Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 49: Organizing Massive Projects, Taming IM, and Exploring the Deep Life Canon

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about organizing massive projects, taming IM, and elaborating the books I would include in the Deep Life Canon.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can also 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:DEEP DIVE: The Deep Reset, Part 1WORK QUESTIONS - The limits of deliberate practice? [12:09] - Getting started on massive projects. [20:11]  - Social media and the dissemination of academic research. [25:04] - Digital time blocking. [31:59] - My opinion on GTD-style contexts. [35:50]   - When a job requires social media use. [40:01] TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Taming IM. [42:13] - How to attend online classes. [50:08] - Breaking a YouTube addiction. [1:00:30] - Controlling heavy RSS use. [1:03:40] - On the phenomenology of technology. [1:06:31] DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Deciding when to give up on a book [1:12:25]. - Dealing with an overwhelming amount of advice. [1:14:05] - Living deeply in high school. [1:17:30]  - The Deep Life Canon. [1:23:47]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. We'll start with quick announcements. In this week's episode, I am trying a new opening segment that I call Deep Dive. The idea is there are certain topics that are interesting to this audience but are maybe too complex or too general to be handled in the answer to a single question. So I like the idea of using the opening of my shows to explore these topics, maybe dedicating multiple episodes to exploring the topic, like we did earlier this fall when we discussed household productivity. So we'll give this a try and see if we like it. We will do our first deep dive segment today. I am videotaping

this segment. My hope is I can then post online in one place and one playlist all of the videos for a particular deep dive so that you can go back later and watch the segments one after another. So we'll see if we like this. We'll see if this works. For our very first deep dive segment, I want to tackle a topic that I mentioned briefly in the answer to a question in a recent podcast episode, and that is the idea of the deep deep. reset. Now before I explain exactly what the deep reset is, let's back up and talk about the more general phenomenon of human nature that this idea responds to. An idea that comes up frequently in theology, in literature, in philosophy, is this notion of humans in response to an acute

challenge to their normal way of life trigger a transformation of of themselves, their character, their path through life that is positive. They go through a reset experience. We see this with Paul on the Damascan road. We see this with Odysseus, finally making it back to his island kingdom after his travails in the wind, dark sea. We see this with Sadartha reflecting under the Bodhi tree after being exposed to life outside of the royal compound. We see this again and again in Joseph Campbell's hero with 10,000 faces. is a very common idea. Now, where does this notion of acute stress leading to meaningful transformation?

Why does it come up so much? Where is it coming from? Well, it comes from, I think, a relatively easy to explain phenomenon. When there is something that disrupts your normal routines, your normal diversions, your normal distractions, this clears room in your psychological space to actually hear intimations from within about what's important and what's not, about what resonates to you in your life and what doesn't. These intimations, moral foundations,

the signal within, which is on the core of almost every philosophy or theology, they're easily obscured. They're easily obscured when we're going through life that has a very rote routine in which there are easy pleasures and devourgely. versions that can give us chemical blast in the moment that overwhelm those when we have cultural pressures keeping us on a particular route and there's some safety or comfort or ease in it.

When we numb away all moments of solitude by looking at screens, all of these factors means that we can obscure with noise, the signal that is, these intimations about what really matters. Acute situations, acute disruption, hardship has a way of clearing out this noise. And suddenly you hear those intimations. If you can listen to them and clarify them, you can make changes that are based on what you really deep down think is important, what actually resonates with what we would theologically call your soul. And that is the foundation of a lasting transformation. So that is why resets in response to disruption is actually a common story throughout human history. Now I brought up this notion recently in a podcast answer because right now for a lot of people, the disruption of the pandemic has put them into that prime situation to hear those intimations and begin to think, huh, maybe I want to transform.

Maybe I do not want to come out of this into exactly the same life I was in before. Maybe I want a deep reset. So that's what I want to talk about. For those who were feeling that yearning, that is why you're feeling it, and let's talk about what would be required to actually help you successfully act on it, to take the hardship of the last year of the pandemic and use that as the foundation for building something good for responding to things that were bad, not with just curling and waiting until you can get back to normal, but with a move towards the positive, a way of reacting to hardship with, goodness. So it's a complicated question about how one succeeds with a deep reset. There are several different principles that I'm going to explore in this deep dive series on the topic. Let's start today with a foundational step, which is the need to inject silence.

Now, I don't mean silence necessarily literally, as in the absence of sound. but what I mean is if you're feeling a need to reset is probably because you're beginning to hear these intimations, well, let's really amplify them. We want to really clarify what it is your feeling because if you don't clarify exactly what this is that you're feeling these signals about what's important and what's not, if we don't clarify them,

you're not going to make the right transformations or changes or shifts when it comes time to change your behavior. We want to make sure that as we go through a deep reset process, We're really getting at why we're transforming and what we're transforming. So we need some silence. This is a good time. This month while I'm recording this is probably a good time. This, of course, applies to any time you think about a reset.

It's probably a good time to get this silence. So what does that mean? Well, I'm going to give you three ideas. Consider for the next few weeks to do the following three things. One, take your news consumption, eliminate any of that incoming information from social media, consolidate your news consumption to a one or two sources that does a pretty good job of giving you what you want to hear,

what you need to hear. So you might subscribe online to a newspaper. If you're like me and live in a major city, maybe you have a newspaper delivered physically to your door. Maybe you use one of those now increasingly popular daily news roundup podcast that takes 20 minutes you can listen to in the morning. Consolidated sources of news. Expose yourself to it in the morning.

and then you're done with the news consumption. There is no more powerful source of distracting and diverting noise right now than the constant bombardment of news about the pandemic, about the election, about other things going on. This is going to innervate, innervate your soul. It is going to divert and distract you. It is going to pervert and transform your emotions into ways It's going to make it very difficult to actually make lasting change.

You will know what you need to know about the world checking in in the morning on good sources. You're not a breaking news producer. You do not have to be checking in throughout the day. And you do not have to be anywhere near a social media algorithm pushing news at you. Their goal is not to inform you. Their goal is to get your user-engage your minutes. That is at odds with your quest to transform into a deeper life. So number one of this foundation, this move towards silence.

Severely restrict your news. do this for the whole month. If you're listening to this, when I release it, it's December. A great month to turn our focus a little bit more inward. Speaking of that, number two, find a way to inject into your life right now,

activity, at least one activity that is useful to other people. Get outside of yourself, get outside about what you're upset about, get outside of the imagined war that you're fighting on the screen of Twitter. Get outside of the fantasy dialogues you're having with these sort of tribal enemies that you have conjured. Get outside of feeling bad for yourself. Get outside of feeling scared.

And put some energy towards something that is useful to other people. It could be other people in your family. It could be other people in your community to keep it relatively local, I think is important. Volunteer. give time, give money, find a way to make non-trivial sacrifices on behalf of other people. This is going to reset and amplify some of these intimations in a way that's going to be crucial for actually figuring out later how you are going to make a reset. So step one, you've taken all the noise of the news, which is just completely strung us out over

the last many months, only getting worse and worse and more recent months, and we're going to remove that source and calm down our autonomic nervous system, calm down our emotions. Number two, we're going to hit that human instinct we have the sacrifice on behalf of others. And that's going to begin to amplify and clarify some of these other intimations. Okay, we're redirecting that energy in a way that is meaningful and productive. Number three, find at least one major activity that you can start doing on a regular basis that improves and empowers yourself. Could be physical.

an athletic training, some sort of exercise or workout you're going to do, it could be intellectual or philosophical. Maybe this is the time to sign up for an online course and you are going to tackle the great works of political philosophy or of theology or of the ancient Greek philosophy or Eastern thought or whatever. I'm going to better yourself for no other reason than you want to have a richer intellectual experience. That is another example.

