Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 72: Habit Tune-Up: Excessive Planning Syndrome

Episode Date: February 18, 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.- Excessive planning syndrome. [3:29]- Deep work and the distraction of social anxiety. [6:48]- Writing for top tier publications. [11:53]- Social media for artists. [17:16]- Hobby overload (and the curse of busyness). [30:18]- Getting started on hard creative work. [38:15]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 episodes. The format of these mini episodes is straightforward. I take voice questions from my listeners about tuning up the nitty-gritty details of their habits. To find out how to submit your own question, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. That is where I have those instructions. quick announcements. As mentioned, my upcoming book, A World Without Email, is available for pre-order.

If you pre-order it before March 2nd, you get access to this course I created called the Email Academy only for people who pre-ordered the book. You can find out more about that at calnewport.com slash pre-order. We got a good collection of questions. Something I'm noticing when I'm looking at my script here, was that a lot of these questions aren't,

they're not really nitty-gritty details of productivity habits, which is typically what we talk about on the show. You know, we'll get into my time blocking is not quite working. I'm trying to build a deep work schedule in this particular context. How do I do that? Some of these questions are like that. I've just noticing that I have more questions than normal this week that are maybe a little bit more lifestyle or general.

So I think that's okay. You know, sometimes that's the mood I am in. So anyways, I look forward to dive into these questions. but before we do, let's quickly say thanks to one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. I am talking about Monk Pack, and in particular the Monk Pack, Keto, Nut, and Seed bars. These are bars that were originally developed for people who were following a keto lifestyle, but that gave them properties that anyone can appreciate who's looking for a healthy stack is not going to give them a sugar crash. It has only one gram of sugar, only two to three grams of net carbs.

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Select any product, and then enter that code deep when you get to the checkout and you'll get 20% off your purchase. All right, let's get started with our questions. We'll start with one about excessive planning. Hi, Cal. My name is Andrew, and I'm a professor of church history in Tokyo, Japan.

Thanks for all the work you've done. It's really helped me sort out my ongoing vocational and professional struggles. I feel like I'm spending way too much time planning my days and weeks. It's like the process puts me into context switching hyperdrive as I jump from project to project imagining how it needs to be done. I look up in an hour or two or even three is gone by. How long should this process take and how can I rein it in? Thanks. Well, Andrew, I think weekly planning, very roughly speaking, maybe takes around an hour. Could be less, could be a little bit more. For me,

it's sometimes more if I also clean out the rest of my inbox. So sometimes I will clean out during my weekly planning, everything I couldn't quite get to in my inbox as the week wound down. That could push the process to more like an hour and a half because just cleaning out that inbox takes a while. But if you remove that from the picture 45 minutes to an hour max, is safe for weekly planning. The good weekly plan is just take you five or ten minutes to do your time blog plan for the day. There's not a lot of decisions to be made with each day.

So if you're spending many hours on a regular basis, especially more than once a week, you probably are doing too much planning. It sounds like the issue is that you're getting too much into the weeds with projects, trying to imagine in advance how a project is going to unfold at too fine of a granularity. you can be a little bit more rough there.

You can be a little bit more high level, right? So when you're doing your weekly plan and you decide, okay, I want to make progress on this project, let's say you're working on an academic paper as a professor. You really could just have a few sentences. You look at your week. You look at your time. You're like, you know, look, I need to get just thinking about this here informally, just using my intuition and experience in this role.

Like really what I need to do is get a good, if I get a good draft of the related work done this week and maybe process my notes from the Flanagan book I'm reading. That would probably keep me on track where I want to be. So great, you put a couple sentences. These are two things I'm trying to get done. Really push on whatever. The related work formatting, there's a good big block on Monday morning. Maybe that's a great time to really get started on that. And I might, maybe I'll put one hour a morning on Tuesday through Friday to catch up on my book notes because the morning's he open. Like you're just doing a little bit of informal planning based on your experience and intuition. Jot down some notes.

Should be a few sentences. That's it. You know? So what you're not trying to do is in this hypothetical, for example, is take that academic paper and figure out all the steps in a four-month process to write that paper. You just sort of look at where you are, what needs to be done, your experience, and say, what this week? What this week should I get done that I know will more or less keep me on a reasonable track? Just trust your experience and trust your intuition. Be a little bit less formal and structured.

Get that weekly plan done in less than an hour. Time block plan should not take much time at all. And then just get after actually executing. All right. Moving on here, we have an interesting question about deep work when you were distracted by social anxiety. Hi, Kyle. I'm Jacob.

I'm a manager at a technology corporation. I've been carving out time in my schedule for deep work. But one thing that distracts me from deep work is social anxiety before important meetings with staff or clients. Typically, when I have deep work blocks before these meetings, I struggle with focus. I feel the need to rehearse the meeting and review content related to it, which prevents me from actually doing deep tasks. Any tips for not letting social anxiety affect our deep work? Well, Jacob, as a tribute to the MRNA vaccines that are out there right now for the coronavirus, I am going to suggest a two-dose solution to help mitigate some of these anxiety issues.

