Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 50: Habit Tune-Up: Artificial Overload, Deep Retirement, and Motivational Crises

Episode Date: December 3, 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: * When deep work creates more shallow obligations. [2:49] * Avoiding artificial overload. [10:00] * Deep retirement. [23:06] * Defusing deep procrastination. [27:00]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.

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or enter the promo code deep at checkout. That's D-R-I-N-K-H-Y-D-R-A-N-T.com slash deep or enter the promo code deep for 25% off your first order. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's, habit tune-up mini-episode. The format of these mini-episodes is straightforward. I take voice questions that focus, specifically on tuning up your productivity habits, a topic I think is particularly important during

this period where our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. Brief announcements before we get rolling, this is actually episode number 50 of the Deep Questions podcast. That just seems like a nice round number, so I thought that was worth remarking. I will say, however, the milestone that I really I'm looking forward to, the one I take more seriously, is going to be the one millionth download of the episode. We're on track. We're past 900,000 downloads right now since we started this adventure back in May. I think we will hit the one million mark at some point in December.

I look forward to that. I don't know. It just seems significant to me. If you want to submit a voice question for the habit tune up many episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. you can record the questions straight from your browser. All right, let's roll. Hello, Cal.

This is Jeff, and I'm an executive at a regional bank. I have no Greek mythology to talk through. However, I will say that implementing some of the productivity systems does feel like a Sisyphan task. So I guess we've got that going for us. I wanted to ask you a question about the results in impact of deep work when it creates maintenance work that is actually shallow work. So I have a situation where I worked for about six months,

very deeply creating a series of dashboards and business intelligence reporting tools. Unfortunately, those tools now need to be maintained on a regular basis, and it's shallow work that's impacting my ability to do anything and anything more deeply. What's your advice on how to manage that type of a situation? if no further resources are available to manage that part of the project. Thanks. Well, Jeff, I have to admit, I was tempted to cut off your question right there when you noted that you did not have any good mythological references, but perhaps the Siphyas reference was enough for me to keep your question in here.

So nice save. So what should we do about the situation? You're in the ironic situation in which your intention to go deep? actually increase the shallow in your life. This happens, so you're not alone. The solution I'm going to propose that you consider is something I sometimes call split personality productivity. Now, the idea here is that you are essentially taking your

professional identity, and you're going to split it. And you're going to split it into two different roles. There's going to be the Jeff that's working on deep projects, projects like the one you just completed in which you created these brand new reporting systems that brought more value to your organization. And then there is administrator, Jeff, who has various shallow type things they need to do. They have to maybe do technical support or monitoring for their system. They have to deal with emails and meetings

to explain the system, the different stakeholders in the company, or whatever it is, whatever the nature is of the shallow work that has been added to your plate. I want you to see these almost as if they're two completely different people. Keep a separate task system for deep work, Jeff, from shallow work, Jeff. When I do this, for example, I use completely separate Trello boards for these different types of roles in my life. When you do your weekly planning, you're doing a separate weekly plan. It can be in the same document, but it's like you're laying out the work for shallow work, Jeff. you're laying out to work for deep work, Jeff.

When you're doing your quarterly planning, you have, here's deep work Jeff's goals. You're working on this big project, and here's shallow work Jeff's goals. Maybe you're trying to streamline your support or expand buy-in on your system within your bank's hierarchy, or whatever it is. So it's like you have two different personalities here. Now assume that neither of these personalities works a full-time job. They both get whatever ratio you want, but shallow work Jeff gets working a 20-hour week. job and deep work Jeff is working 20 hour a week job. And you want to do the most you can for each of these roles. So when you're thinking about your planning for shallow work, Jeff,

you're like, well, how can I automate or streamline the type of support work he's doing? Maybe, for example, you should be using a ticketing system. This ticketing system could be completely internal, right? That you're not actually, you could, but maybe you're not even actually forcing other people in the bank to interact with it. You're just moving their messages into a ticketing system where you can keep track of things easier. Maybe you have some sort of automated process for how you gather information or reports. You know, how do I gather information about how people are using my system? Something that happens often. Maybe you automate it where you have a shared folder where people enter their data by Friday and on Monday morning you take it to consolidate. Like,