Maybe it's a physical thing I'm going to craft and build whatever. A canoe in my woodshed. I'm sure most of us have woodsheds. We all certainly know how to make canoes, right? Whatever it is. But something that is non-urgent, non-necessary and aimed only at trying to make your own life better to empower yourself. Those are the three foundations for the silence needed,

the reorientation inward needed, the breaking away of distraction needed to then make, as we'll talk about in later episodes, good transformative steps. So severely cut off the news. Start doing something that is useful to other people. Connect to other people and help them for no other reason than you want to be helpful. And three, start doing at least one thing, non-urgent, aimed only at trying to make or empower yourself and make your own life better. Let's do these three things. Do these three things right away. This is the foundation on which we will build. And we pick this up with the next deep dive segment, we are going to then talk about how to build on this foundation of silence and solitude and self-reflection to actually then start to figure out, okay, what am I all

about? And once I know this, what changes do I want to make? So we'll pick this up next time. But for now, let's get on with the rest of the episode and start with some work questions. Our first question comes from Victor. He asks, what's the limit of deliberate practice? Legendary jazz player Charlie Parker is said to have gone from mediocre to excellent after practicing 12 to 15 hours a day alone in a woodshed. Is this desirable for most of us? Or is it just a burnout waiting to happen? Well, Victor, my short answer is, you know, if you think you might have the chops to make it as an elite musician, then out practicing everyone else is a reasonable strategy.

For the rest of us, however, who work in front of computer screens and in offices, I think the story on deliberate practice is more subtle. So deliberate practice, of course, is how you get better at things. Just to quickly go over the general point here, deliberate practice is an activity that is specifically, designed to stretch you past where you're comfortable and using feedback to deliberately improve weak spots and amplify the things that you're good at. So it's basically coached or structured practice to improve. And it stands in contrast to other ways of learning or getting better at skills, such as repetition or just learning information about how to do something well. So deliberate practice is our best understanding of how people get good at things.

but when we shift from the world of Charlie Parker, or it's pretty clear exactly what practice means. I can't hit these notes cleanly when I am playing at this speed. So I sit in the woodshed and I play at that speed until I can hit the notes cleanly. Or I'm having a hard time with glasando transitions. And so I'm just going to do that again and again, each time really focusing to get it right until I can get it. That's classic woodshed practicing.

In the world of office work, it's not always so clear. Now, if you go back to the episode I did of this podcast with author David Epstein, we talked a little bit about the work of Robin Hogarth on what are known as wicked versus kind learning environments. Charlie Parker in the woodshed is a kind learning environment in the sense that there is clear indications of how well you're doing. There's clear feedback. it's pretty obvious what practice means and how well it is going.

Most people in most office style or creative or knowledge work jobs are in what Hogarth called a wicked learning environment, in which is not always clear what skill you should be improving, how well you are doing, and what activity is going to give you the most bang for your buck when it comes to actually practicing. So it can be difficult no matter how motivated we are in these type of knowledge jobs, it can be difficult to just woodshed it because we don't have the equivalent of the scales that we can go over again and again in the woodshed. So how do you deliberately practice

in a wicked learning environment like knowledge work? There's a couple general approaches to come up commonly and are often effective. So one way, and this is something that Scott Young and I talk about in our online course top performer, this is something we talk about a lot, is that you first of all attack your field

journalistically. To identify the skill to get good at, which in a wicked learning environment can be non-obvious, you actually try like a journalist to uncover, okay, this person in my field, I want to uncover what it was that made her so successful. Something about where she is resonates. I want to have a similar career trajectory.

What was it that she does? What was the skill that she had made? mastered that allowed her to make these leaps when other people were not so successful. You could, of course, ask the person, though people are typically pretty bad at reflecting on their own self-improvement trajectories. And so you might want to approach it like a journalist and actually just figure out the beats of his or her career and pull out of this research. It was probably when she mastered this and had the success on this project that gave her the opportunity, whatever it is. So you first approach things like a journalist to identify even, what should I get better at?

This can be non-trivial. It's the point I'm trying to make here. In these wicked learning environments, it can be surprisingly difficult to even figure out what do I want to get good at. Charlie Parker did not have that issue. Next, once you've identified the skill you need to get good at, the closest you can probably come to a woodshed in a sort of knowledge work environment is probably designing a project, putting yourself on the hook for this project, getting permission to do it, people are expecting results, but the project is designed that you are going to have to get better at the skill in question to successfully execute. And now you have the pressure of this project needs to get done. I said I was going to put together this initiative. I was going to gather this

report. I was going to do this conference, whatever it is. And the execution of that project becomes your equivalent of playing to scales, trying to play the licks faster, whatever, the musician would do to get better. So that's a common rhythm. The other common rhythm for how to get better in these wicked learning environments is to actually identify opportunities for formal education on skills that could be relevant. So you have a classroom environment where you essentially have a kind environment that is encapsulated within your broader, wider, wicked environment.

You have a class, you have lectures, you have tests, you have whatever. a much clearer place to actually apply your energies. Epstein talked about this in our interview about how he was trying to get better in his non-fiction journalist writing and he actually took a class on fiction writing. And doing the fiction writing class, which is very structured, you had assignments, and you were given the information in a kind to learning environment type way, actually really improved his nonfiction writing, especially when it came to the role of dialogue versus exposition

and really understanding how you develop character and convey information he's systematically trained on that in the fiction writing class and could then transfer that skill to this much more wicked learning environment of just I write for Sports Illustrated, I write for ProPublica, I have to just figure out how to make a long-form piece good. So those are two of the main ways I have seen people tame the wicked learning environment of knowledge work, use journalism to identify skills than projects to push them or find kind learning environments,

formal education opportunities that can then help you very deliberately build up skills that will transfer to your main field. But the Victor, the broader point about all of this is that it's all messier. It's all messier than people that are in pure, kind learning environments have to face. It is much messier than musicians have to face. Knowledge work is much messier than And athletes have to face knowledge work is much messier than, say, professional chess players have to face or professional poker players, right? It is just a complex, messy environment. As much as we want to just go to the woodshed for 12 hours, we just don't have the equivalent. So the thing to do is to find our messy alternatives, be it as journalist project-based approach

or finding related skills that you can formally learn and just keeping at it. Keep stretching to get better. Give yourself a break. that it's messier, that you can't Charlie Parker it, and have some confidence that most of the people around you are doing no deliberate practice. So messy as it is, to keep finding a way in our wicked learning environment-rich field to improve and stretch is something that is going to pay real dividends.

Alex asks, how do you get started on a massive project? I am in academia and have recently received my first large research grant. It's a five-year study and the startup is overwhelming with all of the protocols that have to be developed and all of the moving parts. It is a giant undertaking. Well, Alex, you can't just wing project management. It is a skill that is non-trivial and for which there are best practices and deploying to best practices makes a massive difference versus just. trying your best to keep the plate spinning through a flurry of email messages, last-minute Zoom meetings, and stress. I think this is generally a point that's worth emphasizing.

We often underestimate the complexity of complex things. You know, especially if they're in our personal life, we look at things and want to just wing it. Well, can I just sort of work on it and kind of ping people and we'll just sort of figure this out. And we underestimate that some undertakings are really complex. And that needs to be structured, and there's ways to structure it that are better than others, and it's a skill worth learning.

So, Alex, in your case, I would say, right away, you need to do a little bit of education on project management, and you were going to feel much better if you do. This is not a new problem. Project management skills work is going to make your life as a researcher much easier.

Now, I'm not an expert in project management, so I can't give you personal recommendations of here are the best resources, but I'll just throw out a few things I've come across just as a way to instigate your exploration. So one thing I talk about in my next book coming out in March is the notion of personal Kanban, K-A-N-B-A-N. Now, Kanban is a project management philosophy that came out of industrial manufacturing, in particular Japanese car manufacturing. it was adopted as an agile methodology in software development. And there is a whole subculture of YouTube videos of individuals who have adopted

ComBond to try to organize complex projects or undertaking in their own life. So go to YouTube, search for personal con bond. You'll find all these videos where people have set up these con bond boards where they have cards that represent different tasks. They're in columns for statuses. This should sound familiar. It's definitely where I drew some of the ideas for the configure piece of my capture, configure control productivity philosophy. Some of these get pretty complex.

