Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 64: Habit Tune-Up: A Look Inside My Book Research Systems

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.- Dealing with boring (but important) work. [8:11]- Best tools for day planning. [18:26]- An insider look at my book research process. [20:31]- Advice for returning to school later in life. [32:46]- Making time for non-urgent pursuits. [38:35]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 a deep questions, habit tune up mini episode. The format of these mini episodes is straightforward. I answer voice questions from listeners that dive into the nitty, gritty details of tuning up the type of habits we'd like to talk about here on deep questions. Before we get going, let's do quick announcements. I got a new phone. My old phone died, and so we ordered a new one. It's an iPhone mini, I guess, a small one. Anyways, the reason I'm telling this is that I get this new phone,

and the other day we were on a family trip. We were going out to a ski resort, and I needed to send an email to someone. I remembered something like, oh, I need to send them an email. And I was trying to set up or log into Gmail on my phone, and there was some sort of issue with the two-factor authentication, I don't really know how it works. Essentially, Google said, huh, this looks suspicious because it's a new device.

So we're going to send a note to your phone. We're going to send a note to your phone so that you can approve that it's really you, except for I was holding the phone. The new device was the phone and the thing wasn't coming through. I don't know. I'm sure I messed it up. But the long and the short of it is I couldn't get email to work on my phone. And I was thinking, oh, I'll fix it when I got home.

But then I had this epiphany. Wait a second. I shouldn't fix it. I should just not have email on my phone. I have a book coming out in March called A World Without Email. What an appropriate preparation for that title to go the time between now and that book without being able to check email anywhere except for when I'm sitting down at my computer. So I thought that was neat.

And here's the thing. I should clarify, this book is not about hacks like this. It's not advice for checking your inbox less. Don't have email on your phone, turn off notification. Now, the book is way deeper. I mean, it's fundamentally arguing that the way that we work today with all this ad hoc unstructured communication is both arbitrary and terribly unproductive and is making us miserable. It lays out this framework called attention capital theory and gets into these deeper principles

about how to completely remake your work, whether you're an employer, an executive, or an entrepreneur. The whole thing is much deeper, obviously. But just, anyways, it felt appropriate. it. Speaking of that book, we will be announcing soon. In fact, when you hear this episode, it will probably be really soon to the announcement of the pre-order promotion for a world without email. So just hold on to whatever digital form your receipt came in. And if you bought it in a, well, you can't pre-order in a physical bookstore. So whatever digital form, your receipt came and just

hold on to it. We're setting up a system for you to submit it to get access to the pre-order promotion. It's going to be really cool. I think especially the people who listen to this podcast, people who love the nitty gritty, who people want to dive in and overhaul their life right away. You were going to like this promotion. So hold on to those digital receipts. An announcement is coming. All right. That's enough quick announcements for this episode. We have a good episode ahead of us. I'm looking at my question list. We have one about a job in which you have to read lots of boring stuff. We have a student trying to become better at being a student. We have someone who wants to know about how I organize the information for my books.

I'll actually, I'm going to load up my system and give some examples during that question. Someone had the temerity, it looks like, here to ask me what system or software to use for planning their day. Oh, you know, he knows there is an advertisement for my planner coming. Beware. So anyways, we've got a good group of questions. If you want to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions on how to submit the voice questions that I answer on this show as well as the written questions I answer on the main episodes. So I'm looking forward to the episode, but before we get started, I want to say thanks to one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible, and that is Monk Pack, M-U-N-K. As I mentioned on Monday's episode, I am bad at eating,

especially during the day and the morning when I'm working, I forget to eat, I see food as fuel. I'm time blocking, I'm executing, and I often get hungry. So my strategy is just to automate my eating during the day to have things nearby that are healthy and will give me energy so I don't have to think about it. So that is why I am excited about the monk pack keto granola bars. These are granola bars that taste great. They're soft and chewy. You get flavors like coconut chocolate chip or peanut butter, but they have just one gram of sugar and two. grams of net carbs. The total number of calories is 140. Right. So these were designed originally for people who are on a ketogenic diet, but they are great for, I think, anyone who says I need a

quick snack that is not going to overwhelm me with sugar and carbs and is going to cause me to crash. The monk pack keto granola bars get it done. They are free of all the things that one might worry about. There is, they're gluten free, they're grain free, they're plant-based, they're non-GMO. There's No soy trans fat sugar alcohols or artificial colors. I don't know what sugar alcohols are, but that actually sounds like a lot of fun. They taste great. It's one of my go-to, I need a quick snack.

