Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 6: Balancing the Personal and Professional, Unreasonable Email Expectations, and Avoiding Hard Creative Work | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: June 28, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on balancing the professional and the personal, unreasonable email expectations and using the internet to escape hard creative work. I also play some question roulette and attempt a lightening round in which I answer as many question as possible in a single minute.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com (I send a survey to this list soliciting questions on a semi-regular basis.)Full list of topics tackled in today’s episode: * Separating personal and professional when planning. * Inducing a sense of urgency. * Balancing work and relationships in lockdown. * Getting into graduate school with bad grades. * Starting a productivity journey. * Resetting expectations about email response time. * Tracking health metrics. * Finding blog readers without social media. * Lightening Round:   - how much deep work can fit in a day?   - what is minimum deep work block length?   - what are tips for overcoming resistance?   - what do you do during your downtime? * A pastor seeking depth when on call. * The origin of my discipline. * A novelist struggling to work. * Managing reading. * On schools and the deep life.As always, thank you to listener Bit Holiday for the original theme music and transition sound effect (bitholiday.net). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Today, among other topics, we'll talk about balancing the professional and the personal, unreasonable email expectations, and using the internet to escape hard work. We'll also play some question roulette and test out a new segment, what I'm calling the lightning round where I'll try to answer many questions in a very short amount of time. Not exactly my strong suit, so this should be interesting. Before we get started, let me just pause to give thanks to those of you who have been listeners in this early stage of the podcast, where I am still learning the technology and still

dialing in the format for this show. There's a great early audience here, and I appreciate you. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you giving me your feedback and I appreciate your questions. Now, if you want to help this movement grow, what I've been told by people who know a little bit more about podcasts than I do, that leaving a rating or a review on the podcast makes a difference. Apple, for example, has some sort of algorithm. They're more likely, I guess, to promote your podcast if it looks like people are leaving ratings and reviews.

Of course, recommending the show to people you think might like it is also. helpful as well. All right. So as you know, I get my questions from my mailing list. Let me just clarify a little bit about how that happens. Every few weeks or so, I send out a survey to my mailing list. So a link to a survey. And it's in that survey that I collect all the information I need to actually answer these questions on the show. So I'm about to send out my most recent question collection survey. So if you are already on my mailing list, then look out for that. And if you're not, you can sign up at calnewport.com. All right, enough of this administrative work.

Let's get rolling and get started with work questions. All right. Shandy asks, when you manage your project slash tasks slash life, do you find that it is more efficient to separate work and personal or to blend it together? Well, it's a good question. I handle the personal somewhat differently than I handle my professional. professional obligation. So for example, during a working day, I use time block planning for my working hours. So that means my working hours, I actually give every minute a job as opposed to

just running my day off a list or an inbox. I don't time block my evenings. I don't time block my weekends. I don't time block more generally my leisure time. All right. So that's one difference. However, if during my time blocked work day, I do plan to get some non-conflop. work related, let's say tasks done, like depositing some checks or picking something up from the store or something like that, I will put that into my time block schedule. All right. So I time block my work days, personal stuff that happens during my work days shows up in those schedules. I don't structure my time nearly so rigorously outside of my work day. Now when I do my weekly planning, so when I look at the week ahead and figure out what do I want to do, what am I trying to get done,

I will at that point deal with larger non-professional objectives. You know, if there's some important work around the house that needs to get done or some household management logistics that need to get done, I'll think about it during that weekly plan and maybe assign a day to it or lay out a plan about maybe getting a little bit done these days. And so during my weekly planning, they do blend together more, both the professional and the personal. Finally, my work task is I've talked about earlier in earlier episodes, I tend to have these separate Trello boards for each role where I can keep track of my obligations and put

them in columns that indicate their status. I don't do this for my professional or my personal life rather. I just have a simpler straight-up to-do list. I use the online service workflowy for that list, workflowsy.com. And so again, similar, but not quite the same. All right. The next question is from redactfus. And he asked, how do you induce a sense of urgency in yourself? In his elaboration, he talks about in the context of his work, he sometimes has a hard time, getting that sense of urgency that will push him to actually get the work done that needs to get done. Well, Redactfus, one way to gain urgency in yourself is, I think, to think, to think,

about yourself this is something I get into in my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you I say in that book look there's two types of mindsets that are possible for approaching your professional obligations there's the passion mindset and there's a craftsman mindset now the passion mindset looks in words it says what am I getting out of this work do I really like this work is this work my passion doesn't motivate me? Am I excited for this work? Is there better work somewhere else that I might like more? The craftsman mindset by contrast says, what am I offering to my work, to my employer, to my business I run? What value am I bringing? How am I making them better? How am I helping them

get ahead? How can I be better at what I do? And what I argue in that 2012 book is that we tend to have the passion mindset, and especially more recently, especially since phrases like follow your passion entered the popular career advice vernacular starting around the late 1980s or early 1990s. So a lot of people today really think about their work through this perspective. What's this offering me? Is this what I really want to do? Is this beneath me? Is there a better job over there? If you're in that mindset, yes, it can be hard to get a sense of urgency when faced with something, let's say a project or a task that really is not going to be that fun. We have the craftsman mindset, however, which is what I promote, what you're really thinking about

I was like, well, how can I be more valuable? How can I get better? How can I be the guy or how can be the girl that gets all of the stuff done really well? Because here's the thing, the craftsman mindset, it unlocks everything. It unlocks all the interesting opportunities. It unlocks all the promotions. It's what gives you what I call career capital, which you'll later be able to invest to shape your career into something that's increasingly more custom fit to you that's increasingly resonates with your ideal vision of your life. If you are so good you can't be ignored at what you do, good things will come. To me, this is a bedrock approach to career advice. So this is what I would say, stop worrying so much. Is this particular project, is this particular obligation? Is this

particular task? Something I want to do. Am I motivated to do this? And think instead, how can I just be really excellent at what I do? So I'm telling you, if you are, things will only get better. And if you're not, it's going to be very difficult to end up in a career situation where you really do feel great satisfaction and meaning. All right. Sidney asks, how have you balanced work and relationships during the quarantine? Assume she's talking about, obviously, coronavirus lockdown. This question came, was submitted earlier.

