Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 70: Habit Tune-Up: Getting Things Done During a Terrible, Isolating Pandemic

Episode Date: February 11, 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. - Timing productive meditation. [6:32] - Extracting wisdom from past plans. [14:00] - Writing a thesis as a side project. [22:44] - Adapting college advice to high school students (plus: a bonus digression on my experience writing books in academia). [30:00] - Getting things done during an isolating pandemic. [36:30]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 my listeners about how to tune up their productivity habits. If you want to find out how to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. Quick announcements. I am finally able to release the details of the pre-order campaign for my upcoming book, A World Without Email. I, of course, have been talking about this book now for several weeks. I'm very excited about it. If you like this podcast, you will love this book. Now, here's the thing about book launches.

Pre-orders, that is, ordering the book before it comes out, makes a really big difference. regardless of the format you ordered in, it really helps with things like the first week sales numbers, which impact the bestsellers list. It impacts how many books, Amazon orders. It's important. So if you are thinking about buying this book anyways, I would be very grateful if you would consider pre-ordering it. So to help thank you for pre-ordering, typically authors will have some sort of bonus or incentive, and I'm doing the same, but I really thought, what could I do what could I do that would be beyond the typical somewhat banal author pre-order bonus? And I came up with this idea of the Email Academy.

So if you pre-order a world without email before March 2nd, when it comes out here into US, you will get access to an online course I created only for people who pre-ordered the book. It's called the Email Academy. It is a video-based course, video-scentrales. featuring yours truly. I walk you through the big ideas of the book and then a step-by-step game plan for putting these ideas into place in your own life. The idea is that this game plan should reduce the amount of email you have to deal with by a factor of 50% within just two weeks. I then talk about how we customize these ideas depending on whether you are an employee

or maybe you are an entrepreneur, run a small team, or if you're an executive that's running a large company, I customize the advice to all three of those settings. So it's a way to really almost immediately hit the ground running with the big ideas in the book, with me telling you directly in a course, here's what to do. It's only for people who pre-order the book. Also, we want to give people who pre-order the book an excerpt,

a long excerpt from the book that, gives you many of the main ideas and sets up what you can expect in the chapters that follow. So here's how it works. If you've pre-ordered or you plan on pre-ordering, go to calnewport.com slash pre-order one word, P-R-E-O-R-D-E-R. At the bottom of that page is a form. You put in your name. You put in your email address.

You put in the digital order number from your digital receipt, from where you wherever you ordered it from. And once verified, we will send you a PDF that has that excerpt. So you get the excerpt right away. You can immediately dive into the big ideas of the book. While you're waiting for your copy to arrive, you'll also get the super secret credentials needed to access the email Academy course, which will go live on PubDate March 2nd.

So to me, this was the coolest thing I could think of to do to thank people for preordering. It really makes a difference when you do it. So remember, calnewport.com slash preorder. A, to learn more about what I just said, but also that is where the form is for you to actually register your pre-order and gain access to that bonus. I'm sure you're going to love the book, and I'm sure you're going to love the Email Academy.

All right, that's enough for quick announcements. We have a good show ahead of us. I'm looking at my question rundown here. We're going to get into some nitty-gritty details about timing for productive meditation. We're going to talk to a thesis writer who has a very busy life. It's trying to figure out how to make that thesis writing work. A short question here about adapting some of my student books for high school. We're going to talk about a writer who is feeling isolated in the pandemic, among other topics.

So I think this is a great show. Before we dive in, of course, let's just take a brief minute to thank one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. I am talking about Magic Spoon. Now, you know about Magic Spoon. I talked about it in Monday's episode. It is great-tasting cereal that adults can feel good eating, zero sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs. It reminds me of those childhood experiences, just enjoying myself with an unhealthy cereal, except for now I can do it without that unhealthy aspect. The thing I really want to emphasize today is peanut butter.

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Try it today. Do your own ranking of these flavors. Be sure, though, to use that promo code cow at checkout because you will save $5 off your order. So get your own supply of delicious guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow. Use that code cow. Save that $5. Have a moment of escape and enjoy that childlike pleasure of just a good tasting bowl of cereal. All right, let's do some questions.

