Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 71: How Do We Escape the Autonomy Trap?

Episode Date: February 15, 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.DEEP DIVE: The Autonomy Trap [7:25]WORK QUESTIONS - How do I focus when working on a distracting computer? [19:58] - How do you maintain energy while increasing deep work? [23:34] - Can the pomodoro technique help achieve deep work? [29:00] - How can I time block when working with two kids in a small apartment? [31:29] - Have I thought about updating my student books? [38:!7]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Are project management tools like Basecamp just a fancier version oof email? [42:26] - How can I integrate OmniFocus into daily, weekly, quarterly planned work schedules? [46:38] - What about the social costs of missing invitations because you're not on social media? [55:09]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I organize my life as a newly published author? [1:01:10] - How do I balance rigor and accessibility in my non-fiction writing? [1:07:52] - How young is too young for getting kids started on the deep life? [1:14:08]Thanks to 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 71. So let's start with an opening observation. Just now I was in the library of my Deep Work HQ, which is just down the hall here from the studio in which I record this podcast, and I was working on the script for this show before I started recording. Now, my library overlooks the back patio of this restaurant, Republic, which I like here in Tacoma Park, you know, I should probably see if they could,

if they'd be interested in sponsoring me. I'm just thinking about that. That would be great. I mean, I can see their bar from my window. So we could literally have like a pulley system where they could put, I don't know, oysters or drinks or something into a bucket and I could pull it up. So, okay, first of all, I'm going to get on that. But in the meantime, here's my question. They play music out there, which I hear quite loudly in my library, which is always fun. and they were playing right before I came in, Shania Twain's, You're the one I want.

Now my question is, are they not writing new music? I remember the song from, God, it must have been like my junior prom, right? So why is it that there's some songs that were popular when I was a kid that still seem to dominate just random playlist today? I don't know, that dynamic must be interesting.

I bet if you look at it, there's some sort of geometric distribution of stickiness, of songs and probably have to filter down the songs that have some sort of presence on radio airplay or maybe that make it to a top 100 list. My guess, I'd have to analyze the data to look at this, is it's a geometric distribution on stickiness. So as you increase the number of, let's say, years that the song is in somewhat regular play, the probability of that song still being a regular play decreases, let's say, exponentially with that distance. That would make sense. That would make sense,

then, that you're going to have from any period that you remember well, like a reasonably good sampling of songs from that period without actually just overwhelming the total number of songs that are available to fit into whatever's being played. So, all right, so here's my two initiatives. One, I got to get Republic to sponsor me. And two, I got to get a mathematician to work out the statistics on that job. Stickiness question because I think we're on to something. All right, enough of that. Let's do quick announcements. Quick announcement number one, of course, I have been very excited about my book. A World Without Email comes out on March 2nd.

As I announced on Thursday, there's this pre-order promotion where if you pre-order the book before March 2nd, you can get access to this course I'm doing called the Email Academy where I'll walk you through the big ideas of the book. I put all the details of that course on my website, calnewport.com slash pre-order. So go check that out. Why do I care about pre-orders?

Someone asked me about this. It's just everything good in a book launch comes from moving as many of your sales as possible into the pre-order period. There's a lot of technical reasons why it's true, but basically it is the elixir of successful book launches. That's why I have been putting so much energy into trying to convince you if you're thinking about buying the book anyways to consider pre-ordering the book. And let's say, if you buy a bunch of copies for whatever reason, send me an email at

interesting at calnewport.com. and I'll give you an extra word of things. All right, so enough about that. Second announcement is the deep dive returns this week. We have a good one in honor of a world without email. It's actually a deep dive about one of the big ideas from that book. So kind of like a nice sneak preview. The videos of these deep dives plus the select questions,

they really should be live by now. The only reason why they're not is because I have been busy. I have the team standing by. All I have to do is upload these videos. I've already recorded and they're going to put them up for me. So I will get to that soon. I have a big deadline today. The day this episode releases, I have a big academic deadline.

So I've been pretty busy, but they're here. They're on my computer. These videos will soon be available for everyone to see, so I'll keep you posted on that. Looking at my script here, we have a lot of good questions. Just to sample these a little bit to give you a sense of what is coming. We have something here about maintaining your energy during deep work. We have something about stress caused by time block planning. We get

into base camp and whether or not base camp can become just the new email. We've got a bunch of social media stuff here, like the social costs of not choosing to participate in social media, people having trouble with deep habits. We have a published author who's wondering what to do next and we even get some into kids and the deep life. So this should be great. We've got some good questions. To find out how to submit your own questions, just go to calnewport.com slash podcast, and that is where I put all of those instructions. So I look forward to getting to all of that, but first, as always, I want to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. And I'm talking about Monk Pack, and in particular, the Monk Pack, Keto Nut,

and Seed Bar. So what these are, is they're granola bars. that have nuts and seeds in them. They taste great, but they only have one gram of sugar or less, and two to three grams of net carbs. Their calorie count is also only 150 calories. They were developed originally for people who follow a keto lifestyle, but they're a great snack for anyone who, you know, you're looking for that snack, you're hungry,

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In today's deep dive, we will be looking closer at the topic of the autonomy trap. Now, this is an idea that comes from my latest book, A World Without Email. Now, if you are watching or listening to this deep dive before this book comes out in March 2nd, then you can think of this as being a sneak preview of some of the big ideas from that book. I also wrote about the autonomy trap in my recent New Yorker article that was titled, the rise and fall of getting things done. So you can look up that article

for a deeper treatment of this topic as well. But let's get started. What I'm going to do here is set up a question, a question that puzzled me about the world of knowledge work. I will then propose the deep, or not the deep type, I should say, the autonomy trap, rather,

as the answer to that puzzling question and then give some thoughts about how we can get out of that autonomy trap. So here's our puzzling question that sets up this discussion. Why are knowledge workers so bad at doing knowledge work? And what I mean about this in particular is that most knowledge work teams and organizations and individuals have fallen into this default workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind where we just rock and roll in inboxes and on instant messenger channels like Slack.

Everything gets figured out with back and forth ad hoc unstructured, unscheduled, messaging. Now, if you're going to isolate one thing you're doing, one interaction you need to have, one decision that needs to be made, of course, the hyperactive hive mind seems like a very flexible and convenient and easy way to do this, because I can just grab you right away, you get back to me right away, it's low friction, it's cheap, we just rock and roll, we can figure things out. Of course, as any knowledge worker with any experience has learned, we have a lot more than one interaction to do, a lot more than one decision to make, we have a lot more than one project to coordinate. So when we scale up this hyperactive hive mind, we end up drowning in communication.

It's why in one major study I cite, we see the average knowledge worker checking their inbox once every six minutes. This is, of course, unsustainable. It not only makes us miserable to have this Sisyphian battle with an inbox that we can't keep up with, but also it forces us to constantly be switching our attention back and forth. The thing we're working on inbox, the thing we're working on inbox. And this constant contact switching exhaust our brain and really lowers our cognitive capacity. So this is, I think we can stipulate, not a great way to work. And there's better ways we could be doing this. I mean, in a world without email, I go into detail about how we could design much better processes that are much more specific that allow us to coordinate and collaborate

and get things done, but in a way that doesn't require us to check an inbox every six minutes, right? These processes exist. Why are they rare? if this way of working is so bad, why is it what most of us do? To answer that question, we get to the autonomy trap. If we want to understand who set the autonomy trap, we have to actually look back to the 1950s and to a very influential, a very influential business thinker named Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker basically invented management theory, the whole idea that you could study management from a theoretical perspective.