You know, we're not under necessarily the same level of lockdown restrictions we were when this question was submitted. But I think it has a good question because it gets to some larger points. So let me give you the immediate answer, which is I think plans are crucial. You have a plan. Here's what's happening. Here's what's happening today. Here's what's happening this week.

What's our plan for when I'm working and when I'm not working? What's my plan for when we're going to go try to get some time together? What's our plan around childcare? Having clarity, working with your partner to figure that out and having it written down. makes all the difference. It's way better than just having no plan and then just having everyone be frustrated all the time

because what's happening during the day is not meeting some sort of underspecified, ambiguous expectation. But I'm going to go on a tangent here sitting. That's why I think this is a good question. Is I sometimes get pushed back when I'm giving talks or doing lectures and I'm talking about productivity.

I'm talking about things like having a plan for your time, time block scheduling, weekly planning, etc. Sometimes you get this pushback, which I've seen become more prevalent recently, that is essentially anti-productivity. Right? So the core of this pushback is, you know,

people just have too much on their plate and productivity is a dead end. You know, it just lets you get even more work done, makes you even more busier. It doesn't get to the underlying big problems with your setup. So don't think you're going to solve, of your problems with better plans or better ways of organizing your time. You know, productivity is not good.

You might imagine I have some issues with that. You know, my response is, well, are you going to be happier if you're less organized? Right. Are you going to be happier if you're missing more deadlines and forgetting things and having the overdue bills come because you didn't have a good system to take care of the bills? You can be happier if your workday is just more haphazard and it's just one crisis to another, one fire to another, the urgent phone calls, didn't you see my messages, this is due tomorrow and you stay up late to get it done? Is that going to somehow be better than being organized?

Well, no, of course, it's not because what's happening here, I think, is a semantic issue. When people are anti-productivity, what they are failing, I believe, often to recognize is there is a difference between how work comes on to your plate versus how you organize what's there. Productivity in my mind is all about how do you organize what's there. However it got there, how do you make sense of these are things I now have to do. You can be productive or not. If you're productive, you're organized, right? You've captured this stuff.

You have it and you have a plan for executing it. You're not letting things to the crack. It's not create unnecessary stress. Things get done when they need to get done. That's what productivity works on. I think where people's real frustrations are, the frustration that sometimes underlies these anti-productivity pushes is actually this other element, which is how things get on your plate in the first place.

Now, here I'll recognize there are issues. You might have a job where you're being given too much to do. Like, that's a problem. Maybe you're being given too much to do, and maybe the person right next to you is getting a lot less to do and for reasons that make no sense. Like personality reasons. They're friends with the boss. or maybe they're cantankerous.

They don't want to. The boss doesn't want to bother and you're nice. So you get more stuff. I get it. Or you have an employer who's trying to squeeze more and more, more and more out of you by putting more work on your plate. Maybe they're firing people and just moving their workload onto the existing staff. Those are real issues. It's not issues with productivity.

Issues with how work is assigned. A lot of people have the same issue with work they put on themselves. Right? You put too much work on your plate. You get too ambitious. you want to crush it and you think that means more, more, more, more, more, more busy as less. And you overwhelm yourself in an exhaustier. Maybe you're a people pleaser.

You say yes to everything. And you're of the person that everyone comes to when they need something. And soon you find yourself with no time for yourself because you have an overwhelming number of obligations to other people. That's a real problem. It's not a productivity problem. It's a problem with how stuff gets put on your plate. And so I think it's important to separate these two things.

is if you try to solve the too much work problem by dismissing productivity, you've only made things worse. Only made things worse. So you have to focus on the too much work problem and say, how am I going to address that? That's a topic for a lot of books, and I've read a lot on it,

and I've written a lot about it, huge topic. But meanwhile, for the stuff that is on your plate, for better for worse, you are going to be happier, you're going to have more free time, your life is going to be richer and you're going to be less stressed if you're productive about how you handle the stuff that for however it got there you are now obligated to do. So Sydney, this is a tangent that has very little to do with your original question about relationships and the quarantine, but, you know, I am prone to tangents.

I think the right analogy here is you're in a boat, there's a hole that's filling with water. Productivity is, let's say, you're using a bucket to try to get that water out of the boat, right? So you're trying to deal with the stuff that's coming in that threatens to overwhelm you. Now, if you get frustrated, hey, this water keeps coming in or this water is coming in really fast. And all I ever do is shovel it with the bucket. And it fills right back in. The solution is not to throw your bucket overboard. It's instead to fix the hole.

And I think that's where a lot of people actually are with productivity in their life. They should have a better bucket. You need to be more productive. Be more organized. It's going to make your life better. the same time, don't think that productivity is going to fix the problem with the hole. You have to deal with why you have too much work on your plate, why you put too much on yourself. Deal with that, but recognize that that's not about productivity.

That's about something deeper and just as fundamental. All right. Let's see what else we have here. Natalia, we have a student question here. Natalia says, as a senior graduating from college this year, I feel regret that I encountered and implemented deep work strategy so late that I have not made the most of my college education. I'm hoping to pursue graduate school two years from now and I'm wondering if you have advice on how to kickstart my academic deep work skills to make up for my college performance.

All right. Well, Natalia, first of all, don't have regret. You are, in terms of your life cycle, very early still to be coming across deep work. Yes, these type of techniques are like a superpower at the college level, mainly just by a comparison. Students are so bad at studying. Their concentration ability is so poor. There is so much, in other words, low-hanging fruit. In terms of academic performance, if you're organized about how you work and if you're careful about your attention, that, yes, it's almost like a superpower.

This is the story, you know, I tell this in my 2006 book, how to become a straight-A student. I got serious about study habits and these type of issues. early in my sophomore year and suddenly got a 4.0 in every quarter from there until my senior spring. Right. Why? I didn't get suddenly much smarter in my sophomore fall. I just picked the low-hanging fruit that no students basically do, the low-hanging fruit of smart systems and treating your attention with respect. So yes, it would have been really useful in college, but it's incredibly useful at the age of 21. It's incredibly useful at the age of 22.