There's one I talk about in my book, and I'm sorry I don't have the link available offhand, but it was an academic. And he had he color-coded his cards. Each color represented a different sort of initiative within a larger project he was working on. And so he had sort of separate holding tanks for each of these, so he would make sure he was making progress. on a regular basis on each of these projects or initiatives within his broader projects. And he could then quickly look at the completed card column and see that if there's a disproportionate number of one color versus another that he was getting ahead of himself, one of the key ideas in Kanban is works in progress limits that you only work on a small number of things at time. Anyways, this will just cede you with some ideas about how you can structure this work.

It's more than just let's send out emails. It's more than just let's have to-do list. There's also a lot of good books, a lot of good books about project management ideas being adapted to the individual or small projects. Right, because Alex, you don't want to have a, you know, complex Gaunt chart of the type or Gant chart, I should say, of the type that you might put in place if you're running some very complex, you know, you're building a skyscraper or something. You want principles of project management, but you don't want to go overboard. There's a lot of books to try to do this, to try to bring ideas of project. management to the individuals. One I've heard about, I haven't read it, but I've heard about, is Franklin Covey has a book called Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager.

And it's all about bringing ideas of formal project management to people who aren't formally project managers, but are suddenly put in charge of something that requires some of those principles. So read that book, look at those videos, start your rabbit hole, take the time to do that now. You're going to feel much better. Project management is complicated, but I think this is a good thing. If you take the time to learn it in a field like academia where a lot of professors don't, again, you're going to have a real advantage. Also, I just find those personal con bond videos from a productivity geekery standpoint, endlessly fascinating to watch. So I may have just inadvertently actually made you 10 times less productive. So Zerk asks, how do you effectively

disseminate research publications? I'm a PhD student and have had several debates. with fellow PhD students over the role of social media in disseminating research publications. Well, I wrote about this somewhat recently, so on September 16th, I published a post on my blog, calnewport.com slash blog. I wrote a post about an interview done with Eric Posner, who's a very famous legal scholar, one of the more well-respected and more prolific legal scholars in the world right now. And the title of the post was Eric Posner thinks it's a, quote, serious mistake, in quote, for law professors to use Twitter. So in this article, I quote Posner talking about exactly this issue,

exactly this issue of whether or not professors should be heavily engaged in social media, whether or not that's going to be in the long run good for their standing, good for their career, good for their impact. So here was one of the quotes I included in this post. This is Posner saying, it requires a huge amount of work, especially at the beginning, to absorb the literature, to absorb the norms. I think a lot of junior people who are on Twitter should instead be educating themselves. So Posner's concern right there is that it's very hard to actually do high impact academic work. no amount of social media engagement can alchemize into the equivalent value within this career track of high-impact work. And so you want to be wary early on in your career of diverting your attention from actually building up the ability to do the high-impact work because you can't sidestep that.

Eventually, that's what you have to do. So you want to be careful that you're not adding impediments to your path to impact. All right, here is the second quote from Posner that I put in this post. He's responding here to this idea that young professors think they'll be more visible and will be good for their career if they're popular on Twitter. Posner says, they're wrong. You see, it's a classic mistake.

They don't realize that everyone else is thinking that as well. You think you're going to get name recognition and you'll get known because you're sending out these really clever and incisive tweets that are going to get the attention of the world. But you've forgotten that a thousand other people are doing the exact same thing. All right, so Posner's really sort of throwing daggers here in this particular piece.

I think what he's arguing is that basically you tell yourself you're on Twitter all the time because it's good for your name recognition and it's good to spread your results, but the reality is you sort of like the attention. You like that you're getting retweets and people liking your sort of quote-unquote incisive observations. We said everyone's doing that. It's a crowded field. You're all basically being exploited by the Twitter algorithm for your monetary value. You should put your head back in your books and write some things. All right. So I think

Posner is giving what we can call the classic crumudgeon response, but I think he's probably largely onto something. Now, based on my own experience, I can't talk about other fields. Like maybe in a newly emerging field, name recognition, public interaction could be crucial. But I think in CS, which is probably similar to law in the fact that it's a long-established field, my experience basically matches what Posner is talking about. The peer review and citation system

really works well. At least in computer science, if you do high-impact work, you're able to get it published. There's a huge tiering of competitiveness of venues in which you publish, and it's all gate-kept by your peers, all peer-review experts in your field.

And so if you've done really good work, You can go to a pretty high level in this tier and get your work accepted. So right away, people know, okay, this work was published here. There's something serious going on. Generally, this peer review process does well. Once you're in a venue where people pay attention, okay, it's in this competitive venue, the citation system picks up. If your work really does build on something meaningfully,

if it really does open up new work, it gets cited. And as the citations grow, more and more people cited, and you can snowball. You know, my most cited paper is actually outside of my main field. It's in cryptography. As a grad student, I co-wrote with a postdoc, a cryptography paper where it's a technical. But there's a certain type of mathematical object called bilinear maps that enables a lot of interesting cryptographic operations because it gives you a way of basically doing algebra with value. that are otherwise obfuscated in the exponent of generators, whatever.

The point was, is there is a particular class of cryptography schemes that use these by linear maps for which there was not a formal security proof, a mathematical proof that an adversary, under some assumptions, could not break this code any easier than just guessing from scratch. And there are certain technical reasons why these proofs were hard. we said under some restricted cases we could actually get a proof. Anyways, this was a needed step at the time. It's been cited a thousand times.

So it grows, right? These things grow. So it works pretty well. I have known people for sure who have tried to build up public recognition in Twitter. Not a single one of these people found that it was positive for their career. I think it is telling that at least of the people

I know in computer science who have tried to do this, most of them found it mainly negative, the stress of the attacks that can come in. Most people aren't used to attacks. They're not used to people getting mad at them. They're not used to people questioning them or their motives, which is just the air you breathe on Twitter. So most of them, under the stress of these sort of random attacks from strangers,

have strongly retreated from Twitter. They found it to be a, on the whole, negative addition to their life. Now, again, other fields could be different, but at least in computer science and at least that sounds like in law if we take Eric Posner's point seriously there really is still no shortcut to producing high impact work

the peer review and citation system works pretty well at spreading that so while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a public profile I have a public profile I don't use social media but I do have a public profile where I talk about issues generally related to my work

it is not a shortcut to advancement is not a shortcut to recognition, and it is certainly probably not a precondition to doing well in your field. Artem asks, why do you insist on time blocking in a physical notebook? I have tried multiple times to do that, but I find that it is easier for me to just carry my phone around with a time block schedule in a calendar app. Well, Artim, I think I mentioned this briefly in last week's Habit TuneUp episode, but I don't insist. on time blocking in a physical notebook. Some people have a lot of success time blocking using digital tools, and I think that is fine. Now, of course, as a quick aside, if you're one of the few listeners of this podcast who aren't

very familiar with time blocking or my time block planner that Artem is referencing, go to timeblock planner.com. I set up a separate website that can quickly introduce you to these ideas, and so you can catch up and keep up with these conversations. All right, back to Artem's question. Time blocking is a general idea. It can be executed with many different tools. At its foundation, what's important is this notion of giving every minute of your day a job as opposed to instead being reactive, to allowing your day to unfold based on things that come in and catch your attention in the moment.