The foundation of so much of the modern business school came out of Peter Drucker's work, and in particular the long study he did of General Motors in the 1940s. Now, Peter Drucker's relevant to us because in the 1950s, he coined the term knowledge work. He helped after this point.

He really helped because of his influence, he really helped American business in particular understand this shift we were making from a predominantly industrial economy, towards an economy that produced a lot more using human brains. This was a very big change, and he helped people understand it and how business had to differ, how it had to adapt to this new type of work, which is now a, not dominant, but one of the

dominant sectors in the American economy. He had this big idea that I have documented, I documented in this book, I documented it in my New Yorker article, he had this big idea that shows up early mid-century and consistent since then all the way up until I find references to this idea in 1999, he died a year later so throughout his whole career he really pushed this notion that one of the key things about knowledge

work is that the knowledge worker needs autonomy. You cannot tell a knowledge worker how to actually do their work. So what should you do instead? Well, he introduced this other influential idea called management by

objectives that basically said give the knowledge worker very clear up so they know what you expect of them, but then leave them alone to figure out how they're going to do it. Drecker, of course, had good reason for this. He had studied industrial manufacturing at GM. He had seen what had happened in industrial manufacturing. There the play was deskill the worker,

have a small group of very smart managers figure out the best way to build the widget, break that down into steps, give those steps to an unskilled worker and so just execute these the way we say. So you would consolidate the creativity and the skill into a small number of thinkers, and then you would deploy down to the workers

simple step-by-step instructions. Now, the point that Peter Drucker was making is that's not going to work in knowledge work. It's too creative, it's too complicated, it's too hard. I can't break down how an ad copywriter writes an ad into a step-by-step process that they can blindly follow. He was interested if you look at his early mid-century writings

on knowledge work. He was very interested in the rise of the sort of applied science research and development labs. And he looked at the scientist in these research and development labs. And he used them as an example. You can't break down having a breakthrough in some sort of chemical manufacturing process into a step-by-step thing that's always going to produce that breakthrough. Right. So we had this notion, knowledge work needs to be autonomous. That was really different in the way we thought about workers up until that point. So it was an important argument he was making. The problem is that he was too successful with that argument.

We see the echoes of this insistence on autonomy today, especially when we think about workplace productivity. People like me exist because productivity in the office setting is personal. It's left to the individual worker. Here's your objective. Here's your mission statement. Here's your incentives. Figure out how you're going to do it on your own.

You want to figure out how to organize your work? Buy David Allen's book. Buy a Cal Newport book. You want to get more out of your day. Buy a time block planner. You know, timeblock planner.com. Productivity is personal in modern knowledge work, and this is Drucker's influence,

that we don't really want to meddle in how work actually gets done. It's not the role of the organization. That's the role of the individual. Well, here's the problem. Once you have set that autonomy trap and you're leaving productivity up to individuals, you're never going to get near the peaks in the fitness landscape

of all the different ways that your organization could be working together because no one individual can push you there. When we all have to figure out on our own, how we're going to organize our work, what do we end up with? The hyperactive hive mind. Well, I guess if I can reach you at any point,

that's useful for me, and that's useful for you if you can reach me at any point, so let's just all be on our inboxes all day. And no one person can easily change this. No one person can easily escape from this autonomy trap because if I stop participating in the hive mind and everyone else is still doing it, I am now a negative outlier. I'm making everyone else's life harder and that is going to have repercussions for me. So we're stuck in this. If we want to use technical mathematical terms and look to the field of game theory, look to John Nash, we can say

that we're stuck here in a suboptible Nash equilibrium. So that is the autonomy trap, is when we delegate how work gets done to the individuals. The way work gets done is in the most flexible, sort of easy, convenient, lowest common denominator-style way, and that is the hyperactive hive mind. Imagine if we did this in the industrial sector. Imagine if I'm Henry Ford in the early 20th century, and we bring in factory workers, and I said,

okay, guys, look, I don't want to tell you how to build a car. I just want to motivate you. I have an OKR right here that says, we want to produce this many cars this quarter, and I put up motivating mission statements, but it's up to you to figure out how to actually build cars, go do it. Look, that is not going to produce cars very effectively.

You are not going to have that group of workers just one day spontaneously say, hey, let's run a continuous motion assembly line. And because of that, you're missing out on what ended up being a 100x improvement in the automobile manufacturing productivity, right? We would never do that in the industrial sector. We sit back and say, what's the best way to build cars?

we don't do this in knowledge work, but we should do more of it. All right, so that's the autonomy trap. Now, it's a hard trap to escape because Peter Drucker was more or less right in his rationale for putting this trap in the place. So Drucker said, look, you can't break down ad copyrighting.

You can't break down making a business decision. You can't break down in modern terms like producing computer code to step-by-step instructions. We have to have autonomy. He was right. You can't. There is no, optimal procedure for writing ad copy or writing computer code. That is very autonomous. So how do we get out of this trap? We have to separate execution from workflow. Again, that's one of the core ideas in a world without email,

is that you've got to separate the actual execution of knowledge work, which is creative and skilled and hard to pin down and needs to be left alone from all of the systems and rules and norms we have about how this work is identified, how this work is assigned, how we help people coordinate to get this work done, how information about this work moves. I call that the workflow. That should not be left to individuals. That's where we need a team effort or an organization effort to actually say what works best. What is our continuous motion assembly line here? And that's how we spring out of the autonomy trap. We say, I'm not going to tell you how to write computer code, but we use scrum to figure out what objective you should be working on,

who's working on what, what's coming next, how much should be on your plate. That is how you get out of the autonomy trap. I think we should be doing this in most areas of knowledge work while leaving people with that great satisfying autonomy and how they actually execute their work. We should think more carefully about how we assign it. We should think more carefully about how much is on each people's plate,

who should be working on what, how people actually interact about the work they are doing. if we start optimizing those systems, we can get rid of this hyperactive hive mind. We can create a work environment where we're able to spend more time doing the stuff that is satisfying, which is actually producing value,

less time doing the stuff that is soul numbing, like scrolling through inboxes, being in endless meetings, or trying to keep up with Slack. But this is not going to be emergent. This is not going to occur because enough people read the right personal productivity book that we just spontaneously throw out

new standards or new processes, this is a whole team or whole organization effort. The autonomy trap is important to understand because it tells us there's a reason why we're stuck in this bad way of working, but when we look at this trap with this more nuanced view that we can separate execution from workflow, we see a way out. We got to get out of this trap because it is making us miserable and it is actually slowing down the entire non-industrial productivity of our economy because this is so unproductive the way we're working now. So Drucker, you have done a lot and you did a lot for this field. Your influence about autonomy was key to knowledge work, but now we need to add this extra

layer of nuance. Spring to trap, we can make our lives, our working lives as knowledge workers much, much better. All right, that's it for this week's deep dive. Let's move on to work questions. We'll start things off with Benjamin, who says, it hard to focus when I have a screen in front of me. How do I work deeply when all of my work is on a computer? Well, Benjamin, the goal here is to help you minimize that urge to look at other things on your computer while you're working. And so there's things we can do in the short term to help train you to diminish that urge. I often talk, for example, about using things like blocking software.

Freedom comes to mind. That's a favorite of mine, but there's other products as well. Where you can set things up on your computer so that when you're working, the most distracting websites, the ones you're trying to stay away from and have nothing to do with your actual work,

are inaccessible, and turning off this blocker is difficult, so you mainly don't. Now, I know from your elaboration that this is schoolwork you're talking about, so leave your phone somewhere else when you're doing the schoolwork. you're not a neurosurgeon, you're not the chief of staff of the president, you will be okay, the people you know will be okay, Benjamin, if they can't get in touch with you for an hour or so.