If you can go through your 20s in your professional career from the beginning, prioritizing depth, balancing deep and shallow work, taking care of your concentration ability so that you can go after the high value activities again and again and do them with intense concentration. So do them incredibly efficiently. It's going to be like compound interest. Right. It's like starting to put that money in.

into your interest-bearing savings account at the age of 20 instead of the age of 30, it's going to make a huge difference later in life. And so you are not too early. There's nothing to regret you should be celebrating that you are so early to understanding these principles that you're not picking them up later in life. So no regrets. All right, so let's go on with the specifics of the question. Well, first of all, I talked about this in an earlier podcast episode.

Make sure grad school is what you want to do. my advice is always you need to know this is the particular type of job or position I really want and I know for sure I have to get this type of graduate degree from this type of school to get it and that's why I'm going to this school and getting this type of graduate degree. That is the context in which you get a graduate degree. So I just want to make sure, and I don't know if this is the case, but it's possible given the way you word your message. I want to make sure that you're not just thinking about graduate school as something to do

something that seems smart, something that seems difficult, something that seems like maybe vaguely speaking will open up opportunities. Make sure there is a particular job or role, and you know that the particular degree that you're going to get, at the particular school that you're going to get it, will unlock that job or role, and without that, it will not be available to you. Now, assuming that's the case,

low grades is a problem. Okay, so going in the graduate school, grades are certainly considered pretty carefully in the admissions decision if you're going to a competitive program. What can you do to outweigh that? Well, your personal statement allows you to explain some of the circumstances around the low grades. You gave me some more details in your elaboration for this question, which I think are very relevant and make a lot of sense while your academic performance might have been up and down. A hundred percent put that in your personal statement. I have been on graduate admissions committees every year since I started at Georgetown.

So I have read numerous of these personal statements that is taken into account. Two, get your test scores high. All right. Because look, this is a good storyline. Yes, my grades are low, but because of X. And then they look over at the GRE and say, wow, these are really high. That storyline tells the story of, hey, this Natalia applicant is a really smart, talented student. Yeah, there are some issues with some personal matters that may have affected the grades, but look at these GRE scores. We buy the idea that this is someone with a lot of academic potential. How do you get your test scores high? You practice the actual test under time conditions. Again and again and again, you can buy sample GREs. You take them on the computer. You've got to take

the test you're going to take under the timing conditions. Don't do other things that you think will transfer over to be useful. You got to just attack the problem incredibly specifically and keep at it until you inch your score to where it wants to be. I think people especially a lot of people underestimate the degree to which people who go to, let's say, elite graduate programs do this, especially people who come from, let's say, a private school background or from a socioeconomic status where they know a professional track, like to be a doctor or a lawyer is what they want to do. Maybe they went to a really good private school. I saw this a lot when I was at Dartmouth. I came to Dartmouth naively, just a sort of public school kid, just one of a

handfuls in that school to go to Ivy League schools. And I was so surprised that so many of the people I knew at Dartmouth who went to, many of them came out of private schools, how many of them ended up going to Harvard Law School? They just sort of knew, like, yeah, this is what we're here for. This is how it works. You go here, you get these grades, you get the score, you go to Harvard law school. I mean, it was all sort of planned. But the point about this is they had, they had LSAT, study groups where they literally just took the sections under time again and again and again and again they posted their scores they did it competitively they inch inch inch inch until they got to where they needed to be they had a matrix that said with my GPA i need this lsat to get my admissions percentage above whatever

and they just did it again and again and again systematically like a runner trying to take tenths of a second off of their 100 meter dash until they got it where it needs to be you know most of the rest of us who don't necessarily come from these backgrounds wouldn't even think to do that we think of these tests as something you know i took my gree a week before you know the deadline it's just the latest i could possibly take it and still get my applications in you know it just never occurred to me so let's try to balance the playing fields here in italia get really good test scores you got to get it by just systematically practicing practice test under time conditions inch those scores higher higher higher, higher, higher, so you get them where you need to be.

Finally, you mentioned that you're going to be working for the next two years at a research lab. Identify, if possible to work on projects that are using cutting ed skills that would be useful in an academic research lab. Be so good they can ignore you. Mask those skills, get really good at it, especially in PhD programs. I think PIs will overlook a lot if they say, hey, Natalia is someone who can come and from day one run or whatever, PCR, machine, or sequencer. and knows exactly what they're doing, this will be a useful addition to our lab from day one that will get you a lot of attention during the application process. All right, so that's a good question to tell you.

A lot of us to talk about a lot of different issues related to education, so I appreciate that. Or let's do one more work question. Travis asks, how do you start your productivity journey? You know, we talked about this in a recent episode. how do you start a productivity productivity system from scratch or restart one? Let's revisit really quickly, but I'm going to be concrete here.

So I'm going to give you the three steps to get a productivity system built from scratch. And for each, I'll tell you, here's your shopping list. You need this and you need this. All right, let's try this. Okay, so as I talked about it in a previous episode, Travis, to go from non-productive the productive,

three things matter, capture, clarify, control. All right, capture, as I explained before, means that every obligation on your plate needs to be written somewhere that is not your head, someplace where it is written down where you don't have to remember it on your own, a place that you will trust yourself to review. Here's your shopping list. Just use a simple digital tool for this at first. It could just be a Word document or Google Drive document. You can just keep these things in list with categories, or you can use something like Workflowee.

workflowy.com, which is basically just an online indented list, but it's really useful. And then have with you at all times some sort of analog paper notebook with which you can capture things that come up when you're not near your computer. That's the one to punch. Your master online list of things, break it up in the categories to a paper notebook that you keep with you to capture things that show up outside of your computer. And just at the end of each workday, transfer those things into your master list. All right. Second step of restarting or starting from scratch your productivity journey. Clarify.

So this means you have to look at all the stuff that's sitting here in your list and need to organize it and make sense of it. What's its status? What's urgent? What's not? And then use this to figure out, okay, so what do I need to be doing in the days ahead? Now, both capture and clarified. These are core, David Allen, getting things done, terminology. So, you know, reading his his book, anything's done. We'll give you more on this, but let's just keep this high level here. What's your shopping list here? Just use your digital list in which you're capturing all of your tasks. That's a great place at first to organize it. You can label things. You can move things between categories, backburner, waiting to hear back, need to work on this week. This needs to be elaborated, right? That's a category I use sometimes that this is not really a well thought through

collection of task yet. It's just a stake in the ground. And use another David Allen term that says, hey, I got to do something about the tree in our front yard. And I don't yet know what that means. So I just need to revisit this and elaborate it when I get a chance. All right. Finally, control. This is where you actually control your time. What time do I have available today? What do I want to do during these various time slots today? give every minute of your workday a job. The right way to do this is time block planning, where you actually block out time on a piece of paper.

