, fiercer, a more effective advocate for what you intuitively know to be true. So that's the first thing I want to say, Laura, is you need to resist that sense that letting in the bad information is somehow a moral failing.

That letting in the bad information is somehow endorsing those who feel like to you at this moment as if they're enemies. It is not. It is how you strengthen what you understand. And the stronger you understand something, the more effective you're going to be. So that's the first point I want to make. The second point I want to make is what happens if you don't have knowledge? What happens if you're just dealing with information? The information that you like. The information that most takes that moral intuition and amplifies it. Gives you a sense of righteousness, gives you a sense of purpose,

selective consumption of information. If that is your only encounter with an issue, you're going to end up a tribe member. You're going to end up in tribal warfare. When all you have is the information that feels right, you go to battle. And it becomes the victories that matter. It becomes the not-giving ground that matters.

You become more extreme. You become, as you were worried about, in the original wording of your question, Laura, you become ripe for radicalization. Those who are instead coming from a place of knowledge are people who are fighting on behalf of truth, whatever that happens to mean. And those fighting on behalf of truth, as we know throughout history, throughout the history of ideas, throughout the history of religion, from the prophets to the great philosophers, those who are fighting on behalf of truth, they feel very different. Their efforts feel very different than those of the tribes.

Their efforts have a foundation that last. Their efforts are the type of efforts that we look back later and say, that is human beings at its best. And it feels very different than the tribal effort of, I hate you, let's do war. When you come at it as, I know this thing as much as I've known anything, and I'm going to act on that.

Now I'm going to explain that and act on that and try to make that real in the world is something deeper. Something deeper. I mean, look back at the racial unrest of the Jim Crow South. The Bull Connor characters were acting on information. The stuff they liked, the stuff that made them feel better, the stuff that made them feel like, I am a righteous person who am fighting against something that I don't like, and that feels good, and I like it. Where do they end up? They ended up with fire hoses and attack dogs, and we look back at them historically and say that was not, that was a vile human.

Martin Luther King had knowledge in that particular context. He understood what he was saying down into the marrow of his bones, and that showed in his action. and it showed in the impact he had. So that's just one example of, of course, many, but there's a difference. If you just stick with information, it feels good in the moment, but you end up tribal

and not good things happen when you're tribal that points you towards radicalization. When you're coming from a place of knowledge where you really understand your idea, you understand it deeply, you understand the best counterattacks, you know where the weak spots are, you know where the strong parts are,

you know the nuance, you know how to apply it to novel, unexpected situations. You are coming then from a place of wisdom, then you can actually have real impact. And that is why I push this, because I do get this feedback a lot that I'm somehow betraying something

if I leave the zones of supporting information, but you're not. You're actually showing a true commitment. So to make this advice practical, Laura, on the things that are important to you, and we have to filter down to the things that are really important because developing knowledge is very time-consuming, so you can't just do this about everything.

You've got to really filter down to the things that feel very important to you in your life. And you've got to put in the effort. You've got to read deeply on this topic. You have to gather the relevant information. Then you need to conflict it with the best possible critiques. You need to look at the best possible alternative. Let those things collide, build some knowledge.

And then you'll be ready to do some good. You might also then be ready to perhaps open up that gate to your family a little bit more. One of the deepest ideas of all that. Abrahamic religions, an idea that ended up being at the foundation of modern ethics, an idea that's incredibly radical but we now take it for granted, is this notion of all people being created in God's image. Now, if you take that from a purely theological context and move it into a moral ethical context, what that is saying is something that is really important and something that we didn't

used to think in our human history. Everyone has worth and everyone has dignity. You cannot essentialize people and therefore discard. You cannot say, well, because of the religion you have, because of the tribe you belong to, because of the color of your skin, because of whatever,

you're from this country, not from this country, that you are less. And so you can be imprisoned, you can be enslaved, you can be executed, all the things we used to do thousands and thousands of years ago where we did not have this notion that all people were made in God's image, and we cannot just say, well, because of this aspect of you, you are now less than this person, and we can treat you as such. I think that's a useful lesson even for today. I mean, I get that tempers are high.

I get that your family members are spouting things that goes completely against what you think is right. but also keep in mind who knows they're probably they're scared or they're uncertain or they're confused or they're angry and they don't know why they're angry and they're getting information and they don't have much knowledge they're getting information

and there's kind of a couple different responses here right? There's the tribal response well I have my information and yours is obviously wrong and therefore you were wrong and I can't possibly have in my life someone who is wrong or there's the knowledge response the knowledge-based response, which is, I think you're wrong.

I think you know I think you're wrong. I think you know and see in the way that I live and act and talk that I sort of think and know deeply about the things I know about, but also I love you. And I'm not going to completely shut you out of my life. What do you think is going to be more effective? If it's just tribe versus tribe, then backs go up. Okay, well, now they are, now Laura is not talking to us. And so, well, we got to, we got to reduce dissidence here.

can't be possibly because we did something wrong, so now we're going to, in our minds, we are going to make Laura into something even worse, and then we don't want to talk to her either. No one's changing. Nothing's been solved. But if you come into that relationship with knowledge, it radiates. When people have true wisdom, and they understand the subtleties and the nuances of things, they understand the different approaches, they have a deep intellectual,

platform, it radiates. And them willing to say, I think you're wrong about this, and I have a different view and if I feel very strongly about, but I still love you, and I am not going to essentialize you to these views. I'm not going to say, you are those views and because that I dismiss you, you are going to have probably a much more positive impact than even if you don't. I think it's just better for the world that you are probably not cut off from your family. Now, I don't know the situation, so I'm just talking here more abstractly, but I think similar

type of decisions are being made around the country right now. And I think it's worth talking about. The other thing that happens with knowledge is that that urge to punish to avoid intellectual impurity, to avoid the sense of betrayal if I interact with someone who believes the wrong things, it diminishes when you live a fully rounded intellectual life in which you are constantly, you are constantly encountering the best ideas that go against the things you believe in. You become much more comfortable with dissent. You feel much less threat.

You feel much less threat by a differing view. You are much less likely to take someone who has a little bit of information and for whatever reason they're clinging to it and try to essentialize them, to make them the personification of a sort of purified evil version of the things that you dislike. Some people really are Bull Connor. Most are just bullheaded. Some people really are radical anarchist. Most are just idealistic.

All right, so Laura, I've gone way out of my lane here. I don't know any of the details of your situation. So this is more of a using your situation like an abstraction against which I'm doing some generalized risks. But just a step back, here's the general thing I'm trying to say here. Don't stop it information, go all the way to knowledge on the things that you really care about. It is not a betrayal. It is actually a sign of commitment. It's going to make you a better advocate for the things that matter.

It is also going to help you avoid maybe some of these situations in which people that you do care about end up cut out of your life in a way that in the end is going to cause more harm than good. So, Laura, I hope that was useful. And for the rest of the habit tune up listeners, I hope you will excuse this quick exegesis on a topic that falls slightly outside of the normal categories tackled here in the habit tune up mini episode. But it just felt like something that would be productive. See, connection to the world of work.

Productive to talk about. All right. That is all the time we have for. today. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. You can submit your own voice question at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. Thank you to our sponsors. Remember, if you want to find out more about this time blocking nonsense we keep talking about here on the podcast, you can do so at timeblock planner.com. It will be back next week with a full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.