Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 63: How Do I Minimize Meetings?

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.WORK QUESTIONS - How do I minimize meetings at my large corporation? [5:01] - Hod do I accomplish deep work in a responsive role? [11:30] - How do I prioritize self-learning when earning a PhD? [15:19] - How do I optimize time spend waiting for data to crunch? [19:27]  - How do I get important work done with kids at home? [21:48] - How do I encourage my teenagers to do deep work? [26:35]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Will a digital shabbat make a difference? [31:04] - Is LinkedIn Useful? [35:50]  - Do I worry about a lack of end-to-end encryption on Trello? [40:00]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How I create challenge when my job has become boring? [47:26]  - How an I stay motivated after reaching the pinnacle of success? [54:29] - How do I stay motivated when I'm not good? [57:40]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 63. I don't have any quick announcements for today. There is no deep dive either this week, though I have another one I'm working on, so we will be back to the deep dive segment soon. We've got a good collection of questions here covering our normal categories of work technology and the deep life. Among other things, we have questions coming up about self-learning.

teaching kids how to do deep work, the value of digital Shabbats, and staying motivated even after you have achieved what you set out to achieve. So this should be a great show. As always, if you want to learn how to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. All right, so I'm excited to get started, but first, I want to mention a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast, and that is monk pack. People who know me know that I am bad about eating. It's one of the side effects of being someone who is really in the deep work is that I often forget to eat.

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It is a great support service for the self-improvement-oriented reader. So right now, Blinkus has a special offer just for our audience. Blinkis.com slash deep, and you can start a seven-day trial that is free and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis, spelled B-L-I-N-K-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkis.com slash deep. We began, as always, with work questions, and the first such query comes from

Rob, who asks, what are strategies for eliminating large and routine meetings in a large corporation manufacturing environment to free up time for deep work? Well, Rob, one of the big ideas in my new book, A World Without Email, is that processes really matter. We know this in the industrial sector. process engineering is at the core of the explosion and productivity that occurred in the industrial sector, I should say, throughout the 20th century, we don't think as much about processes right now in the knowledge sector, but we should. Most of the things we do in knowledge work is implicitly supporting one process or another, right? We have a process for how we make new decisions on marketing materials. We have a process for how we make client pitches. We have a process for how we

organize and check in on client task execution, whatever. Now, we typically don't name these things. We just make them implicit. We tackle them in an ad hoc way, which tends to be some combination of, let's just chat through email and Slack and set up meetings. So if you want to reduce the meetings, you have to first say, what is the underlying process that these meetings are servicing and are there more optimal ways of implementing this process, ways that doesn't give us these long, repetitive meetings that happen again and again, that when you scale this over many processes, gives us too many meetings. You have to get to the underlying process and replace it with something better. Now, getting down to the core issue is a really important idea. I think too often, and this is something

I'm trying to combat with the new book, I think too often when people think about workplace inefficiencies or things they don't like in the workplace. They get too many emails. I have too many meetings. They want to just fix the superficial issue. Well, can I just have people stop sending me so many emails? Or can I have a better email management system? You know, better rules for how I process and sort my emails,

or I batch when I read my emails. Or can we fix the norms? So that, yes, the same emails are sent, but people don't expect to get an answer within a day. Same thing for meetings. Like, well, can't we just have less meetings? Can't we have a culture in which we do, us meetings. Merlin Man years ago posted, it was facetious, but it was funny, but he posted this

idea that a lot of people took, I think, more seriously than Merlin meant it to be serious, where you had these like attention chips. They're like poker chips. And basically, if you wanted to, let's say, bring someone into a meeting, you had to give them one of your like attention chips. And so you only had so many. You only had so many hours of time that you were allowed to take from people's lives. So once you've used up your attention chips, you weren't allowed to schedule any meetings. But again, it was a joke, but that general type of approach is superficial. Let's try to solve the behavior we don't like. Whereas what I'm trying to argue is those tend not to work, because all of these emails in your inbox or all these meetings are serving a purpose.

They are how some implicit underlying process is unfolding. If you don't want that high level behavior, you have to actually change the lower level process. Make it explicit. Here's how we do it. here's how we organize, here's the information flow, here's how this unfolds in a way that has less of the high-level behavior that you dislike. All right, that's really abstract, so we can get a little bit more concrete. What happens is when you identify these underlying processes that are generating meetings, you get two things that can occur.

Once you start optimizing, how do we actually want this process to happen? You can often replace a lot of meetings with something that is more, let's say, systematic or more asynchronous. It might be, we don't have. have to actually meet every week to discuss the script for this video and approve it. What we really should have is a process instead where by this time each week, the script draft gets put into this shared drop box folder. And I know to look for it there, and I will edit it, and it will put a finalized draft

ready for the copy editors, will be there the next day. You know, you could have some sort of system that doesn't require everyone to take an hour out of their day and sit down. if that's a better way to do the process. Now, I'm paraphrasing here a real system from, it's an example from the book where there's this whole really cool system for producing daily videos

for this media company where there's no email involved and there's no Slack involved. There's like a shared spreadsheet that has the status of things and as the status changes, people see it and the information moves in a very systematic way

from one shared Dropbox to another. It's a really cool system. I'm not doing it justice with this, paraphrasing, but what I'm trying to hint at here with this semi-concrete example is what it looks like when you start optimizing the underlying process so that you're not just canceling the meeting,

you're accomplishing the same goal that meeting originally accomplished, but in a different way that has less of a footprint, less of a cognitive footprint, less negative side effects. Another thing that happens when you begin optimizing the underlying processes is sometimes meetings don't go away, they get better. Now it's like, okay, we do need, maybe it's efficient for this for us to talk synchronously, to all be in the same place, we can make a lot of decisions real quick,

but we were just generally throwing a meeting at this issue and they were lasting 90 minutes. We could probably get this meeting down to 20 minutes if it was a structured meeting. This information has to be in our shared folder before the meeting starts. Everyone has their pitch. Everyone gets five minutes.