Now, I like physical notebooks. The reason why I made my planner a physical notebook and not, let's say, a piece of software, is one, I don't like to have to engage with technology during periods where I don't need to. right? So if I do a lot of productive meditation or I work while walking, I do a lot of work on whiteboards, I do a lot of reading-based work where I have to read articles or read books to try to pull out information. And during those periods of my schedule, I'd like to be able to know what's going on without actually having to load up a computer screen or without having to look at my phone. The second reason why I like physical notebooks is that it's flexible. I think we underestimate

both the efficiency and flexibility of handwriting on a piece of paper. We can draw boxes, we can format the boxes, we can draw an arrow from a box to a list that we circle over on another part of the paper, we can cross something out. I do schemes where I do double outlines of boxes that are for administrative task and I do a thick drawn-in outline of boxes that are for deep work so I can quickly see the difference between those two things. I can write very fast. Apps are efficient, but they're not as efficient as just I have a pencil and here's a blank piece of paper. I just think it's a great interface.

And there is friction involved with, I have to click on this, I have to stretch this, and then I have to type with the little keypad on my phone where I'm using my thumbs, and then that didn't quite work, and now I have to pinch with my fingers to zoom back out. Don't underestimate the efficiency and flexibility of paper. And finally, there's a psychological component.

My planner is non-trivial size, and it looks nice. You're holding this planner, it's with you. It is a token, a concrete token that reminds you, oh, I am a time blocker in a way that maybe just having an app on your phone does it. Like, yeah, I have this app. I have a lot of apps. This is a pain. I'm just going to open up my inbox. Having that planner that you spent some money on and the paper is good and there's that orange ribbon, you know, it's psychology. Oh, I'm a time blocker. You know, I'm a time blocker. You're more likely to stick with the time blocking. So to summarize,

I don't really care what tool you use. I have some arguments for why physical is better, but those are not knockout arguments. And I think there are certainly a lot of people like you are, Tim, that have a certain digital workflow where they find the digital tools to be better. Hey, that works for me too. What I care about is that you're time blocking

versus not time blocking. So if that is working, that's great that you have something that works. Keep blocking. And you'll keep reaping the benefits of this more intentional approach to getting your work accomplished. All right, moving on, BB8 asks, what's your opinion on GTD-style context?

Do you recommend them? Are they necessary? Well, I think we may have just reached peak productivity geekery here, mixing in a nuanced GTT question with a Star Wars reference. I think we're one D20 Dungeons and Dragons reference away from just exploding in a supernova of nerdiness, which I'm excited about. All right, so let's talk about GTT style context and how I feel about them. So let's just quickly remind ourselves of what a GTT context is. So in GTT, everything on your plate is captured as a clarified next action.

They're on these big master list. and you organize them by context. Context are typically like a location or state in which work might be done. So in canonical GTD, you might have a context for at store, another one for at phone, another one for at computer, another one for at fax machine. So like when you're at your phone, like, oh, I just got a call.

Well, now I'm at my phone. You might look at the at phone context. I see a lot of next actions that are things you can do while you're at your phone. You're like, well, I'm here, while I'm like grab a couple. Or you're at the store, well, let me look at at store, and here's a bunch of things I'm supposed to do while I'm out shopping. So while I'm grab some of those tasks, where you're at your computer, you can look at the at computer context and see, and what are some tasks I can do there.

So it's a way of organizing the task in your to do list. If we're going to talk about context and compare them to my capture, configure, control philosophy for productivity, you might at first assume that context is a way to do the configure step. because it's a way that you're kind of organizing your task, but I actually think of context more as David Allen's approach to what I would call the control step of productivity, which is figuring out what tasks to do in the moment. It is an implicit control strategy, right, that the way to figure out what to do is to observe your context

and then look at the context list and then take things off the list to execute. In canonical GTD, this is portrayed as a very mechanical process. This is the famous David Allen's cranking widgets. This is what automates in some sense of your work. All you got to do is context, look at my list. You grab something, crank. Look at the relevant list, grab something crank. And you look up after a day and a successful day's work been done.

My approach to control is to instead time block. Where you don't just wait until the moment and say, what's my context, what actions are associated with this context, which ones do I want to do next? You instead plan your whole day in advance. As you know, my philosophy is when you look at the whole day as one, unit and try to build a schedule that is optimal for the entire day, as opposed to deciding in the moment what is optimal in this moment, you get huge advantages. You work with the reality of the contours of your time. You work with the reality of the ebb and flow of your energy. You look at the reality

of, okay, here's small versus big blocks. When are I going to have time for this? And when you couple that with higher scales like a weekly plan, you can really get a lot more done. So basically my thought is context is one way to decide what to do. I think control strategies like time blocking is probably more effective. Now, you could use context again in the configure stuff of my philosophy as a way of organizing your task, but there I differ as well. I think role status configuration is more effective as I talk about a lot. I like to organize my task by role and then within each role organize them by status. I just think this is more important than trying to figure out in what type of place, what I execute this task.

And then when I make my time block, it makes it easy for me to look at the roles, look at the status, and figure out what I'm going to do. In other words, I would rather have my time block plan tell me what context I should be in, then instead just wander into a context and say, what should I do here next? All right, let's do one more work question.

Laura asked, what do I do when I've quit social media personally, but my job requires me to contribute to their social media by weekly. Laura, I don't think it's a problem. All right. So your work requires you to do something on social media. On their account, it sounds like. So probably posting information or maybe, you know,

I had an example once of someone who had to monitor a department account in academia because they're recruiting. So they're sort of seeing if people might be interested in the role through social media engagement. I think that's all fine. The issue that people have with social media is when their personal accounts is constantly accessible on their phone and it becomes a way to numb,

it becomes a way to escape having to confront their own thoughts or it becomes a diversion, a source of cheap chemicals to hide the pain and distract them from what's going on in the world around them. That's where the behavioral addictions arise

and that's where people see a serious diminishment in the quality of their life. None of that's going to happen if twice a week, on your laptop, you have to log into the company Twitter account and post some nonsense about, you know,

here's, not nonsense, but whatever. Like here's this week's programs. I'll post it. Nothing bad is going to come from that. All right. So it's not as if social media itself is this dark force that if you accidentally touch it, you yourself are going to be darkened.

It's the role that social media plays in people's personal lives, especially when they open themselves through the full exploitative attention engineering power of these tools. That's where the negativity comes from. So, Lord, don't be concerned. If you don't use social media in your personal life, nothing's going to happen if twice a week you have to do social media for your work. Just, of course, don't do it on your phone, do it on a schedule, do it on your desktop computer.

Don't allow that to open a rabbit hole that you then fall down and spend three hours looking at tweets. Get in, do what you need to do, get out. I don't think it is going to cause any issue in your life. All right, well, speaking of technology, let's do some technology, questions. Johan asks, what is your opinion about instant messaging? And do you have any suggestions on how to think and handle it? I'm actually going to combine this with a related question.

So around the same time, Subha sent the following question. I find the real deep work killer is WhatsApp. How do you deal with it and draw boundaries? From family to colleagues to clients, everyone uses it to communicate. And some messages are time critical, but it is a time-sucking rabbit. hole. All right, Johann and Subha. My thought about IEM is that it is much less exploitative, it is much less unsavory than let's say some of the giant platform social media monopolies, because for the most part, if I'm understanding these tools correctly, it's not that

there is a ton of energy being exploited to get you to use it more, to hijack your attention, to try to extract lots of data from you. The actual mechanism is pretty straightforward. There's channels. People chat with each other on the channels. So the issues people have with IM tend to be more about the relationship they have created with the tool

and a little bit less about a purposefully designed exploitative relationship, which I think is positive because it gives you a lot easier time of actually changing this relationship. It's not what Tristan Harris calls the asymmetric war of your attention versus these giant conglomerates.

It's just behavioral patterns that should be reshaped. So the issue with IM where people fall into trouble is when they allow it to become a parallel conversation track throughout their day. By which I mean as you do other things throughout your day, you constantly have these parallel conversations going on and you feel obligated to participate. Yeah, that is a real attention killer

that will create what Subha is so graphically described as a time-sucking rabbit hole. And it is not a way to function. You can't have parallel tracks throughout your day, where in one track, you're doing whatever's in front of you. You're trying to work. You're trying to enjoy a sunset. You're trying to read. And on another track, you're in conversation with your friends and your cousin and your

family. Can't do those things simultaneously all the time. The brain can't do that. The brain cannot operate in parallel tracks. You create a huge context network switch collision. It's going to make you feel frustrated. It's going to make you feel exhausted and make it hard for you to do anything well or to enjoy anything worth enjoying. So the key to a healthy relationship with I.M, in my opinion, is to break the parallel conversation track model. So how do you do that? Well, you check in at set times. This is when I check in on I.M to see what's going on, the chat with people and have conversations. Now, here's the thing. If you do that, You're going to miss things. You're going to miss questions that are maybe time critical.