I don't want to think about it. Now the good news is we have a special deal for our listeners. You can get 25% off your first purchase of any Munkpack product. Say that three times fast. By visiting Munkpack.com and entering our code deep at checkout. Munk Pack is so confident in their product, it's backed with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, if you decide that you want more sugar alcohols in your food, they will exchange the product or refund your money, whichever you prefer.

To get started, just go to munkpack.com. That's M-U-N-K-P-A-C-K-com and select any product and enter the code deep at checkout to save 20% off your purchase. I also want to mention Blinkist. You know I'm a fan of Blinkist. You know the drill. 4,000 nonfiction bestseller title spread over 27 categories that have been reduced to 15 minute text or audio summaries. It's a subscription service.

Over 15 million people have subscribed. You can get unlimited summaries of the books that have the ideas that you need to know. as I've been advocating on this show, it's a great way to quickly expose yourself to a lot of potentially relevant ideas and identify those books that you should go deeper on. So consider, as we are now officially in the new year,

consider a 10-day challenge, where for 10 days, you listen to one new book summary per day. That's 15 minutes. You can do the audio if you want to just do it while you're out walking a dog. 10 days, 10 big ideas, 10 books, at the end of the 10 days, buy the book,

that you heard a summary of that was most interesting to you, and then read that book, repeat that a few times a year, think about how much smarter you would be. That's just one suggestion for how to use Blinkist, but it's one that I want to throw out there. So as I mentioned on Monday, right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

You go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep. They get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkis.com slash deep. All right, let's get started. Our first question is about dealing with the necessary but boring.

Hey, Cal, it's Robbie over here in Tampa, Florida. I have a question for you in regards to reading some really fun information such as insurance contracts, let's just say. When we are reading this kind of information, it's very dry. You know, is there a way to make the information more enjoyable to read, or should I just caffeinate up and push through? Thanks for all you do. Well, Robbie, boredom is a fascinating topic.

I think the first thing we need to do before we discuss it is strip it of its pejorative connotations. Let's get more clinical. Bortem is, let's think of it as a reaction to a distressing state in which your brain is lacking novel stimuli. It is a reaction in which you feel both distress at that lack of novel stimuli and a craving to seek new novel stimuli. So that'll be our clinical definition of boredom that's neither good nor bad. Now, a topic I've been looking into recently is this notion that we don't know a lot about why boredom exists, but it's really interesting that it does. My running hypothesis is this is a deeply and uniquely human feeling. You know, cats don't get bored. A cat is happy to sit all day in the sun if it's well

fed and doesn't feel like its life is in danger. Humans try that, right? I mean, this is called a beach resort, but a lot of us struggle with it. We want to go do something. We want stimuli. We want to go encounter something. We want to forage for information. We want to forage for information. We want to forge for food. We want to build things. And I have this sense that, I don't know if this is true, but it's my theory. I have this sense that this boredom drive is part of the secret sauce of what makes human human because we have this brain that's capable of symbolic thinking and from symbolic thinking we can do advanced planning and with advanced planning and symbolic thinking we can build things and innovate and create in a way that most other animals cannot and yet most animals if not

all animals have this countervailing drive to conserve energy you don't want to spend energy unnecessarily because you might need it later you might not find food for a while you might need to get away from the animal, that's why most animals have this energy conservation drive. Humans have it too. Boredom counteracts it. Bortem is what says, you know, I'm not just going to lay out in the sun all day, I'm going to go invent

fire. That's really simplistic, but I think something like that might be going on. By the way, if you're like a paleoanthropologist or a neuroscientist who knows something about this or this idea, please let me know. I've been doing some interviews about this topic for a sort of very long-term writing project I'm working on and I'm fascinated by it.