Decisions are made. They're recorded in this document. And then we're out. So once you understand the process, you've identified the process, and you asked a question of how do we optimize this process so that its cognitive footprint is minimized, as negative side effects are minimized, then you start coming up with these ideas. Like, well, we can get rid of most of the bloat in this

meeting if we have some structure, if we put some fences around it. So that's my general suggestion, Rob. You can't just attack the head of the hydra. Say, yeah, too many meetings, let's stop doing them. Those meetings are serving a purpose. So if there's too many of them, find the underlying purpose, stabbed at Hydra in the heart, and say, let's fix the underlying process and say, let's fix the underlying process in such a way that the meetings aren't as necessary. Librarian asks, I work as a reference librarian and have started time blocking my planning time each week.

However, about half of my time is scheduled to be on the reference desk, where I have to help anyone with a reference question. Do you have any suggestions on how best to use this type of desk time rather than just doing email for 20 hours a week? Thanks. Well, from a time blocking time, perspective, probably what you want during those reference desk sessions is a dual-use block.

That's where you have a block that says, I'm primarily doing this, which in your case would be answering reference desk questions. And in the time that remains between those questions, I'll be working on that. Now, the question is, what's the right type of that? What's the right fallback activity to schedule into this dual-use time block? And I would say probably not traditional deep work because the context switching of having to answer these questions and then return

to something deep is going to be very frustrating. So you're constantly going to context shift enough that you're never going to be able to really give a deep task your full concentration. So, I mean, I think what I would do

is probably use those blocks as a time to dual schedule lots of tasks, admin work. You know, okay, get this done, send in that, fill in this, research that. depending on what the rate is of calls or questions you get at this reference desk,

you could actually probably consolidate most of your administrative work, if you're very organized about it, into the same time you're at the reference desk. It maybe doesn't make those reference desk hours the most fun, but what it means is the 20 hours a week that you are not doing the reference desk is open. You're not just going to be on email and doing task or doing whatever, because you got a lot of that done very systematically

and in an organized fashion during your reference test hours and now you can embrace the time outside of that and get some deep things done. Let me put an hour of deep work every day before it. Let me work on this project. Let me pick up this new skill. Let me have a,

what I sometimes refer to as a phantom part-time schedule. So this is something common with people who start time blocking and get really effective. they time block they get really effective. They realize they do not need 40 hours to actually get their work done. And so they sort of implicitly have a part-time schedule. They're kind of done with their work.

They can be done with their work by two, or they can have a two-hour block in their day in which nothing has to get done. And I say, look, you earn that time by being very effective, and you can kind of treat it like you have a part-time job and have a different thing you do during those hours. You can pick up new skills. You can build a side hustle. you can lead to contemplative life and get deep into some sort of new philosophy or theology or ethics or something like this.

I mean, it's really a gift, especially if you have, let's say, kids and child care that last a full eight-hour workday and you have a phantom part-time schedule. It's really a gift to get an hour a day or two hours a day that just work on yourself and your own brain and things you pursue just for the sake of quality or just for the sake of depth. So that's another thing you might be able to do. if you're really careful about what you do, how you dual use that time, you really be locked in. Don't just sit there idly on your email. Like get everything out of email on the task list,

configure, organize those lists, what's my status? Let me get out ahead of things. Let me get things done. Let me be very organized about it. Boom, boom, boom. So that you have like a really great job in the other 20 hours.

You still have meetings and other things to do, but you have a lot of flexibility in that schedule. And I think in other words, if you use that reference desk time well, it's going to make the rest of your time something even more special. Our next question comes from Phil. Phil says,

How do you prioritize self-learning endeavors versus formal schooling? Is one more appropriate than the other in certain context? I am a PhD student. My work engages many disciplines, which I am not thoroughly trained in, nor do I feel I have the time to be by the end of my doctoral training if I want to finish in a reasonable amount of time. Yet I still feel the need to learn and do it all, and I find myself scanning the course catalog irrationally, scouring the internet for MOOCs to level up my knowledge

and daydreaming about all the adjacent possibilities I might explore. Well, Phil, you know I'm a fan of learning for the sake of learning. I also believe that if you're in a doctoral program, you have a lot of free time, you have a lot of flexibility, so the idea that you are pursuing related or only semi-related fields and learning about them, that's all good. I'm a little concerned, though, just based on the wording of your question, that what might actually be going on here is that your dissertation dodging. So a common way that I think people deal with the stress of a dissertation, the stress of having to put your intellectual chips on the table, and say, okay, here it is.

I've mastered these ideas. I've written up this thesis. This is original thinking. It's going to be evaluated, perhaps ruthlessly. that can be very scary. And one of the ways that people can dodge is like, well, I don't really want to do, I want to learn some more things. I'm a generalist. I'm just, let me read some more.

And maybe I'll end up eventually ABD and be like, yeah, that was kind of too structured. Like, I'm just a, I'm a man of ideas. And I'm just like, there's so much I want to learn and so much to know. And it just seemed I can't just waste my time focusing in on one thing. And I'm going to say, waste your time focusing in on one thing. It's not a very long period. If you're at a certain point of your dissertation process, maybe it's like a year of focus. But it's important if you're going to train at this level to actually go beyond exposure to ideas, being in a class and seeing those ideas, having the ideas accessible in a conversational setting.