Here's what I'm doing from 9 to 10. I draw a box around that time and label it. Here's what I'm doing from 10 to 1030 and so on. Any plain spiral-bound notebook will work for this. I'm actually looking at my desk right now, where I have my red and black or black and red notebook, rather. I've enjoyed using those. Some people just use standard grid notebooks.

some people just do this on a legal pad and then rip out the page when the day is over. I will give you a little hint. Publish and I are actually working on, let's say, a planner product that I've designed that will solve a lot of these problems for you. Look for that in the fall. I will talk more about this planner project as we get closer. But so when you get there, I'll have a tool for you that'll help. but for now any notebook will work.

And then finally, part of control is also stepping up one scale and maybe planning out your week and planning out your quarters. What's your shopping list for that? The very easiest thing to do is just to email yourself your weekly plan or write it up in a text file and print it and keep it with the notebook in which you do your time block planning. All right. So Travis, there you go.

Very concrete. Here's what you need to restart your journey. You need to start capturing. Use an online list for it in a paper notebook you bring with you. You need to clarify and organize all of this work. Just do that by moving and relabeling things in the digital list. You need to control your time, do this with a time block plan that you do in any notebook and have a weekly plan just printed out and paperclip to that notebook or sitting there in your email inbox where you'll see it every day.

You do those things. It's going to be night and day, Travis. You're going to feel like you suddenly have control over all the things on your plate. And to go back to Sidney's question from earlier, once you have control, over everything on your plate you've captured it you clarify it you're controlling your time you can now see hey is this way too much is this not tractable is this overwhelming me because once you have your system working well you're controlling your your cognitive resources the best you can if things are still overwhelming you can now be confident in saying okay something has to change

like a little addendum to my sidney answer from before another reason why i think anti-productivity thinking can be damaging is that if you were not organized, if you are not productive, you're less likely to believe that you are overloaded because you might just blame yourself and say, well, I am just, I just have things that are a mess in my life. And of course, I'm not getting things done. So get your system locked in, reduce distress required in dealing with the stuff that's on your plate. And hey, Travis, if you're still at that point feeling overwhelmed then it's time to look at where is this work coming from and why do I have so much. All right great question Travis let's play some question roulette. Now if you don't remember the way

question roulette works is that I randomly select a question from my question database that I have never seen before and try to answer it right there without preparation. So I am clicking the button now. Let's scroll down. The question comes from Justin and the question what is this got a survey monkey screen block here here we go the question is how do I grow my online fitness business without social media all right that's that's a good question actually I have another question I had another question in here from a reader named Vaux that asked something similar so I'll just combined my I'll combine my responses here

Now, first of all, it might be the case that social media does have a useful role in business promotion. Maybe you're doing advertisements using social media, or maybe because you're in the fitness space and fitness has a really large Instagram footprint that posts on Instagram of some type are useful for building up an audience. So maybe, Justin, if you are in really good shape, you can be one of these sort of Instagram, fitness model type people, gather an audience that will gather you, let's say, training clients. I get that. I get that. Look, social media can be valuable to businesses. Why? Because everyone's using it, despite my best wishes. But I never really am down on a business that uses selectively social media to advertise or perhaps to try to build a certain type of audience. If you need to do it, though, Justin, you need to do it like a professional.

So I have this whole chapter in digital minimalism, my 2019 book, where I actually spend time with professional social media brand managers, people who do the social media for very large brands. And here's what I'll tell you. Their phone has nothing to do with this. They're not looking at Twitter on their phone. They're not looking at Instagram on their phone. They're not interacting with people and getting in fights with people

or really obsessing over, you know, how many likes. likes did this get? They tend to use sophisticated interfaces on their computer. They tend to have a very clear schedule. Here is the content we produce. We produce it on this schedule. Maybe they track some metrics, which they crunch and look at on a larger granularity, maybe every week and every month, to help inform the content schedule. But the social media accounts they manage for these brands, otherwise have no real footprint in their cognitive landscape. And so that's my advice. If you run a business where you have to do some stuff with social media or you think it

really might help, do it like a professional. Do it on your computer. Do it with a schedule. Do it with a systematic plan. Crunch metrics on a regular basis, but not daily, to help influence this plan. And let that be your only interaction with the platform. It's once a day. It's every other day.

minutes where the video gets posted. That's the way. Treat social media like a professional and you can try to extract benefits from it without having it. Capture your brain and turn you into someone who's obsessed with the social media. Turn you into someone who is not actually doing the things that really matter for your business. So it's a good question, Justin. I'm not going to be mad at you. If you use social media for your business, as Dave Ramsey says, I'll still be your friend.

but use it like a professional. Get yours from the network without letting the network get its own goals from your brain. All right. That was a good round of question roulette. Let's move on to technology questions. Jeff asks,

how can I reset expectations of my colleagues so that they know that I will not immediately respond to all emails? Well, Jeff, here's my suggestion there. Don't reset their expectations. Now, there's this moment in 2007 where we got the rise of the now infamous. I'll be checking my email twice a day auto responder. If you all probably remember this, this was, this came from Tim Ferriss.

This came from a four-hour work week. It was a throwaway reference in the book just amidst a lot of advice when he was talking about eliminate, so reducing the amount of work on your plate, he talked about, hey, you can put in an auto responder. It would seem like a logical thing. Engineers liked it. Like, oh, this is so clear. If I tell people, I'm only checking it twice a day and give them a good reason because it's going to allow me to be more efficient. That's an airtight argument, and then they'll be okay with it. Here's the thing. You don't see those autoresponders much anymore, and the reason is they annoyed the hell out of everybody. There's a subtle psychology that's underlying.

this. So it looked good on paper, this auto responder, but it really ran counter to the insights of motivational psychology. Because think about what happens if I'm one of your colleagues and I get this auto responder from you. Okay, so basically what I'm hearing when I get this auto responder is that you are making changes in your work life over which I have no control, but that will make my life harder. So from the motivational psychology perspective, the locus of control in this scenario is not near myself and is very near you. This is something I have very little control over. It's going to make my life harder.

