Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 53: Covey's Quads, "Perfect" Productivity Systems, and Reducing Laziness

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about Stephen Covey's quad systems, the quixotic quest for a "perfect" productivity system, and reducing laziness, among many other topics.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 3WORK QUESTIONS- Why did I become a scientist? [13:50]- Time blocking scrum teams. [18:27]- Stephen Covey’s quad systems. [22:50]- Is an MS essential? [27:28]- Time blocking the night before. [28:52] TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS- The futility of perfecting productivity systems [31:41]- Thoughts on pair programming. [41:44]- Keeping track of novel connections between ideas. [52:14]- Forced social media use [55:15]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS- Deep living for stay-at-home parents. [1:02:02]- Dealing with people not interested in personal development. [1:08:56]- Reducing laziness. [1:12:51]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.

This podcast is brought to you in part by Magic Spoon. Folks, I've been talking about Magic Spoon all throughout this dumpster fire of a fall, and for good reason, we need our moments of escape. And what escape could be better than enjoying a bowl of sweet cereal, just like you used to eat as a kid, and doing so without all of the junk that came with those childhood treats. Magic Spoon has somehow created an amazing tasting cereal that you don't feel guilty eating. Zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, three net grams of carbs per serving.

This is a cereal that is somehow keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carb, and GMO-free. I do not think any of those things would have applied to Cocoa Krispies. I'm just guessing here. Now look, you can get this cereal in four flavors, cocoa. fruity, blueberry, or my favorite, frosted. All tastes great. Frosted, though, is the best. I think we all objectively agree about that.

But here's the thing. Life is hard, and I think we could all just use a little Magic Spoon to make it a little bit easier. So go to MagicSpoon.com slash Cal to grab a variety pack and try it today. And be sure to use our promo code Cal at checkout to get free shipping. That's magic spoon.com slash cow and use to code Cal C-A-L for free shipping. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. The show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Let's do quick announcements.

I have three points to touch on here at the beginning of the episode. One, I am continuing to solicit feedback from you the listeners about how to upgrade this podcast for the second season that will begin in the new year. One of the ideas, for example, I'm thinking about is instead of asking just my mailing list subscribers, the submit questions, I might just create a question asking page on my website so anyone could ask questions at any time. So let me know what you think about that. Two, it's been a while since I've thanked people for their reviews for this podcast,

but I just wanted to let you know, I really do appreciate. appreciate them. I read every review. You know, I started this podcast so that I could have some connection with my readers during a time when the pandemic was making it hard for me to actually see people. And so I really appreciate that feedback that comes from you back to me. One of the recent reviews we have on the podcast, for example, comes from Rebecca Ryan, who says, in a year that most of us will all agree has been a dumpster fire. Cal's podcast has been a reality check. Rebecca, I feel the same way. I have been getting a lot out of it. So thank you, Rebecca, and thank you to everyone else who has been leaving reviews.

I do think that also helps other people find a podcast. Finally, I want to mention we are at our third episode now in which we are beginning with a deep dive segment. I am taping these. I am filming them, and I will be releasing them online. As soon as we finish this first deep dive, I will release all the videos and I will do this for future deep dives. The idea is if you like a particular deep dive topic, you'll be able to go back and just see directly my smiling face talking about the points. You can jump to each part separately.

You won't have to go back and find old podcast episodes to piece together the deep dive segment. So I will keep you up to date on that, but we should have filmed versions of the deep dives coming soon. And with that in mind, let us get started with the deep dive segment. we have now reached the third part of our deep dive into the topic of the deep reset. Now as you'll remember from the earlier parts of the series, the deep reset is a response to this very human urge to want to transform or change your life to be deeper, to be more meaningful in response to disruption. Now when we are recording this series, which is in the late fall and early winter of 2020, we have had plenty of disruption. So there are plenty of people out there right now who are feeling this need, this drive to want to reset,

to emerge from this chaos into something that is better. So in the first part, what we talked about was advice for gaining some silence in your life. unplugging yourself from this anxiety-producing constant churn of information, distraction, and diversion that makes any real reflection impossible. In part two, we then said, what should you do with this silence? And this is where we talked about the strategy of resonance sampling, where you identified the key areas of your life, the areas that you want to focus on, the areas that you want to emphasize and cultivate into something very meaningful. We talked about exposing yourself, exposing yourself to examples in documentaries,

in books, in real life, and trying to see what resonates and what doesn't, listening to those intimations that we can now hear because we cleared out the noise during part one. So during the second part of the series, we gave you advice for beginning to collect in these different areas of your life that are important, beginning to collect examples. This resonates. That resonates. This really seems to catch my attention. Now in part three, we want to start talking about how do you take action on what you discovered. Now here, I think the tendency is to jump right into concrete goals. You look at these examples that resonated with you, you extract from them a very clear goal. You know, I'm going to run a marathon. I'm going to quit my job, whatever it is, and you're like, let's just go for it.

I'm going to caution, however, that we take a slightly slower approach. Now, having worked with and talked to and observed and read about and been involved with lots of people going through transformations in their life for various reasons, one thing I can tell you from experience is that jumping right into concrete goals is a risky strategy. Why is it risky? Well, what happens is that it is difficult to get goals right. it is difficult to actually find the right goal that is achievable but is also aspiring and inspirational

that's going to move the needle but you can actually get it done it's easy to get these things wrong at least when you first try now if all you have is to concrete goals and it doesn't quite work out it was a little bit too hard there's an unforeseen obstacle it's not really working you lose your motivation well this thing I was doing this goal I don't think I'm actually going to accomplish it and there's no platform for you to land on when you fall from that particular aspiration, and so your efforts in general fizzle until they're no

longer there. So I'm going to suggest instead a more, I would say, consistently successful strategy for taking action on these things you've identified as being important, and that is to use what psychologists call a heaven- hell exercise. Now, this has been validated, of course, into literature, but I think intuitively we know this works well just from our own experience. So here is the idea. Before you get started with any concrete plans, you're going to write down,

you're going to write down a description of what it is about your life right now that's not working, and you're going to project that into the future about how things are just going to get worse. What your life will be like if you do not reset. This is the hell imagery. Next, you're going to write

write down a vision of what your life could be. If you actually acted on all these different elements you identified, that resonate with you, these clarified intimations of what you want your life to be about, these intimations of meeting, what your life could be like. And I would suggest that this, what's known as heaven imagery, is narrative. This is what a typical day would be like. If I transform my life along these things I've identified now as being imported. these both written down.

This is where I am and where I'm going to go if I don't transform. It's where I could be. It's what my days could be like if I did transform. That is a very powerful foundation. Now, from this foundation, this foundation that you can read, this foundation that is plugged straight into these things that resonate. So it's going to very clearly sing your tune when you read this imagery. from this foundation you can launch particular goals and particular initiatives.