So that will also reduce temptation. All you're doing here is giving yourself exposure to working without distraction, so your mind gets used to that. By making the distraction almost impossible, you have no choice but to work without this distraction, and thus you're getting exposure to that. But I would say, Benjamin, that one of the most powerful things you can do to help focus these work sessions from now and into the future is to time block your work sessions. Here is the time I am working. Here is what I'm doing during that time. For the first half hour, I am doing this, for an hour I am reading, for the next hour I am working on this problem set.

Time block it. The advantage of time blocking is that now you know what you're supposed to be doing and how long it is supposed to take. The only commitment you have to make is, do I want to follow my time block schedule or not? Now, if you don't follow your time block schedule, there's a problem. You're eventually going to have to cross it out and create a new schedule, or at the very least, really confront without a doubt that you failed to follow that schedule. So often it's easier just to stick to it. I have one hour to get this reading done.

That might be a little tight. Let's get into it. I don't want to break my schedule. And you're much less tempted to do the distractions. Now, I really want to emphasize the degree to which when you do not have these type of constraints around how you are using your time, your mind is therefore constantly having this battle with you. Or they say, look, there's no particular plan here. We're just kind of working.

Work includes breaks. Why not take that break right now? And every single moment of this work session, you have to have this debate about, well, why not have this break right now? Well, what about right now? Well, certainly by now we should be having to break. It's very exhausting. It's reducing your focus. And look, you're going to lose that debate eventually.

When you're time blocking, you're not having it. The only debate you're having is, am I time blocking this session or not? And that is a much easier decision to stick with. It's a much clearer decision. There's much less decision fatigue. So you can do the training, do the blockers, put your phone somewhere else. That's a really great way to get sort of ice bath-like sudden exposure to working without distraction, but time blocking, I think, is what's going to really in the long term help you work

when you're working and do other things when you're not. Our next question comes from Laurel, who asks, how do you maintain energy while increasing the amount of deep work you are doing in your life? Well, Laurel, when you're trying to get more and more deep work into your schedule and you're trying to avoid this from exhausting you. There's two types of fitnesses that matter. The first is obviously physical fitness. If you're getting sleep to the extent that you are able to control that,

if you are eating well, if you're getting sunlight and getting outside and you're walking a lot, and just you have your body in a mode that is active and it's used to activity, you're well hydrated, et cetera. So your actual physical fitness is better. you can do more deep work. It's incredibly energy consuming to do deep work. If you're used to, if you're in good shape, if you take care of yourself and you're used to, let's say, doing other types of physical exertions, you can actually tolerate more deep work than if you're not.

It's an important point that we often, that we often miss out. Though I certainly know in the world of elite academia and elite thinkers, it's not uncommon to find people at the very top who are in surprisingly good shape because it's part of how they try to get more out of their brain. The other type of fitness that matters is cognitive. Like, let's think about what we just talked about with Benjamin. If you work in a haphazard way throughout your day, where you just kind of get after it, you're looking at your inbox, you're reactive, you're like, what should I do next?

Do you see what's my meetings? You're constantly in a mode of trying to negotiate or make decisions about what you should do next or whether you should take a break or whether you still want to work or how you feel. This is exhausting. It saps a lot of mental energy, which means you will have less available for the deep work. sessions that you do want to actually accomplish. So someone who has a nice tight time block schedule, one thing after another, with the appropriate amount of breaks in it, one thing, break, a couple things, break, you're actually conserving a lot of energy there. It's like when you

put lighter shoes on marathon runners at the professional level, it makes a difference because every single stride, that's like 5% less weight they're moving. Multiply that over the thousand, thousands of strides that make up 26.2 miles, and it's a real difference. So same thing. Decision fatigue, thinking fatigue. If you're letting that build up in the background, you'll have less energy. That's a key part of cognitive fitness, but also just in general. Do you give in to algorithmically optimized distractions when you're not working? Are you on your phone all the time? By doing so, you're really reducing your capacity to tolerate boredom. You're really building up a threshold of stimuli expectation that's going to make it hard to do serious

intellectual work. It's going to make you anxious. All of this is really draining as well. Emotional draining really matters. So if you're doom scrolling Twitter, that is draining your emotions. You drain your emotions. That's cognitive energy. It's going to be harder to do deep work. All this matters. Do you regularly do cognitively demanding things even outside your work in the sense of like reading hard books and trying to understand them? That matters. Do you get enough solitude that is time alone with your own thoughts and observing the world around you. Are you getting that on a regular basis so that your brain can recharge and you can structure and make better sense of the information in your life? All of these things add up to cognitive fitness.

If you're a digital minimalist deep life type of fictionado, your cognitive fitness is probably great. You can tolerate more deep work. Then if you're hunched over on that phone, you have that email inbox just scrolling by. So physical fitness, cognitive fitness, both of these things add up. And then in the end, how much you're able to do is also going to be a function of the type of work. Some deep work, for example, might push you into a flow state because you're largely just applying skills that you have already honed. You can do a lot of flow state deep work. It feels great.

Some deep work is going to be deliberate. Maybe you're trying to pick up a new skill. You can't do as much of that. It feels terrible, right? So keep that in mind as well. once you have your innate capacity determined by your various fitness levels, you have to combine that with the type of deep work that you are trying to accomplish to figure out how much you're going to be able to tolerate

and just be reasonable about it, know thyself. You're getting exhausted, you're getting exhausted. That's about as much as you can do. But that's okay, because Laurel, the other thing I want to point out here is the way that you move mountains with deep work is not in a small number of heroic days. it's a mini large number, I should say, a large number of consistently applying work. Six months of two hours per day of true deep work, that can do a lot of damage. That can do a lot of damage. So maybe I'll leave you with that. You do want to set up conditions to be conducive for deep work,

but you want to be at the same time realistic about how much you can actually be done and not obsessed too much about what that number is. I care more about how many, how many, uh, deep work tally marks you have in the metric tracking box of your time block planner. I care more about how many days in a row you have a count there that's greater than zero than I care about whether or not you're able to go up to the cabin in the woods and knock out eight hours straight. All right. So I like this string of deep work questions we're doing. So let's do one more quick one.

And then we'll move on to other topics. James asks, have you ever used the Pomodoro technique to help achieve deep work? The Pomodoro technique, of course, is where you have a timer that's always set to the same amount of time. You start the timer, the timer's going, you focus very intensely on what you're doing. When the timer goes off, you take a break. It's usually for a set period of time, and then you repeat. I don't know if I have this right.

I think a Pomodoro is typically like 50 minutes of work and 10 minutes a break. I might have that wrong, but it's something like that. Here's my thing, James. It's a perfectly fine training technique. It's a perfectly fine training technique to use timers in general to help push your ability to concentrate, I think is great. I call them interval sprints for concentration training where you say I'm going to work for this much time and no distractions, concentrate as hard as I can while that timer's going. And if I mess up, I stop and reset the timer. It's just great walls.

Just like I talked about with Benjamin, having some constraints on what you're doing makes it much easier to focus. if you're just free for all working, knowing you're going to take a break at some point and having to keep negotiate should that point be now. So I like having a timer. I like the idea of being as intense as possible for a short amount of time just to get exposure to what it feels like to concentrate at your limit. Hey, by the way, if you go to your limit on a regular basis, that limit expands. Just like if you push your lungs or muscles to the limit, eventually your lungs get bigger,

your muscles get stronger. So it's the same idea. So I love using timers to do that. that's basically what the Pomodoro technique is. The one place where I differ when I talk about my interval training is that I think that time should start small and increase. Start where you're comfortably able to focus really intensely and just keep increasing that 10 minutes at a time until you get comfortable at the new time and then increase. So I actually think about using timer-based concentration training as a way to expand how long you're comfortably concentrating.