I'm making this up because I don't know the nature of your work, but that's the type of thing I'm talking about. You have automation. You have streamlining. You're trying to reduce the footprint a shallow work, Jeff, trying to keep your work low stress, automated, predictable. If you have to have a lot of meetings, you might look at that and say, let's use some sort of standing meetings or automated meeting scheduling software so that there's not a lot of back and forth emails. You want to try to minimize the amount of unplanned ad hoc communication that shallow work Jeff has to do. It's just like in general you're trying to get done what you need to get done in that role, but make it as efficient as possible, keep its footprint reasonable. Then you're completely separate planning for

deep work, Jeff. I'm working on this project. I want to make progress every week. I want to have time every day. And here's when I do it. And here's where I go. And here's the ritual. And I have these milestones I'm trying to hit. And I want to be really locked in and producing the best possible value. So it's like you have two different jobs. And you're trying to do each of these jobs as well as possible. Now, this might all sound just conceptual because you're still one person working each day. But I'm telling you from experience when you split yourself in the different personalities, and you optimize those personalities separately, it just works a lot better than when you have it all mixed together.

It just works a lot better when you're just reacting to your inbox, looking at your to-do list, trying to figure out, should I work on this project, or should I answer this question about my existing system, and you just feel generally busy, and you just feel generally frustrated. When you split, when you separate, when you optimize each of these separate roles, both of them gets done better. And so that's what I recommend. I actually unfold the strategy.

So my book coming out in March, I get into this. Where I talk about you can basically hire yourself to be your own assistant. And it's a bit of psychological judo, but basically you really separate out that your role as someone who's doing an administrative work from your role as someone who's not. And maybe I'm just more used to this because, you know, I've had multiple actual different jobs concurrently. I've been writing books while being in academic since I was whatever 20 years old. And so I'm sort of used to having different roles that are really different. So I'm pretty used to just having this world going on to book writing and this world going on in academia. And they're so separate that that you kind of just switch back and forth between them.

So maybe I was used to that. So when it came time to do what I'm talking about now, which is, well, what if your administrative work was its own role, almost like a separate job that got its own hours, it was natural for me. because of the quirks of my professional background. But it's something that I talk about in my new book, and it's an idea that I'm trying to get out there now, this split personality productivity. It's a psychological hack that actually can have pretty profound positive benefits on not only how much you get done,

but how happy people are with you and how low your stress level can remain. So good luck with that, Jeff. You might want to add a third job, which would be focused just on reading Greek mythology so that next time we can really get your game there much stronger. All right, let's take a question here from the world of academia. Hi, Cal. This is Janice, and I'm 35 years old and just starting a PhD program.

And my question to you is, how do you implement the mindset that allows you to be okay with the process of accretion that you talked about? I find myself constantly feeling like I have to work really hard, overwhelm myself, and then everything falls apart because I'm exhausted, and then failure sets in, and I have to start all over again from scratch. If you can help me figure out how to move and be okay with that process of accretion and be patient with that process, that would be greatly appreciated. Well, Janice, the problem you're talking about is one that is quite common among PhD students, the way I typically summarize it is the urge to artificially create busyness. This notion of I want more to do, I need more to do, you throw a lot on your plate and then you burn yourself out. Very common, especially for people who are maybe coming into their doctoral programs a little bit later in life, such as yourself. And by later, I just mean you're in your

30s, which means you've had some exposure to the world of regular work before you entered a doctoral program. for reasons I'm about to explain, that makes this particular issue more acute. Now, the way I typically understand the artificial busyness response is that being a doctoral student is a different type of hard than other type of regular work. So in some ways, being a doctoral student is easier than regular work, particularly in the sense of how much you have to do on any given day. It does not for most programs during most parts of the programs, especially after you're done with the coursework. It does not actually generate a very heavy load of many different things that you need to get done. A lot of doctoral programs, there is no long to-do list from which you can be checking things off all day. So in that sense, it's easier than regular work.