And here's the thing. If a particular goal doesn't really work, it was ill-conceived, an obstacle arose you didn't think about, you're not back to ground zero. That's just one of many different strategies and attacks you're deploying to move from the hell to the heaven. Some will work, some won't. That is a much better place. So now you're not dependent on any particular strategy or idea or habit actually sticking. What you really have to commit to is just, I will work. want the heaven image I want to get away from the hell image. That can get you through.

Lots of failed approaches or false starts. It can help you over time, shape, and return, and persistently do the efforts required to actually trigger the reset. Working from this imagery, again, it's just going to be much more consistently successful than just throwing out there the first ideas you have for a goal or a habit. You know, something I've observed, and one of the reasons why this is successful is when we jump straight to goals and habits, we tend to also not to actually choose what's the best thing to do. We tend to choose the things that we want to do. If in our vision we are a novelist or something like that,

we want the thing to be most important is that we write a thousand words a day in the afternoon or something like that because we like the sound of it, but that might not actually be the most important thing to do first if you want to rebuild a life in which you're writing fiction, right? And so when that doesn't really get you anywhere, you have the heaven hell imagery. You say, let me try something else.

Let me try something else. Let me try something else. All right, so what do we do with this imagery? Well, I said you should write it down. This should be in a document that you should review quarterly and maybe monthly. I tend to think quarterly is a good scale or scope. Some people prefer monthly. That is up to you.

That is at your discretion. When you do this review of this document, during which, by the way, feel free to update it. it's a living document you might change it you might tweak it you may have been exposed to a new idea that's even more inspiring that's all fine when you review this either quarterly or monthly

you then are going to detail out in the document what is it we're working on this month or this quarter to move us from the hell towards the heaven imagery what are the things we think are to be most effective you're writing it down in black and right here's what we're trying to do then as you get to each week

you're building your weekly plan for the week, you look at this document and say, okay, what am I doing this week that is going to align with the strategies I identified, the objectives I identified for this quarter, or for this month, making sure I'm moving those things forward. And if something really falls off the rails halfway through a quarter, you might go back and say, let's rethink our attack for this quarter. That didn't work. Let's try this instead. Now, in the next part of this deep dive discussion, we'll get more concrete. We'll talk about some specific case studies and get some sense of what these strategies might look like and how you might actually adjust them. But this is the idea I want to leave you with

today is that you need a foundation for transformation that is below specific action. And it has to be a foundation that is inspiring. It has to be a foundation that is tied in directly to these deep line residences that you have already identified. That's what's going to make it strong. And then you really need to see what you're going to be doing each quarter as deploying particular attacks and strategies to try to make progress, some of which will work better than others, but you know exactly what you're working on.

You know if it succeeded. You know if it failed. If it fails, you record that and bring in something else. There's a very systematic approach to transformation. But transformations are complicated. There's many unforeseen swerves, an obstacle, so a systematic but relentless attack is what's needed. So I think now is the time if you were following along in this program to begin working on your heaven, hell imagery.

I think if you've gone through the first two parts of this exercise, you were ready for that. Next time we'll get more concrete about how particular strategies for acting on these images, what those might actually look like. So we'll pick up this deep dive discussion next week. Now it's time for some work questions. Rafael asks, why did you choose to become a scientist? In your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, you propose the amount of money someone is willing to pay you as a metric for how valuable your career capital is.

However, for scientists, money is often not the primary concern. What drives you as a scientist and what metrics do you use to evaluate your professional life? Well, first of all, I want to say this question inevitably had to be the first question that I answered today because it was the very first question submitted to the latest question survey. So for now, the way I solicit questions for this podcast is that I send a link every two months or so to my mailing list for a survey, online survey, and say, hey, go submit questions. I sent out a new link last week, and this question was the very first of the 500 or so that have come in so far. This was the very first.

So congratulations, Rafael. I guess that's some sort of arbitrary distinction. Now let's actually go to your question. It's an important question because it actually misunderstands the relevant point from the book, so good they can't ignore you. So this is a good occasion to clarify. So in that book, I introduced an idea from the entrepreneur and writer Derek Sivers. And the idea was what he called money being a neutral indicator of value.

Now, his point for that was if you are looking to make a change in your working life. So if you are looking to, let's say, jump into your own business or start selling a product or shift to another line of work, A very good way to get feedback on whether your skills are sufficient to support such a change. A good way to get that feedback is to see, will people pay me for it? His idea is that people are happy to give you positive feedback, but people will not give you their money unless they actually find value in your skills or the products you're selling, etc. So he said, let people's willingness to pay be a good neutral indicator that what you want to do is something that is valuable. Now, Rafael, I think the issue is, is you are,

you're interpreting this as a linear feedback scale. That the more money people give you the better, the more money you can make, the better or more meaningful or more valuable your work. And that's absolutely not true. So the way that this, this Derek Siver's concept actually works is just whatever the appropriate scale of money is for the thing you're thinking about doing,

do you make an appropriate amount of money? So in Derek's example, he did not leave his career as a professional musician to work on his startup CD baby full time until he was making a reasonable salary, a reasonable amount of money selling his product. That's how he knew, okay, I think I have something here. And that's all that means, Raphael.

You know, you don't, it's not, if you make a million dollars off something that that is 10 times more useful or valuable, valuable and if you make $100,000. It's just the idea here is see if people actually pay for something as a better indication that is valuable than just people giving you positive feedback. So why did I become a scientist? Well, because as I've talked about before on this podcast, I have always looked up to, idolized and been very interested in people that just use their mind to create new knowledge. I really like the refined application of the brain and it was something that

always resonated with me. If we were to apply Derek Sivers' philosophy to me becoming a scientist, I guess the best example would be, is there a PhD program that is willing to take you on? And PhD programs in the sciences, they pay you, right? You don't pay money to get a PhD in the sciences. They pay you a stipend. Everything is otherwise paid for. Is a good program willing to pay you to be in their program? A good program was. So that was a good use of money as a neutral indicator or value that my science skills are out of place that maybe I could make a run at being a scientist. So I hope that clarification is useful and congratulations again, Rafael, for being the very first question asker of this latest survey.

Alex asks, how do I time block in a scrum team if I'm not able to predict the task I will be working on in a given day? So Alex is talking about he's a software developer. They use the scrum project management methodology in this methodology. You actually have a transparent and collaborative way of deciding what you should work on next. So when you finish a task in the scrum methodology, roughly speaking, there's going to be a synchronous meeting where people say, okay, what should Alex do next? Okay, Alex do this? What do you need from people?