Once you're doing this, once you can comfortably hit, let's say, 90 minutes. minutes of concentration that's really deep, you don't really end up needing the timer anymore. You don't need to talk about your schedule in terms of Pomodoro's. You just get very used to intense concentration as a particular activity. And if you're doing something like time block scheduling, it's like when it's time to do concentration, that's what you're doing until that block ends. And having the artifice of the Pomodoro timer and measuring things in Pomodoro's becomes less important.

All right, moving on, several of these deep work questions ended up in involving time block planning in the answer. So let's do a question here that's just about time blocking. Samir says, with the pandemic, I am working from home in a small apartment in New York with my wife. We have a five-year-old doing remote school and a six-month-old doing what six-month-olds do, cry, chewing your computer cord, messing with your keyboard, etc.

I can never follow through on the time blocks set in my time block planner. Loving it, by the way. how does one effectively time block when their whole day is one where you are juggling domestic fires like a crying baby who bangs her head on the floor while you are trying to get work done? Well, Samir, first of all, thanks for bringing up time blocking. For everyone else who doesn't know what that is, timeblockplanner.com, you can learn more. So I always preface these pandemic-themed questions Samir by pointing out. Pandemics are terrible.

this one is making work for a lot of people into essentially a dumpster fire from a productivity standpoint. So you should not be too hard on yourself. Your goal should not be how do I operate at my optimum, even though I'm being burned in a dumpster fire. That's not the goal. The goal is how do I avoid having all of my skin melt off before this dumpster fire gets put off, gets put out? And And then the final point I always say is that it will pandemics go. They come, then they go. Then the coronavirus becomes something that's endemic, like other colds and other flus. You're back in an office.

Your kids are back in school. The amount of time you are dealing with a baby chewing on your keyboard wire will go down by a non-trivoledly large percentage. Okay. So that's the preface. We're not trying to make you into Elon Musk. while you have two kids and a wife in a small apartment, we're trying to keep you from jumping through that window

because you are in an apartment with your wife and your two small kids trying to work. Just trying to keep things sane, trying to keep our head above water. All right. So what can you do here that helps with time blocking in particular? I want it abandoned time block planning because the alternative is going to exhaust you. It's also going to reduce your productivity, which matters because what we want to do,

what we want to do if you're like me or like you are where you have kids at home and homeschooling and you're in peak dumpster fire right now. Now, you want to get the same amount of work done in a lot less time because you need that flexibility. You basically need what I sometimes call a stealth part-time job. Your hours are basically part-time, even though your bosses don't know this, because it's impossible to actually be engaged without distraction and work for a full workday, again, when you have a small apartment and all these people at home. So we actually want to be more productive so we can do less.

Time blocking is going to allow you to squeeze, okay, get the things. So need to get done done with intensity. Let's get out. how do you do that with the distractions? The two things I have to recommend is, number one, just give more breathing room into your time blocks. You're probably being way too optimistic about how long it takes to get things done.

Most people who are new to time blocking already grossly underestimate how long things take. Now if you throw into this, this extra factor of you're not in your office working in the way you're used to working, you're instead in this environment that is full of distractions, well, now you have to, now you're probably even extra severely underestrily,

underestimating how long things takes. You need to give yourself much bigger time blocks for your tasks. You can have backup activity. So like, okay, if I'm not as distracted as I think I'm going to be and I finish this thing with 20 minutes to spare, maybe you always have an activity B listed in that time block, an alternative, non-urgent, but useful activity you can turn to to eat up that extra time. That's probably a good way to build out your schedules. Now, because you're putting more time on things, you probably have to be more careful about your weekly plan because you're going to have to start things earlier and spread things out and work with your available time between meetings better. So now you need to start looking at your schedule at the bigger picture because now you're going to

spend more time on the things you are doing. I think you will find that useful. Two other useful things. One, if it works, you might want to do distraction coverage shifts with your wife. Here's the four hours where I'm primarily on deal with the kids if they have a problem duty. Here's the four hours where you're on that duty. During those four hours, I am going to time block like musk. You know, it is going to be all in, incredibly intense. Let's get it done. And then during the other four hours, okay, I'll do my inboxes or I'll have my zooms because I'll get some leeway if I get distracted my zooms. Because, hey, hey, boss, look, dumpster fire. I'm here with my kids. There's nothing I can do about it. Don't pretend like it's not true. In fact, it's good for you to see in the Zoom that it's

very hard every time you have me come into one of these meetings. I think that's fine. Right. That works too. And then the third thing I'll say is Negotiate things to be easier I think most Most bosses Not most but a lot of bosses They're empathetic They don't know what to do

It just sucks It's a dumpster fire And it's an inequitable dumpster fire You're 26 Living with roommates Have no kids You know in Florida It's you're barely noticing things different

You're in New York City with two kids Whoops This pandemic is hitting your work possibilities your ability to get work done, 10x more. This is weird sort of inequitable dumpster fire type attribution. Just say, hey, here's the deal. I'm home with two kids.

They're not in school. The schools are closed for some reason. It's really hard. So I need to severely cut down my Zoom meetings because that makes it almost impossible for this to work. And here's how we're going to get around that. Here's what I suggest. We'll have this one meeting where we can summarize things.

You can send me stuff. And you know, suggest something as an alternative. but just ask. Find the things that are most making your life hard and ask. It's not your fault that this pandemic has happening. And most bosses want to help. They're empathetic. Tell them this is what I want to suggest and why you'd be surprised by how much easier you can make it. Again, our goal here is not to be super productive. It's not to be Elon Musk. Our goal here is not to just grin and bear what happens. Let's try to make our lives easier. Lower our expectations about what we can get done before the pandemic goes away, which it will. All pandemics go away. Before it goes away, we want to just make sure that we keep our head above water. Let's maybe have shifts with our wife. Let's give more breathing room into our time block schedules. Let's talk to our boss about temporarily removing the things that makes things most difficult for us. Survival mode, Samir, survival mode. We're getting there, but this will make that journey a little bit less trash smelled and singed. Moving on, Matt asks,

have you thought about updating your first books, like how to become a straight-a-student or how to be a high school superstar? Well, Matt, that's an interesting question. I did look into that, actually. I don't remember exactly when this was. It was either right before I published Deep Work or maybe it was right after.

But at some point, my agent and I did talk with the imprint it published those books. I had this idea, not necessarily that I would rewrite write the whole book, but that I would have an extensive new introduction, where I could talk about what I've learned, lessons from students I've heard from since those books came out. Also, the ideas I was going to summarize, like, here's some ideas that weren't in these books that I've learned since that you should also keep in mind. You know, like a pretty extensive introduction for a new edition.

And I figured this was a good idea because these books sell well. As student guides go, they've sold really well, I think. I mean, I just looked up right before I answered this question. I looked up my most recent royalty statement. And so through, what does this say here? Like through the June of 2020, I've sold around 200,000 copies, for example, of how to become a straight-a student. So that's good as student books go.

It ended up not panning out mainly because they didn't really offer very much money. To be kind of crude about it. It was at the time, like what I would make, like a third of what I would make, maybe doing just like a one-hour talk. And today, maybe it's like a fifth of what I would make, giving a one-hour talk. So just the economics weren't there to actually spend all the time that would take, and I put my energy into other projects is what happened. But one thing we did do, so later I returned to Penguin Random House.