You don't have a ton to do. You don't have people waiting for you to answer you right away. You don't have to stay up late to get things, you know, the report finalized. you don't have a ton of people emailing you with questions that you have to answer. So in that way, it's easier. But in other ways, being a doctoral student, it's harder than normal work because the thing that you are supposed to do, which is research and publish, papers, pre-PHD,

and then your doctoral dissertation itself, is intellectually harder than what most people do in their normal jobs. So you have this interesting tension. You don't have as much to do, but the things you have to do is really hard. Now, I think this can be a difficult transition for a lot of people. If you've been exposed to regular work, I think it is easy to feel uncomfortable. Not having that background of busyness, not having an inbox to do battle with, not having five meetings to jump to. You can feel guilty.

You can feel as if do I really have a job? Is this a real thing? There's often these feelings of guilt that I get from PhD students. and that can lead to a compensation in which you try to induce busyness. Say yes to a lot of things, bring a lot of things on your plate, just create in your own mind artificial urgencies because it makes you feel better. You feel less guilty.

I'm doing things. It's like my friends who are also in their 30s and have jobs. It feels more like that, so I feel more comfortable about it. The problem about inducing that artificial busyness as you are discovering is that you are forgetting that in these other ways your job is harder. actually have to do, producing these papers. Producing these dissertations is so demanding that if you introduce the artificial busyness, you're going to burn out.

And so it's not actually the right strategy. So what I'm going to tell you, Janice, is that it is okay to do less. In fact, the key to doing well in your current, very esoteric, unusual, and unique professional circumstance, which is being a doctoral student, the way to really thrive there is to do less, but to do what you do really well. And that is different than regular work. And it's going to take some getting used to. It's going to take some while to shake off the guilt about not having anything to do all morning long. But once you get used to it, it actually can be pretty cool. It can actually be a pretty cool job. All right. So how should you do this? Well, first of all,

you want to introduce a regular deep work routine. I would suggest probably first thing during your day. I suggest it should be two to three hours. Every weekday during this block, you go somewhere that you associate with depth, you do a ritual that you associate with this period, and you read or write academic caliber results. If you don't have anything to work on, find something to work on. Get a, you know, agree to do a book review, agree to do peer review or to help your advisor, do drafts of peer reviews, do an annotated bib for your advisor, whatever it is. Get yourself assignments, even if you're early in your program. So you always have academic level thinking and writing to do. You do it every day. You do it for two to three hours. You do it with a ritual.

What I'm trying to do here is to defang the idea of thinking and writing academic work. I don't want it to be this thing that lurks in the background that you're afraid of and not sure if you're going to be able to do it. That's scary, that grows in its scale. Imposter syndrome. builds a wall of obfuscation and obstruction around it. I want you to avoid all of that by just saying, I just do this every day. I'm always reading and writing something for academic work. Maybe later in your program,

what you're working on is like an important paper, a chapter from your dissertation. Early in your program, it might not be that important, but it all just gets mixed together. That's just what you do. That is a big rock. The second thing I'm going to recommend

is that you have a clear shutdown to your workday. Do not do the typical graduate student trick of just I can kind of work all the time. shut down at five. This is what I did. I did it because I got married very young. And so unlike the other young grad students around me, I had a wife who had a normal job, and I just aligned my hours to her job. That meant I was the first person there at the status center at MIT each morning, and I was the first person to leave. But I just worked backwards from that idea that I have a pretty easy job in terms of the number of obligations I have on my plate. I should be able to fit this within a set time. So let me make that set time. And when I'm done, I am

done. Janice, if you use a time block planner, I want you to focus in particular on that shutdown complete checkbox. I invented the shutdown ritual at MIT to shut down research-related ruminations. That's where that idea actually came from. You should be doing a clear shutdown ritual checking that box every single day so that your mind can unwind from the stress and anxiety of trying to find your footing in an academic world. And then what should you do for the rest of your time, be okay with not having too much to do there. Essentialize your obligations. Don't bring on things you don't have to. Make your default be saying no instead of saying yes.