Do you have it? Go. And then you give it your full attention until you're done. A thread you've probably picked up, if you've been reading my New Yorker articles from this year, you've probably picked up this thread that I think these type of structure, often known as Adzile project management philosophies, are probably the right type of way to approach office work. I think it's much superior to the approach that most office settings use, which is hook everyone up to Slack or hook everyone up the email and just rock and roll. So Alex is asking, though, how do I time block if, you know, the way these scrum days work is that you work on one task until you're done and then you're basically assigned a new one. You don't know when that task is going to complete. But once it is, you move on to the next thing. You don't have that much say over what's going to happen with your time.

Well, Alex, I agree that a team that's running a peer agile methodology is going to have a different relationship with time blocking. And in fact, what I often recommend for those worlds is that you have a binary distinction between time in which you are actually executing the task identified by your Agile methodology and the time that surrounds it. The time in which the other types of obligations you have and your job get done. The time in which you fill out the survey that the benefits office needs, the time in which you go and get your parking pass renewed for the parking garage, etc. et cetera. That periphery time that falls outside of your agile sprints on tasks that are optimally identified, you can time block that to make sure that you're making the most out of it. And then the time that is, okay, this is me just working on the main thing I'm supposed to do. You're not time blocking. I agree. Because these decisions about what you should be working on

when during that time is being made for you by the project management system. So this is kind of an interesting point because basically, if most offices ran in the way that I wish they would, if most offices were borrowing many more ideas we see from software development shops that use things like agile project management methodologies, my time blocking ideas would become much less relevant. So basically, if the world of knowledge work worked the way I think they should, we would actually need much less time. blocking because as you see in Alex's situation, in an office environment that actually really takes seriously what's the best way to deploy brains, there is a process to make these decisions for you. This is what you should work on next. Now do this. Now, of course, you know, look, there's a lot of caveats here. People get very worried about this notion that someone is going to micromanage how they work in a very creative field. Of course, that's true. Software development

has its own flavor to it where it really can be broken up into these discrete tasks that are tackled by sprints. And then the creativity comes in how you actually implement those tasks, how you actually write the code. So I don't want to oversimplify and make it seem like all creative knowledge work can be broken down to a system and a task board saying this is what you do next and this is what you do next. But what I'm trying to say is the more process or structure we have in knowledge work, the less

important it becomes for you as the individual to have to put the structure into your own time. So Alex, you're right. You don't have to time block the time that is being spoken for by your agile system, but there is typically even in these type of agile jobs, periphery time, which is much more autonomous and has much more annoying task floating around than it. Time block that periphery time so that you can get what needs to get done done as quickly as possible. Dimitri asks, what do you think about Stephen Covey's approach to planning? Particularly, I'm talking about planning things by dividing them into four quadrants, important versus non-important, and urgent versus non-urgent.

Well, Dimitri, Stephen Covey's quads has been quite influential both to me and I think in general to the world of productivity. For those who aren't familiar, just imagine a two-by-two grid. You have a column for important and non-important, and a column, or I would say a row for important and non-important, I should say, and a column for urgent and non-urgent. So you have four combinations. Covey named him quad one, quad two, quad three, and quad four.

His main philosophical point is that it's easy to fill your time with the quad that is, that chorus, responds to urgent and important, that you can spend all of your time, just here's something that needs to get done, important, here's something that needs to get done and is important, and that it's actually the quad, though, that is non-urgent and important, what he calls Quad 2, that gets neglected. So I believe, and look, I'm not an expert on Covey. It's been a while since I've read his work, though, again, I really want to emphasize how foundationally influential. His thinking is to almost everything that has followed, including my own work. So let me just

give you that point. I believe the way he talks about it is that you want to take the non-important and urgent and really de-emphasize it. You want to then make sure that you are balanced in a reasonable way between the urgent and important and the non-urgent and important, that you don't put all of your energy that remains just on what is urgent because the non-urgent, these are the long-term projects that in the end could really move the needle. All of that philosophy is really important. I know Covey has some particular planning methodologies

that explicitly reference those quads. You build these to-do list and you have these categorizations of the things in your to-do list. That I don't know as much about. What I typically would recommend to the modern knowledge worker in an age of email, in an age of non-stop onslaught, an age that is much different than the age in which Stephen Covey wrote his work. And I do really want to point this out. If you look at, for example, Stephen Covey's Franklin

Planner Methodology, where it's a planner that you can buy that really captures a lot of Stephen Covey's thoughts, even to today, you can see pages they sell for these planners where they have a space for you to record emails. And there's 10 lines under it. Right. So obviously this came out in a time when you didn't receive 100 email. a day. It came out in a time where you didn't have to check your inbox once every six minutes, like the average knowledge worker does. So what I would say, what I would take away from Covey's philosophy is that when you're doing your multi-scale planning, when you're planning your day, which is based on your plan for your week, which is based on your plan for the quarter,

you make sure that the quad two is well represented. Covey has identified that as a separate type of task that is easy to neglect as a crucial identification. When you're at these various scales, you want to make sure that the non-urgent but important is getting time. That is what in the long run is going to distinguish someone that really moves the needle and someone who is just, I don't know, hardworking and dependable. I also like his philosophy that when you're thinking about your systems and your plans and what you take on your plate and what you don't, that you should be very skeptical of the quad that corresponds to urgent but non-important.

Covey gives us a good mindset of essentially vigilant combat against the non-important but urgent, that you're very suspicious of that, you try to minimize that, you put into a small box, you try to take the stream of those tasks whenever possible and divert it around you, that that is just a swamp in which you are going to get stuck. So I just think from a terminology perspective, the quads are very important. I think from a philosophic or ontological perspective, it's important to think about these categories. You're making sure the quad twos get emphasis.

You make sure that the non-important urgent is getting defended against. All of that is really useful. But I would then just apply, apply those ideas, apply those categories, apply that philosophy to the much more modern approaches to physically organizing your work that people like me talk about. Ravi asks, is a master's, degree essential these days.

Well, Ravi, as longtime listeners of this podcast know, I'm going to tell you that that is the wrong question to ask. That's much more general, and it's not very meaningful. The right question to ask is whether a master's degree is required for a specific job or position or promotion that you want and that you have evidence requires that degree. That is the way to think about master's degree. I want to do X. To do X, I need a master's degree in this program from a school of this caliber.