To go beyond that and say, I'm going to put my chips down on the table and try to actually advance a world of ideas. I'm going to take a topic and try to do original work in it. I know it's scary. It's not as scary as you think it is, though. it just feels scary because you're in the middle of it. But it's really important for your intellectual development if you're at that level of training to actually try to advance the worlds of ideas. That's going to require some focus.

Here are the things I'm working on. Here's my dissertation. It's built on these particular fields. I know these fields. I'm going to write. I'm going to produce this thing. I'm going to put it out there. I'm going to put the chips on the table.

Now, this doesn't mean that your whole life has to be built around it. I'm just arguing that you should have a really clear distinction. You have your workday, what's your time block? That workday is focused primarily on your dissertation. What you're learning, what you're thinking about, what you're reading, what you're writing about is all focused on getting a dissertation done on a very good normal time frame for your dissertation. When your workday is over, schedule shutdown complete. Now the time is yours and have some self-learning projects there.

It could be things that have nothing to do with your field, things that have to do with your field. Treat that as a sort of separate type of thing. That's like your bike riding time. That's your gardening time. That's your woodshed time. You can be exposed to interesting ideas and interesting people. You're not cutting off your generalist instincts. You're saying that's separate than my work hours.

Now again, if you're a doctoral student, you don't need a full workday. It's an easier job than doctoral students realize at the time. Maybe this is from the morning until three or whatever. But that's what I'm going to say. I'm just worried. I don't know if it's true, but I'm just worried that your dissertation dodging. So time block your work hours. focus on the dissertations can be great for your mind to do. You'll be okay. It's not as scary as you think.

And then outside of that time, if learning new things is like you're woodworking, I think that's great. And for the moment, that's where that effort should exist. Continuing with our graduate student theme, Balaji says, I'm a graduate student who crunches large amounts of data for a living. I usually need to wait for varied periods of time for my current jobs to complete, and I get distracted during that wait time, which spirals into hours of pointless web surfing and social media. So, Balaji, my advice here is the same I gave to the reference librarian earlier. You should be time blocking your work hours as a graduate student. The blocks in which you're working on data crunching and there is going to be variable

periods of waiting for those processing jobs to end should be dual-use blocks. Use number one is running these data crunching jobs. use number two is fill in the blink. But you have a very clear secondary use for that time, and you take that as seriously as any other time block, that when I'm not actually doing the efforts required to get the next job data crunching, I'm working on this other thing.

The block makes it clear what that other thing should be. As I mentioned to the reference librarian from earlier, you can get a lot done. There's a huge amount of productivity latent, in those variable periods if you just have a really clear menu of what to do during that time. Now, I don't know how long these variables are. I mean, if you're talking about sometimes it's 45 minutes, sometimes it's 90 minutes, you could have deep work as that dual use. You could be reading or writing or what have you. If it's much shorter, like a five minutes here, 15 minutes there,

20 minutes here, five minutes here, then I would have more administrative or logistical type work scheduled as that dual use. So it's like, okay, the next two hours, I'm running jobs. on the servers and waiting for them or whatever. I'm also getting done all of the logistical administrative tasks that are kind of annoying me for this week. So when that block is over, the

time that remains is very unburdened by the shallow, and now I can really get into the deep in that time that remains. So use dual-use time blocks to make the most out of these waiting periods. And again, I think the impact

it will have on the rest of your schedule is going to be bigger than you realize. There's much more time and productivity latent there than you're probably giving credit. Next up is L, who asks, with kids at home, any suggestions on how to get important work done? In her elaboration, Elle mentions that her kids are doing remote learning from home, and this generates interruptions. They come in with various problems or what have you, and it makes it difficult for her to really get into a deeper, more important, that would benefit from lack of interruptions. If you're not a single parent, if you have a partner who's also working from home,

you need to divvy up the hours. You need to both be time block scheduling and you need to coordinate your time block schedules so that it is clear who is in charge of dealing with kid interruptions during what times. Split the day and half, however you want to do it. And during the times where you're not responsible, try to get some blocks in there for important work. in fact, I would go so far as to say, don't waste parts of your day where you have a lot of meetings.

Don't necessarily waste your uninterrupted hours on the meetings. I would use the hours where you could be interrupted for those meetings, right? People understand, right? It's pandemic. The kids are at home. They come in, they interrupt you. Like, sorry, my kids are interrupting you.

That's the reality. The meeting is probably much less productive than you working on something deep. So, like, let the interruptions hit the meeting. A good reminder to your colleagues that like, hey, this is my, my situation is not easy. So, you know, ease off. So if you have someone else at home, you got to be clear about it. These are my hours. These are, these are your hours. More generally, the point I often make is that in a moment in which you were responsible for

parenting a child, you are the person who is watching that child. And if that child is under a relatively advanced age, if they're under 14 or something like this, you can't really predictably or effectively get important things done. You might be able to get some things done. You might be able to get tasks done. But it is going to be frustrating because it is a full-time job to be caregiving to a child. This idea of like I'm going to kind of be caregiving for a child while also getting my work done. Don't think of that as something that is possible that you're just not doing quite right. That's like an impossible, almost impossible thing to ask. So you really have to prioritize caregiving and child care. So that's why I'm saying if you have a partner split it.

you know, this is my time when I'm not caregiving. Also look into other child care options. You know, I don't know how old your kids are, but do you want to introduce a part-time nanny? Do you want to introduce a learning hub? Like, there's a lot of different options that have emerged in the pandemic, some more affordable than others, that give you child care time where you are not the responsible caregiver. And that's time in which you can really heavily focus on getting important stuff done. And finally, I think it is completely reasonable to sort of throw up your hands on this year and say it's a dumpster fire year. I can't watch my kids and do my job the way I used to. Those are two jobs that we're somehow trying to do together. Let's not pretend like it's possible.