Psychologically speaking, we do not like things in our life or the locus of control is distant from ourselves. And so what's going to happen? Resentment. Annoyance. Even if I know logically that, yeah, it's smart that Jeff doesn't check his email too much. Just the fact that you're announcing it's going to make me say, you know, I don't like.

it I don't like this at all Jeff I don't think how this is going to work what if this happens what if a client needs us no no no no no I don't like this Jeff let's go back to the way things were so what do I advise people I say here's what you do just stop checking email as frequently don't tell anybody don't have a party about it don't put on an auto respondent just don't check us recently now you have to balance this with really having your act together right you cannot let things go through fall through the cracks. You have to have, just like we talked about earlier in the show, you've got to have a productivity system that's airtight. You've got to be capturing, you've got to be clarifying,

you have to be controlling. People have to learn to trust. If I send Jeff an email, it will not get forgotten. He will get to it. He'll act on it. I might not hear back from right away, but he's not going to forget it. If you do that, in 99% of the cases, people will say, fine. Because what happens in the 1% of cases where someone says, hey, Jeff, what happened? How come I haven't heard from you? You just say I haven't seen my inbox recently. Okay. They're like, okay, well, great. Look at it when you get there and you do.

You know, it's not that big of a deal if people trust that you are going to handle what you send their direction. So the one scenario which people really do insist on really quick feedback is when they don't trust you. If I've learned that Jeff might never get to the email I send them, Now I'm thinking I have to actually get confirmation from Jeff directly that he has this and is working on this and he's told me about it because otherwise I don't trust him. And you know what? I don't want to wait around for that confirmation because then I'm going to have to remember it. So you better respond to my email right away. And that's the scenario in which people actually care about it.

So if you have your act together, you're fine. Just check it however much you need to check it. Get stuff done. Don't let things fall through the crack. People don't care about your email habits. They don't want to read about it. You know, they just want something off their place. and know that it didn't fall on the ground somewhere.

So that's usually what I advise to people. I think we tend to catastrophize how much people are thinking about us and our habits and how much they're going to care if we change some of our habits. And for the most part, people don't care. If you have your act together, people aren't going to closely monitor your habits. They don't want to know what you're doing. So I would say, Jeff, the way to reset their expectations is just to reset how you work and you should be fine.

All right. Tara says, what is your system for remembering to track both health metrics and deep work hours daily. So the fact that I track these two things is something I mentioned in an earlier episode. That's what she is referencing. Tara goes on. I intend to track these, but I struggle to remember. Also, would you mind sharing some of the health habits you track?

Thank you. Well, Tara, the way I do it is the last thing before I go do before I go to bed at night. That's a much simpler habit to remember. is just i have a notebook i use the the mullskin weekly planner style notebook and i keep it by my desk in my study and it's just what i do it when i'm literally when i'm turning out the lights so i could really i have a a great cue i'm coming to my study to turn off my lights i go over i take out that notebook and i write down my metrics that's why i don't forget right it's a habit that's tied to something queued to something i do every day

What do I track? A lot of different things. I have codes for each of the metrics I track, just a couple letters. So I can record the metrics really quickly. So deep work hours is one of the things I track. The way I literally write that down is D, W, then a colon, and then hash tallies. As I mentioned in a recent episode, the last few months, I've broken out. I have two hash tallies.

The top one is for writing. The bottom one is for CS thinking, for various. reasons I've been breaking those two things out. What do I track for my health? I track whether or not I stuck with my food heuristics, the heuristics with which I guide how I eat. And I literally just have a symbol I write if I did. Now, if I almost did but kind of had an exception, I put a tilde above the symbol, then I'll maybe jot down a note below. Like, well, I almost did, but I ate, you know, whatever. A bunch of goldfish. Which is not something. normally do, you know, for snack or something like that. I track how many steps I took. I have a great

analog pedometer. It runs on a watch battery. It resets to count every night at midnight. You just put it in your pocket in the morning and it counts steps. No Apple Watch needed, no phone needed, no one harvesting my data. I love single purpose pieces of technology that work very well. How many steps? So I write that down. And then also I write down that I do my baseline exercise so every single day i do 30 pull-ups 30 push-ups and 50 it's a combination of of various types of dip type thing dips and uh inverted and facing forward details don't matter um but i do those every single day no there's not a bodybuilding routine this is not a i want really big muscles routine it's instead my theory that our human body evolved to expect to occasionally

but on a regular basis, have to really use its major muscle groups in a very intense fashion. And it seems to me, if we don't do that, if you're sedentary every single day, certain things turn off, certain things start to atrophy. Look, I don't have particular science to talk about here.

It's just an instinctual theory of mine, but I've always found that I just think my systems run better if every single day there's an intense moment where your major muscle groups are working incredibly intensely, like when you're doing a pull-up, for example. Right? So I write X. That means I did my baseline fitness for the day.

Now, if I did a workout in addition to the baseline, I write EX plus. All right. So that's the system. That's basically what I track. I track it every day. I recommend tracking your key metrics because as I wrote about in my very first book in 2005, how to win a. college my very first book one of the pieces of advice in that book is if your mind knows that your

behavior for the day on key activities is going to be tracked it's much more likely to actually summon the motivation to do it you're going to do the pull-ups because you know that if you don't at the end of the day when you're turning off the lights in your studies you're not going to be able to write e-x in your notebook that sounds trivial it's not psychology is weird it makes a big difference. So find a certain time in your day to track these metrics. Definitely track metrics. Tara, it's something that I have sworn by.

All right, let's do one more technology question. Jeffrey asks, when starting out blogging, what's the best way to find readers? Especially if you are not using social media. Well, first of all, Jeffrey, even if you were using social media, it's not going to get you readers for your blog. What's going to get your readers for your blog is having a blog that is, so good it can't be ignored. But you're offering something that's really valuable to people

based on perhaps your unique experience or a unique point of view that you have, something that people find inspiring or authoritative or really interesting. That's incredibly hard, by the way. It's incredibly hard. It's why like most magazines fail. It's why most online content ventures fail. It's like why most blogs fail and most social media accounts have very few followers and most podcasters are never listened to. I mean, it's really hard. to produce content that people really want to hear at a high level. But if you do that, if you're so good you can't be ignored, people find you, audiences find you. Yeah, there's little things you can do.