I published deep work at it, and so good they can't ignore you, at a different publisher, came back to Penguin Random House who published my first three books, my student books, for digital minimalism and a world without email. And one of the things my agent and I negotiated once I came back was I wanted to return those books to the original covers, and this we were successful in. So the first two books, The How to Win at College had this yellow cover

and How to Become a Straighty Student. It had this red cover, and I love the simplicity of them. When How to Become a High School superstar came out, we went to a different type of color. It was sort of like a diploma texture. And they went back and we said, well, let's change the first two books to also be in that diploma texture. So they kind of fit together like a set. It was kind of an interesting idea.

They'd look like a box set. But I never really loved the way it turned out. And reader sort of missed the original really bright, iconic covers. And so that was one of the things we did change. We went back. And now in all the future printings, you'll see those books are back in their original covers. Oh, and we had a new cover designed for how to become a high school superstar that was not that diploma color, but was also a solid.

It's solid blue. So now the way the box set works is there each one solid color. That's a minor thing, but I just have a lot of nostalgia and affection for those original books. I was like 21 years old when I was working on some of those. And so I'm happy to have those back in the original colors. The other thing that's happened more recently is we've sold the audio rights. So I think how to win at college and how to become a straight-a-student.

Now, as of like last year for the first time, there's audio versions of those books available. So those are the updates I have done. I have not yet updated the content, though I do just point people towards the archives of study hacks at calnewport.com. The first two or three years of that blog is basically extended versions of my student books. That was the whole idea of the blogs, is like the ideas and the examples. and the cases that did not make it into the book would come onto that blog. So if you're looking for more, go back and look at those early pages at study hacks. All right, let's do some technology questions.

All right, let's kick things off with Salin, who asks is tools like Basecamp, these so-called project management tools, are they just the new email? As she elaborates in her company, they use Basecamp, but she feels like she is overwhelmed with what are called Basecamp messages, and it has the same type of emojis and back and forth communication that she didn't like about email. So she's worried that these new technological solutions, these alternatives to a world dominated by email, might just end up being just as bad. Well, So, Lynn, you definitely need to read my new book, A World Without Email, because I go deep. into these topics, and I think I can give you a framework for better investigating these questions. One of the big ideas you'll see in that book is that the tool is not so interesting to me. Right? When I say email, I'm tired of email, people often ask, well, what tool is better? And I say

that's a non-sequitur. As far as I'm concerned, that question is not relevant. What I care about is workflow. What are the rules and processes and systems by which your task are identified, assigned, reviewed and coordinated to work on, right? How does your work actually unfold? Some answers to this question involve lots of back and forth ad hoc unstructured, unstructured, unscheduled messaging, what I call a hyperactive hive mind workflow. These are easy to implement with an email inbox.

They're easy to implement with Slack. But as you see here, Salin, they could be implemented even on top of a more complex service like Basecamp. If you begin to rely really heavily on the chat features, if you rely very heavily on the direct-based camp messages features. I don't care what tool you're using here. The hyperactive hive mind workflow, I don't think, is good.

If you have to constantly monitor conversations, you're miserable and work worse. What I like are workflows that have much less unstructured and unscheduled back and forth communication. I want a way of coordinating and collaborating with people on a project that does not involve me to have to constantly be monitoring

some sort of asynchronous conversation. tools like Basecamp or other project management tools are really useful when you're trying to build these type of workflows that do not rely on the hyperactive high find but they will not give you this workflow for free. They will not force you into this workflow. They are just a tool. Just like I'm saying,

nails and a hammer are really useful if you want to build a bookcase. It doesn't mean that if you have a nail and hammer, you're going to end up with the bookcase. It's just a useful tool, but you still have to figure out how do I build a bookcase, what am I going to do here,

make the right measurements, make the right cuts, hammer the right things. That's what it is with workflow. So you have to actually speak in terms of workflows and figure out how do we do this type of work? How do we do client intake?

How do we deal with client issues? How do we deal with producing new episodes of our podcast? Whatever the different implicit processes are that produce all the value in your team or organization, what is our workflow that we use to execute each of these processes?

And when you're trying to, I come with these workflows, you're trying to minimize back and forth communication. All right. Once you're thinking like that, oh, base camps suddenly becomes great. Oh, we could have all the information for this particular thing, tracked in this website. It's all right here. It's easy to see. We can get rid of this type of back and forth communication.

But it still has to exist surrounded by specific rules that you and your team have agreed on about the workflow. It's a hammer and nails. It's not a complete plan for building a bookcase. So that's my answer there. stop thinking about tools, start thinking about workflows. Once you really know what you're trying to do with your workflows, then suddenly you'll see that all these tools have a lot to offer to be deployed as part of your larger workflow plan.

And again, basically the whole idea of the world without email that I pitched in my book is how you build these new workflows. So it's not easy. Two-thirds of my book gets into how to do that. So if my answer here does not seem like it's a complete plan for this overwrought metaphor of bookcase building. That's because these things are hard to do, and there's a lot that goes into it.

But that's the high level. That should be the high level picture here. All right, now we have a question from Sean. Sean says, do you have any recommendations for integrating task management software like Omnifocus into my time-blocked, weekly, seasonally planned life? He then goes on and has a more elaborate version

of this question that has many references to Greek mythology, but also some other mythological cultures as well. All right, so for people who don't know why that's relevant, if you listen to my habit tune up many episodes, we applaud superfluous references to Greek mythology. So, Sean, I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but my hat is tipped to your use of Nazir Dai Buk, Jin, what else you have in here, and several other references, so well done.

All right, to answer your question, if you're doing daily planning, you're doing weekly planning, You're doing quarterly or seasonal planning. What role does task management services like Omnifocus play? Well, I somewhat separate Omnifocus out from other task management services because it's task management and sorting, right? So the big thing about Omnifocus is that it has the know-how, the software know-how so that you can give it queries.

You know, show me tasks that are, you know, relevant to this context and this project and that are due soon. And then here you go. Right. So it's like a database for your task. For most people in most contexts, I think it's overkill. I think it's cool.

And if it makes you more likely to do your work, then fine. And for some context, it's actually really useful. But for a lot of people, if you're doing especially the weekly, daily planning, it's okay if your tasks

are in almost any format. Even if you're just listing them them in a giant word document or you have them under, you know, on Trello boards or you have them in a to-do list app, it doesn't really matter. You look at them and just your brain,

instead of a database algorithm, kind of figures out, okay, what do I really want to do this week? And then when you're looking at your day, what do I really want to do this day? And that's flexible and smart, and it knows the context, and your brain can typically do better queries

than any type of database can. So I think this notion that an algorithm is going to get involved in your productivity systems and by doing so is going to make you better at getting things done. This was really the idea that was so key to the productivity prong movement during the early and mid-2000s has largely not panned out. There is no algorithmic panacea that's going to make you more productive. You look at the stuff you need to do. You know how to make the

right decision about what you should or shouldn't do. That's not the hard part. The hard part was, is, and probably always will be doing the work, actually executing. And software can't help you. So whatever task management software you want to use to keep track your tasks, that's fine. Just as long as you're looking at them at this quarterly, weekly, and daily schedule, you'll be able to more or less figure it out. If you want to do complex queries and algorithms and omnifocus stuff, that's fine. But for almost everyone, it is not a necessary precondition. And speaking of necessary preconditions, let's talk about one of the sponsors whose generous support is a precondition for this show to exist. How is that for a transition? I am talking about