We're muddling through this year, getting done what can get done. It's going to get better. All pandemics go away. And then we can get back to actually getting after it. I think that is a completely fine response as well. It's like, yeah, this is terrible. It's a war zone. Yeah, I can't do the same work that I used to be able to do.

I will be able to do that work again. Pandemic will go away like all pandemics do, but in the middle of this dumpster fire, things are just different. And you have to be okay with that answer as well. So let me just quickly summarize all the different points. One, I'm a big advocate of caring for a child. Child care in the moment is not conducive with also working.

We all have to acknowledge that we should not try to trick ourselves and to like, well, I should somehow be able to do both. You can't. It's a very difficult situation. So option A is to find any option you can to have time in which you're not the caregiver, so you can split this up with your partner, you can look into other types of pandemic child care options. Option B is also just to acknowledge it, yeah, it's hard and not as much stuff is going to get done. I've talked about this on this podcast before. I'm not going to have nearly as productive of a year as I normally do this year because, yeah,

it's been a dumpster fire and I'm just, for example, not getting as much research done. There's just a lot going on. And it's going to get better because the pandemic's going to go away. We're going to get back to a normal schedule. But I'm willing to just say, yeah, this year was bad. But it didn't break us and things will get better. So, Elle, I hope that is useful. I feel your pain.

I empathize with you. And I just keep coming back to that note. There's things we can do to make things a little bit better now. But just keep remembering that the entire picture is going to get significantly better. All pandemics go away. we're getting there. All right, let's do another question here about kids. Anne asks, how do I gamify deep work for my 13 and 16 year olds?

In other words, Anne is trying to figure out if there's some way to make the pursuit of depth a game so that her kids are more likely to try to do it. Well, to be honest, Anne, that seems too complex for me. my advice when it comes to kids of that age is that the core behavior that you need to both model and insist on is time blocking. Now, obviously, they're not time blocking their whole day, but they're time blocking their necessary schoolwork. All right, when are you going to do your schoolwork? Let's block it out. When is it going to happen during the day?

Do you need to do some on the weekend? Is in the evening, it's in the morning. You have a study hall. You really figure out, like, what is your plan? What is your plan for getting the work done that needs to get done for your schoolwork? I used to recommend when I did student advice more exclusively. When I used to give more talks to parents, for example, I used to recommend at a certain age at least having like on the refrigerator somewhere a calendar where you can see all of the due dates

for tests and papers and exams, right? So you know like, okay, in two weeks you have a paper due. A month from now you have an exam due. so that when you talk to your kids about what's your plan, where is the time specifically that you're going to work on this? When is the time when you're going to get this homework done? You can be looking at that calendar and help them think and learn about, okay, well, when are you going to start studying for the exam?

How is that going to work? It's just a day before. You're going to start next weekend. Is it going to be one hour a day? You force them to come up with a plan for everything that's coming up on their schedule. This is natural for adults. No, some adults. It's not natural for kids.

You've got to help them with this. Time block, time, block. time block. This is what has to get done. It has to get done somewhere. Where is that somewhere? When is it happening? Right. So you get them into that mindset. You insist on that. Now once you're time blocking, now you can kind of optimize what happens in these blocks. So now it's, okay, I have math homework due every Friday for my calculus class. It takes me whatever. I put aside two hours for that. On Wednesday is actually the best time to do. it because I have whatever trumpet practice on Thursday. The kid has a time block. Here's my time

on Wednesday when I work on my math homework. Now you can optimize. So you know what's going to help you hit that block or maybe even make that block smaller is if you give me your phone before you do that. Why would you need your phone? This is time you've put aside to do nothing but finish your math homework. And yet if you had your phone and you were looking at your first, that's only going to slow down how long that takes. You're going to break your block or have to use more time, waste more time on your block. So here's the rule.

You give me your phone during that block. And they see like, oh, I get this done in an hour instead of two hours. Right. There's no real good argument why I have to have my phone while I'm working on my calculus homework, right? And now they're getting exposure to putting aside time, focusing without distraction, getting things done quickly. This is way more effective than just generically saying,

look, you're too distracted, you look at your phone. too much, like you're waiting until the last minute. That's all too vague. That's all too general. You got to get specific. And I think with kids, time blocking schoolwork is one of the best things you can do, especially once you start time blocking those deadlines are coming up. When they roll into a paper without staying up late, when they come into an exam with no stress,

when they see they can have the time, they can half the time required for their work because you take their phone during those periods. They focus, they get it done, then they're done, and then they get their phone back. you really are doing a great service to that kid. Not only are going to be less stressed and they're going to do well, you're giving them a toolkit that when they go to college and beyond is going to give them an almost unfair advantage because of how much more effective you are

when you're time blocking and optimizing versus what most kids do, which is just, I don't know, a very hazy simulacrum of what work actually looks like. I'm on my phone, I'm on my computer, and I'm kind of doing work. Right, and that's my suggestion. Forget gamifying, let's block, let's optimize, They will thank you for it later. And with that, let's do some technology questions. Our first technology question comes from Marguerite, who asks,

have you considered looking at the Orthodox Jewish model of Shabbat in which one day a week you don't deal with electronics? Well, generally speaking, I'm a big believer in the Shabbat model. I like the way in particular that I think the Jewish approach to Shabbat where you really start sundown Friday. Friday night, all day Saturday, until your Haftala celebration, Saturday sundown. I think that having the Friday night and then all day Saturday as a day of rest, I'm a big believer in that model. I think obviously in an age of knowledge work, that rest should be more intellectual rest than physical. It's not a day that we're not in the farm fields because we're never in the farm fields, but it should be a day in which you're not reading news, you're not working.