You're going to annoy people. Hey, Johann. Hey, Sue Pop. What's going on? Question mark, question mark. Emoji. What people do when I am? Where are you?

Come on. They're annoyed because they're used to getting a response from you would be convenient for them to get a response from you. They are now no longer getting an immediate response from you. Here's the thing. Stay on the track. Stay on the path. Apologize.

give this simple explanation. I'm sorry. I wasn't on IM. I just checked back in now. I didn't see what you had seen earlier. You don't have to over-explain it, but just make it clear. Yeah, I'm not on IM all the time. And I try to catch up with what's going on when I do log on. You sent this question. You made this comment during a time when I was not on.

It will frustrate people, but this frustration will be muted because the only real counter argument to this is you should be on IAM all the time because it makes my life easier. It's an argument that sounds stupid when you say it out loud so no one does. So the frustration will be muted. You might have some misdirected anger like, well, whatever. People will find other ways to get mad at you. But here's the thing. Miss some things, upset some people.

They will adjust. They'll say, great, Subha is just not on IM all the time. She's not on it while she's working. She's not on it while she's out for walks. So if I really have something I don't want her to miss, well, maybe I'll email it to her, or maybe I'll wait till a time when I know she's on, and they adjust. It's not so bad. I think that's worth doing.

You're going to have to go through a period of some temporary frustration from your friends and from your family, but what you're going to gain from it is freedom from a completely untenable way of living, which is with a parallel conversation track. You also can try to offset some of this frustration with alternative structures for interaction. action beyond just I am. It will help satisfy some of these really deep human need for connection and communication. So for example, start setting up standing meetings with people. Yeah, I always zoom with my family on Sunday nights. We do, uh, if they're, you know, I'm assuming in this case, these are all people, by the way, who are not physically nearby because

you're talking to them on I am, right? Um, we do like a virtual happy hour with our friends. you know, once a month. We do watch party plug-in with, where we watch movies together on Netflix, synchronized so that we can all chat. And if people are nearby, if people are nearby and you're just sort of I-A-Me out of convenience, like, no, here's what we do. We go for like a walk every week or every morning. We form a running club together.

Whatever. We go get drinks together. Whatever it is, right? In other words, standing more substantial interactions with people so that you you're getting that social connection, then you're going to feel better about not having just the constant ad hoc back and forth. Because again, I talk about this in my book, Digital Minimalism, with sort of constant linguistic back and forth. It really doesn't add up in terms of your mind. It does not add up in your mind to be a solid social connection. You really need this more long-form,

analog, what I called, conversation. You need the analog conversation if you actually are going to feel like you're connected. So just set those up on a standing meetings, and then you'll feel a lot less pressure for this sort of back and forth ad hoc messaging to play that role in your social life. You might even try office hours. Again, don't use this terminology. It's going to make you sound like a nerd, but whatever, a set period of time in which you're always available to people know.

They can IME you, they can call you, they can zoom you. If they're local, they can swing by. You know, hey, it's the time, whatever it is, four to six on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. And people just know, oh, that's when you. Johan's available always. Subha's always available to them. That's when I ask this question. That's when I call her up.

That's when I swing by and say, hey, do you want to do whatever? People have an alternative way to get in touch with you that they know will work. They will feel better about not being able to get in touch with you right now. So this is a big issue. I'm glad you both brought this up. IAmin as a parallel conversation track is untenable.

It is not a way to live. A lot of people have fallen into that. There is no way to read. you set that without causing temporary frustrations with people, but people will absolutely adjust, especially if you're apologetic, especially if you set up these alternative modes of building strong social connections, you will get through to the other side. And life without the parallel conversation track is a much better, more focused, more gracious, more productive, more happy, more satisfied, more calm way of living. So it is worth that short-term pain to get

to that long-term benefit. Alex asks, are attending online lectures in college worth it? Well, Alex, I might be biased here. I'm literally about an hour away as I record this from teaching an online lecture, as I have been doing since the beginning of this pandemic in March. So, of course, my instinct is to say they're brilliant and you absolutely should attend. So I'm going to try to put that bias aside to give you a, generally accurate answer.

So what I honestly feel, Alex, is for the most part, yes, it is worth attending the online lectures if your college is virtual. Of course, we can step back and acknowledge the soon-to-be datedness of this question. I mean, obviously, this is a question that is relevant to basically this year. By year, I mean, you know, starting March through this spring, there's sort of be one year when a lot of college in the U.S. is virtual. That's going to change. So it's not like this is a general question probably

that's going to be relevant for a long time, but it's worth jumping into because I think there's a more general point I can make. Why do I think it is worth attending online lectures? Well, you have to learn to material at some point. At some point, there is material being presented that you don't know that you have to process in your brain until it is something that you do know.

That is the basic transactional relationship. of the classroom. A live online lecture is as good of a time as any to begin this process. Say, okay, there is a set time when this is happening. I'm going to be there during the set time. As the information is being presented, I'm going to do my best to try to understand it, both in just my thinking and my notes. Now, you could do this later.

You could do this with a pre-recorded version of the lecture, but that's harder because you don't have an appointment to do it. you don't have the value. If I do it right now, the professor will be live, the professor will see them in the class, there's advantages to it, and it's at this set time. And I just know this is when my class is. So I'm going to do this work now, as opposed to at some point I'm going to get back to watching a recorded lecture, which is something that you can endlessly procrastinate on and maybe not get to at all.

So here you are. You're in the live lecture. As long as you're there, concentrate. Let me try to learn this material as much as I can now, because every bit of learning I do now is learning that I'm not going to have to do later when studying and I'm not going to have to do later when preparing for a problem set. You are buying yourself time. So you're not wasting time on the lecture. You are actually, the intensity of it is saving you time later on when you do eventually have to learn a material. So you're paying attention,

you're trying to understand, you're trying to take good notes. If you want to learn more about note taking, you should look at my book, how to become a straight-a student, where I really get into different modes of note taking depending on the type of course. The summary here is that note taking format matters. You're taking good notes in a way that forces you to try to understand. You're concentrating trying to understand. If you're in a live lecture, the other advantage you have is you can ask questions. So one of the core ideas in sort of my early student books and in my early student-focused blog post on study hacks is that

that when you are encountering information as a student, you want to clearly identify where you don't understand what's being said and then fill in those blanks as soon as possible. If you're listening to the lecture, you're taking notes, I didn't get that, right? You know, Professor Newport was talking about polynomial time verifiers as being a core component of understanding non-deterministic polynomial time complexity classes. something I'm teaching today, so it's on my mind. I didn't quite get the verifier format, what's the certificate versus the input.