Hi, Kyle. I heard that you needed some more questions about habit tune-up. So here it goes. With this pandemic, I think I've been struggling to find a good time to do productive meditation. I do walks for exercise, but sometimes I do them for solitude and things like that. I think what I'm trying to do is to find an natural place to put it in, especially a time where the productive meditation perhaps connects next to my work. So, for example, I was thinking right before I planned or right before I started working, and that could be a good time. I was worried at the end of the day because I already did a shutdown.

So if I do a shutdown, then if I'm walking home or whatever, imagine that we finish the pandemic, it didn't really make sense to do a productive meditation. So I guess I'm trying to think about it. When should productive meditation be included? Well, this is a good question. First of all, let's do a very quick review of what productive meditation is. This was an exercise suggested in my book, Deep Work, in which you would go for a walk. While you are walking, you will try to make progress on a single professional problem, just in your mind.

When you notice your attention slipping from that problem to think about email or something that's coming up later that day, you just notice that slip. is where we're borrowing this idea from mindfulness meditation. You notice that slip and bring your attention back to the problem. And if it wanders again, you notice the wandering, you bring it back to the problem at hand. There's two benefits to productive meditation. One, it's like calisthenics for your ability to concentrate. If you do this regularly,

your ability to maintain your mind's eye on a complex problem and make progress will be significantly improved. But two, even while you're, you're just training, you're actually getting work done because you're thinking about something in your head. Now, at first, your productive meditation sessions might not be that productive, but they will soon get better. All right. So with that in mind, I think the right way to think about productive meditation is in the same category as any other deep work block you might schedule during your day. It's not a special category. It is not something that needs to exist

outside of your normal workday. It's not something that you should wait until you come across a time in your day where you would normally be walking like walking home from work. Schedule it like any other deep work block. Just like you might schedule from 1 to 230, work on this computer code or write this book chapter.

You can schedule from 1 to 2 to 30, do a productive meditation section on whatever activity is relevant. In other words, we sometimes get tripped up when thinking about productive meditation because we're outside and we're walking, so it feels categorically different from other work. The fact that we're outside and walking is somewhat orthogonal here to the point that productive meditation is cognitive work.

It does get things done. It is making progress on hard problems. It also just happens to have the side effect of training you and you're doing it outside. So just work in productive meditation blocks into your normal schedule. Just choose something you need to make progress on. I'm going to do 30 minutes of productive meditation on this problem. I would recommend as an advanced tip, putting right up against one of these productive meditation blocks,

a then standard deep work inside block on the same topic because productive meditation primes the pump. It also helps you switch your mind from other things, clear out attention residue, get through distraction because you're going outside and you're focusing on this problem and you're bringing your attention back to the problem. It's a great deep work ritual. So that might be the way you do it at first.

I want to spend two hours on this hard thing. First 30 minutes on foot, productive meditation, next 90 minutes in my normal deep work environment, trying to make further progress. As you get better at productive meditation, you might schedule much longer sessions where you're mainly doing work outside. I used to do this quite a bit. There was two different outdoor locations near where I live outside of Washington, D.C., where for a while, I haven't been doing this during the pandemic,

but for a while, I was scheduled quite regularly going to one of these two spots. One was a wooded trail near Long Branch to Long Branch Creek, if you know, Montgomery County, Maryland. And the other was a park in Wheaton, Maryland that had lots of different trails, but also a really manicured formal garden. And during times of my life where I had a lot more free time, so, you know, I didn't have a book launch going on, or I wasn't doing a bunch of podcasting, and I just really had my Georgetown work, my research and my teaching, and my schedule was pretty open,