Be very organized about the task you do have to do. A lot of young academics say, hey, one of the advantages of being an academic is I don't have to care about things like productivity. I'm not an executive. But here's the thing. That's all just brain noise. your job is to take your brain and produce value. Why would you inject unnecessary noise? What will happen if you just allow tasks to just float around and keep track of them in your head like open loops?

That's all just going to give you stress. That's all going to reduce cognitive power. It's like an athlete who's smoking the occasional cigarette. Be productive. Capture, configure, control so that your brain is left more free that when it comes time to think it can do so. So you're essentializing your,

task and being very organized about the task you have. That means the task in your life, the administrative tasks during your workday are not going to leave a big footprint. That's great. Your brain needs that breathing room. You know, you can have meetings or hang out with other students or do some more reading or do some more writing in addition to your sort of foundational rhythm. But that is actually a really good grad student rhythm. You start every day intensely with thinking and writing. Then you have a pretty open and loose afternoon where sometimes you do more reading and writing, sometimes you're meeting with your advisor or talking to their students, and sometimes you're doing administrative work. You have a hard shutdown, let your brain unwind, and you do other things.

The final thing I might recommend is finding ways to keep signaling to yourself that you take seriously your field and you enjoy it in a way that is beyond just the obligations that you owe your advisor as a student. So back in the days of my blog when I was doing student blogging, I had this series called The Romantic Scholar, where I was helping students at the graduate and undergraduate level, maintain intense motivation, and in particular intrinsic motivation for their work.

And what this means in your context is go to lectures, read things about your field, that you're doing for no other reason except for you're interested in them. It's not directly related to your research. It's not connected to a paper you're writing. You're just signaling to yourself, I'm interested in my field, I like people in my field, I read about my field.

I am someone who wants to be in this field, and I think that's a noble endeavor. I had a famous post years ago called Heidegger with Heffawizen, I recommended that students who are over 21 pretentiously take their 19th century German philosophy text to a English-style pub have a pint while you read it by the fireplace, just the environment of that is romantic

and it sort of makes you feel like that you're connected to the work and that you're someone who's just interested in these ideas. Do that type of thing. Whatever the equivalent is of wearing the beret and, you know, sitting by the fire with your abstinth, or whatever it is. Do that type of over-the-top stuff

because it just helps you build up this love for what you're doing and yourself and a character, it puts the emphasis on the intellectual exploration and makes it seem less like a weird job. All right, that's a really long answer. So let me just summarize this, Dennis. Your job is hard in a way that normal jobs aren't. That's okay. You shouldn't have a lot to do. Don't create a lot for yourself to do. You want to be reading and thinking. Keep the tasks you have to do reasonable and find ways to inject into your everyday life, this sort of non-urgent, non-required, self-initiated embrace and engagement with your field more broadly. You put these things together, your PhD years can be great. It really is an awesome job.

It really is a great way to spend some time if you have a brain that likes that type of challenge. And so let's lean into what's good about it. Let's not amplify what's bad about it. And I think you're going to find that this experience ends up a positive one. I want to take a moment to briefly mention another sponsor of this podcast, which is Mint Mobile. Now, as I detailed in Monday's episode, Mint Mobile is one of these low overhead agile upstarts in the world of wireless that has found a way to offer an unlimited plan for only $30 a month.