You can clearly identify in your notes, question mark. You're in class, you can now raise your hand and whatever in Zoom, you click the icon, or you just unmute or you type in the chat, however your professor works it. You can try to get that clarified. It makes a big difference. Because, again, this is the way I typically talk to students

is, you know, you want to try to understand the materials you're encountering it, have a note-taking format that captures this understanding, clearly identify all your questions, try to fill in those questions as soon as possible. Your first line of defense for doing so is asking the professor questions. So if you're a student who is in class,

taking notes, trying to understand, asking questions with question marks, you are going to cut the time required to prepare for an exam or a problem set by a factor of two. And then, of course, after the lecture, you want to fill in the rest of the question marks, so you can email questions, go to office hours, go back to your textbook,

you have a 48-hour window. I always say you have to, answer, fill in the blanks of all the question marks in your lecture notes before the next lecture occurs while it's still fresh. You do this, you're going to significantly reduce the time required to do well into course. All of this is really well served by letting the live lecture, attending the live lecture be the foundational cornerstone of your study approach. So that's what I think, Alex. Attend a lecture to your best to understand, ask questions during the lecture, fill in your blanks before the next lecture begins a couple days later. This is a good

rhythm for staying on top of material, you're actually saving yourself time here in the long run, even though in the short run where you say, oh, I have to actually go and turn on my computer feels like it's taking more time. It's not. It will save you more time in the long run. Though, of course, secretly, the whole point in this answer, Alex, is just to get my students to show up for my lecture when I start it in about an hour. Let's take a moment to thank one of the sponsors of the deep questions. podcast. Hydrant. Hydrant is a refreshing drink mix

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and get that plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com slash deep. That's mintmobile.com slash deep. Cut your unlimited wireless bill to 30 bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash deep. Returning to the questions, our next query comes from Jacob. He asks, how do I break a YouTube abdiction? Well, Jacob, I mean, my short answer is sometimes people, People need permission, right? They need permission to make a big change.

So I'm going to give you that permission by saying very clearly, stop using YouTube. Stop using it all together. Take it out of your life. I can tell from your elaboration you provided for your question that it really does have a negative hold on you. It really pulls your time and attention away from things that matter to extremes. and it seems to be manipulating your emotions

and your feelings about the world in ways that is dark and unproductive. And so I'm just giving you the clear answer. Stop using it. It should not be in your life at all. Now, the step back a little bit, I'm going to apply an idea for my book, Digital Minimalism,

to help hopefully make this commandment stick a little bit more. So I would argue that what you want to complement your abstention with is an aggressive investment in more meaningful alternative activities. YouTube is filling a big hole in your life right now, Jacob. That's how you are numbing. It's how you're avoiding unpleasant feelings. You do not want to just confront all of those all at once and just white-knuckle it. And that's going to be sufficiently unpleasant enough that you are likely to fall back into bad habit. So let's fill those holes

with something that's a little bit more meaningful. So put in place other meaningful activities or hobbies, things that you can obsessively pursue but are going to give back to you instead of detract from your experience, things that might enrich yourself, things that might help other people, experiences that will generate gratitude or awe. This is the time. As you step away from YouTube, get something else going. You can always tweak what these activities are. You can always adjust. I want you to have an action-oriented mindset right now, Jacob,

and I want this action to be meaningful action. Make your days busy, but busy with things you choose. Working from that foundation is going to be much easier. It is going to be much easier to step back from YouTube in your life. that hole that wants you to avoid or numb or distract or divert can now be filled with things that are going to enrich you and once you get used to that alternative, that enrichment-focused alternative,

you're going to have a much easier time not going back to that poor substitute of letting algorithms capture your attention and keep you there by hitting your brainstem, hitting your amygdala, giving you a little burst of emotion. All right, so I think YouTube should now be done in your life, but this will only last if you fixed the things that drove you there in the first place. So Jacob, get after it. Samir asks, what is your take on RSS readers where one ends up subscribing to 80 plus blogs?

Well, Samir, I'm a big fan of RSS, and in general this notion of consuming content produced by independent individuals that you have delivered to you. in a easy-to-read format. I think this is the social internet at its best. I think this is a much more healthy way to produce and spread interesting ideas than something like a social media platform. So I don't think it's a problem that you're using RSS and you're using it to consume blog content.

That being said, there is a couple best practices to make sure that RSS consumption is something that is tamed and a positive, not negative force in your life because, you know, an overcrowded RSS feed reader can become just as much as a distraction or diversion as anything else on the internet. So there's a couple best practices to prevent that from happening. One, monthly calling of your subscriptions.

So at the first of every month, so when you flip from one calendar month to another, go through the 80 plus blogs or whatever that you're subscribing to and unsubscribe from the blogs for which you didn't really read their content. month. I remember this for my days of heavy RSS reading. There's a lot of blogs that you subscribe to because you come across one post that caught your attention. And you said, I want to know what's going on with this blog. But then you see the titles of future posts and you're like, okay, this is not what I thought it was going to be. Cole those once a month. That will keep the list much more svel. The second best practice is have reading routines. Don't let your RSS feed reader

be a background distraction, something that you can turn to anytime you feel bored or anytime you want to numb or distract. Instead have appointment reading. I talked about in my book Digital Minimalism, having a weekend ritual. You load a bunch of articles onto your tablet. You go to a coffee shop if it's not too cold or by the fire in your house or wherever and you sit there and you just read for an hour or two and you get through the week's worth of articles. So you get exposed to a lot of interesting, diverse content, but this content did not act as a constant distraction or pull at your attention throughout the week. Maybe you do this every evening, you know, after dinner, maybe it's something you do over breakfast, but have the time

set aside in advance of this is when I go through and read this content. Don't let it be a default activity at every moment. Do those two things, Samir monthly calling and appointment reading, and I think RSS-fueled blog reading should and could be a positive force in your life. All right, let's end our technology questions with a real simple query. Abby asks, are you familiar with phenomenology? How do you think technology affects the experience of experience? I was, of course, joking about this being a simple question. Phenomenology is a notoriously complex feel.

of philosophy. Just ask anyone who has tried to spend some time with Heidegger. But, you know, it's a deep question. Deep questions are worth contemplation. Let's just give it a at least a quick glance here. We should start with a definition of phenomenology. Here's one I took from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective of first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to distinguish from but related to the other main fields of philosophy. Ontology, which is a study of being or what is. Epistemology, which is the study of knowledge and logic, the study of valid reasoning,

ethics, the study of right and wrong action, etc. So if you read the phenomenologists, they're all about, in some sense, what matters is not ontologically speaking what you are as a person, but just the collection of experiences that defines your subjective encounter with the world. My goodness, we're getting complicated here. But what Abby is pointing out is that an interesting thread of philosophical inquiry right now is the impact of various technologies on our experience of the world, a sort of techno phenomenology, if you will. It's a very sort of of of the moment question and a very interesting one. some of the classic thinking on this question,

I think you can trace back to probably Marshall McLuhan, and in particular his interpretation by his sort of pupil, Neil Postman. You read a book like Amusing Ourselves to Death by Postman, you get a sort of interesting take on the way that in this case, various technological communication mediums can actually affect the way that we actually understand

the world, sort of a classic phenomenological point. There's also a lot of other angles you can go with techno phenomenology, but I think that's a classic route. I'm convinced, for example, having studied Postman, that we can look at Twitter in particular and talk about the phenomenology of righteous warfare that it creates. So if you have mediated a lot of your encounter with the world through Twitter, your subjective experience of the world is one in which there is warfare going on

and there are clear enemies and clear heroes and it is an epic almost religious battle between these foes. It's a phenomenology of sort of peak emotion and righteousness and anxiety. It really changes. It really changes your subjective experience of the world.

I have a friend, for example, just to make this more concrete. I have a friend, for example, who went through a period. He's an entertainer. He went through a period in which Twitter was not kind to him. And I remember the way he described it to me is that when he would be just going for a walk, just outside, unrelated to Twitter, he experienced and encountered the world with a sort of clinched fist, anxious readiness for physical attack. His body encountered the world as one in which someone was going to jump him at any moment and fight him

because his encounters with this tool had just shaped his subjective experience of the world to be one of constant warfare with enemies coming after him in battles he had the fight. So this is just a specific example, but it is worth, as Abby points out, keeping in mind the ways in which the particulars of how popular technologies function can really change the way we understand ourselves in the world. We like to think of ourselves instead as this pure Descartes-style self

that's imperturbable, that encounters the world through various tools and then tries to make sense of it and different tools give us different types of information, but we have this self in the middle that remains invaluable. and that is what is, you know, encountering all this information. And so who cares if the information is coming through Twitter versus a telegraph versus a conversation?