There'll be opportunities to come across your plate, you know, that this person wants to interview you or someone is spreading, you know, the word on their own network. I basically say, I wouldn't sweat that so much. What I would sweat is, is there something I can say that is going to be super compelling, right that's what you should be thinking about and that could take a lot of work to home that voice and figure out your message uh as steve martin famously said you should just be so good they can't ignore you if you do that good things will come i think that is the case with content you cannot short circuit or jump start that process by tweeting every day at some point you have to be producing something

that people want to consume all right let's try something new here let's try a lightning round i'm going to try to see how many questions I can answer in, let's say, a single minute. All right, here we go. How much deep work is realistic to fit into a day that is free of other distractions? I'd say two to four hours if you're doing something really intense, like learning something hard or trying to solve a math proof. If it's more creative or more flows type work, up to eight hours is possible. What is the minimum block of time for scheduling deep work? 60 minutes, I would say. It takes up to 15 minutes just to clear out attention residue,

so you need at least some time left to make that block worthwhile. Let's see here. Next question, do you have any tips for overcoming the initial resistance to starting a deep work tasks? I would say rituals, rituals, rituals should determine when you work, where you work, and what actions you take right before you work. A good ritual can help you get started on deep work when your mind is otherwise not cooperating. All right, final question. What do you do for downtime or fun?

Down time. Look, I have three kids and something like three jobs at the moment. I do not know of this downtime you speak of. I would say when I do have a couple of free moments, I guess reading and thinking walks is what I do. All right, how do we do here? I was about five seconds over, but that was pretty good.

I think we got through four questions in a minute. Wow, if we did all of them that quick, this would be a much shorter podcast. So we don't want that. Let's get back to being. bloviatory and move on with questions about the deep life. Jason asks, how does a pastor engage in the deep life when he is on call 24-7? Well, Jason, I hear from a lot of pastors.

It turns out that deep work has quite a following among the pastor-it, and I would say the solution is, don't be on call 24-7. Now, I think at first that might sound like, wait a second, you're saying that I should not be there for my parishioners, that I should prioritize my own type of thinking above the needs of my parishioners. And I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that there is a difference between being available to those who need your help and being on call.

They're not necessarily the same thing. If your parishioners know that there's a way for them to reach out from you and have clear expectations that they will hear back, maybe not immediately, but they will hear back. there's a system in place. That is sufficient. They know that, yes, Pastor Jason, he is there when we need them. You know, I send a message to this, I send a message to this address, and I always hear back from him, you know, the same day, and he's very prompt about it.

That can be sufficient. So you've got to change this mindset that being caring and being available is the same as being on call. Another problem that pastors have, especially at smaller churches, is that they are in the middle of everything, logistically speaking. Right? They're in the middle of maintenance discussions and stewardship discussions and discussions about the education program and what's going to happen with the hiring of the new bookkeeper for the office.

And they're sort of in the middle of everything and everything is done in an ad hoc way. It's just a bunch of email threads going back and forth and calls that happen. And there is no actual time for the contemplative practices that are at the core of a spiritual leadership role. There's no actual time to have the insight that goes into the sermon. There's no actual time to write the sermon that's actually going to help people make breakthroughs. There's no time to come up with the programs that are maybe not so obvious, maybe more long term, but are really going to make a difference in people's lives.

So if you are a pastor, you need to think of yourself as a CEO of a small company, and the CEO is not involved with every decisions of a small company. So you actually have to study the same well-versed, well-developed entrepreneurship leader about how you actually build systems, how you work on your business instead of in your business. You've got to look at that same literature that, let's say, a technology startup founder would read or the owner of a bakery might read. So you could look at, for example, the e-myth revisited. That's a famous book about shifting your mindset. working on instead of in your business. There's a book available online called Work the System, which I also recommend that gets into a lot of detail about how you actually take the regularly

occurring things within your organizations and systematize them in a way that doesn't require you to be in the loop. It doesn't require you to be responsive all the time. So Jason, that's my two suggestions. If you want to do the contemplative portions of your job properly, you need to shift from being on call to being available with clear expectations. and you need to extract yourself from being a sort of ad hoc participant in every decision being made. You need systems. This is not making you a worse leader. It is making you a better leader.

Right. Isaac asks, From reading your books, it appears to me that you have a razor sharp discipline and a ruthless approach to productivity. Well, I don't know if I'm ruthless, Isaac, but I do take the rest of the beginning of your question as a compliment. I am quite disciplined.

I do subscribe to Jocko Willink's catchy phrase, discipline is freedom. I have found that to be true. All right, let's go on with your question here. I was wondering if you were always like that since you were a child or if you think you have developed it over the years. No, I was not always disciplined. I was famously non-disciplined, I would say, during a lot of my childhood years,

the typical setup of someone who is very smart, but doesn't always want to have to heart. work. As I've talked about before, really college was a turning point for me. After my freshman year of college, I got serious about my work. I got serious about my work as a student. I got serious about my computer science research. I got serious about my role as a writer. And from there, I would say my systems got sharper and my discipline got practiced. So that was the turning point for me. Audrey asks, I'm a novelist. and have absolutely loved your blog and books as inspiration to delve into the deep life.

For years, I've been addicted to the internet and social media as a way to escape the hard work of writing. Can you please share your thoughts on how to practice the deep life when doing something that's artistically challenging and or exhausting? So, Audrey, I have a few thoughts here. And there's a pragmatic thought, which is use less social media, quit more of the platforms, and for the platforms that remain, use a tool like freedom, an internet blocking tool like freedom, so that when you work, you can literally turn off access to desirable websites and social media apps.

You can turn off that access for the duration of your work. So you know that there is no option of you actually getting that done. Or you can do like Dave Eggers does. Dave Eggers writes on a laptop that has no internet. It's an old laptop. you can get one like this for very cheap. And he goes somewhere. There's no Wi-Fi in his house.