So send me a note at interesting at calnewport.com if you know something about that. All right, that's all a diversion. Let's get back to Ravi's main question. This is what boredom is. It's a deeply human drive. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's there and it's distressing. What do we do in the context of work? Well, it's a crucial question because, Robbie, what you are experiencing is not unusual.

I have a chapter in my book, Deep Work, that is titled Embrace Bortem. And one of the central ideas of that chapter is that a lot of deep work is boring. And again, that's not a problem with the work. It is just a reality that if you're going to focus on one thing for a long period of time, which is at the core of the definition of deep work, you are going to not be exposed to a lot of novel stimuli. So that distressing sense of, I need stimuli, let's go get novel stimuli, let's check our phone, let's check email, let's get up, let's go on Twitter, whatever. That is to be expected surrounding most deep work.

So you are in a completely normal situation that your reading of insurance contracts is creating that reaction. So what do we do about it? Four quick ideas. Number one, and this was the main idea from that Embrace Boredom chapter, make boredom a more regular occurrence in other parts of your life. What I said in that chapter is that if in all circumstances outside of work, if you react to the distressing sense of boredom, you're waiting in line, you're in a, whatever, you're driving, you're waiting for a commercial, God forbid, to finish while you're watching a show,

if you react to boredom consistently with taking out your phone and exposing yourself to algorithmically algorithmically enhanced, optimized novel stimuli, your brain builds this Pavlovian connection that boredom means stimuli, boredom means stimuli. Now the problem with that is not that, you know, it's necessarily great to be bored while you're waiting in line or it's bad to look at your phone, it's that when it comes time to look at those insurance contracts

the next day, your brain says, no, no, I've been taught. Bortem mean stimuli. And that sense of you have to distract yourself could become overwhelming. This doesn't mean you need to be bored all the time. It just means on a regular basis throughout your day, both in work and outside work, just be bored, wait in line,

do the first half of your walk before you turn on the podcast. Again, not all the time, but on a regular basis, you expose yourself to unresolved boredom. It breaks to Pavlovian connection. Your mind gets more comfortable with this idea that, yes, sometimes we don't get stimuli. It will not protest so much

when it then comes time to stare at that insurance contract. But humans 30 years ago were bored all the time. It was unavoidable in just life. We've lost a lot of tolerance for that. We can get that tolerance back. Two, looking at the actual workday, clear time constraints help. So, of course, you know, Robbie, I'm going to push you towards a time blocking as a discipline. As always, go to timeblockplanter.com to learn more about

time blocking and my planner that helps you with it. But whether you use my planner or not, you should be doing something like time blocking because your brain is much more on board with potentially boring activities when it knows it starts here and it ends there. If it's open-ended, your brain says, well, we can't do this all day. We're going to have to take a break at some point. Why not now? And then you have to do that fight again and again. But instead if it's, I have a one-hour block to finish reviewing this contract. And I want to get it done within that one hour block because otherwise it'll go into my next block and I'll have to change my schedule. It's much easier to stay focused on something that's not intrinsically stimulating.

Number three, you got to have crystal clear rules during these sessions when you're doing boring things like reading insurance contracts that say 100% absolutely no social media, 100% absolutely no email, 100% absolutely no whatever, right? don't let your mind have the debate of can we take a quick break to look at this or look at that. Lock your time. If you need a lot of time that have clear discrete blocks with clear discrete breaks in between them. But do not have the argument with your mind continually while you're working on something boring about whether or not you get to take a break. If you have a hard time with this, this is a good time to use a tool like freedom.

on your laptop or on your computer to make it impossible for you to actually check distracting websites while you're working. Now, if you have an iPhone, I believe Apple, I believe this is true. I believe they somehow crippled the ability of blocking applications like freedom to control what happens on your phone. But the good news about a phone is it's portable. So you turn off the phone, put it and do not disturb, and move it far away from where your work is. So you can't get your phone easily. You know, go put it in your car. Because you'll grab your phone if it's down the hall, you might do it, but it's a little bit too self-incriminating to actually put on your jacket and go outside and unlock your car and go get it.