Phenomenology says, no, no, no. Your whole experience is shaped by your subjective encounter with the world and the way that these encounters are mediated is going to then affect the way you understand the world. So there is not, these are not just neutral channels of information with more being better than less. Literally how you think the world is can be shaped by the what you are holding in your hand. All right, that is a very cursory take on techno phenomenology. There's way more complicated takes and way more nuanced threads to pull there. But, Abby, I appreciate the question. It's a deep question worthy of deep thought.

Exactly, ironically, the type of deep thinking that doesn't happen when you outsource more and more of your personhood to your phone. So, you know, that is the irony of talking about techno phenomenology as those technologies themselves make it difficult to actually have that discussion. so hopefully I have spurred a few more of you to engage a little bit more philosophically with this techno world around us. All right, on that, why don't we do some questions about the deep life? Harrison asks, how can I tell when a book is too difficult for me to read? Harrison, for me, the sign that I'm not going to get very far with a book is typically if I don't recognize, the illusions or references being made. So the author is making illusions or references

in a way that clearly assumes that the reader knows what he or she is talking about, but I don't get those references and I don't get those illusions, then I know that I'm not going to be able to pull out of this book what I would hope. I don't have the proper content preparation for that particular discussion.

This happens to me a lot, for example, when I'm reading period nonfiction, so nonfiction written, say 100 years ago, or more. There is often quite a lot of references or illusions from like, you know, I just don't have, I don't get that classical reference. I don't know about those philosophers that were big at the time, but I don't know what they talked about.

And so I can't pick up what you're saying. At which point I'll normally move to a secondary source that still try to get at those ideas but in a way that makes more sense. So Harrison, that's what I'd recommend. If you don't get the references and illusion, go to a secondary source or move on. do, but it's just the language is complex or the point subtle. Well, the right response there might just be to slow down and perhaps to try to take notes in your own words that forces you to try to process and describe in your own words the point being made, that that active, active recall

can help you consolidate sort of subtle or complex arguments. Carl asks how much advice is too much. As someone who listens faithfully to your podcast, you must admit that there is a lot of advice to absorb with little time to practice the skills you speak about between episodes. How long should listeners stick with a particular practice before returning for more tips and advice? Well, Carl, fair enough, I give a lot of advice on this podcast. However, I don't want you to think about the podcast as being a laundry list of practices that you need to put into place. I agree. There would be way too many.

I tend to go, you know, an hour and a half or more on these episodes riffing on a wide variety of topics. They come out every week. There's no way that you could put all of these different ideas into practice. So I think the better way to think about this podcast is what I am doing in these episodes is giving glosses or interpretations. or takes on a small number of underlying fundamental philosophical ideas. To hear me give answers to many different questions that all orbit around the same central issues of meaningful, productive work, understanding technology, in a rapidly changing techno environment, and trying to understand our quest or desire to live a deep life.

By hearing me come at these topics from many different angles with many different questions is a way to just better illuminate the underlying topics, to better understand my general philosophy towards these topics, to better arm yourself to then in your own life face the questions that you come across and come up with answers that are somewhat congruent with the way that I see the world. I think a really good example of this same idea in progress is probably the financial guru, Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey does three hours a day three hours a day

on his radio show and podcast giving financial advice he's been doing this for years and yet his financial advice is summarized and he has a collection of what he calls baby steps I think there's seven I might have that number wrong but his financial advice has been in place for decades

and it can be summarized in seven steps if I have that number right. And he does three hours a day, and he's done three hours a day for over 10 years. The reason is not that he has that much instruction to give to people. It's that what people want to hear is these underlying ideas be applied again and again

and again from different angles on different issues. It really helps them embed deeply. Okay, I really understand what this mindset, this philosophy to finance really means. And now when I tackle issues or decisions in my own life, I can come up with answers. So maybe that's the way to think about it, Carl. This is like, you know, productivity midrash here.

We're glossing, exploring, probing, and pushing on these fundamental topics from many different angles so that we can deepen our understanding of them. The practices that really resonate, put in the practice, but more importantly, adopt the underlying philosophy

so that, you know, you can make decisions that are effective and powerful on your own when you deal with your particular deep questions. that come up in your own life. R2D2 asks, what advice would you give a high school student about living the deep life?

Well, R2D2, first of all, good for you for asking this question at your age. I think most young people, high school, college, and into their 20s, tends to approach life a lot more haphazard, it tends to be some combination of just chasing achievement. If I could only get into that college,

or if I could only just get that job, that's the key. And mixed in with some degree of hedonism. You know, let's party. Like what's going to make me feel good in the moment? So you have sort of achievement and hedonism and you just go full speed towards those things and say, I hope this just works out. Of course, what happens is you will eventually hit a brick wall

when that will all crumble. you realize you need more in life. You know, when that happens, it just depends on how lucky or unlucky you are. Could happen in your teenage years. It could happen in college. It could happen when you're 28. Eventually, though, you will hit hardship in life where you realize that, okay, just hedonism and chasing achievement is not by itself going to get me there.

That brick wall can be pretty devastating. Some people are able to do post-traumatic growth and get stronger after those collisions, other people fall into despondency or depression. So why am I mentioning this? Because if you put the foundations to live in a deep life in place early, that brick wall is not as devastating. You will have a foundation of resiliency with which you can make it through these obstacles that are coming. These young years are going to feel a lot more stable and you're going to get a lot more out of them. So I'm glad you're asking this question now. It's a big question. I'm going to give you a small answer.

I'll give you three parts of the small answer just to get you thinking. You know, first and foremost, you should do the basic deep life transformation steps. I've talked about many times on this podcast. At a very high level, this is where you identify the sort of buckets in your life that are important, the things that matter to you. This is where I'm usually alliterative with my Cs, like craft, constitution, community, contemplation. But whatever it is, here are the buckets that are important to me. develop a keystone habit you stick with and track in each of these buckets that signals to yourself that you take that bucket seriously. And then you want to rotate from bucket to bucket giving one to two

months to each, trying to overhaul that part of your life to be more in line with what matters to you within that general category. I've talked about this before, so I won't be labored the point, but basically systematically trying to reform and reshape your life around things that matter. It's not too early to do that. But I would say also for high school students in particular, this is a good time to develop character. What is your code? Your code about how you live through good times and bad. You need the code in place and trusted before it actually gets flexed.

I think too many young people just bounce from thing to thing in their pursuit of achievement and hedonism. You become easily pushed around. You become easily manipulatable. You feel very unstable. you will find yourself getting really hooked into something that catches your attention and then disappointed or despondent when you realize it's not all that you thought it would be. You do need a code to earlier the better.

This will be a source of stability. If you're religious, religion can do this. If you're philosophical, philosophy can do this. This can come from even martial sources. Traditionally, that has been a source of character and stability. Whatever it is that resonates, you don't have to get this. is perfect, get something that seems right, at least in the general sense, and you can always refine and adjust that as you read more and explore more the world of character and ethics and

what matters to you, but you need a code, you need to stick to a code, that is stability that's going to get you through a lot of ups and downs. Finally, I would say at your young age, you should also care about interestingness. This is a term I coined in my third book, which was called How to become a high school superstar. Very interesting book. Not a great title, interesting book. It's basically what if Malcolm Gladwell took on college admissions. But I talk a lot in there about this notion of interestingness and this idea that young people in particular, it's a great age, to be exposing yourself to interesting stuff, to be reading interesting books, to be going to events for no other reason that it might be interesting. This is the point where you can transform yourself

from a boring striver or a slacker hedonist into someone who is actually interesting to be around. This requires what I call underscheduling. You can't have too much structured time in your life. If you're a part of 30 different activities, you can't become interesting. If you're worried about college admissions, the whole point of this book is that interestingness will pay off more down the line than having a lot of things on your resume. Anyways, read that book, High School Superstar, I think it's really underrated.