And yes, you're not on your phone all the time, just surfing the internet. I think that's good. I think that broad interpretation of Shabbat is good for people. I have done it off and on. Unrelated to this question, it was one of my convictions for the new year, as I was going through my own deep life bucket overhaul habits, was to actually get back into a very serious Shabbat routine in which it really is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.

I think all that's good. A little known fact is former Senator Joe Lieberman, Al Gore's vice presidential nominee or candidate, I should say, during the 2000 election. He actually wrote a whole book about Shabbat, like why you should do it. And I read it for some reason. Interesting book.

All right. But to your question, will this by itself be the cure to distraction and digital technology and your phone and your tablets dominate your attention? Will this by itself be what you need to cure those forces? And I would say no. I think it's good to do a Shabbat habit, but this cannot be your solution to a life in which you're deluged with digital distraction. If you are unhappy with the role that these devices play in your life, taking just one day a week off from this behavior is not enough because it means the other six days you're miserable. We do not tell someone struggling with alcohol that their key is to not drink on Saturday.

We do not tell someone who is struggling with their weight to say, don't worry about it, I have a solution, eat healthy on Saturday. The advice would seem nonsensical. They need to change all the days of their life, not just one. So while Shabbat can give a much-needed break from many different demands and give your brain a time to unload, when it comes to the digital aspect of your life, if in general you feel like you need to get away from all that din, I would argue that you should design a life from scratch in which that din is not so loud. Where that when you get to Shabbat, it actually does not feel that much different. Maybe you don't look at your phone at all, like you're not checking emails, whereas on other days you do, but it's not a major change.

And to change your relationship from scratch with these devices, you have to do something like the digital declutter I talk about in digital minimalism. You've got to start from a blank slate, figure out what matters to you, work backwards from those things you care about to figure out how you want to use technology to support it and then happily miss out on everything else. You have to expect that you're going to have to retune up these ideas frequently, that you're going to have to have to. have to return to them frequently. You're going to have to maybe do new declotters. It's an ongoing process. I talked about this in more detail in last Thursday's habit tune up mini episode. But that's the broader point I want to make here is I have never really been a big believer that these temporary breaks, whether it be a digital Shabbat, but also I want to throw into this discussion the notion of like doing a detox occasionally, like once a year you do a week or a month

without your phone. Like, that's fine. But if that gives you a lot of relief, you really need to ask the question. Is what's the behavior is giving me relief from? Maybe I don't want that behavior. So that's my bigger thing. I love the Shabbat idea. But do not let that be the full response you have to the role of the digital in your life. If you're rolling in the Friday night so happy that you finally get to put your phone down, then you probably need to change what's happens, you know, Sunday through Thursday. That's what I would put it. So great idea for Shabbat, but that by itself is not the solution to the overwhelm that so many of us feel from our devices. Tweedledee asks, is LinkedIn useful? Should I be spending time there? They claim that it is a great

way to find clients, but in my eight plus years of being on LinkedIn, I have gotten work from exactly one person. Well, Tweedl D, For you, I think the answer is clearly no. Don't waste any more of your time and attention on that service. It's obviously not returning very much in terms of new business. And I know it's probably taking up a bunch of your time, especially as LinkedIn has evolved to be more like a social network and less like a networking facilitation site.

So for you, yeah, don't do it. Now here's the important thing. For other people, the answer might be different. For other people, LinkedIn maybe has non-trivial values. It's how they found jobs. It's how they've done hiring. Maybe when they lost their job two years ago, their ability to go to their secondary networks

and find people in an industry was the key to them finding a new job. And for them, LinkedIn is useful. But the key thing here is that there is an evaluation that should be done. What Tweedle D, and I'm assuming this is not your real name. If it is, let me just say as an aside,

maybe what's really going on here is LinkedIn is very useful, and the reason Tweedledee is not getting work is because his name is Tweedledy. And it has nothing to do with the network is that people think that's really weird. All right, aside over. Tweed D did an assessment. What value am I actually getting from this?

Oh, that's not that much. What's it taking for me? I'm on it a lot. Great. Cost benefit done. I don't need this network. That's a brilliant minimalist approach to technology. Someone else with a much more reasonable name, does this analysis, says, great. This network has brought me some value, so I'm going to keep it in my life.

The question is, are you doing this evaluation among the tools in your life? The problem is not whether you use a given tool or not, it's whether or not you're using that tool without having first done a cost-benefit analysis. Now once you've done a cost-benefit analysis, if there's enough value from a tool, and this is core minimalism, this is my book digital minimalism, gets deep into this, if you've decided that a tool

brings you non-trivial value, you have now done something very important. You have identified what the value is that tool brings, so now you can optimize how you use it. You can say if this is the value I get out of this tool, how do I want to use it so that I can still maintain that value but minimize the other cost? So if you're the LinkedIn person who is not named Tweedledee and found that when you lost your job, the ability to search your network and find the new job was valuable for you, you like that safety net,

and you know that's why you're using LinkedIn. You would say, great. To get that value, there's not much I need to do day to day on this network. I certainly don't need to be, you know, browsing the content or the LinkedIn pulse or whatever. I just need to keep my profile more or less up to date. And when I meet someone in a business capacity, I need to probably make a friend request to them. I don't know how that quite works, but make a request for a connection to them in LinkedIn. That gives me all my value.

So great, it's not on my phone. I basically don't use it outside of those two cases. A, something changed to my job status. So I update my profile. B, I meet someone new, and in that case, I will log in to LinkedIn on my web browser and send them a request. And that's it. You see, now you have minimized the cognitive footprint of this service while still maintain your value. So once you've done a cost benefit analysis, you get those two different plausible benefits out the other end.