I would go spend half days on these hiking trails, working on a problem. I have a third location. There's a Sligo Creek that's near where I live, not as exotic because there's a road right there. That's another place I would do a lot of work, and I would do these long walks. One of the three hours I would spend with a notebook,

just walking and thinking. So as you get good at productive meditation, It can actually be a significant work block, but in the beginning what I'm trying to say, when you're still new to it, do a half hour and then switch to in-person inside effort on the same problem. And it's such a great virtuous cycle because at first, again, these sessions are going to help prime the pump

and you'll get better deep work done, but they're also getting you better at these sessions. So you can do longer outdoor sessions. You can unlock even better work. And pretty soon you can find yourself hiking long trails are spending half days outside and getting a lot of work done. And it's a really fun way to do it. So I'm glad you asked that question. Finally, I will just say separate solitude. Separate solitude from productive meditation. I think walking is also a great way to expose yourself to solitude. Like I talk about in digital minimalism,

if we define solitude to be freedom from input from other minds. So it's just you alone with your own thoughts, input from the world around you, the physical world around you. We need that solitude on a regular basis. It's how we make sense of our world. It's how we let our minds unwind. It's how we have insight about ourselves or other issues. Do that at completely separate walks. First thing in the morning or after you've done your shutdown complete for the day.

Those are great times to do solitude walks because your mind is relatively uncluttered. It can just observe and think. This is a great season to do solitude walks. It's still winter, but we see hints of spring depending on where you live. I really like that. The sun gets a little warmer. The sun gets a little bit more intense.

You hear a little bit more songbirds. You see the snow melting. At end of the day or beginning of the day, go on these walks, be alone with your own thoughts. That's great. Don't mix it with work. That's a separate type of thing. All right.

So I've gone off now on quite a long digression on productive meditation, but let that be evidence of how seriously I take this topic and how much affection I have for us. I'm glad I had a chance to talk about it. All right. Let's shift now and tackle a question about how to look back at your past plans and extract meaningful insights from them. Hi, Cal. My name is Volker, and I work as a computer science researcher.

I am doing a weekly planning and quarterly planning routine, and I think it's going quite well. What I'd like to get some advice on and what I'd like to optimize a bit is a reflection. on past weeks and maybe past quarters. What I've done so far is looking at the tasks of the past week that I didn't finish and the ones that I finished and then write a little sentence about what went well and what didn't. But often I ended up writing, oh, I didn't get to this task or I didn't get to that task.

So I don't really know whether this is a good way to get the most out of a feedback session like that. And so I'm trying different things, and I'd be happy if you could give some advice on how this feedback could help to improve future planning. Thank you very much. Well, Volker, I appreciate this question because this topic of how you do post-mortems on your past plans, if we're going to be needlessly alliterative, as I like to be, how you do post-mortems on your past plans is a rich area. And it's one that I think is worth coming back to a few times so that we can develop or cultivate our thinking here. So first, I would say quarterly or semester if you're in an academic environment is probably the right scale to go back and look at your past time block plans and your past weekly plans to try to extract some wisdom about what went right and what went wrong and how to improve things going forward. All right, so we're at this scale of doing this every three to four months.

What is the right thing to do here? Well, first I would say, I often tout one of the benefits of time block planning is that you get a better sense of how long things actually take. Often in our head, we're much too optimistic about how much time is really required for certain commonly occurring tasks. time block planning makes you confront the reality because when you under schedule, your time block schedule bust and you have to fix it. So you get this natural feedback. Oh, checking my email on Monday takes an hour, not 30 minutes. Recording a podcast episode takes 90 minutes.

Not the hour, I thought, etc. That type of feedback, I don't think you really need to do anything special to a crew. It's just going to be something that you naturally gather by going through your schedule every day, having a time block schedule making changes when you bust your schedule. This will just naturally inculcate a much better wisdom about how long things actually take. So just as a first point, I'll say that bit of feedback I talk about a lot doesn't require extra effort on your part. So what should you be doing actively during this quarterly review of your past time block plans and weekly plans? Well, borrowing from Monday's podcast episode, I would say this is a good opportunity to apply the Eisenhower, the Eisenhower box method.