Okay, now I will go get that degree from that school if I can. That is the level of specificity you need when thinking about master's degrees. Never think about it just generally. Like, well, people seem to need a master's degree these days. Maybe that will open up a job opportunity at some point. Nope. Have the particular promotion or job or position upgrade in mind and have the hard evidence that the particular type of degree you were going to get. From the particular caliber of school, you can get that degree. Have the evidence that that is going to make the difference before you invest a time and before you invest the money. All right. Let's do one more quick work question. AD asks, should I do time block planning?

the day before. Well, AD, it's not a bad idea. If you feel like you have enough breathing room at the end of your workday to set up your time block schedule for the next day, you can make that part of your shutdown routine. And I can tell you that is a really good anxiety buster. So when you do your shutdown ritual traditionally, you're checking sources of uncertainty and you're trying to close open loops. So you're looking at your inbox to make sure you're not missing an urgent email that needs a response that night. You look at your calendar to make sure you didn't miss some sort of appointment or you know what's on your plate the next day. You look at your capture columns. If you're using something like my time block planner, which you can learn more about it,

timeblock planner.com. You're using something like my time block planner. You have these pages right there next to your time block grids where you've been capturing notes and ideas. You process that all into your system. You look at your weekly plan. You make sure that you generally know what's going on, you're closing open loops before you check that shutdown complete box of my planner or before you say a shutdown complete mantra if you're not using the planner. If you add to that process actually making a time block plan, your first swing at a time block plan for the next day, not a bad idea.

Then you really are going to feel comfortable. Like I not only have closed my open loops, but I know what tomorrow is going to be. It's really going to help your mind relax and release some of that. anxiety. I've done this sometimes. A lot of times I don't because I end up not time blocking, ironically, room at the end of my day to build the next time block plan. I just use the rest of that time to get a little bit more done. I sometimes enjoy starting my day with the time block plan as a cinerine exercise. Okay, let's get into work mode. I'm making my plan. You know, it's like you're

taking your focus and removing it from the morning chaos. I have a lot of young kids. We have long mornings. It's a whole thing. And it gets me into work mode. But I think for a lot of people to just have the time block plan in place to be like, okay, it's time to work. You open it up.

Here's the first block. Go. That could also be really effective. And again, I think if rumination and work anxiety is an issue, having the time block plan done the day before as you shut down your work, as you do your shutdown ritual, probably will give you an extra, an extra boost of anxiety reduction. So, AD, that is a good question. And with that, let's move on from talking about work

to talking about technology. Mark asks, no system is perfect. Are there parts of your productivity system that aren't working as well as you would like? Well, Mark, I know this was meant as a question for me, but I think there's a much broader discussion that's relevant. So I'm glad you asked this question so I could get to the broader discussion. I'm including it here in the technology section of the episode

because it does overlap, as we will see with technology. So in the context of knowledge work, this idea of a perfect productivity system, we can trace this back to David Allen. So at the turn of the 21st century, when David Allen was promoting getting things done, he was actually pitching a pretty audacious idea. I mean, I remember when this book came out. I was a productivity nerd in my late teen years and early 20s because I had run a startup during that period. And so I really remember David Allen's book.

And what was audacious about his claim was not just that he was going to help you organize your work better. Not just that he was going to help you, like maybe Stephen Covey would say, focus on your priorities and not waste too much times on the things that weren't important. he was proposing a totalizing productivity system in which you are freed in the day to day from having to think or be stressed or overwhelmed by work. The system would tell you what to do next. You would crank the widget and repeat. Mind-like water was a key phrase. Stress-free productivity was another key phrase.

It was supposed to be a all-encompassing totalizing perfect productivity system that just would tell you when it came time to work what to do next. You would look up after a week or a month had passed, and the right stuff is getting done. He was pushing back on the stress that was beginning to arise as the 90s turned into the 2000s. There was a stress beginning to arise because of overwhelm. Now, email had a lot to do with this,

but we were getting more and more work on our plate, more and more requests, more and more messages to answer. People were feeling overwhelmed by work in a way that they didn't before. and Alan said, I can get rid of that stress. You are basically going to offload your efforts into the system. The system will just tell you what to do moment to moment. You can just be there.

The zen-like presence. Cranking widgets. Cranking widgets. That was a very seductive idea, and it was perfectly timed for the beginning of this age of overload. Where did that come from? Well, basically what Alan was doing, consciously or not, is he was taking, the big innovation in industrial productivity that had occurred in the early 20th century, and he was bringing it over to the 21st century.

So the big idea of early 20th century industrial productivity was this notion of de-skilling the worker. Now, this term deskilling, I believe it came from the left-wing labor economist Harry Braverman, and it was meant pejoratively, you know, looking at it. Looking back at this period, we think of this as pejorative, but basically the idea was the worker, we do not want the worker to have to think on their feet and apply skill to problems and figure out how are we going to build this thing or get around this issue, that we should consolidate all of that creative thinking at a small number of elite managers. and then we can just promulgate down to the workers in the factory, just do this step and do this step efficiently. That it would be way more efficient and way more financially lucrative if you consolidate the creative skilled thinking

and then spread that out to deskilled workers. Now, of course, for labor economists, this is considered to be very bad for the worker. It made work for the actual deskilled worker. made in something that was much more, not just much more drudgery, but it also got rid of a lot of your actual economic leverage. It made you more exploitable, et cetera. David Allen's system was basically saying, well, let's do that, but all within the head of a single individual. So we can have a productivity system in which we consolidate all the decisions about how work should get

done, what work should get done, and then most of your day, your brain will operate like the deskilled factory worker. Just executing. Executing the things the system told you. You will simulate in your own brain the Frederick Winslow Taylor with the time stop wot saying, okay, crank widgets, crank widgets, go faster, faster, faster. Now it's very ironic because again, this shift, this deskilling shift was seen as very negative for workers when we were looking back mid-century at this change that happened in the early

20th century, but by a time we got to the beginning of the 21st century, we were thinking, well, if we could do this within our own heads, at least we would get some relief. Because there's a lot of stress to try to figure out what should I do next. What do I work on? How do I deal with this mess? And if we could just compartmentalize that into the small part of our brain working with a productivity system, that makes the decisions about what work needs to be done and how. And then most of our time, we could just have the low stress, mind-like water, you know,

exploited factory worker mindset of just crank-witches, crank-witches. This was a hugely innovative idea. It's a big reason why getting things done was so popular. Now, here's where technology comes into the picture. Pretty soon after this idea began to spread, we get the productivity prong movement. Now, again, this is what I document in that recent New Yorker article I wrote on this topic, but this is where you get people like Merlin Mann who were basically augmenting Allen's vision and saying, yes, but the way this is really going to work,

we're going to simulate the elite managers making all the decisions about, you know, how work should actually get done is we got to throw technology into there. Because if we can use really advanced software and scripts and Apple Talk connections that we programmed up on our Macs, we can basically automate a lot of this thinking and decision making and information moving that has to happen so that, you know, again, the amount of mental resources we have to expend on dealing with. with the overload, figuring out what to do. We can reduce that even further if we throw technology into the picture.