ExpressVPN. You've heard me talk about ExpressVPN before. How VPN's work is that you connect to their servers. You have a secure encrypted connection to their servers. Their servers then connect to the greater internet on your behalf and then get the responses straight to their servers and then send you those responses on their encrypted secure channel. So as far as the whole internet is concerned, they're talking to this generic Express VPN server. They don't know they're talking to you. There's lots of ways and advantages why this is important. But there's one that they have been emphasizing recently, and I think it's kind of cool. It allows you to watch many different versions of Netflix. You see, Netflix says, where is this server connecting to me

located in the world. Great. We're only going to show it the shows that that part of the world is allowed to see. If you use ExpressVPN, however, you can choose which server, where you want to connect to a server. So you can connect to an ExpressVPN server anywhere in the world. Well, I mean, I shouldn't say anywhere. I mean, I don't know if like America, Samoa has a large ExpressVPN data farm, but all over the world, there are servers available you can connect to. And then if you then go to Netflix. Netflix thinks you're in that world. Curious what the UK has on Netflix that you don't. Curious what Japan has on their Netflix accounts that you don't. ExpressVPN allows you to find out. So that's just one of many really interesting features you get from using

VPNs. If you're going to use a VPN, ExpressVPN is the gold standard. So if you want to get your money's worth out of your streaming services, go to expressvPN.com slash D. Don't forget that slash deep as that is what is going to get you three months free of this service. That is ExpressVPN spelled EXPR-E-S-V-S-V-N.com slash deep. ExpressVPN.com slash deep to learn more. I also want to talk about Blinkist. As you know, Blinkist is a subscription service. If you sign up for Blinkist, you get access to.

15-minute summaries of over 4,000 non-fiction best-selling books spread out over 27 categories. Now, if you want to understand why this is important, it's helpful to know a little probability theory. In probability theory, there is this particular class of reinforcement learning problem called the multi-armed bandit problem. It is an abstract math problem where you are trying to get at this tradeoff between exploitation and exploration when trying to find valuable resources. How long should you stick with something that's valuable? How much time should you spend exploring for something that could be more valuable? Blinkist allows you to essentially get an optimal solution to the multi-arm bandit problem in the world of ideas.

You can probably guess that is a script that I wrote myself, but I think it's an interesting concept because here's how I use Blinkist. The short book summaries allows me to rapidly and with low cost explore. Is this book interesting? What's going on here? What's the main idea here? What's this author have to think? I then consider reading the full book exploitation in that particular framework.

That's where I actually am reaping the deep value from the idea. So if you use a book summary service like Blinkist, you can take a general area, get quickly exposed in an exploration phase to a lot of ideas, and then dive in deeper in the smaller number of books that seem like they are going to be most promising, that they are going to return the most value. If your goal is to optimize the amount of really useful and smart ideas you get from the world of writing, a Blinkist-driven strategy is going to help you accomplish that goal. So that's why I like Blinkus and why you should like it too. They have a special offer just for our audience, or at least the segment of our audience, that did not turn

off this podcast about halfway through my discussion of reinforcement learning and probability theory. But for those of you hardcore nerds that remain, you can go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven day trial and you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkist.com slash deep. Let's be honest here, I'm probably going to get in trouble for talking about sarcastic optimization during my blinkest ad read. But, you know, I'm recording this on a Friday, and I get punchy sometimes by the end of the week. All right, well, let's soldier on with our technology questions.

Our next question comes from Maria, who asks, what about the social cost of children? choosing not to participate in social media. She notes that she doesn't use social media, but by doing so, she has paid a price in missed information and invitations that appear only in our social media circle, as well as on Facebook, which has increasingly become the dominant means of communication. We have been in the dark about so many activities and gatherings, only to be told later that everything was posted on Facebook. So we should have known.

Well, Maria, I think we need a more nuanced approach to understanding how to integrate social media into our lives. My big philosophy on this issue, of course, is digital minimalism, which says you should start by identifying what is important. What is important to you in your life? What do you actually want to spend your time doing? You then work backwards from these identified values and ask the question, what is the best, way to use technology to amplify these things. So you are now putting technology to use much more selectively to support specific things that are really valuable to you. Now, one of the keys of this strategy is that when you know why you're using a particular technology, it is much easier to optimize

that use. You can put rules in place to make sure that you can still do the valuable behavior, but avoid all the other behavior that you have no interest in. This is a much more nuanced approach than just saying, I use social media or I don't use social media. Facebook is good or Facebook is bad. So in this case, if you find that there are certain groups on Facebook in which events and gatherings are posted that you want to know about, and that's valuable to you, because these are groups of people that you care about and you want to spend time with and you like the social interaction because spending time with your friend and community is part of your answer to the question of what I value, then you could say, okay, I'm going to use Facebook to help support

this value of spending more time with my friends and community. But now that you know why you're using Facebook, it is much easier to put those rules around it to optimize this particular use. So for one thing, if this is why you're using Facebook, well, it's not on your phone. For another thing, if this is why you're using Facebook, you're not really posting things or getting into arguments with people because that has nothing to do with your goal of I just want to make sure I don't miss gatherings or events that are useful to me because it'll help me connect with my friends and community. So now you say this is something I'm probably accessing just on my computer. How often do I need to do it?

Probably twice a week. I mean, unless people are really doing pop-up parties that they're only announcing on Facebook, like, all right, everyone, potluck, seven hours, let's roll. Unless people are doing this, you probably have a little bit of notice. So now you're down to checking Facebook just on your computer. let's say twice a week. Furthermore, you say, well, if this is why I'm using Facebook, let me just really follow the people or groups that actually have events I care about.

So now you're unfollowing all these people you've randomly followed over the years or over time so you don't have to see their junk show up in your timeline. An extra powerful hack is if all of this discussion is actually happening specifically in the Facebook group's feature, you can bypass the news feed altogether. You can use a plugin like News Feed Eradicator. I've had readers tell me that you can directly bookmark Facebook group pages on your computer browser.

So you can just jump straight to the page, not have to see, you know, what your uncle's cousin's neighbor has to say about QAnon or something like this, right? So when you know why you're using Facebook, man, you can get this down to 20 minutes twice a week on your computer. You barely miss anything, but this tool otherwise has no footprint. in your cognitive existence. The social media companies hate this. When they fight people like me, they always want the choice to be binary. And they say, no, no, no, you have two choices.

You can either have this weird Cal Newport, live in a cabin, Luddite position, that all social media is bad and no good things has ever happened. And social media has, you know, made kids ruder these days and they used to be and cars are bad. or you can say that's not true and then you have to just use our tools.

Because once you're in their ecosystem, then you're in there 50 minutes a day, like the average Facebook user that got your minutes, they've got your time. Mark Zuckerberg can, you know, buy a small country. When people like me say, actually, I don't want you to do that binary. I want you to say, why am I using the social media tool and therefore what's the best way to use it? They hate that because guess what? if you're using Facebook 20 minutes a day twice a week on your computer browser,

you are not profitable to them. They hate that. You're making them no money. You are not useful to them. You're barely active. They cannot grow another $100 billion if you're only using their service 20 minutes twice a week on a computer browser. But I don't particularly care if Facebook grows another $100 billion.

I want to make sure that you don't miss that gathering that your friends are having. and at the same time are not finding yourself completely overwhelmed with the negative morass of a life that becomes completely ensnalled in the distracting tendrils that is modern social media. So that is my answer. Figure out why you're using it. Once you know why, put it in place the rules. Once you have the rules, it gets you the value and sidesteps the cost.