A, you might take a service out of your life altogether and clear up that footprint, or B, you keep a service, but you're able to be incredible. structurally structured about how you use it. Either way, the negative impacts of the service in question are going to be greatly reduced. All right, let's do one more technology question. This one comes from M. He asks, what are your thoughts on the lack of end-to-end encryption in productivity apps such as Notion or Trello?

Well, M, I would say I'm not that bothered about no end-to-end encryption on Trello, which I use. I'm actually, to be honest, not quite sure what end-to-end encryption would mean in a service like Trello where the whole point is your data is stored on their servers and they create the web-based display of the data for you. When I think of end-to-end encryption, I tend to think of, I'm communicating with someone else and I don't want someone in between to see what I'm doing. But it's a little bit different.

I'm not communicating with someone else when I use Trello. I'm putting my data on their server so that they can do a better job of display. it than I could do locally. So, I mean, it feels like at some point their servers are going to have to unencryp that data so that they can create the webpage I'm looking at. But more importantly, I think, if that does bother you, and this brings me to a more general point, things like Trello or what you get out of notion, especially if you're not really collaborating with them, can easily be implemented locally with no internet involved at all.

So if you're worried about this information falling into the wrong. hands or being observed, you can get a similar functionality to Trello in a spreadsheet or a Microsoft Word document. I mean, you're someone who cares about end-to-in encryption, so you might be intact. There's certainly scripts for Emacs. You can use for plain text file-based productivity. There's tools for plain text file productivity that just run on your computer. You can even really get index cards and pin them to a bulletin board in your office. The bigger point I wanted to make is that reality that, yeah, you can implement what these tools do locally, easily, with any number of approaches, emphasizes the degree to which there's nothing magic happening

with these productivity aids. There was this period in the early 2000s, in which there was these high hopes for a techno-productivity utopia, in which high-tech tools could actually take on, on our behalf, a non-trivial portion of what makes work hard. This was this utopian dream we had when in 2005 and 2006, there was this convergence of David Allen's getting things done with sophisticated software like Omnifocus.

And maybe we thought software could actually take on a lot of the burden of sort of organizing and choosing work and make work easier. And it turned out that's not the case. There's no magic algorithm, no complex database query, no adaptable way of displaying data in different views that could substantially reduce the difficulty of still having to make decisions about what you need to work on and then just doing the work. The best that you actually get out of productivity supporting software is some better

organization, getting stuff off your mind, which reduces anxiety and cognitive loads. You can get rid of those negative side effects and make it easier to see everything that's on your plate that supports decisions. But it's still really hard. You still have to figure out what to work on and convince yourself to do it. So this is why the tools I use are the tools that are popular now like Trello, they're actually really simple. Because there's nothing much to be gained by complexity. Again, there's not some complex software thing that can make your job. significantly easier. The very best it can just help you organize what's on your plate, reduce some cognitive burden from trying to track things or be anxious about things.

You can put more of that energy into the hard work of actually choosing work and executing. So, I'm basically using your question about end-to-end encryption, and I'm elevating it to this broader point of software is pretty simple. The stuff that works is pretty simple, and that's on purpose, because that just emphasizes the fact that work is complicated and hard. Software can't solve that so you get something simple that's reliable and low friction and helps organize things and keep things off your mind. And then don't sweat too much more about that software because 98% of the effort is still going to be you figuring out what you want to do and actually doing the work. I want to take a moment to talk about Mint Mobile. If like many people

you are trying to save more money this new year, you could do worse than to look at your wireless bill. Those things get big. Those things creep up. You feel locked in and it just sucks money out of your pocket. Mitt Mobile is the solution. You can maximize your savings with wireless plans for your phone that start at just $15 a month. All their plans have unlimited talks and text. They will also give you high-speed data that's delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. There's no store you have to go into, there's no salesperson you have to talk to. You order online. They send you a SIM card in the mail.

You stick it into your existing phone. Boom, $15 a month. You're saving serious money. So if you want to get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month and get that shipped to your door for free, just go to mintmobile.com slash deep. That's mintmobile.com slash deep. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash deep. I also want to talk about my body tutor.

If one of your New Year's resolutions was to save money, then surely one of your other resolutions was to get healthier. I literally can think of no more effective service for getting this done than my body tutor. This is a company that was founded by my friend Adam Gilton. who used to be the fitness and health expert on my study hacks blog. It is a 100% online coaching program. You are matched with a coach. This coach helps you figure out what you should be eating and how you should be exercising

and moving. And then, and here is why it works, they check. Accountability, accountability, accountability. You talk to the coach online again and again every week. How's it going? Did you do it? Do we need to tweak anything? What Adam figured out a long time ago is that it's not information that is the problem when it comes to people struggling to get fit.

It is actually following through. It is basic human psychology when you know you have to look that coach in their digital eyes over your Zoom window and say, I didn't do it. You don't want to do that so you actually get the work done. That's why their customers are so wildly enthusiastic about this service. So if you want to get in shape, my body tutor is the way to do it. MyBodytutor.com to find out more. Tell them that you came here because of deep questions and they will give you $50 off your first month.

That's My Body Tudor.T.com. Mention deep questions and get $50 off your first month. Let's continue now with questions about the deep life. Our first one comes from Lori. She says, what would you suggest I do to experience the sense of challenge and using my brain when I'm not getting that for my job? I currently work a six-figure job where I can reasonably produce the results needed working approximately 20 hours a week.