And he has his laptop with no internet. There's just no easy way for him to distract himself, right? And so when he's writing, the option isn't there. That's the pragmatic answer. A couple other things that I want to put into this diagnosis, though, Audrey. We might want to look a little bit closer at this procrastination. I mean, if you're an established novelist, then you could ignore this. But if you're an aspiring novelist, you want to make sure that actually

your training is up to speed, that you understand how the right industry works, right? That you are in a position where doing to work will likely result in a publishable novel. We've talked about this in earlier episodes. If your brain doesn't actually trust the plan you have is going to lead to the goal you want to get to, it will withhold motivation.

And you will experience that like procrastination. This is why, for example, national novel writing month has a pretty low success rate because you might say, hey, it's great. I'm going to write every day this month and write a novel. That sounds fun. But if you really don't know anything about the publishing industry, you don't have a lot of writing experience, you have no connection to the publishing industry, no agent, you don't even know how that works. Your brain probably will figure out, hey, I have no confidence that this activity is going to lead to the goal I have in mind. So when you get the day three or day four and you sit there and you're starting at that

screen, your brain's like, come on. Let's go to Instagram, right? So this is probably more general, Audrey. I think you're an established novelist, so this doesn't apply. But for those who aren't, sometimes the motivation problem is not just a lack of will on your end. It's a lack of planning, a lack of training, a lack of knowledge of how that world works, which brings me to my third point, which is, you know, if you know what you're doing, maybe you've done a little bit of internet blocking, what's left is a mindset shift. Like art is work. Chuck Close made it clear

when he said inspiration is for amateurs. A professional artist, pick the times they're going to work, they pick the places they're going to work, and they execute again and again and again. Sometimes you'll feel good, sometimes you might get in a flow state, sometimes you might feel inspired,

but most times you don't. It's just work. Like if you are a professional athlete, you hit the gym, and you have to hit the gym, and you've got to lift these weights because if you're not sufficiently strong, you're going to get pushed around on the court. And it's just your job and you do it.

So that's the final part. I would throw in there is the mindset shift. Inspiration is for amateurs. Set your time, set your location, crank to work again and again. I think you do those three things. I think you'll find that your production is going to go much higher. So just to summarize, use internet blocking tools to help dampen that immediate urge to check things. Make sure that you really understand the field.

you have a good plan that you're trained, that your mind trust, your work is going to lead to a conclusion, and then change your mindset to one of art as work, not as something that is fun or a constant source of inspiration. All right, Clark asks, how do I best manage my reading? Do I time block different subjects? So I plow through one at a time. You know, I want to have well-rounded results. So far, it's a little messy. Well, Clark, one thing I think is useful is having some set times where you generally do read during the day. So you kind of have some milestones in the day where reading happens. I tend, for example, to go for a walk pretty early every morning. I go to a particular field and I do some reading under an oak tree that I like there that's pretty well shaded. So I have my oak tree

reading in the morning. I usually read over lunch. If I have a little bit of, have time in the evening. I read in the evening as well. So I sort of have these milestones in my day that I associate with reading. So that's useful. Going beyond that, I wouldn't obsess too much about what you're reading. Do you have just the right mix? I think you should be, you should feel fine, Clark, that if a book is really not working for you to abandon it, you should also make sure that in your rotation are books that you're really excited to read and that are easy to read, just to kind of prime the pump and keep you excited. So you kind of go back and forth. between books you can devour and books that require more time.

And then otherwise, I wouldn't sweat it too much. Basically, a life where you're reading a lot and you're reading a real mix of things is going to be a life that's much better than one in which you are not doing those activities. Our final question comes from Chris. Chris asks, I've read your books. I recommend deep work to everyone. How can schools incorporate these ideas? I find the school environment now to be the opposite of deep work.

Well, Chris, I absolutely agree with you. I really do think the ability to sustain concentration on cognitively demanding task is really the superpower of the 21st century. It's the Uber skill on which almost everything else that's valuable in our economy can build. We should 100% be training for this. I think the ability to concentrate in 21st century American culture is like what physical fitness or sword-fighting ability was in the martial culture of ancient Sparta. It's something that you would want to inculcate in everyone. It is to 21st century American culture what horse riding and aero shooting was to 18th century Comanche culture.

I'm reading a book about Comanche's, and I've learned that they knew that if you were a planes Indian, it was going to be crucial, crucial to your own survival and a tribe survival, that you're excellent at handling horses and excellent at hunting with arrows. And so this is what the culture was built around, training very early. Again, 21st century America, our equivalent is sustaining concentration for all the reasons I lay out in the book Deep Work. And yet, Chris, you are absolutely right. We don't train for this in the school environment. We don't talk about it.

We don't push kids on it. We accommodate a more fractured attention span with a shoulder strug. I say, you know, kids these days, they have their phones. I guess what we need to do is just move our pedagogical methods more into the world where they're comfortable. That's not the way it works with hard foundational skills. They are hard, right? It's not necessarily we're going to be comfortable. It's something that we have to instill.

And I think there's great benefit if we do. So I think this is a big issue. You know, I've seen places where concentration is explicitly focused on, if you'll see as the use of that term in that context. You know, one of the inspirations for the book Deep Work, for example, was the time I spent as a doctoral student in the theory group at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory when I was getting my PhD.

In the theory group, concentration was a tier one skill. understood that. You would practice it. You would see MacArthur Genius Grant winners sitting there staring at whiteboards where they had projected a grid-like pattern and on which they had drawn honest-to-god, goodwill hunting style, combinatorical graph structures, and they're staring at them for an hour trying to make insight. The ability to sustain concentration was seen as a skill that a course you wanted to practice. Things like email and social media we're seeing with great suspicion.