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one of the few and the weird who have a bad phone. You want to get your plan shipped straight to your door, no store involved. Go to MintMobile.com. slash deep. That's mintmobile.com slash deep. So let's shift our attention now from a question from someone early in their career to someone asking a question at the end of their career. Cal, this is Joe from the Woodlands, Texas. There's a group of people, men and women, that have that spark that they want to keep on learning. And we have the opportunity and the

time to learn and do deep work. And I'm talking, of course, about retired Americans. We want to learn more than just the informational. We want to learn knowledge and maybe some wisdom. And you know, Cal, it's not easy to get older. You know, there's a lot of shallow noise. We all the dangers like Netflix and falling and Facebook. So, but I'm a digital middle bus now and it's taken a while. And I just got my time block planner. So please, some guidance for the men and women and retirement. Thank you very much. Well, Joe, coming from someone who spent a lot of his early childhood in Spring, Texas, I can offer a hello from your former Texan neighbor. Now, as to your question, obviously retirement is not an area of my expertise, but I have talked with readers who have been

trying to apply some of my ideas in that stage of life. And I think the main thing I would say is I don't think I would have such a clear binary distinction between retired or not retired. You know, if you are trying to build and optimize and live a deep life, there are many things that go into that. There's many, as I like to say, buckets that are important. You have craft, but you also have community and you have constitution, you have contemplation or whatever the buckets are you define. And all this happened when you've quote unquote retired is you've taken from this large

collection of different activities that you are intentionally going after, you've taken one of those activities away, whatever it is that you used to do for your old employer. But I don't think that changes the fundamental approach to life, which I preach, in which you have the buckets that are important and you plan your life around focusing on big wins in each of those buckets. So now maybe in your craft bucket, you have freed up time that you used to spend at whatever you did, you know, at the insurance agency, at the corporate wholesaler. I mean, I don't know what you did for a living. And the time you spent there, now you're maybe you're going to put some other type of craft in there. And maybe it's commercial craft. Maybe it's a high quality leisure

related craft. Whatever it is, the underlying approach to life, I think, doesn't change too much. And so that's what I would still recommend. You have your buckets. You're trying to optimize what you do in each of those buckets, given your current circumstances. I would still plan. I would still have quarterly plans. I would still use my quarterly plans to build weekly plans. I would still use my weekly plans to time block my weekdays. Now, these can be maybe slightly looser time blocks than you might have needed if you had a job with a lot of tight turnarounds and demands and chock full of meetings, but still have some intention to your day. Here's what I'm doing, doing working hours.

Here's how I'm allocating those hours. Here's when I'm done. Here's when I shut down. This gives you still some differences or transitions between. the day and relaxing evenings or between the week and relaxing weekends. So in other words, I'm saying not a ton changes. The real change here is just the ingredients you are working with as you build this stew of the deepest possible life, if you'll excuse a little bit of a weird metaphor there.

So, okay, you're not doing that particular type of work anymore. Great, that gives you some more flexibility. That gives you some more options. But back to the structuring, back to the, the planning because the intentional life, as I always argue on here, at least in my opinion, the intentional life is always going to be a more resilient and satisfying life than one that's lived more haphazardly. Let's do one more question. This final question is about deep procrastination. Hi, Cal. My name is Myra. I'm a professor of French. You've written on your blog about deep

procrastination for students, and I would like to hear you address how it affects. professionals and how they can resolve it. What advice do you have for people who are at a crisis point with procrastination and who need to complete major projects within a very tight timeline? Thank you so much. So as Myra noted in her question, deep procrastination is a phenomenon I first started talking about way back when I was writing predominantly for students. it was a phenomenon that I observed among students, especially really over-scheduled students at elite schools.

These are students I would be working with, they give advice to, and this is when I really began to observe this phenomenon happening quite frequently. So the main symptom of deep procrastination is you can't work. And by can't work, I mean, you will have something that's urgent, that's important, that you need to get done. So like for these students, it would be a final paper or a take-home example. that their grade depends on, and they just can't bring themselves to work on it. They just can't do it. And it was really a striking phenomenon

when I first observed it, because the students would get extension after extension. The professors and the dean's like, look, we want to help you here, but you have to hand this in. Eventually, and the student would say, I don't know what's going on. I just can't bring myself to do any work on it.