I want to be using my brain more, but given my salary, role, and personal life, I don't plan to change my job. My company pays 80% towards a graduate degree, so I was considering getting another master's degree. Well, Lori, longtime listeners of the show probably know what I'm going to say already about the idea of getting a master's degree just as something to do. My philosophy on this is very clear. You should not get a graduate degree unless you have a specific job promotion or role that you think would be beneficial for you. And you have clear evidence that the particular degree that you are going to get from the particular school in which you're going to get it is necessary for you to actually achieve that. goal. Outside of that specific instrumental context, I do not think you should pursue a master's degree.

I do not think that these are appropriate to be deployed as just diversions or something to do or something to just sort of ambiguously open up some options that may perhaps open up one day. Deploy graduate degrees for particular purposes. Otherwise, you're going to waste a lot of money. You're going to waste a lot of time. Now, let's look at your current situation. It's one that's actually pretty common in the town where I live, which is Washington, D.C. You know, there's a lot of people in this town who have very stable government jobs that pay well. And due to their family circumstances, maybe the ages of their kids or they're caring for an aging parent or something like this, they want to keep it as is, even though it's not super demanding to actually try to get

a promotion, the take on more responsibility, might transform the job into something that is much less flexible or autonomous or would have a much bigger footprint and because it's a government job, it's not like the money is going to really jump up. So it's not like, yeah, your job's going to get much harder, but you can get twice the money. So I've come across a lot of people just locally who are in a similar situation. This job isn't completely challenging me, but I want to keep it. So what should you do about that? Well, you mentioned, for example, you're working approximately 20 hours a week. So the first thing I would suggest is to take on the challenge of creating what I called earlier in this show a phantom part-time job. There's two ways that you can have

roughly 20 hours free during a week. The first way is that you're working 40-hour weeks, but doing so kind of lazily. Kind of taking your time, you're surfing the web a lot. You know, nothing's really that urgent. But you have these eight hours a day that you're basically in work mode is just often in a low energy sort of way. That's not great. The phantom part-time work approach would be, let me very carefully time block. Capture, configure control, I'm going to time block my days. And I want to try to be done by two.

Maybe, you know, occasionally there's a meeting you're going to have to call into it three or four, but it's like you're not trying to schedule things then. Like, I want to be very organized, very focused, right? You have that challenge of trying to like keep all your work, you know, uh, organize and your energy on point. Like, I want to get the things done really well and be done, you know, by two. So it's as if you have a part-time job, even though, you know, it's still technically last a full day. That then frees up the extra energy in a way that is much more easily utilized. And if it's just in step interspersed throughout your day and it just gets

expressed with web surfing breaks and context switching and just sort of low energy approaches to your work. So approach your work with structure and energy. That's That's going to make it more palatable. You're going to produce better results. And then free up much more clearly the time that remains for other things. Now the question is, what should those other things be right now? Well, this is where, not surprisingly, I'm going to go back and look at the deep life buckets. What are the areas of your life that are important? We've just covered craft, but you're going to have other areas as well. This is a time, it's a new year that you can go through and say, I'm going to overhaul those buckets one by one.

And what a gift, you have tons of extra time and energy to do so. You know, maybe this becomes the season in which you get very involved in community that you're going to become very helpful for family members. You maybe, you know, your local church that you're a member of. You're going to step up and run there or something, right? Like, whatever it is. Maybe this is the time you're getting really the community. Or you're going to get your health into a really good place and train for

something or you are going to get very serious into mastering a type of philosophy or deepening your spiritual life or you're going to deepen your sort of ethical commitments, whatever it is. But you have time. Deploy it towards, here's the buckets that I think are important. How can I overhaul each area of this of my life so that I'm putting energy on the things that matter and not wasting too much energy on the things that are shallow? your answers to those questions, I don't know what they'll be, but I love the fact that you have energy to go after them.

I can tell you that if you're very aggressively going after and overhauling each of those buckets, you'll have more than enough to do, and what you're doing is going to seem very fulfilling. Now, a couple other points I'll mention here. You might want to go back and listen to my deep dives on the deep reset, because maybe you want to do an even bigger reset of your life, which is sort of like a bucket overhaul on steroids, so you might want to go back and listen to those episodes.

I have video of them. I'm all going to soon be uploading into a playlist to make it easier to actually go through. The only other thing I'll mention is a specific possibility is that as you look at your craft bucket, a side hustle might be something you're thinking about, a small company, a new skill that you're building up outside of the context of your current job

in a bid to perhaps set up yourself for more autonomy in the future. that's another good use of energy, and it's a specific answer you might come up with as you go through this deep life bucket overhaul process and you're looking at the craft bucket. That wouldn't be a bad thing to think about as well. There's interesting autonomy to be gained when you have some sort of side hustle that can produce pretty consistent non-trivial income. All right. So, Lori, that's what I would say. Don't do the master's degree unless you have a very particular reason to do it. don't just go through your job lazily. Pretend like it's a part-time job and be very intense and take on the challenge of fitting everything into part-time hours. Use that freed up energy to look at your life and say,

let's make it deeper. All right, Sanjay asks, how can we stay motivated after reaching what we have dreamt of as the pinnacle of success? In other words, finding new mountains to conquer after scaling your own Mount Everest. Well, Sanjay, the war. wording of your question points towards an obvious answer in the form of a book called

the second mountain. Obviously, this is a book that is well suited to the question you have. It's written by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. And it has this mountain metaphor that builds on just what you're saying here. The first mountain in Brooks formulation is essentially career success. What do you do after you've scaled that mountain? That brings you to to the eponymous second mountain. And in Brooks's formulation, the second mountain is about getting beyond yourself and improving the lives of other,

being connected to other people, improving the state of the world. The second mountain, as Brooks argues, is where the deeper meaning is extracted in life. So obviously that book is really well suited for the situation you're in right now. Another book, so I read David Brooks' book. I also read Richard Roar's book.

book, Falling Upward. So that's Richard Roar, R-O-H-R. Now, Falling Upward is essentially the book that the Second Mountain is based off of. I actually enjoyed it a little bit better. I think Brooks' book was very carefully and insistently secularized, whereas Roar, who is a Franciscan monk, comes at the problem, you know, deploying obviously the tools of Christian theology. It just felt like to me that Roar's tools were deeper and more intellectually muscular. You know, there's just a, he had such a deep tradition of theological, philosophical thinking on this topic that he could just, bam, like come right at it, body blows on the topic, where I think Brooks's path was a little bit more language.