Hey, what's that going to do to my concentration ability? What's it going to do to my core skill? So it's possible to imagine a pedagogical environment where we do care a lot about concentration. We just don't do it in most places. So, you know, I do think schools really need to change. I think in part,

we need to actually be helping students develop this skill in the way that you would develop a math skill in the way that you would do. develop a physical skill. This is one of the key points from deep work is that focus is not a habit. It's not something you know how to do, but you should just probably do it more often, like flossing your teeth. It is instead a skill that you get better at with practice. School should be the place where we practice. I don't know exactly how you do this, but I mean, I can imagine some sort of

curriculum where, like, you really prioritize this. Let's practice working on this hard thing for five minutes. Now let's practice working on it for 10 minutes. Let's do the Roosevelt dashes I talk about in deep work where you have a timer going. Can I concentrate really hard for that time before the timer goes off without breaking my concentration? There's things we could be doing. The way we design our assignments matter. Giving more time for the students to work on hard things in controlled environments where there aren't distractions. That matters. Now, this is really complicated. If you want, for example, to get more concentration out of, you know, six-year-olds, you're probably going to have to balance that with a lot more physical activity, because it's not going to be natural for a lot of six-year-olds

to sit still and concentrate. So once you start prioritizing that skill, it's going to require some new creative thinking. As we move our way higher up through the educational process, we can get much more explicit about this. Hey, here's what it feels like to take a calculus problem and to work it through in your head. Okay, try it right now. See how that's hard, see how you can't keep your attention? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about the metacognition that occurs there. All right, how can you get better at that? Well, we're going to do these exercises today.

Now we're going to do derivatives again and again. We're going to real quick. We're going to real quick in our heads just to get comfortable with laying down the basic foundation. Okay, see how that feels. You know, I mean, it's something that, again, I think we could really be training. The college level, the college level, this is where you're at your elite concentration finishing process.

That's what it should be like. The college level should be the place where now you're in the, you're in the, the arcaneum, you're in the stacks of your library, and you're doing battle with the dusty tomes. I mean, it sounds anachronistic. But there's a reason, there was a real value that came from this sort of old school college experience. The value was it taught you how to wrestle with hard things for long periods of time

without distraction. So at the college level, we should really be pushing that. We probably need to be a lot more structured about how we talk to the kids about, here's how you should work, where you should work, You should have your work hours. You should sign up for your work hours. You should have concentration groups where you all go to this corner of the library. And you help each other stay on focus.

Okay, let's go do 30 minutes and come back and report back. Now let's do another hour. Like, it's something that we should be talking about with as much facility as, let's say, a, you know, a cornerback on a football team would be talking about their 40-yard dash time. This is something just foundational to doing your job well. Now, I think one of the issues here is it's not like we are modeling for students what a good, sustained, focus, rich cognitive life looks like. Have you been around college professors recently? It's a mess.

It's a mess. It's a hundred different groups and units and department heads all haphazardly trying to carve off another sliver of your time and attention because it makes. whatever they're doing more convenient in the moment. College professors are terribly harried because of that. The time that is left to actually prepare and teach good courses, mentor students, and do research, the core activities we would want from a 10-year-line college professor is vanishingly small and increasingly happens in the morning or in the evenings.

And that's not great because then what happens? Well, the people who happen to have the setup that allows them to do work in the evenings or do work in the morning are now going to get a lot. ahead. But now we're not prioritizing for just sheer intellectual horsepower, but for other types of factors. So we're no longer necessarily pushing ahead in academia of the very best minds. We're pushing ahead the minds that, for whatever reason, maybe don't have kids so they can just work all night or don't need as much sleep. So they can put in that 5 a.m. shift that other people can't, or that have a huge child care support network. And now, for some reason, they should now be

promoted ahead of someone else because they're just going to get more of that work done. I don't want to go on a tangent here, Chris, but the point I'm making is that we look at the actual instructors in our educational institute and we're living the opposite of the focused or deep life. So I wrote an article about this earlier this year for the Chronicle of Higher Education's magazine. It was called his email making professors stupid. I make a lot of these points. And I made in particular this notion of like, why should not universities be?

what I call citadels of concentration. Like the one place that you get, you go through when you're 18, 19, 20 years old, and you see this exemplar of what it's like to set up an organization that actually prioritizes and respects the life of the mind. Where else would that be more important

than out of university? And then everyone would get exposed for about four years to what that could look like to sort of rebuild an organizational structure that's not about what makes things convenient for everyone. It's not about what's most flexible for everyone.

It's not about what's easiest for everyone. It's about how do we take brains and allow those brains to do what they've been trained to do at a world-class level, even if it requires a lot more framework and scaffolding and support to make that happen. Because there's value in focus, there's value in specialization, and it's important. Think about if we had millions of college students being exposed to these citadels of concentration early in their life, that would then go on and affect how they run their companies, how they run their households, how they run their own careers.

I think it could be really positive, which is to say, in other words, we kind of have to get our own house in order before we can start talking to the students coming through our house and saying, this is what you should be doing with your brain. So, of course, you've hit a nerve with me. I think we have criminally under-emphasized

the importance of concentration, of the ability to focus, of the ability to apply your brain to demanding tasks. and I think there's a price to pay for it. I think it's an economic price to pay for it. I think there's a price to pay for it in terms of individual productivity. I think there's a price to pay for it in terms of the quality of our individual lives. So I'm on board.

There's not an easy answer, but I'm on board. I think teaching students how to focus, talking to students about focusing, giving them time to focus, helping them build that skill. That should be in the K-12 curriculum. Our university should be Citadel as a concentration. even those could be a giant pain for most people involved. I think if we do that, A, we're going to produce a lot more great scholarship.

We're going to produce a lot more great students. And we're going to produce a whole generation of college educated youth that have been exposed to the possibility of a much more cognitively enhanced life. And that's going to go and trickle out into society at large. So I'm on board, Chris. Our school should be the place where people learn that. 21st century American equivalent of Spartan war skills or, you know, Comanche horse riding skills, or whatever historical analogy we want to use, because that is our crucial skill of the 21st century.

We have to stop ignoring it. We have to stop genuflecting to these attention economy, doodads and gadgets that fragment our attention that give us busyness, that push our emotional buttons, that numb us, that distract us. that cannot be the core. That cannot be the core receptacle of our cognitive energy. We need to reclaim that cognitive energy, get used to applying into hard problems, making progress on hard problems, processing hard information and coming out with sophisticated, useful, progressive results.

All of this requires a reorienting over what we value in the society towards high-quality cognitive activity. So it's a good question, Chris. I am 100% with you. You lead the campaign. I'll be right there behind you. Let's get the Citadel's a concentration. Let's get our schools focused again on the act of focusing.

I think it would do a lot of good for almost all aspects of our society. Right. So that is all of the time we have for today. As always, if you have questions that you want to ask, sign up for my email list at caldneyuport.com. I send out that survey on a. semi-regular basis otherwise until next time stay deep