And that was the dream that the productivity prod movement really pushed was David Allen's sort of schizophrenic internal split between mind-like water widget crankers and the elite manager is trying to make sense of all of our work. If you combine that with high technology, then you can really minimize the time having to deal with the stressful stuff and really just get down to like I have on the focus and I hit this context button and magic happens beneath the scenes and then I get a list of like this is what you should do and I just do the top thing. Really seductive idea. Didn't work? That's the problem is it didn't really work. Knowledge work is so it's so complex and interpersonal and

haphazard that we did not succeed in this effort to be able to completely disassociate the executing portion of ourself from the planning portion of ourselves. I think the sheer volume of email and then later instant messaging that entered the scene also made these systems sort of impossible. You know, they couldn't handle 150 messages and people just got lost in their inbox. Like I just have to be in here doing stuff on the fly all day. Like I don't even have time to try to put these into a system and then arrange them by context. And there's not even time to do that. So the dream of a perfect productivity system that could just tell you what to do and then you would just do it.

So a seductive dream, it did not work. It just did not work. So what do we, where are we today? What do we get out of productivity systems? We get guard rails and structure to help make the combat against this whirlwind easier. but it does not free us from willpower, it does not free us from ambiguous, confusing decisions. It does not free us from having to actually just do hard things

that are hard to do and that we don't want to do them. It doesn't free us from having to confront on a regular basis, a sort of sheer insurmountable volume of work that's being pushed our way. What we get out of productivity today is just help dealing with this, structure for it, guardrails for it. We do not have systems that are going to tell us do this and don't worry about it. But we do have systems that say, well, at least I have things captured, so I'm not wasting energy keeping these in my head.

We have systems that say, I have more to do than I can ever get done, but at least I can time block my time today to make the most out of what I have. We have systems that say, let me check in at the quarter and weekly level to make sure that I am making progress on the right things. Let me clearly document my work. Let me move things around. Let me do configure so I can see all my work, who I'm waiting to hear from, the different context.

Let me consolidate my information with the task so that I don't have to waste time or burn off energy and friction trying to find information. Like all of that is really helpful and it can make this tractable, but it doesn't free you from in the end having to just face complex things and do hard work. So Mark, I'm giving you a lecture here just because I think it's interesting. This is well beyond what you asked. but I think the way I see productivity and productivity system today is that that dream we had and we can get the perfect system that just kind of does the work for you and you just have to execute.

It's a really interesting historically speaking dream. It didn't really pan out. So we have to change our mindset. We're not seeking a perfect system. We're seeking a system that can be our ally in doing the really hard thing, which is trying to keep up and succeed in a world of high-paced modern. knowledge work. Alejandro asks, what's your view on the technique of pair programming?

Now, for people who don't know, pair programming is a strategy in software development where you sit two programmers at the same computer monitor. So you're working together on writing a particular piece of code. I think you typically have one person is controlling the keyboard at a time, but you're both looking at it the same screen. and trying to make progress on the code. Well, Alejandro, I'm a big actual supporter of pair programming. I get into this in my book coming out in March in some more detail.

But basically, the fear people have about pair programming is that you're going to cut your productivity in half. You know, instead of having, if I have 10 programmers, instead of having 10 different parts of my program that we're building, the system being worked on, if I pair them, I'm only making progress on five things at a time. would think, oh, that's going to cut my productivity in half. But as I talk about in that my new book, often what you see instead is that productivity goes up. Now, why does productivity go up? Well, because of what I called in deep work, the whiteboard effect. So in deep work, I have this chapter that says, don't work alone. People often misunderstand deep work and say, well, that's a completely solitary activity.

But what I argue in that book is that working with a small group of people together on a hard problem can be a significant boost to how much work you accomplish and the quality of that work. And why is that? Well, when you're all there looking at the same proverbial whiteboard together, trying to solve the problem together, you achieve a much higher intensity of focus first. And why is that? because of the social cost of distraction. If I'm working on a math proof by myself, there is no social cost if I let my attention wander. There's no social cost if I look at my phone.

There's no social cost if I just daydream. If I'm sitting with two collaborators and we're working on a math problem together at a whiteboard, there is a social cost because I'm going to have to stop them and say, look, you're going to have to go back. I missed what you said because I let my mind wander or I looked on my phone. So when people are working together, they tend to achieve a much higher intensity of focus.

And as I argue, of course, the higher intensity of focus you accomplish, the higher quality of results you're able to produce and the faster you're able to produce those results. The other benefit you get that makes up the whiteboard effect is that you're bringing in different pools of expertise and knowledge. So if I'm working on a math problem where I might get stuck, the person I'm working with my collaborator might have a technique that gets us past that place. And then where we get stuck again, I might remember a technique that opens something up. So you just have a broader pool of expertise to pull from.

Progress can go faster. For both of these reasons, you can often get much better results when you have a small group of people working together as opposed to just one. It's what happens with pair programming. You don't let your attention wander. You don't jump over to Slack to the water cooler channel because you're sitting here with someone else. They're going to say, what are you doing?

Now we have to stop and wait for you. And second, you're both bringing different pools of knowledge to the programming that you're doing. So you might not be quite sure how to make an algorithm work. The person you're parprogramming with might say, no, no, you just use a red black tree there. That's the rebalancing there with this type of data is a non-factor, etc. So to give a specific answer, yes, I like techniques like pair program to give a more

general answer. I think this type of engineering, concentration engineering, we can call it, probably should be more widespread in elite or creative knowledge work, because ultimately, if you're trying to extract value out of human brains, you should care a lot about what are the conditions that allow you to extract that value at the best rate. Concentration plays a big role in that, and there are many, many better ways to achieve good concentration than just putting someone in front of a general purpose computer by themselves with no structure, saying make progress on some hard mental task. And by the way, here's browsers and email and Slack, and it's all on the same screen and just sort of go for it. You know, we can engineer better ways

to get more value out of the brain. The whiteboard effect is a great one. I'm glad computer programmers are figuring this out. Scientists know it as well. I do it all the time. It's why I have these Zoom meetings, multiple Zoom meetings every week with people around the world. That's how we make progress on problems.

Scientists know about the whiteboard effect. I think other fields should think about this effect and how to harness it as well. I want to take a moment to talk about one of the sponsors that makes the deep questions podcast possible, and that is Optimize. Now, as you know, Optimize is a subscription service run by my good friend, the monastic CEO, Brian Johnson. It's a subscription service where you get ancient wisdom combined with modern science,

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Speaking of turning the page on a hard year, I think something that a lot of us experienced over the last eight or nine months is the degree to which having control over your mind is crucial for a deep life. I mean, how many of us found ourselves spiraling out of cognitive control because of concerns about the coronavirus, concerns about what was happening with the election, social media or the internet, polling and pinging and diverting and distracting, this overwhelming sense. of out of control anxiety and thoughts that you could not wrangle. You have to get control over your mind before you can take full control over your life.

And there are a few tools better to help you accomplish this goal than Headspace. Now, Headspace is a new sponsor of this podcast, but is probably not a new idea to you because this is the number one app out there to help you take control of your mind through mindfulness-based guided meditations. With the Headspace app, it will walk you through how to do this type of meditation, a type of meditation that is critical for being able to keep your attention separated from all of the rumination, all of the thinking, all of the stress that is trying to divert it. Are you feeling overwhelmed in the moment?

Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you. Having trouble with sleeping, they have a meditation to help you with that. Are you anxious in particular about the election? They have particular meditations just to help you with that as well. Now, I'm sure you have heard about this app because there's over 25 published studies on its benefits. It has 600,000 five-star reviews, which is crazy. And it's had over 60 million downloads. So this is the leader in the space of using technology to help you take control of

your mind. It is literally the opposite of these social media apps that might sit next to it on your phone. Those social media apps guarantee you rumination and anxiety. You hit the Headspace app next to them instead. You are now using technology to get the opposite effect, which is some clarity, some peace, some separation from the rumination. I couldn't think of a better use of technology in these fraught times. All right. So if you want to try Headspace, go to headspace.com slash questions. That's headspace.com slash questions to get a free one-month trial with access to Headspace full extensive library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal you're going to find.

If you want to kick off 2021, exercising your mind as much as you are hopefully thinking about exercising your body, you need to go to Headspace. dot com slash questions today. Returning to our questions, Trent asks, how do you store and later retrieve the connections and ideas you make while reading papers or thinking?

Like when you do deep reading of a CS paper or maybe just deeper work in another field like a philosophy book and you have a revelation that connects an idea you just absorbed to some other idea that can be magic. How do you then store these ideas and how are you able to find and retrieve them later? Well, Trent, in the world of my writing,

as I've mentioned on this podcast before, I use Evernote. I have notebooks for book ideas. I have notebooks for articles. I have notebooks for blog post ideas. You know, if I have an interesting connection, it goes to Evernote. So if it's connected to a particular article or book in progress,

then it will go into the notebook for that article or for that book. If it's new, like this is something I could write an article about one day, or this could be an idea for a book one day. I have notebooks for general ideas, ideas for future books, a notebook for ideas for future articles. I actually break those out in terms of general topic areas. I think it's critical to get these ideas written down so your mind doesn't waste a lot of

cognitive resources trying to keep the open loop preserved. And so that's where those go for me. The key here, however, is that you have to keep using Evernote enough that you do not fear that you're going to lose them. I recommend having a recurring item on your calendar that comes up every month in which you just quickly scroll through all your notebooks. That just gives your mind peace that you will not forget ideas that go in there. And of course, really use the notebook. So when it comes time to pitch another article, I'll go back and look at my article. ideas. When it comes time to write a blog post, I will go back and look at my blog post ideas notebook. So as long as your mind trust that you will use those, you can really get

these ideas off your head. In computer science, typically when I'm working on a paper, we're going to have a shared document that me and my collaborators are using. So if I have an interesting connection, like maybe we can use this technique over here to help solve this paper here. I just throw a quick section into the paper. We use a tool right now called Overleaf. It allows people to easily collaborate. In the same style, you would use a Google Doc to collaborate, but for a particular markup tool called latex

that mathematicians use to write papers that have complex mathematical notation. The tool doesn't really matter here. The point is we build out these shared documents. They get really big and unwieldly, and then eventually we extract out of these documents the results that we then transform into the papers we submit. So I always have a place to put those ideas as well.

It's this one growing document that surrounds each of the ideas that I'm currently working on. All right, let's do one more technology question. Jane asks, what is the best way to deal with other people who expect you to be using social media as part of your job, even when you feel that it's not part of your job? Now, Jane goes on to elaborate that she's a fiction writer, that she used to be a heavy social media user. Then she quit, in part because she read deep work. She credits her abstention from social media

in allowing her to actually finish a book she was really proud of that was sold at auction. She did really well with that sale. But now, ironically, this book that was so successful because she was not using social media is generating for her a lot of pressure from her publisher to be on social media. She says her editors are beginning to acknowledge that maybe it's not the best thing to spend a lot of time on Twitter,

but they say she should do it just to be safe. Well, Jane, I know from your elaboration that you share a publisher with me, so just tell your editors that Cal said it was okay not to be on social media. Now, I know that might not entirely work. So what is a, what is showed, but it might not. So what is a, I guess, a more comprehensive solution here? Well, I have something to recommend. If you're at a stage in your career, you know, you just signed a big deal.

You want to sign another. Maybe you want to sell another book in the series. And you don't want to rock the boat or upset your editors right now. I'm going to recommend the Ryan Holiday strategy. So what I'm referring to here is how. my friend and author Ryan Holiday handles social media. So if you don't know Ryan, he writes nonfiction.

He's known mainly for the books he writes about making Stoic philosophy accessible, though he's written about other topics as well. He is very wary about technology, use, and distraction. But he does use Twitter. And the way he uses it, however, is very systematic. So he has, I think what he does, is quotes from Stoics, like inspiring quotes, and he publishes one every day. And so there's a reason to follow his Twitter feed.

A lot of people get inspiration out of it. I think he also with Instagram has certain types of photos that sort of pre-programmed that he publishes. Here I am interviewing this person or something about a run he went on. But it's very thoughtful. This stuff is basically published on a schedule. He doesn't interact with people. It's a key thing.

So he has a Twitter present that makes sense for what he does. I mean, he inspires people about Stoic philosophy. His Twitter feed, you know, publishes inspiring Stoic quotes, but he's not on there. He's not on there, you know, fighting about things or arguing with people or trying to get likes and not likes.

And actually, it's a very successful Twitter feed because people are interested in those quotes. And then when it comes time to announce a new book or something like that, he can. And I'm sure that makes his publishers is happy. I mean, Ryan and I actually share the same editor so I can ask her, you know, how sad or happy she is that I'm not doing the same thing. But Jane, I think that might be a good strategy for you. So what I would recommend to be a little bit more concrete here is that if you feel

like you need to be on social media, have something that you regularly post in a sort of systematized pre-scheduled way that requires you to do no interaction with people. Now, the thing you post should relevant to your brand or your type of writing. I mean, it could be, for example, I mean, I've seen fiction writers do things like you're, maybe you're posting, it's like, uh, images you find of like really inspiring places where people write or notebooks that you really enjoy. You have like an aspirational, inspirational quality, but it's also really clear. Like, this is what I post and I post it every week or I post it every day or whatever you do. And you just set that up and go. None of this is on your phone. You're not interacting. Social media is not

playing a role in your life beyond the sort of like setting up these things that you auto post. I would then recommend having a way that this brings people back to a digital world that you own. You should have a very nice website. And this website should have a prominent place to sign up for an email newsletter to hear more about you. The things that you're posting to social media, maybe they should be posting on your website in a more elaborated form. you know, so that when people encounter your tweets about whatever, notebooks or pictures of inspiring places to write, they're kind of pushed back to your website where they can sign up for your mailing list, which is where you ultimately want people as a writer, is you want them

on a mailing list. You do not want them just as generic followers of a social media feed. So that's what I would suggest. Now, this will take some work, but it's not distracting work. You do have to generate this content on a regular basis, but generating content's not bad. for a writer. The thing that's bad for a writer in this context is getting sucked into interaction in social media. Getting into a place where social media becomes a default activity that you turn to when you're bored. That is poison for a writer. Content creation is good

for a writer. Primes the pump. So Jane, that's my strategy that I would suggest for you for now. And just to summarize this all, your social media stream has like a very specific Ryan Holiday style. I post this on a regular schedule. It's kind of cool and interesting to follow. It pushes you back towards my website where it's elaborated. On my website, I try to get you into an email list. You have no social media on your phone. You don't interact with people on social media. Your only real involvement with this medium is you're creating the content that you're basically prescheduling to post. If your book advance is sufficient to pay for this, maybe even have someone who does that posting for you.