These same issues, of course, afflict professionals as well. This is the question Myra is asking. I think it is an important one. Now, before I dive into this in a narrow way, there is, of course, the broader point here, which is anyone with some psychological training is right now probably picking up the obvious and clear overlaps between deep procrastination and depressive syndromes. They can be quite intertwined. Extreme apathy is one of the well-known symptoms of, for example, clinical depression.

So these worlds can be intertwined. and so I'll just put that out there that if you are feeling I just can't, you know, whatever the proverbial equivalent is of get out of bed, I just can't do this work. There may be a clinical depression issue going on here, and this is something to talk to with someone who is a professional because it is very treatable, but you got to deal with a professional there. There's also some other things that go on with deep procrastination that I picked up working with these students.

and I want to talk about this more narrow take on this issue in case it's useful for Myra or anyone else who is listening to this podcast. So one of the things I found when dealing with deep procrastinators is that the source seemed to be, the acute source, seem to be burnout, a particular type of burnout. So the demands of their work,

so just the physiological demands, is past some threshold of tolerability, combined with a sense that the locus of control and the activities was extrinsic to use the terminology for motivational psychology, but the sense to which you felt like, I don't know why I'm doing all of this, or it wasn't really my decision, or I'm not really sure why I felt like I need to be doing so much, the more you felt like that, and then combine that with an intolerable physiological load, that combination is what could basically short-circuit the motivational systems and give you deep procrastination. And so I saw this a lot with overachieving

students because they were often had been on this treadmill for a long time of now it's the time to put your head down, you'll get the reward later. You got to get into the college, and once you're in the college, you have to be the most impressive student there. When I would deal with MIT students, often, for example, they would be these really bright kids and no one in their school or their family had ever gone to a school like MIT before and there was all this pressure they felt if I have to be impressive, I have to stand out, everyone's counting on me. And the only way they knew how to be impressive was to throw a lot of work at themselves. What if I triple major? What if I do 25 different clubs? Like the only lever they had the poll to show that they were impressive was doing

more things. So they just felt this huge load of work. And they weren't really sure why they're doing it other than just this is what I'm supposed to do. I don't want to let people down. My parents want me to do it. Just vaguely speaking, what else am I going to focus on? I'm 19. This is the only thing I have access to if I feel ambitious, I guess, is just trying to be successful at school. They're not quite sure while they're doing it, and it's really hard. That combination, very dangerous. The same thing can happen in the professional world where you feel completely overwhelmed by work, and most of the work does even feel that important to you, and so that lack of motivation plus the physiological toll can spark short-circuiting of the motivation system, and you get deep

procrastination. So if you want to get out of deep procrastination, you actually have to address both of those issues. So you have to reduce the physiological toll of your work, which is a combination of essentializing that is actually taking things off your plate. So, Myra, you're an academic. You can take things off your plate, but there's a high social cost. You're going to have to pay the social cost. I'm burnt out, I'm overloaded, my quotas are full. I know I said be on this committee. I need to step back. I know you need me to help with this, but I'm, I'm overwhelmed right now. I'm taking a breather, whatever it is. You got to take things off your plate. You got to essentialize. And then you have to take what's left on your plate

and be very organized about it. It makes a big difference. If you're full capture, full, configure, full time block control lowers the physiological footprint of what you do have to do because you're outsourcing or offloading anxious thought into a system. And that's something to would otherwise have a physiological toll. You're now reducing that toll by outsourcing some of that into the system. So that combination of aggressively doing less, even if people get mad at you. And Myra, I'll tell you, I have been yelled at many a time. I've been yelled at many a time as an academic. That's just the nature of the job. It stinks, but, you know, that's just what happens in academia.