Look through those weekly plans and ask yourself, for example, am I spending enough time on the things that I identify as important, but not urgent? The projects or initiatives that I know are going to really move the needle on my career, make my life more meaningful and satisfying, but for which there's no. one who is saying this needs to get done now. This is what Stephen Covey calls quad two, the important but non-urgent box. If you do not think that you are making enough progress or spending enough time on things in that quadrant, this is a time to try to correct that. And when you're working on your quarterly plan for the quarter ahead, you really clearly identify, here is a small number of things that are important but not urgent that I need to make

progress on, here's what I want to get done this quarter. Let me actually think through how I'm going to get that done. Maybe I need some sort of rhythmic scheduling approach here where there's very particular times I do it every week, or I can figure this out on a weekly basis, or there's some hour minimum I want to do, or I'm going to wake up earlier, whatever it is. But you start to confront that. This is also a good time to look at that second row of the Eisenhower box to consider how much of your time is being spent on things that are not important and not urgent or things that are not important but urgent. And you might have to dive into some of your time block plans here to get into the nitty, gritty

details of actual things you were doing day to day. But you want to come at this with a scaffold every single quarter. If there are things that now with a little bit of distance and a little bit of reflection seem like they're neither important nor urgent, find a way to take those off your plate. I'm going to wind back this commitment. I'm going to stop agreeing to do these types of things. I'm going to no longer do this,

whatever project I've been trying to make progress on, that's not that important, it's not that urgent. I'm going to take this responsibility off my plate. You try to get rid of as many of those things as possible. Again, in the moment, it just says, hey, there's something that came in through my email, things are going on, it's just activity. You might not notice that a particular,

a particular recurring activity is not important or urgent. You can get rid of them at this place at this point. Also, as I talked about on Monday, this is a good time to look for things that are urgent, but not important, like things that people need from you, but it's not that important. You can ask,

how can I automate this? How can I simplify this? How can I get a process in place that minimizes the cognitive impact of this work? This is the point during your quarterly plan where you have enough time and distance to see the forest for the trees and tame those type of tasks as well.

Right? So you're putting more time for the things that are important but not urgent. You're trying to put less time into the things that aren't important. All that can happen at the quarterly level, looking at your past weekly plans, looking at your past time block plans.

It gives you key data, gives you key data for figuring that out. The final thing I say that is useful during this reflection period is look at your system, look at your processes. Seeing trends and busted schedules or running out of time or crowdedness of meetings on your schedules, you can come up with new heuristics, new processes, new strategies for the quarter or semester ahead.

You might decide, for example, Monday and Friday are meeting free because I need that breathing room to make room. Or my meetings are too spread out over the day. So maybe I'll have a no appointments before 11 a.m. rule. and then really go deep in the morning. Or maybe you decide I need to work for the first hour every day, start my day earlier and work the first hour every day. I'm this particular type of thing. I'm trying to get better at.

Look, I'm just giving examples here, but you think about heuristics, you think about strategies, you think about processes. Now that you can see what happened, how do you make what is coming? How do you make that better? Maybe this is where you realize

I need to significantly cut down the number of things I say yes to that requires a Zoom call because I'm averaging four per day, and it's eating up my days, and I need the average two per day. Well, that means I'm going to have to say no to the coffees. I'm going to consolidate these type of meetings, and I'm going to get off this project,

which generates two meetings a week, right? All of this type of planning can happen when you have a little bit of distance and when you can look back. All right, so that's my advice. Do a post-mortem every quarter or semester. Make sure you're spending enough time on the important but not urgent.

Make sure that you're trying to reduce the time you're spending on the not important. Tune up your heuristics, tune up your processes, tune up your strategies. All of that can be written down in your quarterly plan, which you should be looking at every week when you make your weekly plan. Do this every quarter, and you'll be keeping the pressure on the right things. This will evolve, like your particular schedule, what you're working on, how you're working on.

This will evolve, but it will keep this sort of selective pressure on keeping that schedule as effective as possible and focus on the stuff that matters and moving it away from the things that don't. It will keep that selective pressure on. and overall over time, that will evolve you across this sort of metaphorical work productivity landscape towards higher and higher peaks. All right, let's do a question here about thesis writing when you have no time to write. Hello, Cal, my name is Brian Mark. I'm a graduate student, teacher, and professor, teaching 10 courses at a time.