So you don't have to interact with the services at all. It's not super expensive to do. It might even be worth stretching using a little bit more of your advance than you hope to do that because, again, you're trying to lay the foundation here for writing a lot more books in the future. That's my suggestion. I think the Ryan Holiday strategy is one that probably more creative types can and should deploy to try to bridge that gap between the old school thinking of you need to be on social media all the time and the other extreme, which is sort of Cal Newport-style crumudgingliness, which tends to upset people. Ryan has the great middle ground. Jane, I hope that works for you.

All right. Speaking of getting deeper, let's move on to some questions now about the deep life. Erica asks, how do you live a deep life as a mom? My husband and I have four kids, ages 2 to 11, and I'm the stay-at-home parent and am looking for ways to live a deep life. My toddler, however, has an age-appropriate attention span, which means my days feel fragmented, especially when combined with the pickup and drop-off times with the older kids and making sure I spend time with each of them. By the time my kids go to bed, I also go to bed.

How can I live a deeper life while also meeting the needs of my family? Well, Erica, I can speak from experience where I say that the short period of one's life in which you are raising young kids is a very intense and very specific, period that may feel different than a lot of other periods of our lives. So there's two points I want to make here about finding depth even in the maelstrom that is young kid parenting. The first is that the elements that make up a deep life during this period, they can be strikingly different than the type of things that make up a deep life, let's say, in the period immediately preceding having kids? So before you have kids, when you're thinking about more depth, it really is a solitary

type focus. It's spending more time exercising, is spending more time honing your craft. It's spending more time meditating by the sunset and hiking through the woods and going out through the woodshed and working on the guitar that you're custom building or whatever it is. when we think about the deep life outside of that particular window of young kid parenting, a lot of what we put into place is solitary. So then it can feel like when we enter this parenting stage in which that type of time alone is in short supply, it's easy to think, well, I'm not able to live deeply. But one thing I've noticed talking with a lot of other parents about these type of ideas

is that there's just a change in the things you pursue, and the things you prioritize, in the things you identify as being crucial to living deeply, a lot of these will involve during this period of your life stuff you are doing with your kids. The type of things you prioritize during a push for depth at this point in your life will be much less solitary than it was before and much less solitary

than these efforts will be later. when your kids are older. So if you think about the deep life buckets I often talk about, or you identify these areas of your life that are important, and then you work on each of these buckets separately, the community bucket, the one that captures your family, as well as your connection to extended family and people and communities around you, that bucket's going to get huge.

You have a lot of effort going into that bucket, and that's okay. The buckets do not have to be evenly, partitioned. Your effort, I should say, does not have to be evenly partitioned between the buckets during the 15-year period where you really are in the thick of young kids. Yeah, that community bucket's going to be big. And a lot of your initiatives for living a deep life are going to involve being there for your kids, what you bring to your kids, what you bring to the communities that your kids are and you are emmeshed in. And that is by design. There are a few things that we are wired to get more satisfaction from than building our lives around our

offspring, helping to raise them, to build for them a foundation of living a deep life by themselves. There's a huge evolutionary imperative there to do that well, which means expanding that community bucket during this 10 to 15 year period makes a lot of sense. You're going to get a lot of satisfaction out of it. The second point I'm going to bring up here is that the solitary efforts relative, relevant to a deep life. During this period require a huge clarity because they're a huge pain to put

in place. You can't just casually go exercise. You can't just casually go to the woodshed. There's probably scheduling to be done. Maybe you have to start waking up early. You have to set up a really clear schedule with your partner about this is the time in which I go and do this. Maybe there's child care involved. It's

a huge pain. A lot of support is needed for any of the more solitary activities you might do related to those other deep life buckets like Constitution where you're trying to stay healthy or contemplation where you're trying to keep your mind and soul fed, etc. And so clarity is really important because it is almost impossible as a parent of young kids, especially for young kids, that just casually find time for those more solitary activities. So having extreme clarity of I do X,

I do Y, and I do Z. Here is the system by which we do it. Here is the system. Here is the schedule, here's how it works with child care, here's when it happens. You need extreme clarity for that, so you cannot be casual about the deep life. You have to be really concrete, at least during this period. So again, working the buckets is the right thing to do here. Here are the buckets that represent the categories that are important to me in my life. I'm going to do the keystone habit in each of those buckets, and I can spend time trying to overhaul each of these buckets. You're being very specific, you're being very concrete. Okay, so for Constitution, this is what I'm going to do and here's how it's going to happen. I'm going to get my husband on board.

Here's when it works. You get really specific because you're going to have to be specific. I think, and I don't know, because I'm in the thick of this too, Erica, I think we're going to find 10 years from now that we're going to be unhappy with how much free time we have and how easily we can casually just go exercise for an hour or two. I think we're going to be a little bit sad that some of that whirlwind has died down. But for now, I think extreme clarity helps. So the summer, work to buckets, get very specific. You have to be very specific during this time of your life about, I do this activity and that activity, and here's how it happens, and be okay with that family-oriented bucket, that community bucket, becoming outsized as compared to all the others.

That is what is supposed to happen during this period. That is what is going to help maximize a sense of depth and a sense of satisfaction. Or at least I hope that's true because speaking from My experience as someone with an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 2-year-old, I am right there with you. Or at least I hope this is true. As someone who is parenting an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 2-year-old at the moment, I agree with you, Erica. This process is no joke. All right, David asks, how do you best deal with the vast majority of people who choose not to invest in personal development? they often make fun of you or don't comprehend the essence of continual improvement,

jealousy and misjudgment, or frustrating, and at times harmful. Well, David, as someone who has been involved in personal development from an inappropriately young age, I can tell you from experience two pieces of advice that will help with your issue. One, stop talking about what you're doing so much, and two, get better friends. I can elaborate on each of those points briefly. First of all, just don't talk so much about the self-development you're doing. It's easy to underestimate the degree to which a discussion of positive changes you're making in your life come across to other people as accusation.