Really cool, interesting book. I get into that in much more detail, but this is a time of your life to make yourself into an interesting person, which means don't over-schedule yourself and emphasize exposing yourself to sources of interesting things, new interesting things, get involved in interesting things,

just for the sake of keeping life interesting. All right? So to summarize, do the basic bucket-based transformation. You need a code. start pursuing interestingness. Do those things now, I think in terms of ROI, there's really no better time than to try to cultivate a deep life. It is really going to help you enjoy

and get as much satisfaction and meaning as possible during these cool years ahead of you when you're still young. And it's going to help you smash through that brick wall of hardship when it inevitably rears itself in your life path. All right, let's do one more question. This final question comes from Interimilar. entertainment strategy guy. With a name like that, I feel like you didn't have a lot of choices

in what you were going to do for your career, entertainment strategy guy. Talk about parents pulling the strings on your path there. All right, ESG, as I call them, asks, what other books are or should be part of the deep life canon? Well, look, I don't like doing favorites or best list. As I've talked about before on this podcast, one of the reasons I didn't join Facebook when it first came to the

campus of Dartmouth College in 2004 is that early Facebook was really focused on list. Your profiles were favorite quotes, favorite books, favorite movies, and I don't know, I have a block. I really have a hard time doing top 10 list. I really have a hard time listing favorites. That was one of the reasons I didn't sign up for Facebook when it first arrived on campus, which is all to say that I can't give you a definitive list of here's the books you have to read, but I can mention some. I've mentioned books before. on this podcast, I think are relevant to leading the deep life. So I'm just through a bunch down on a list here as I was thinking right before I did this question.

I don't know. I think I've mentioned some of these before. Some of them I haven't. This is not a definitive list. It's just a sampling off the top of my head of some books, I think, are relevant for those who are exploring the deep life. I really enjoyed William Lee Miller's book, Lincoln's virtues. It's an ethical biography of Lincoln. Lincoln is a hero of mine

and someone I have studied extensively. I love the style of Miller's book here. He writes it in a sort of old school Southern scholar style just stylistically is entertaining. But also a great look at what it means or how people develop strong character and ethical foundations.

Speaking of Lincoln, I just started recently reading David Reynolds's new cultural biography of Lincoln titled Abe, and I'm finding that to be really useful as well is really placing Lincoln in his times trying to understand what was happening intellectually, philosophically, religiously, and in entertainment in his culture at the time and how that shaped how he developed. So Reynolds is an acclaimed writer of that period. So not surprisingly, I think this is like a opus that he has penned and I am liking it so far. If we

follow this thread of Lincoln books, I would also probably mention John Stofford of Harvard, his book, Giants. My wife actually used to work for John's wife when we lived in Cambridge. We babysat his kids before. Actually, I have a signed copy of this book because he published it while we were still there in Cambridge. I think he was the chair of the history department at Harvard at the time. Anyways, that's a really good book. It contrasts Lincoln with Frederick Douglass.

Sort of built around their meeting at the White House, but then going backwards from that event to try to understand both how they sort of differed and complimented to each other and what we understand about those times won a bunch of awards rightly so. If we move away from Lincoln,

if we go towards technology, I mentioned earlier in this podcast, I'm a big Neil Postman fan, amusing yourself to death is a wonderful, accessible application of Marshall McLuhan's philosophy to our moment of sort of techno media. I also really likes this book, Technopoli,

which I quoted and built upon in deep work. If you're interested in this sort of techno philosophy, Lewis Mumford's book, Technics and Civilization, that's from earlier in the 20th century. Really influential book, I mean, Mumford really looks at the ways that the sort of technological developmental trends really affects the ways,

culture, shape, and run. It's a wonderful example of this way of thinking where technology can have these unexpected impacts and influences on how we live or understand the world. I'm a huge fan of James Gleek. Basically everything he has written. You should read the information. You should read chaos.

You should read genius. If you're interested in science and math and technology, how minds restructure the world, I mean, Gleek is the master at the, these type of science biographies, I mean, not really biographies, but these works of popular science, he really does a great job of capturing what it's like to be a Nobel caliber physicist, what it's like to be at the Santa Fe Institute as a new field of mathematics arise. Or in the information you learn all about Shannon and Turing Lovelace, the development of digital

knowledge and communication tools and all the theory that goes around it. A great book. Anyways, I'm a big James Gleek fan. If we want to go philosophical, I think man's search for meaning, of course, by Victor Frankel is a classic logotherapy is a concept that I think anyone should know who's interested in finding meaning and satisfaction in their life. If you want a more theological take on these issues, Abraham Heschel's God in Search of Man. This is a classic in the genre. gives you a very sophisticated take on revelation. I actually found out recently that my grandfather,

was a well-known religious scholar during his era, actually spent some time with Heschel during a sabbatical in New York City, so I think that was a cool connection. Joseph Campbell's also probably worth reading. People often cite the hero with a thousand faces as his canonical work of sort of building on Jung to understand mythologies worldwide.

I'm also recognizing now that I might have accidentally called that book The Hero with 10,000 faces earlier in this podcast, so if that's the case, I'm correcting it here. I often recommend the people a more accessible introduction to Campbell is actually a book called The Power of Myth.

And this is adapted from his famous Bill Moyers interview. It's not a straight, transcript of that interview. It includes stuff that's not in the interview and it's been heavily edited, but I think it's a really accessible summary of Campbell's sort of Youngian philosophy about mythology. And everyone should read that at some point. There has been huge cultural impacts from these ideas, even if we don't realize always that that's where these ideas are coming from. Return to the theological theme. You might also read the case for God by Karen Armstrong. I think this is a phenomenally underestimated book. Armstrong is a former nun,

but she is not formally religious. This is not a book that is proselytizing. It's not a book of formal apologia in the sense that it's not a book trying to convince people to subscribe to a particular religious doctrine. You can think of it as more of an apologist track on the notion of religion in general. Basically, she does a history of the role of religion in human affairs to try to understand what purpose religion filled, but also how it did it, and how the rise of the Enlightenment, which came pretty far along into religion's history, created this new dynamic and gave rise to notions like doctrinaire fundamentalism, which literally didn't

exist in the early notions of religion. It's a fascinating story. It's a fascinating narrative. And it's a much more sophisticated take on theology, which I think is worth reading. You know, this book came out at the height of the sort of early 2000s new atheist attacks on religion. And if you read this book, you're going to look at the new atheist attacks in religion and think they seem just hopelessly childlike and naive. Armstrong paints a much more nuanced vision of theology. where, you know, ritual and doctrine and practice is about trying to approach the ineffable.

It's about trying to make sense and structure intimations in a way that resonates. That is a somewhat mystical and subjective art. It handily discards, I think, the straw man notion of religion as just being a collection of facts that you either assent to, or not, and that empiricists can come in and say, well, we don't have evidence for those facts. It's a much more richer and human psychological and philosophical exegesis on the role of religion. Anyways, I think it is hard to have a strong opinion on religion if you haven't read this book first, because it just takes the underlying axioms of the conversation and endlessly enriches them, which leads to much more subtle and nuanced conclusions.

So again, it's not a book that's going to try to convince you to be religious, but it's going to help you understand religion in a way that I think is quite useful for any pursuit of a deeper life. All right, Entertainment Strategy Guy, I just rattled off a bunch of books there. This is not an exhaustive list. It's not a complete list. These are not the best looks. It's just the books that came to mind as I was thinking about your question.

I think the bigger key here is not that this book or that book is going to change your life, but instead that a commitment to reading deeply, encountering deep ideas, and reflecting on your own life and trying to structure and integrate these ideas into your own life,

is that general commitment is what is going to give rise to depth. So let's all shut down our phones and unsubscribe from these social media channels and open up a big book and go deep. All right, well, I think we've gone long enough. This is probably a good place

to end this episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted your questions. My questions all come from my mailing list readers. So if you want to submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com. We will be back soon with our next episode, but until then, as always, stay deep.