I'm in my final year of my Master of Fine Arts MFA program and will be working on my thesis. I want to organize my schedule. What advice do you have for graduate students with multiple full-time jobs and a family? Brian, your name is quite the coincidence because I am about to point you for advice to a story from my book Deep Work about my friend, also named Brian, who when I interviewed him back for that book was in a very similar situation. He was working on his PhD dissertation in comparative literature, if I remember correctly, but he was also teaching full-time. So he had a busy job.

He also had a family. So he did not have a lot of time, but he had to make progress on this intellectually very demanding thesis. And I talk about him in deep work because what he did was a great, generally applicable strategy for people who need to make regular progress

on something hard, who have busy schedules. He just carved out this early morning period. every morning, same time, every weekday morning. For him it was pretty early, I'll be honest. It was in the five, so it wasn't a happy time, but that's what worked for him. Other people can do this a little later, but the key thing is it was a regular time where he worked on that thesis every single workday morning. Now the key things he added to that regular schedule was location and ritual.

He carved out space in his basement. It was not the most scenic space in his house, but it was a space that he only used for writing that thesis. He then ritualized every aspect of that early morning writing session down to when he brewed his coffee. The first cup would be at this point. The next cup would be at this point. Even when he would go to the bathroom was part of this schedule. I mean, the whole thing was incredibly ritualistic. So there was nothing left up to his willpower. There was for sure no email. There was for sure no social media. There was for sure no news or YouTube. Come on, it was five in the morning. No one needed him. He just followed the ritual, work, work, work. When it's done,

his kids woke up normal day. This approach of highly ritualized, highly repeatable, work, same time, every day, same rituals. It's very effective. And if you do this, you'll get a lot of work done in your thesis. It's much better than coming at your thesis, by the way, with this mindset of, you know, I'm overwhelmed by it, I'm worried about it, I'm going to wait until I feel like I'm in the right mood to write to try to make some progress. This actually is going to get this work done much faster than most students in your situation. You have more flexibility because you have no choice but to work every day. Progress will actually get made.

And those days you felt non-inspired, you still produce stuff that's useful. It still moves the needle forward. So it's a really great recommendation. Now, my friend Brian, who I featured in that chapter, by the way, went on to become one of the co-founders of Mouse Books, which is one of my favorite companies and one of my favorite products. You've heard me talk about mouse before, I suppose, but it's a really cool concept.

They take short stories or novellas. They print them in these small format notebooks that fit in your pocket. They're a little bit smaller than a smartphone. If you know field notes, they use the same printer. So it's the same size of field notes. And the whole idea is when you would feel normally like you should reach for your phone,

you could have a mouse book in your pocket instead. you pull out the mouse book and actually read something that's going to be intellectually challenging and illuminating. Anyways, you can imagine I love that concept. I'm always pushing mouse books. I talked about him in digital minimalism, but just to connect the dots, that's the same Brian. And so there's a lot of wisdom you can extract from his experience.

So question asker, Brian here. I think you will find that advice to be useful for you. Now, as I just mentioned, when the co-founder of mouse books was doing his morning thesis writing ritual. Put a lot of attention into when he made his cup of coffee. I don't think he probably thought enough about what type of coffee he was drinking,

but if he was, I would have recommended 4-Sigmatics delicious mushroom coffee. You know I'm a fan of this coffee because it has that nice, smooth, nutty flavor. Lower caffeine than normal so you're not super jittery, and it has that lion's main mushroom in there that really does something special to your brain.

It tells your brain, it's time to do deep work. The thing I want to emphasize, which I mentioned on Monday, but I want to underscore today, is that they have at the moment, 4Sigmatic has this winter sale going on in which you can get up to 50% off their products.

Now, in addition to that sale, if you're a deep questions listener, you can get an additional 10% off on top of that. Now, in order to get that additional 10% off, you need to go to 4%. 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. That's 4Sigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep to get that additional 10% off.

They're already on-sale products. This is the perfect time to try out 4-Sigmatic coffee. That's 4-Sigmatic.com slash deep. I also want to talk about my body tutor run by my friend Adam Gilbert. It's a company that's been around since 2007. It is an online coaching program to get you into better health. You design a meal plan. You design a fitness plan.