Put in your car if you have to. Put an internet blocker on your computer if you have to. I'd have crystal clear rules. And I'm doing the boring thing during this clear time block. I do not look at the internet. I do not look at my phone. If you need this type of training, like using a blocker, for example, in my experience, after about a month or two of doing this, you will basically re-weigh wire those cravings in your brain and you will find that you don't actually need the blocking anymore and you no longer need to put your phone in the car, you're just very used to the idea of when I'm working on this, it's all I'm doing. The fourth thing I will suggest is structure the efforts themselves. If you're just kind of reading for an hour, that is harder than if you have

a note-taking format or whatever. I don't know how insurance contracts work or why you're reading them, but where you have a special document in a particular folder that's associated with this particular contract, and there's five categories, and you're annotating the contract as you go, maybe you're using some needlessly complex note-taking app on your iPad with an Apple pencil where you can highlight things in different colors and export and save the PDFs. This is a place where throwing some unnecessary complexity at the project is not a bad thing. A little bit of structure, a little bit of complexity, it gives a framework for your efforts that makes it easier to sustain concentration than if it's just a monolithic activity like I'm just vaguely reading for an hour

or two hours, all right? What's my four suggestions? Train boredom another part of your life, clear time constraints, clear rules during those time blocks, and add superfluously complex structure to the actual activity themselves. This applies to basically any deep work activity. Most of them are fundamentally boring. So you have to have a plan for, for how you deal with this deeply interesting and deeply human reaction. All right, let's do a question now for which my answer will be obvious well before I actually even start speaking. Hello, Kel, I'm Rahul, and I had a question about which software or website do you think is the best for day planning? Thank you.

Well, Rahul, I think planning is kind of overrated. my suggestion is to let your email inbox do that work for you. Just keep your inbox open, keep scrolling through it to find messages that seem easy to answer and answer those. Of course, you should probably take a social media break once every 10 or 15 minutes so this doesn't get overwhelming. The key thing really is to be as busy as possible because it's a busyness and activity more than anything else that indicates you're doing good work. All right, of course, I'm joking about that. Rahul, you got a time block, time block, time block, time block. You can find out about the method at timeblockplanner.com.

You can watch my video on there to figure out how time blocking works. Whether you use my planner or not, it's just a quick way to find out about time blocking. That is the way to organize your day. Give every minute a job so that you're intentional or what to do with your time. If you get knocked off your schedule, fix the schedule for the time that remains, have a clear shutdown at the end of your workday, do a shutdown routine. That ends with you checking off that shutdown complete checkbox.

Obviously, I'm a big evangelist for this. Rahul, long-time listeners have heard me talk about time blocking too much, but I'm almost excited for you because if you have not heard of this concept, that means the whiplash. You are going to feel when you move from however you're planning your day to day to doing time blocking is going to be so profound. that's going to be almost exciting to watch.

So I think you're in for a really big improvement, a really big improvement to how you plan your day. I only hope that you didn't turn off the podcast right after my joke answer, because if that's the case, and I've just made your life a lot worse. All right, moving on, let's do a question now about how I organize my own information that I use for my writing. Hi, Cal, I hope you've had festive holidays,

also known as a raucous bacchus. Thank you very much for the deep thinking you do on these productivity topics. My questions are about the logistics of how you've researched and maintain the large volume of information for your seven books before and while you're writing them. Do you simply use the folders of your operating system to file the files or an app such as Evernote? Secondly, do you classify and file the information at the chapter level or down to the subtopic? level. Third and final question, do you use specialized long-form writing software such as Scrivener or the more standard MS Word or Google Docs? I appreciate your time and wish you great success

with your upcoming title. Looking forward to the new book in March. Well, I appreciate the Bacchus reference, but it seems to me if you're referring to a festive gathering that has the sort of behavior attributed to Bacchus, you would actually use the term Bacchanal instead of calling it a Bacus. So I will give you half credit, half credit for that Greek reference, which is enough for me to still answer your question. So I thought what I would do here, and this is always exciting for the listening audience, is I have my laptop here. Let's actually go to my laptop and look at how I organized information for my most recent book,

which is a world without email, which as you mentioned comes out in March. I say it's exciting because you obviously can't see what's on my screen. So it's literally me narrating stuff on my computer screen. This is riveting stuff, guys. Okay, let's do this. I'm going to start by going to Evernote. All right, which wants me to save 40% off on premium, not right now. All right, so let's log into Evernote.