So if you're just in general a lover of philosophy and complex thought, but are not Christian, I think you're going to get a lot out of Roar's book. certainly did. And you'll get a lot out of Brooks's book as well. They're both tackling this same issue, Sanjay. So I would recommend either or both. But again, they come down to the same idea that it is this process of maturation that happens, that as you're developing your identity earlier in life, this is sort of based off of your accomplishments. And then you have this process of maturation where you grow into a richer, more mature period of life where you are actually now expanding beyond yourself and helping other people and helping your communities

and that it's and there's a peace and stability and character that comes from this. Anyways, it's a line of thought that comes up a lot, historically speaking. These two books, I think, do a great job of making the case. And Sanjay, it sounds like it's exactly where you are right now. So whichever one of those sounds more appealing, pick it up. All right, we have time for one last question here. This one comes from FIS. Fizz says I have ideas for a lot of cool things to do

like building electronics as a hobby but I'm unable to sustain my motivation as soon as I question myself. I feel a sense of hopelessness that maybe it's pointless to, for example, build my own Arduino plant watering system when it probably won't be as good as a commercial one and maybe it won't work anyways.

Well, Fizz, first of all, that's an awesome project. I've thought about it myself. I think it would be really cool to build an Arduino-powered plant watering system. And again, it is something I have thought about myself as a project that I would like to take on. Well, let's get to the bigger point here, which is asking what's the point of high-quality leisure activities

in the first place? The goal is not trying to maximize some sort of economic value. And the goal is not, look, I'm building a plant-watering system because I'm going to save 20% off of the plant-watering system that I could have bought from the store. No, I mean, of course the thing you're going to build is not going to be that great. I mean, compared to what, something that has been engineered by experts and tested,

and there's hundreds of thousands of dollars behind it? Yeah, it won't be as good. But to what end is that an issue? The goal of high-quality leisure activities is to do things for no other reason than just the enjoyment that you get out of doing those things. It emphasizes to your mind that not everything in your life is instrumental, that there's things about the world that are just cool and they're just interesting, and you find pleasures in them.

That's an incredibly sort of resilient, anti-fragility-inducing revelation to introduce into your life. Now, when it comes to making, that is building things from scratch, the reason why that's very fulfilling is that our mind likes it. You have a conception in your mind

that you make manifest concretely, and in that is a sort of deeply wired sense of satisfaction and appreciation. It's one of the things that humans do, One of the things that makes us special is that we have this drive that conceive of something in our head and then go out there

and hit the flint against the other rock and eventually make it real. Here's the hatchet I built. That feels really satisfying to us because that sense of satisfaction drove us to build things and invent things and is why our species, of course, you know, is very different

than all the others. And so you build things because it gets in touch with that. You're creative, you're working up against the frictions of the real world, the resistance of material, the resistance of gravity,

the resistance of how electrons flow and how hydraulic valves for your watering system don't always open as cleanly as you would think. And you're combating these realities of the world and you bend them to your whim and you get something that does something. It was your conception. Now it's manifest concretely. It feels great and it's fun and it's interesting. That's why you do it.

So if you're interested in making, there's a whole community of DIY makers that just revels in that creative energy and could care less how good your thing is versus. as something else. It's a very nice sort of sweet community, very non-competitive. One of the people I really like in that world is Adam Savage. Adam Savage was one of the two Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel famously. He's now the editor-in-chief of a website called Tested.com. They do all sorts of videos about people. They build things. He does this series called One Day Builds. He just has this wonderful cave, which I'm really jealous of. It's basically a warehouse in the Mission District in San Francisco that's just for him. And it's all material.

and tools, and you can go in there and build almost anything, but they highlight other people in these videos, and there's a whole community, and they're all celebrating each other. Like, you built something cool. Hey, here's my first thing I built. That's great. You know, thumbs up. And it's this really cool, nice, sweet community. There's just people that get real pleasure out of, I made something happen.

Like, this thing didn't exist. Now it does exist. And in an age where things are increasingly digital, we underestimate that value. I get into this point in my book, Digital Minimalism. I get into this argument about the analog and the digital our distinct magisteria, at least in terms of how our brain conceives of the world and our things. Producing something on a screen can be valuable.

Building a thing that blinks or moves or turns the water off and on, our brain finds more valuable. Fair or not. That's just the way we're evolved. So that's all a long sermon to say, A, build your watering system. B, spend more time around makers and the maker community. I think you'll find it really, really supportive. And C, just recognize you do the quality

leisure activities, not that instrumentally gain something, not to save money, not to impress people, not to solve a problem that otherwise could not be solved. There's probably a product you could buy or someone you could hire, but instead just to have the joy of I can manipulate the world and create something kind of cool, huh, that's fun. I like the other people who are doing it. I enjoy doing it. that should be more than enough. And hopefully those answers should be more than enough for this week's episode. Remember, if you want to submit your own questions, you can find out how at calnewport.com slash podcast.

I'll be back later this week with a habit tune up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.