And then you get assigned a coach who holds you accountable, gives you feedback, make sure not only that you stick to the plan, but the plan adjust as needed to work for your circumstances. Here's the secret sauce about this. That coach, you are checking in with them every day. Adam's company has this great app or website if you prefer it, where it makes it very easy, but you check in on what happened during that day,

and then the next day you get feedback from that coach. It is this daily feedback and check-in that really helps my body tutor get unparalleled results, because when you know you're going to talk to your coach every day, they're going to see what you're doing, you stick with it, and you generate the data that lets that coach adapt and adjust. And this is why Adams company has always generated,

great results. If you are serious about getting healthier and guys can you think of a more important time to get healthier, then you need to check out my body tutor t-ut-o-r.com. Tell them Cal sent you from the Deep Questions podcast and they will give you $50 off your first month. Say hi to Adam for me when you sign up. I miss them from his old days of being the health call on this for my study hacks blog. So that's mybodytutor.com. Mention deep questions and start your quest to getting in better health. All right, we have a quick question here about adapting some of my college advice to high school students.

Hey, Cal, how you doing? I have another question to submit for the podcast. I was wondering if you can touch on how you would adapt your becoming a straight A student book for high school kids. I deal with them a lot as I'm a coach and just wanted to see your things. thoughts on that. Thank you. Bye. So I published How to Become a Straight A Student, which is the most popular of my student book trilogy. I published that in 2006. And most of those ideas are going to be helpful to a high

school student because they're timeless, the importance of focus and intensity, scheduling out your time, having systems versus not having systems. However, in 2010, I published a follow-up called how to be a high school superstar, aim just at high school students. Now, if you look in part one of that book, the part one playbook has extensive study advice for high school students that basically adapts the key ideas

from how to become a straight-a student to the high school setting. If I remember correctly, the biggest changes is though the work is easier in high school than college, high school students have a lot less time. So it gets a lot into, how to make the most out of a more limited amount of time.

The goal is to avoid having to stay up late, for example, doing your school work. That whole part one of this book also has a big emphasis on doing less, which is very scary, right? Very scary for a lot of high school students who are thinking about college admissions, but the book gets into how doing less but doing what you do better can actually be the foundation of not just much more happiness and meaning in your work, but it actually can help you improve your chances to get into college. Interesting book.

Highly recommend it, but that Part 1 playbook has study advice for you. Two pieces of trivia about that book. People often asked, why was my second book called How to Become a Straight A Student? Whereas my third book is called How to Be a High School superstar. I can make up a story about why, in the latter context, B is used instead of become the pre-school superstar.

present versus the future, but honestly, I just don't think I thought about it. It wasn't the original title. We kind of came with that title later. I don't know how much I love it. I just didn't think about it that much. I probably should have made it symmetric with straight A student. There's no real reason why it's not, so don't read too much into that. Second bit of trivia about that book, and this was probably not the smartest thing. I wrote that concurrently with my doctoral dissertation. I had finished all my coursework. I was publishing, it came time to do my doctoral dissertation. I was a little bit bored. The first mistake I probably made is instead of actually taking the best results of what I had published in the years I had been in MIT leading up to my doctoral dissertation,

I decided, why don't I write a doctoral dissertation on a new topic? Everything in my dissertation was theory that I did from scratch just for that dissertation. I published some of it later. It's not what I would recommend to the average PhD student, but really MIT had this attitude of like, you're just always come with ideas, you're very productive, you're always publishing, so why not? I just thought it would be boring to spend a year stitching and expanding

stuff I'd already done again, I don't know if that was the best idea but it was interesting and then that was not enough I was worried about being bored that was not enough so I also wrote this book concurrently

because dissertation writing only takes so much time and everyone walks on eggshells around you when you're doing dissertation writing like oh you're running your dissertation so you shouldn't have to do anything else and I don't know I didn't have a ton else to do

so I would write the book I think I'd write the book in the morning and work on the dissertation of the afternoon, be done by five. Everyone was happy. So that was definitely a period of my life where my deep to shallow ratio, as the ratio of hours I spent doing concentrated work versus shallower logistical work, I don't think it has ever been higher than during that period where I was writing, not just writing dissertation, but doing the math from scratch and then writing it while also writing

a book. And then once I'd broken that seal, I'm kind of storytelling here. This is a divergence, but, you know, I, okay, so I wrote how to become a, how to win at college, at college. I started how to become a straight A student in college, finished at my first year at grad school. And then kind of took a breather from writing because, you know, I had to do grad school. I had courses.