You are going to see that this cost-benefit ratio is going to shift decidedly in your advantage. It is like a behavioral middle finger to Mark Zuckerberg, and I am in favor of that. All right, let's do some questions about the deep life. All right, let's kick things off with Lily. Lily says, I'm living the dream by finally being published. I even got a lovely New York Times review for which I'm profoundly grateful. But I'm trying to figure out this whole being a published author thing.

I started a scrum, con bond board, and have your planner, which has helped immensely. And do you have any other advice to tackle what is basically becoming a small business owner? Also, thank you so much for deep work. I read and listened to it repeatedly to help me get through writing my book that sold. Well, first of all, Lily, congratulations, not just on being published, but publishing a book that got reviewed in the New York Times. A lot of books get published each year. But if you're getting reviewed in the Times, that means you published a serious book. That is like a really good novel or a nonfiction book with some gravitas.

So that is not easy. So congratulations on that. Thank you also for the kind words about deep work. You may have missed the fine print in the flap, but it says by purchasing this book, you are in agreeing to a contract in which you will now owe 20% of any royalties due to you from creative endeavors inspired by this book

are now due to Cal Newport. So you can just send those checks through my agency. That would be great. That would be the ultimate pyramid scheme, the way. I could just I would never have to write again. Just write one book. It would be like, if this was the case, if like you could get a royalty cut of every creative endeavor that something you did helped inspire, like essentially me and what,

like Stephen Pressfield and what's, I'm thinking of the author of E. Pray, Love, who then wrote Big Magic, why am I, why am I blinking? Elizabeth Gilbert, we would all have big houses down in Palm Beach. But no, that's not the way it works. All right, so Lily, here's what I'm going to say, perhaps controversially. Don't think of yourself as a writer as running a small business. There is a tendency when you get, especially like a good book deal. You have this tendency towards, and by you I just mean debut authors in general. And I'm thinking about myself as well back when I was first getting started.

There's just tendency for freneticism. I got to do things now. right i gotta i need i need things i need wheels in motion i need projects i need endeavors right because like this is a big deal and and i need to have a level of activity and busyness commiserate with the sense of big dealness that comes rightfully so with hey i got this deal and i got a new york times book review and i'm doing serious writing but that's counterproductive because all of those efforts actually take you away from the thing that the publisher wants you to do and the thing that is going to be most responsible for having a sustainable, successful career,

which is writing more good things. And so the number one thing you should think about is I'm not a business, I'm a writer, and it's a completely different type of job. And it's a job in which my number one priority is to have time to think and write, and that's what I mainly want to do. I want to think and I want to write. So I'd be worried about having a con bond board. I'll be worried about having a scrum board because that's a different mindset.

That's a mindset of like I'm a task executor, well, I should have more task because more task means I'm trying harder and I'm going to earn my keep as a writer. I'm going to live up to this advance I was given. But long term, that's counterproductive. So it slows down how long it takes for you

to write the next book and how good that book is going to be. So make writing at the center of your life as a writer. Make exposure to the type of creative inspiration that you use for your writing a major part of your life as a writer and make sure that you have a ton of solitude. You need time alone with your own thoughts, just observing the world around you, so that you can make sense of this information. You can make sense of your experiments.

You can create the cognitive scaffolding on which you're going to actually create new ideas, be them fictional characters or nonfiction theories. And a lot of that doesn't feel like work. Like, man, I'm reading a lot and I go for a lot of long walks. But that is work if you were a writer. And none of that really requires that you move a card around on scrum board. Now for the stuff that does come up, it helps to be organized so that it doesn't bleed into your head. Time block plan, your days is fine because that helps you really minimize the footprint of the non-creative stuff. You want to have daily planning, weekly planning, seasonal planning.

That's very useful. Capture, configure, control. That's very useful. But it's less about enabling you to do lots of stuff and more about taking the stuff that you have to do and then put it into a smaller package. That's what I would actually recommend. I'm kind of famously slow to do things as a writer. You know, my lack of social media has raised a lot of eyebrows. I didn't start my blog until a few years in.

And then that's all I did until I started this podcast last year. So it took me over a decade to add a second thing, which was this podcast. And that's kind of it. I mean, I occasionally do a course with Scott Young, but that's 50% because I just like hanging out with Scott Young. and we get to hang out and go to studios and work on these things. And I'll do some speeches, you know, off and on. If I'm really in writing mode, I don't do a ton of speaking.

So it's not that fun for my speaking agents. And if I'm in book publicity mode, you know, then maybe I'll do more. But look, I'm not very busy as a writer. I don't see it as a business. I don't have a staff. I've messed around with virtual assistance and this and that. And figured, like, actually, I kind of like the advice I heard Joe Rogan once say, which was in creative endeavors,

if you have enough things going on that you need an assistant, the key is not to get an assistant, but to do less things. I think that's probably right. But because of that, though, I published six books in the planner. Because I can just spend more time thinking to writing.

And I have a full-time job that's not writing, so it would probably be a dozen if I didn't have that, which is by far will outweigh almost any other thing I could be spending my time on. So I don't actually know your situation, Lily. So I'm speaking to in sort of an abstract new writer. When you get that first big book deal, resist the urge to get busy and have a life that seems kind of to yourself or to other people like almost unusually lingwood. I write, I walk, I think, I read.

But if you can do that, you are going to actually be much, much more valuable to your publisher. Your life's going to be much, much more interesting. and you're going to produce the books that I look forward to reading next. All right, our next question comes from William. He asked, how do you balance the goal of conveying your ideas and being rigorous in your popular nonfiction work? I mean, maybe rigor isn't the right word because I didn't mean it pejoratively,

but I think you'll understand what I mean. In your academic work, you were writing meticulous proofs, but the world of popular nonfiction writing that you also do is much different. He goes on to say Like Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, is an amazing storyteller, but the science in his writing is mostly a thin veneer

on the stories he wants to tell at the opposite of the spectrum he goes on is someone like Dave Epstein. I think Gradwell even commented that he couldn't imagine doing the amount of research Epstein did for range. But as good as range is,

you can still find instances where he is citing secondary sources or a study doesn't really seem to support his argument. All right, so William concludes by saying, just to be clear, I'm not trying to denigrate authors like Epstein.

You even have actual academics out there who are publishing work in their field that is filled with errors. And he mentions one whose name I won't say. Do you struggle to reconcile the two or the goal's just different? All right. So let me try to summarize this. I think what William is asking is how do I reconcile my two worlds? Like an academic world where everything is meticulous, scientific style writing and a nonfiction world where that's just not the case. It's more compelling, it's more accessible, but it's just it's not quite right.

I think, William, the world of science in the world of science writing is more Gladwellian than you realize. So based on your question, I think you have this vision of what scientific writing is like. So peer-reviewed science papers are the type that, you know, I've written something like 60 or seven peer-reviewed science papers. you have this vision of that of sort of correctness, that it's experts that just, they know it, and here is exactly what's right and not right, and they cite everything properly, and it's just like some platonic truth

that's being ossified into this peer-reviewed text. Actually, this type of peer-reviewed science writing is much more Gladwellian than you would think. Science as an endeavor is much more Gladwellian than you would think. And what I mean by Gladwellian, It's not that science is full of really interesting stories with cool characters whose odd lives help highlight interesting observations about our world. What I mean about Gwadwellian is scientists are trying to argue for a particular point of view. The way science work is not that when I write a paper, I am trying to successfully capture like every possible option in view and give a complete, nuanced, and comprehensive treatment of the question.