This is the first place where I gather notes when I'm working on a big writing project like a book. I just need a place to capture both research relevant points, but also to capture my own thoughts about the book and its structure and the thesis. I usually start in Evernote. So I'm in Evernote now. I'm going to have a notebook stack here called Book Related. And I have a notebook in here called A World Without Email. There's 150 notes.

It's four or five years old. I've been collecting notes in here for a while. So there's 150 notes in here. some of these are me opining from years ago about the structure and the tone. I tend to put, it's not that interesting, but I put some asterix next to the title so it gets sorted to the top of the notes. But most of these are just things I've thrown in here. Like here's something about a paper by Tom Davenport. Here is some notes on the book E-Mith Revisited.

Here is books, some notes, or just a note saying, hey look at Andy Groves book High Output Management. I had heard somewhere something about that book and thought that could be relevant for, there's a chapter in a world without email about building processes, and I ended up reading that book and pulling out points from high output management for the book.

Case studies fall in here. There is, right? So, okay, notes. I have book notes in here. So books that I drew a lot from for the book. I have notes and Evernote where it's a, like a guy. So basically, like I'm looking at one here.

So there's a book, for example, called Social Physics. I pulled some stuff from for the book. And what I've done here is I marked up that book using my slash dot method, where I put a slash on the upper, upper right or upper left corner of the page. If there's interesting information on that page, and then I bracket or put checkmarks next to the interesting information so I can shift through the book real quick to find what pages have interesting information, then go down and see what I marked off in the book.

Here in Evernote, I took this book, Social Physics. I have a bunch of these, but I took this book where I had done those, and what I just did is put a summary. So I went through it real quick and put a summary under each chapter, like Chapter 1. Oh, it has a definition of social physics. There's some success stories. Chapter 2. Example of helping idea flow on trader social network and increasing profitability, blah, blah, blah.

This is like a final step before I begin using a book for, a chapter because I can quickly look at this summary and be like, okay, let me see what's in chapter three or four might have the type of material I need for the point I'm trying to make, and then I'll go back to the book to find that information. Right, so I have a bunch of notes like this. I also have folders. So I'm going here to my writing folder on my Mac, and now I am going to, let's see here, the folder for this book, A World Without Email.

All right, so then in my world without email folder on my Mac, I have a folder called Research. And so I have a bunch of folders in here as well. So basically what are these folders and how are they different than Evernote? For whatever reason, when I'm dealing with files, I like to keep them in my directory structure on my computer as opposed to, I guess you can attach files and Evernote. I just trust this more. I'm a Dropbox fan and all of my different machines use Dropbox to synchronize my main directory

so any file I add to this directory not only does it show up on my other machines but it's also stored in Dropbox folders actually Drew Houston the CEO of Dropbox is one of the endorsers there's an endorsement from Drew on the new book he's very interested in these type of ideas we overlapped each other actually a little bit

interesting tidbit at MIT I think he was a master student or an undergrad computer science student at MIT while I was also a grad student there. All right. So I'm looking through here and it's articles mainly. So like I just mentioned, I just mentioned, for example, that I had done slash dot notes on a book called social physics. I had a note in Evernote that kind of quickly summarized the type of stuff in each chapter. So I could more easily draw stuff from that book when I'm trying to put together a chapter. in my directory on my Mac, in the research folder for this book,

I have a directory called Articles from Social Physics, and inside it I have one, two, three, four, five. These are PDFs of academic articles that are cited in that book that I thought were particularly relevant or potentially relevant to the book I was writing. So I have a bunch of these directories underneath research are collection of academic articles, So it's stored in PDF format.