I was getting started as a researcher. I had to write a master's thesis. I was traveling around the world and presenting papers. And then at some point I realized, like, okay, this is okay, this is okay. It's not as scary as I thought. so then I broke to seal to write how to be a high school superstar concurrently with my dissertation. With that seal broken, you know, I turned around right after that book and pitched and sold so good they can't ignore you, which came out just two years later in 2012.

I sold that. Oh, man, I'm trying to do this timeline. It was just as I was starting my postdoc. So I wrote that during my postdoc because I guess I didn't think I would have enough to do as a postdoc. And so during my two years as a postdoc, I wrote So Good They Can't Ignore You. I do have memories of going to conferences during that time for sure and wandering the halls, doing productive meditation on the book. I still have my notebook somewhere where I was really trying to sketch out chapters.

And so I wrote that right away after How to Be a High School superstar. That came out just after I started at Georgetown. And then just like with MIT, I took a little bit of a break because I was like, hey, I have this new job. this seems like a hard job being a professor, so I don't want to write another book at first. And that lasted a little while, a couple years really. I also was having kids. So I had a kid right after, my first kid right after, so good.

So I was having kids, being a professor for the first time. And by 2014, I decided, okay, this is not so bad. And that's when I started working on deep work. And I've kind of been writing books ever since then. So, hey, this has nothing to do with your question, but I thought it was fun to go back. And even just for my own sake, do a little bit of a walk-down memory lane

about my pace of publishing, which now I am recognizing as I look back is somewhat sporadic in the sense that I go through down periods and then periods where I'm writing a lot. So, hey, there's a bonus answer to a question that no one asked. But with that of mind, let's get to a question that someone did ask, which has to do with writing during the pandemic, even though you're feeling quite isolated. Hi, Cal. My name is Rebecca. I'm a writer, and I'm in month nine of working from home due to the pandemic. And here's the productivity challenge I'm facing. I'm struggling to maintain a rhythm of deep work while working from home because I feel so isolated. I find myself doing things I know are irrational, such as breaking a deep work block in order to check my email. I don't need to check my email every five minutes, and I find myself doing it anyway. And I realize that email is not the best way to meet my need for community. But right now, that community bucket feels so depleted that any type of connection feels comforting.

So I'd appreciate any thoughts or ideas you have to share. I really enjoy your show. Thanks so much. Well, Rebecca, I think the first thing to reiterate here is that the pandemic we're going through is a once-in-a-lifetime type of negative event. It's a real dumpster fire. It makes everything really hard. And our goal does not need to be operating at our peak during this period. We need to give ourselves a bit of a break.

It's okay if we're checking email too much. it's okay if we're not getting after the really big, important, non-urgent project that's going to change our career right now if we're kind of waiting a little bit to do that. You know, that is okay because this is a really hard time. I don't know if we talk about that enough. I'm talking to myself here, Rebecca, as much as I'm talking to you. I mean, I've been having a hard time with the fact that I'm not really able to publish in the way that I normally publish as an academic due to many reasons.

that all directly tie back to the pandemic. I've talked about this on the podcast before. And I find myself falling into similar states sometimes where I'm thinking, this is terrible. I'm a big publisher. I publish lots of papers. I have a big H index. I get cited all the time.