People get mad. You're not doing, you're not doing things the way they think you should do it. They don't like what you're doing. They don't think you're doing enough. They don't think you're making their life easy enough and so that they yell at you. Not really an acceptable way to interact with humans, but, I don't know, academia is its own beast. So less things, at least temporarily, blame the pandemic if you need to. I think it's a good one because it's true.

It's like, look, I'm fried. I'm putting my head down, right? And then structure what you have to do really well. That'll lower the physiological toll. So that helps in this equation. But then you also have the extrinsic versus intrinsic motivational toll. Resparking an intrinsic motivation for your work. It's difficult.

It can be difficult. And what it might mean is bringing off your plate hard projects that you're really not, you really don't like. It's not really what you want to do. You took it on because there's grant money available, but it's really outside of what you're excited about and putting in the reflection and the experimentation to try to figure out from scratch.

Here's some new endeavors I want to work on. I feel seriously about it. I think it's useful to the field. I think it's pushing my skills. I think it's pushing my brain. You've got to re-spark some sense of motivation in what you're doing. It helps to build up deep work rituals around the work.

I go to this location to do the work, find an out-of-the-way location to do it. I have these big rituals around when I do the work. I do the work completely separated from email and Slack and everything else did I associate with overload? So it just becomes a part of your day and your identity of like there's a times what I'm just thinking. And that's, I'm a thinker and that's what I do.

Some of the advice I gave to Janus might be relevant here as well. These tricks like putting into your life engagement with your field that is unrelated to your professional advancement. Just a signal to yourself that, oh, I'm the type of person who likes these type of things. Look, a lot of this stuff seems arbitrary, but it's not. What you're trying to do here is just take that locus of control and shift it from the extrinsic back towards the intrinsic. I am doing this because I am a scholar. I think scholarship's important.

I like this field. I have a theoretical framework I want to develop. I read about or study great scholars in this field. It inspires me and I want to follow in this. their footsteps. To go back to my advice to Janice, and I think, Myra, this is mandatory. You need to wear a beret. You need to wear a beret everywhere you go, because how else can you be a French scholar without a beret? And you probably need a cigarette holder. So I'll just tell you that. You need a beret and a cigarette holder and a bagget under your... This is probably borderline offensive now. But what I mean

here, actually, Myra, is some of this over-the-top stuff is not over-the-top psychologically, because you're signaling to yourself, I'm a scholar. This is important to me. This is what I like to do. I think this is important, even though it's sometimes hard. Those two things put together,

reducing the physiological toll and moving your motivation back towards the intrinsic a little bit more. You don't have to shift a ton by just having a reasonable shift in the right direction in both of those components

means when they combine, now you have a better chance of falling under. the deep procrastination threshold. And this is something that gets better and better. Then you fall farther behind beneath the deep procrastination threshold and where you eventually can end up if you really keep on these two things, really prioritize these two things,

really just get used to there's occasional jerks in your department yelling at you because you're not, you know, joining the senior hiring committee this year because you're burnt out and you need to take a break. You find that not only do you fall, below the deep procrastination threshold, but you might find a spark for the work comes back.

And that internal engine of motivation or inspiration comes back. All right. So anyways, that's my narrow take on deep procrastination. I have that formula. Sometimes dealing with those operands matters. Sometimes as I mentioned in the beginning, there's also larger

depressive syndrome issues involved. So of course, I'm not the one to give expert on advice of that, but there's plenty of people who can give you very good advice on that. So keep that in mind. But basically, I think this is a generally good point for people. These two things matter when it comes to work motivation, how hard your actual day is, and how much you feel like the work you do is something that you're proud that you do or inspired by or just feel like it's something you chose to do. Keep those two things healthy and your mindset towards work

itself will remain healthier. All right, that is all the time we have for today's mini episode. If you want to submit your own questions for the habit, tune up many episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Talnewport. We'll be back next week with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. Until then, as always, stay deep.