The other thing I find in this research directory is transcripts of interviews. So I did a bunch of interviews. I tend to take notes real time when I do interviews. I do the interviews on the phone and take notes real time. All of those are being stored in these directories as well. All right. So that's a look at how I actually store this information. And then when I start working on a chapter for a book,

I'm drawing from these notes, I'm reading these papers, and I begin to build an annotated outline straight in Microsoft Word, which is what I currently use. So I'm interested in Scrivener, so I'll put a pin in that. But for now, I just use Microsoft Word because I know it. And I'll build out a sort of annotated outline

in a Word document for that chapter where I begin trying to figure out what I want to say and what order I want to say, and I begin pulling information out of Evernote. I go to these articles stored in my research directories, and I pull out the relevant ones and read them and pull out quotes. And I get this big,

cumbersome, ad hoc formatted, annotated outline that grows where I'm kind of pulling in and making sense of what I want to say in all the materials. And once that gets into a form I like and I've pulled in all the stuff I want to pull into the word document, at the top of it, I start writing. So that when I'm writing that chapter, I'm looking just primarily at information that's in the same document. I can really work on it anywhere. And that is how chapters are formed. All right. So good question. Good question, because it gave me a chance to get a little bit more in the weeds about how I actually organize and store the information when I'm working on a book chapter. I want to take a moment here to talk about Mint Mobile.

As I mentioned on Monday's episode, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless plans for only $15 a month. We are talking unlimited talk and text plus high-speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. They're so cheap because they got rid of all of the overhead. This is an agile online company. You do it all online. They mail you a sim car straight to your home. You throw it in your phone. You're good. No going to the store and having to wait in line and talk to the sales rep. It is a really inexpensive way to get really good service. I wanted to mention a case study of how expensive these old premium wireless provider plans can get. I discovered earlier this week that I was

paying close to $300 a month some months for my wireless plan I had through a traditional provider. I had been given a 10% discount with this provider back when I was at MIT and you can be grandfathered into that 10% discount. So I just sort of kept that plan in place and didn't pay much attention to it. Well, it turns out it was not a very good plan. It was some complicated share plan where they would charge us for more data every time we went over relatively small limits. It is the opposite of what Mitt Mobile is offering, which is just 15 bucks a month for unlimited. There's real disruption happening in the wireless world, and Mitt Mobile is a great example of that. So if you want to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get that plan

ship straight to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com slash deep. That's mint mobile, mint spelled M-I-N-T, mintmobile.com slash deep. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month. Don't be like me. Paying $300 a month and not even realizing that you're being raked over the calls, cut down that bill and do it at mintmobile.com slash deep. And after you are done cutting down your cell phone bill, get your body in the shape.

And the way to do that is with my friend Adam Gilbert's company, My Body, Tudor. This is a company. I've talked about this a lot. I talked about it on Monday. Adam was way ahead of the game in leveraging technology for fitness.

It is a completely online company where you get one-on-one coaching over the internet. You have a coach. The coach builds an eating plan, builds a fitness plan, and then holds you accountable. This is the secret

sauce to My Body Tudor, you are talking to a real coach who is going to hold you accountable for actually following the custom-built plan. This really works. There is a reason why Adam's company My Body Tudor is very popular. It's a reason why this has been around since at least 2007 when Adam used to guest post on my blog study hacks because it actually gets things done. You can find out more at his website, mybodytutor.com. That's my body t-ut-o-r.com. Now here's the thing. If you mention that you are signing up

because of deep questions, you will get $50 off your first month. So make sure that you mention deep questions when you go to mybodytutor.com. I know Adam. I know his service. I know many people for who it worked really well. If this is the year to get in shape,

and guys, it really is. I mean, come on. We've got to do something positive. out of this dumpster fire of a year. Mybodytutor.com will get it done. Returning to the questions, we have one now about becoming a better student when you were returning to school later in life. Hi, Kyle. I hope you're well. I'm so sorry if this question is repetitive. I'm not sure if it's been asked before because I am quite into the podcast, but thank you nonetheless for giving me this opportunity to speak on your platform. So the question

that I have for you today is what advice would you give to a university student like me who is trying to improve academically in their subject but also in other subjects? So for me, for example, I'm studying political science along with sociology, but I also want to improve in my maths. So what advice would you give to me because I do feel like it is coming at a later stage in life. I'm at university and I do want to be like a high, a high achiever. But because it's later, I do feel like I've missed out on the basics. And I feel quite stagnant. Well, I'm not going to get into too much detail about specific advice for doing better as a student in university.