I am doing this, ergo, you are bad because you are not. I know that's probably not fair, and I know that's probably not your life. know that's probably not your intention, but people don't want to hear it unless they are working on similar types of self-development and want to trade experiences or war stories or try to optimize or top up their strategies. But if it's someone who's not involved in improving that part of their life, just execute and keep it to yourself. Look, I am known. I am known for advice. I am known for self-development. And I still don't talk about this stuff around my family for the most part because people don't want to hear it. I mean, they want to hear it when

they want to hear it. And when they want to hear it, they want to hear it from the right type of person. It's a very personal thing to try to identify things you want to improve and figure out the right type of messaging to do that. And so just, I would just keep that a lot more to yourself. Like get after it in your own life. Make your life fantastic. Make it deep. Craft a deep life that is impressive. But until someone asks you about it, I wouldn't share too many of the details. and two, yeah, find better friends. Find people to spend time with who also prioritize

living deeper, producing more value, mean more healthy, doing remarkable things with their lives. The influence of your social group on your own perception of life and your own tendency or ability to take action is crucial. This comes to mind, for example, the social network research of Nicholas Christakis

from Yale that talks about how with many important traits you end up basically the average of your closest friends and your social network. So it actually is in itself an important life hack to try to create social networks of people who care about the same things you do in a way that is going to elevate your own game. Like I'm a writer, for example. I spend a lot of time riding. It's important to me that I have a peer group, a friend group of other 30-something riders that are really known in their field and have been for years trying to hone their craft and make a name for themselves. To spend time and talk with these people as I do on a regular basis helps me keep pushing myself as a writer.

If I only hung out with people who had no connection to that, probably my ardor for professional development there would begin to dissipate. So David, just see that as much as a productivity hack as getting in your steps, or time blocking your work time, find friends who care about these same things. So that's my two pieces of advice. Don't brag about what you're doing. Don't tell people what you're doing if they don't ask

and put more people into your life who actually will ask because they care about these type of efforts. Our final question of the episode comes from Roy, who asks how to reduce laziness. How do I reduce laziness? Well, Roy, I don't know that I would use the term laziness. I think more clinically what you're talking about based on the elaboration you provided me is that you find yourself unable to make persistent progress on what you think to be important changes to your life or efforts to improve your life.

That is very common. There's two big causes of it that I want to point out here. one is arbitrariness. So a lot of times these changes that people try to put into their life towards the positive are relatively arbitrarily selected. You just get fired up about a particular idea.

I'm going to run five miles a day. I'm going to write 10,000 words a day, etc. An idea that kind of in the moment seems grandiose and just having the idea itself gives you a little moment of excitement. But then you find yourself as time goes on

saying, man, I don't know, this is hard. Is this really the right thing to do? Is this even possible? What is this going to lead to? I don't know. I just kind of made it up. It only takes a few sort of tired days. It only takes a handful of unexpected obstacles for those type of arbitrarily selected goals to dissipate. The other issue that causes lack of persistent progress on self-improvement is to focus on abstention. The focus on this is what I don't like, so I'm going to stop doing this. For whatever reasons, the way our brain is wired, that's actually not typically that effective.

You just say, like, I don't know, I think I'm on social media too much. I think I just want to stop using my phone so much. I don't know, it's easy to say, yeah, but let me use it a little bit, and I do need to check this news, and is it really that important that I never use this? It's just really hard. Abstention and isolation is not usually a powerful

strategy for persistent change. So how do we overcome both of these issues? Well, Roy, I would go back to what I talking about in the deep dive segment at the beginning of this episode, which was the heaven, hell exercise. And what you do in the heaven, hell exercise briefly is you have a narrative description of what you don't like about your life right now and what it would be like if you never change this, what your life would be like. And then you have your,

heaven imagery, which is a narrative description of what you would like your life to be like, what it could be like, what a transformed life would include. And this becomes the foundation. The thing you commit to, the only thing you have to persistently commit to is I want to move away from the hell and towards the heaven. That's not a hard commitment to make because it's visceral. I want that life over there. I don't want this life here. Now once you've committed to that general thing, as I talked about in the deep dive segment, now you can try various strategies, various habits, various hacks to help you move from the hell

towards the heaven. But these don't feel arbitrary anymore. It feels like, okay, I'm trying to take a good swing at moving to this specific goal. That doesn't feel arbitrary. Also, this is not abstention-based. You're not taking behavior out of your life because I don't like it and I want to do less of it.

You're taking behaviors out of your life now because you're trying to get closer to the heaven and you're committed to, I want to get closer to the heaven and farther away from the hell. this psychological shift makes a big difference. So Roy, that is what I would recommend is that you build up this image and you review it.

You read it, read it every week if you need to. This is what I want to do. Okay. At the moment, what are the things I have in place that I'm experimenting with to help get from hell towards heaven? Psychologically speaking, you're much more likely to have persistent motivation. Philosophically speaking,

this is what life is about, cultivating and crafting the capital G, capital L good life, requires clarity of vision. We got to get out of just a sort of generic world of sterile clinical self-help where you're collecting off the internet life hacks and goals that seem in the moment inspiring and you get towards this deeper philosophical substrate of, I want this for my life. And right now, these are the efforts I'm doing. And again, the only commitment you have to stick with is that you want the heaven over the hell, that commitment will fuel much more persistent effort on the other things. And when some of the other things fail, like this particular strategy didn't

work, or I didn't really think this through, you're not giving up the whole ship. You just replace it with something else. So Roy, I'm not going to allow the word laziness here. What I'm going to say here is that there has been a sort of inconsistent application of your underlying deep desire to have your life be something deeper. What I'm suggesting now, I think, is a better way of making action on what I think is a deep inclination you already have for improvement. Now, you know, how do you choose these activities? How do you choose these habits? I would go back and use my sort of deep life bucket-based transformation formula I talk about all the time. What are the major buckets in your life that are important to you? You start by trying to

establish a keystone habit in each of those that you tractably actually execute. That will change your mindset into being someone who is willing and able to do non-urgent but important action on the areas you care about. Then you go one by one in each bucket and try to do a transformation of that area of your life. And then you repeat and then you repeat. Strategically, that's probably the best way once you have this imagery to actually start structuring your change to dip your toe in the water to make progress at a acceptable pace. But I've talked about that before. The new element here is that fundamental foundation of, I don't want this, I do want that. And I remind myself of that regularly. And all of

of my actions I'm doing is about moving from this image of hell towards that image of heaven. Roy, I think that will work for you. You are not lazy. You are just waiting for the right motivation to take action on the change that I think you are really hungry to make. All right, that is all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. Also, again, thank you to everyone who continues to subscribe, rate, or review this podcast. I really appreciate that. We will be back later this week

with a Habit Tune Up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.