I'm not publishing right now. This is a problem. Alarm bells are going off. And sometimes I have to step back and say, well, you know, also half a million people died this year because of a pandemic and our schools are closed and my kids are at home. And it's terrible, which is all to say, I think we all or many,

of us are having our own versions of this, this tension between the difficulties of the pandemic and our aspirations for where we would like to be in a perfect world. So let's all give ourselves a little bit of a break, a step one. Step two, let's give ourselves a dose of optimism. Pandemics are terrible and when you're in the middle of them, they feel endless, but they end. We get a really bad respiratory illness pandemic about once every 100 years. We get pretty bad ones once every 20 or 30 years or so. They all end. And this one will end too. I think that helps to remind yourself of that because it reminds you that the difficulty we're going through now, trying to keep our head above water in our careers, trying to keep our kids head above water, their education, trying to

keep our sanity together, these efforts are finite. And at some point, not too long from now, those efforts will become a lot easier. And then we can turn our attention back to making up for lost time, supercharging our career, trying to help our kids catch up. You better believe that as the pandemic winds down here on the Deep Questions podcast, we are going to have some superhuman plans for really making up that lost ground and catching up to all of those colleagues of ours who don't have kids and live in interesting places and we're not really knocked off their path by this pandemic. We'll catch up and we'll catch up

with really smart productivity and a lot of focus on a lot of deep work. And we'll get to that. And that's coming and it's not too far from now. If you want a dose of optimism on this, I would say significantly cut back on your news consumption and listen to Zaynep Tufekhi's recent interview on Ezra Klein's podcast. She will make you feel a lot better about the intermediate future time span. She will also have you, you'll come away from that interview saying maybe I'm going to spend a little bit less time doom scrolling because maybe I'm not getting a completely accurate picture from the news right now about the good stuff that could be coming once we get through

our current hard path. All right. So let's go easy on ourselves and remember that we only have so much longer to go. And then we can really turn up the fire and try to make up ground. All right. Now, onto your specific question, Rebecca, what I would suggest actually is working less, consolidating that work, and being more intentional and specific about filling up that community social bucket in your time outside of work so that during your more compressed and clearly

defined work blocks, you're not suffering from the same craving for connection. So probably if you're a morning person, you know, get up and get into your work, time block plan, rituals, strategies, whatever you need to do to get into your deep work, be on top of all your shallow work, take stuff off your plate if you can because again, it's dumpster fire time and we're all trying to survive. In that work with a clear schedule shutdown complete and then put a lot of energy into what can I do now to connect to people or feel connected so that you're getting a lot of that. Add stuff to your life that you want it normally do. you're going to have to put in a lot more energy right now to get that sense of connection than you would have to during normal times. But by giving yourself more time to do that and focusing on it more, you keep that bucket full. And then when you're working, it will be easier. Also, I've been preaching this for a while now.

Do less work during the pandemic. Work a virtual part-time job if possible. Be very organized, time block, be on top of things, be very strategic about trying to get things off your plate. Get in, get your work done, and be done earlier than you might. might normally do because I agree it can be really hard if you're very isolated to have these long stretched out work days. They, you know, they get lonely after a while. If it feels more intense and you have the pressure of the time blocks than when you're done, you're done, and then you can go do whatever it is you need to do, your Zoom calls, your outside fitness classes, your walks with friends,

your fire pits, whatever you need to do. I think that's going to be the better balance. All right, so this is another question which I've digressed to some degree relatively far from the original question, but I just think it's important to emphasize this point for myself and the whole audience as often as I need to, as long as this pandemic is going on. It's a dumpster fire. We all need to go easy on ourself. It's going to get better. So it's not going to be forever. We will have time to catch up if we have to slow down during this period. When all things are added up, the amount of time we're going to lose for the pandemic is not going to be insurmountable for us to catch up in our jobs, especially if we listen to deep questions.

especially if we do the type of things we talk about. In the meantime, do a little less, let's work a little less, let's be more structure, let's get things done earlier so we can focus more intentionally on these other buckets that are harder to get these days. If we do this, we will make it one way or the other. Better times are coming, and in the meantime, we're doing what we can

to keep the train on the tracks, to keep it moving forward. We'll pick up that loss speed soon. And we will pick up this discussion next week as we are out of time for today's episode of the podcast. To submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the podcast. And until then, take a deep breath, turn off the news, and as always, stay deep.