Because as you predicted, I have talked about this quite a bit on the podcast. But I wanted to address another element of your situation, which is the idea that you were returning to school later in. life. And the point I wanted to make is that you are seeing that as potentially a extra obstacle to overcome. I want to come at that as saying that it is actually an advantage. And now I know this from personal experience. So I wrote a book about how to study and write papers and manage your time as a student. It came out in 2006 and was called How to Become a Straight A Student. the idea of that book is I actually went out and interviewed a bunch of straight-day students.

I filtered out those people who felt like they were grinds. I'm not interested in just stay up later and put in more hours. I went and found the people who actually seemed to be intentional about how they approach school and leveraged that intentionality to get good grades. And I wrote a book that said, here is how they did it. What I discovered was largely in line with what I had figured out on my own for how to become a straight A student. And that's that book.

It's been out for a long time. It still sells really well. In fact, we released an audio version of this recently. So for those who are interested in the book and would rather listen to it, there is an audio version available now. We didn't record one back in 2006 when we first released a book, but we came back to that later. So I said that book is still selling well.

Here is the interesting thing about those sales. And this is based on anecdotes. We don't really have a way of track. tracking this, but just based on people I hear from, the book is particularly popular among people who are going back to school later in life. And so I hear from a lot of people who are going back to school later in life. These could be people who are, you know, I hear from a lot of vets, for example, who are going back to school in the GI Bill. I also hear from just adults who, for whatever reason, want to go back and get a degree they didn't have before or get an additional degree,

or maybe they had an associate's degree and they wanted to get up to a bachelor's degree, etc. So I hear from a lot of people who are coming back in the school later in life, they are much more likely to look for advice, just like you are asking this question. When you've been out there in the real world, you've been deployed, you've raised a family, you've run or worked for a company, you have a very rational mindset of, okay, here is a challenge, college, let me get some information about how to do this well. That seems obvious. Most undergraduates that are going to school, you know, at 18 or 19 or 20, they don't do this. They don't think about what's the best way to be a student. They don't try to improve their habits. They don't look to gather information from

people who have done better. They just sort of wing it. For them, school at this level is as much a social cultural experience as it is an educational experience. And so they worry about being too structured or professional about their student approach because, you know, for them living on campus at university is not just about the grades. It's about discovering themselves as an adult and figuring out, you know, how much beer the human stomach can actually maintain, whatever, right? Which gives people who are coming back later in life an advantage because they say, what's the challenge, what's the rules, let's go. And the good news is, is what I hear again and again from these people coming back to school later in life is that when they get a good instruction

manual, like how to become a straight-day student or talk to other students or do experiments on their own study habits, it seems easy as compared to the experience of the 18- and 19-year-olds that are also maybe in these same classes. When you are intentional about how you manage your time, how you organize your work, good techniques for taking notes, starting things ahead of time, using a calendar, time-blocking, all the type of stuff that's not so surprising out there in the real adult world, it turns out that being an undergraduate student, is not necessarily all that hard. So that's the optimistic message I want to give you.

You're going to find that it's not as hard as you were thinking. You'll get back into the swing of it, but the key is just to have some intentionality about how you approach the job of being a student. Just treat it like you got hired to be a marketing executive, and now you need to learn how to do marketing, or you were just hired to be a project manager, and now you need to learn how to project manage.

You're being hired to be an undergraduate-level university student, learn how to do it well, how to become a straight-A student, that's a good source of advice. There's other books. You can experiment on your own, but just have some optimistic faith that by even asking these questions, you already have a non-trivial advantage over many other students who are approaching this challenge earlier in their life. All right, we're running a little late here, so let's try to slip in just one more quick question.

Hi, Cal. I work as a creative freelancer, and in 2020, for a variety of reasons, I ended up overworking and burning myself out. In 2021, I'm planning to cut down my work to around half of what it has been and to spend the remaining available time picking up a couple of unrelated skills, specifically learning to play guitar and drawing. I wanted to ask if you have any guidance on how to structure my learning when I don't have any specific goals other than getting better. Well, first of all, I congratulate you for being so intentional about your career crafting to borrow a term that actually exist in the job satisfaction literature.