What happens when I'm writing a paper is I have an idea that I'm trying to convince you is useful. And the way science works is that when someone else will then attack that or have an alternative or try to build on it, and it is in that interaction, in that clash between different scientists who are sort of egotistically focused, here's what I want to do. And yes, maybe not citing the whole literature, maybe not giving the most comprehensive possible treatment of every angle on it. They're advancing their point of view. When these point of views clash, you get better and better understandings of the real truth. That's how the scientific method works. We just happen to have a lot of structure and how we do it, rules about how we cite. If we're doing mathematical work, of course, the math has to be correct.

And so it keeps it civil. But you can think about the scientific endeavor like nonfiction writers saying, hey, look, I've got my pitch for why deep work is important. I have my pitch for why I think 10,000 hours of practice is important. I have my pitch for why I think generalism is understated. And so I have that same mindset when I think about nonfiction. My goal is not to try to capture everything that is true about the topic and give every caveat and every alternative view. That's actually impossible and no one does that.

And even if you tried to do it, the writing's going to be completely boring and stayed. Instead, I take an idea that I think is right in the general sense as important in the general sense that could have an impact on the trajectory of our culture. And I make my pitch for it. and I'll marshal ideas and I'll marshal research and I'll say this is my best argument for it and I don't see it as my goal to say now let me put every counter argument into the same book and every exception and caveat into the same book I figure someone else will write a book to attacks back or they'll write no shortage of snarky articles trying to say you forgot that caveat or what about this and a whole other series of books might come in and completely change the way we think about something

And in that aggregate whole, we get a better understanding of the world in our lives. So I think this whole thing becomes less fraught, William, when you release this vision of like there's some ultra-rational, platonically correct treatment of things. That's what scientists do, and writers are just arguing polemically for points. Everything's polemic. Everything's polemic. And so this is why you just need the ability for a lot of things. lots of people to put out their own polemics and allow in that collision, something that roughly approximate a functional truth can actually emerge.

So, you know, I see this type of thinking online. There's these communities, like these rationalist communities where people sort of obsessively try to eliminate every possible logical fallacy from their type of thinking. But I don't know. I think a lot of this online rationalist communities, A, is utopian and B, a lot of it is just fueled because people who are naturally pretty rational. They're just kind of annoyed by people who aren't. And so you're kind of modeling in your own life

that's sort of ultra-rationality because it's just, some people, it's just genetic. Just get really upset by, that's not quite rational. Or there's a fallacy there in how you're thinking. Or that's hypocritical. That's the worst for some people. Like that's different than what you said over there

and you're giving a different treatment here to what you're treating over there. And some people are like, okay, we can get rid of all of that and if we just be ultra-rational. And I love rationality, but there is no destination there. In the end,

we're all just, we're all just polemic. so hopefully we can do it with some empathy and hopefully we can do it with some freedom so that when all of these storylines collide, we get something just useful there. All right, let's do one last question. This one comes from Kim.

He asks, how young is too young to get kids started on the deep life path? Kim, I would say four and a half years. All right, that's all the time we have for today. No, I'm joking. All right, I have a deeper answer here. I don't know for sure, right? I have a

whole mess of kids, but they're relatively young, so I'm pretty new to this. You should probably talk to me in 16 years, and I'll probably have some more insight as well. I can mention two ideas that I think are true, though I'm happy to hear other people's thoughts of what I'm missing here. The first idea is that when it comes to the deep life, which I think is a fantastic model to hope that you can inculcate into your kids. It's a model that not only makes life more meaningful and satisfying, but also much more resilient. When you really embrace the principles of the deep life, you're much better able to not only handle rough times, but actually rise to the occasion or even find some post-traumatic growth in those times. So deep life is good.

We want our kids to be thinking about the deep life. How do we do it? I mean, beyond the solution of having deep questions podcast played in the crib as soon as your baby comes home from the hospital, I would say the first big idea that I think is important is that your example is more important than almost anything else. Really clearly and demonstrably live the principles of the deep life in your own life. This will be incredibly influential on your kids as they get older. Look, I mean, if you're just busy and on your phone all the time and kind of stressed out and angry and doom scrolling and, you know, outraged all the time, you're sending that message that this is what, this is the right approach to life. If on the other hand,

you're a real deep life practitioner, you're not distracted all the time, but your phone is usually in the foyer and that you have these clear things you value that you spend time and spend time doing and revel in and get great satisfaction out of it. You don't waste a lot of time on the sort of distractions or the superficial, the things that could really get you away from pursuing what's important that you clearly communicate. In this area, my life is very important. And this type of thing is the key, and I prioritize it and make time for it, even though it's not the easiest. And because of that, I don't spend other time doing this. I'm not watching a ton of TV. I'm not on my phone. But I run this volunteer group, you know, at our temple, because that's really

and that's really important to me, and I do this type of reading, and I really care about my books, and here's my over-the-top leather chair. And, you know, just living the deep life is by far one of the most important things you can do, because you're giving a model for life that they're going to see is quite successful and quite appealing, and they're going to see what the components look like, and then they're going to be more likely, though they'll never admit it to you, and say, maybe I'll try that. The other thing that I think is probably important is giving them a head start in these efforts by trying to hold back those forces that can make the deep life nearly impossible to achieve.

I'm talking about social media. I'm talking about smartphones. I'm talking about video games. I'm talking about interactive screen time in general. All right. If you want to give your child a running chance at leaving the house and in those early years on their own, really developing depth in the areas that are important to them. Don't give them a smartphone early.

Don't let your young boys play video games all day. Don't let your 13-year-old be on social media. This is so highly distracting in an addictive fashion when combined with the volatility of the teenage brain, you can essentially arrest any experimentation or progress with actually developing areas of their life, finding deep pursuits, figuring out what's important,

getting that reward, getting that feedback. You can basically arrest that completely, and it's a coin flip whether or not they will be able to extract themselves from those forces as their brain matures. Some will, some won't. I think we know a lot of people on Twitter right now

who fall into that never actually left that stage and got deeper in their life category. That's the practical thing you would do. Smartphones, before 16, no, honestly, probably before 18 is even better. Yes, they will say that all my friends do it, and I can't have friends if I don't do it. But just remember, that has been the excuse of teenagers to do things that aren't actually good for them

throughout the entire history of what we, since when we've had teenagers. So that argument by itself, this is not Clarence Darrow, right? This is not a super persuasive argument. You'd just be ready to hear that. So be very careful about smartphones. video games, I mean, in particular, just be careful about the very addictive video games, like the very high graphic ones that are played online multiplayer. Those things are completely engineered to be quite addictive, right?

This is why, you know, a game like Fortnite can be a huge devastating force in the life of, like, a teenage boy in a way that, you know, I don't know if you're playing your Nintendo Switch. Probably won't, right? Because those games aren't engineered to be addictive. you're like racing a cart and it's kind of fun until it gets boring, which was like my experience with Nintendo growing up. Like, oh, this is fun, but it's only so much fun. And now I'm going to go do something else.

But if you had given me Fortnite, you know, you'd have to remind me to bathe seven days later. All right. That's my practical advice. Model the deep life. Most important thing you can do. Two, keep highly addictive, engineered to be addictive technologies out of their hands until they're right about to leave to home

or until they leave the home, because even if they have seen the deep life and it appeals to them, those are so much more powerful than their teenage brain's ability to resist that it is going to arrest that development. And speaking of living deeply, it's time for me to shut down this recording for this week and go enjoy my weekend. I'll be back later this week with a habit tune up mini episode. go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how to spit your own questions. Go to Calnewport.com slash pre-order to find out about why you should pre-order my new book. And until the next time, as always, stay deep.