I don't think enough people think enough about this notion of what role does craft play in my broader image of a deep life? What role in particular is my job play? What type of job do I want? But also how much time do I want to take it up? What type of efforts I want to be involved in? How do I get that where I want it to be? When you're intentional about how you integrate your work into your broader life,

you're much more likely to build a life of resilience and satisfaction. So I like what you're doing here, where you're looking at your particular job and saying, huh, the way I'm loading work on my plate right now is not working for me. It's unbalancing my buckets in a way that's not working for me. I'm exhausted. I'm overwhelmed. I could significantly cut back maybe on my work and gain more autonomy in other parts of my life. That is a formula that's been effective for a lot of people. You know, I have a chapter in my book, So Good They Can Ignore You,

that talks about autonomy as being what I call the dream job elixir. And I tell stories of people like you who aggressively reduce hours in some places of their work and increase their focus on other things. And maybe they bring in a lot less money, but they change their lifestyle. And they do a lot of this sort of manipulation of what role does work play in my life? I like the way you're thinking. Now let's get to your specific question about making progress on high quality leisure pursuits for which there's no particular urgency.

or for which your schedule might not be obviously stable. Like some weeks you might have more time than others. Well, I should first mention, and there's an interesting new book that you might like. It was written by the journalist Tom Vanderbilt and is called Beginners, and it's about his efforts to pick up lots of new skills, including drawing later in life. If you want to find out more about this book,

I actually wrote a review of this book for the New York Times Book Review. So right now you can find my review of beginners online at the New York Times. I believe it's coming out a little bit later this month in the actual print New York Times book review. But anyways, you might like that book because it gets into some of the deeper benefits and the reality and the interesting aspects surrounding just the goal of learning things when you're a little bit later in your life. Now, to get a little bit more nitty-gritty in my book, Digital Minimalism, I have this idea of leisure plans. Right, this was the idea. The leisure plan idea was the idea that led the times of London to make fun of me.

I forgot they used some British insult for me, but they thought this was over-the-top productivity geekery to have plans for your leisure. But this is exactly the circumstance where a leisure plan makes sense, whereas you have something like I want to learn to guitar, which is actually the example I used in the leisure plan chapter in digital minimalism, that actually takes some structure, right?

Just to say, I vaguely want to learn to guitar, you're probably not going to get anywhere, and there's real benefits to actually picking up these hard skills, even if they're non-urgent, that's what the book Beginners is all about. So having some sort of loosely structured plan to guide your high-quality leisure activities, that is actually useful or called for.

Now, you don't want to be over-the-top, like time-blocking and getting way into the weeds about exactly when you play guitar and how you play guitar, but roughly what I suggested, and again, digital minimalism will give you more details, but roughly what I suggested is that you get a sort of concrete objective related to the pursuit. I think my example for guitar playing was you were going to,

you wanted to be able to play songs from a Beatles album at a party that you're hosting. And then you can break that down into, okay, how am I going to do that? Like, what's important to kind of figure out, like, how, what am I going to have to practice? Do I need a teacher? Like, how much work is that going to take? And I suggested that basically when you do your weekly plan, you figure out what you're doing to make progress on your leisure plan for that week. I talk a little bit. You can break this down

into sort of one-time things and repeatable, consistent things. So, you know, your plan might be, this is a good time for me to practice guitar. After work before dinner, I'm going to do that Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. Or you're going to have lessons set up. And so, you're, you're you know when those lessons are going to happen. Or you look at your week and say, I'm busy on Monday and Tuesday, but yeah, Wednesday. Why not I end a little bit early and do guitar playing? It's just a place to reflect on your week when you're moving around the chess pieces on the chessboard. That is your time.

It's time when you're looking at your week ahead to figure out what am I working on me leisure life. What's the best way to fit that into this particular week? Add that to your weekly plan. It makes a huge difference, right? Your ticket advantage of what's available to you can make a lot more progress. So that's what a leisure plan is. I don't want to be over the top with it. I don't want your leisure to become a job.

But if you want to get the real benefits from high quality leisure, it's worth actually doing hard things and achieving non-trivial hard goals, like how to play the guitar, how to draw something very well. That requires a little bit of intention and structure. Something like a leisure plan will probably get you there,

even if it leads to the Times of London, making fun of you. All right, and speaking of, time. It is time to wrap up this episode. How's that for a transition? To submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast, and you can find out more. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions Podcast, and until then, as always, stay deep.