So the first dose is to have, for every meeting scheduled on your calendar, for any presentation where you might be anxious about talking to other people and how it's going to go, schedule a rehearsal slash review of the material at least one day in advance. To be automatic, this goes on my calendar, the Zoom call a day or two before. I also add for myself a rehearsal slash review session. Now the key for this rehearsal slash review session is that it is earlier than your anxiety would normally come. You're not putting this right before the meeting because then that day when you're starting

to worry about the meeting, you know, like I still, you know, I still, you know, I have. haven't reviewed this yet? What if I don't have it? I mean, the anxiety is going to be there. But if you actually go over everything and convince yourself, okay, I know I'm going to say, I've rehearsed it, this seems good, I have a plan. And you've done this before you even got close enough to be anxious. That can help short circuit a lot of anxiety once you actually get, let's say, to the day of. The second dose, the booster dose, as it were, should happen right before the meeting. So schedule 20 or 30 minutes right before every meeting to go over the material one more time, make sure you have everything together

to clear your head, etc. Like have that little bit of a buffer. Now you're going to do a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy. As you find yourself, let's say the day of, starting to feel a little bit anxious, it's starting to distract you from your deep work. Instead of actually directly addressing the ruminations that are vocalizing this anxiety,

you say, okay, I did a review already and felt confident. And I'm going to check in, all that again right before the meeting, just to make sure that nothing slips my head that I went over the day before, that's a good plan. I trust that plan. So I don't need to think about that meeting right now. This is a little bit of a cognitive judo trick. It's basically the same idea behind my shutdown complete ritual. The whole point about the shutdown complete ritual we talk about often on this show is that when you feel work anxiety, you can say, I'm not going to address the ruminations

directly. I'm not going to review my plan. I'm not going to think about what's coming up. I'm not going to try to convince myself point by point that things are going okay at work. I'm going to say instead, I said shutdown complete, or I checked the shutdown complete checkbox in the time block planner. I would not have done that yesterday or earlier today. If I had not actually reviewed everything, reviewed my plan, checked everything, closed the open loops, and made sure I was okay to stop working. So I am okay. And it's a big difference. not addressing the specifics of the anxiety, but instead just reassuring yourself that you did a ritual that you trust

really reduces to grip that has on your mind. So you can just do the same thing here. I did my day before review and felt confident about it. Hey, you can even put a star in your time block planner that if you finish that review, that rehearsal, the day before a big meeting, you're like, this went well, I think I have what I need.

I think to me is going to go, well, put a star next to that block, right? make it visual. So you can literally say I would not have starred that block if I was not confident after that that I was prepared. So I'm not going to go back and think about specifically what I'm going to do. I'm not going to review anything in my head. I'm going to say, look, I did the review yesterday. I started. I wouldn't have done that if I wasn't confident. And I have a check coming right before just to review and make sure that nothing slips through. That's a good plan. I trust it. If you keep going back and just reviewing the ritual and not the rumination, ritual not the rumination. Again, the grip.

of that rumination will be lesser on your mind. It doesn't eliminate anxiety. It limits its potency. You can find yourself better able to execute that deep work, or whatever it is you're trying to do, that the anxiety has been distracting you from. So again, you're not going to get rid of social anxiety from your life, but this really will,

it's like it turns down the volume. It's probably the best way to explain it. Simple hack, simple visual cues, simple routine, but it can go a long way. All right, let's see here. We have a question, oh, a writing question. A question about writing for top publications. Hi, Cal, I'm Alex, a writer and small business owner in Austin, Texas.

I'm a big fan of your podcast and books. My question has to do with writing for top-tier publications. How do you recommend avoiding the slush pile when submitting articles to competitive magazines and blogs? Thanks for taking my question. Well, Alex, in my experience, which fair warning may not be representative of all freelance writers, but in my experience, I think people put too much focus on submissions. They have this model that the way that top-tier publications operate is that they look at submissions to try to find what are the most interesting article ideas that have been sent our way. Let's select the most interesting article ideas to put out, let's say, like an issue of our magazine. And that's not really the way it necessarily works.

A lot of top publications are less interested in finding interesting submissions than they are in finding interesting writers. They want to have a stable of contributor and staff writers for their publication who have each a distinctive style and point of view and really good craft. It's like you're assembling a sports team or something like this. You know, we need a versatile power forward and a really good big man to stay in the paint. You're trying to put together a team that can.

and regularly generate the type of content that's going to help your publication sort of stand out. Also, you could have writers for your publication that have a distinctive voice, that people come back to your publication to read, etc. So if you see top-tier publication as they're gathering writers, not submissions, that means your focus would be less on individual submissions and more on your own career as a writer, that you want to be a writer who is so good that you can't be ignored. Now, I don't do a ton of freelance writing, but I do a fair amount.

In most recent years, the places I've probably published most often would be the New Yorker, the New York Times, and to a slightly lesser extent, wired. I would say those are the three publications where I do most of my article publications. In all those cases, I've never blindly submitted something. In all those cases, an editor has come to me. You know, hey, here's a topic. Do you want to take a swing in an op-ed on this, et cetera? they had read my books, I suppose.

Maybe they were subscribing to my newsletter. I had just developed over many years a point of view in a particular style and had worked on my craft. And for some publications, it seemed like a good fit for what they're looking for. So they came and talked to me about it. So Alex, if you deploy that model in your own career, your focus really should be on how do I become a writer who has a specific style and point of view that's interesting. supported by really good craft. So it takes a lot of practice, but also takes a lot of intention.

You know, kind of leaving the mindset of just, and this is the problem with the submission mindset, is you're just looking for what is an interesting topic. Oh, here's another interesting topic. And you can be all over the place, just trying to find interesting topics. Whereas if you instead put that energy into, what are the types of topics I talk about,

what's my point of view on these topics, what's my style, and you're honing that, that can pay off more into long term. So how do you actually become noticed? Well, I suppose you need to be publishing in places where you can be seen. So places that are maybe more accessible than, you know, the Atlantic. If the very top tier is coming to you, you're not coming to them. They're not going to be accessible yet.

So how do you catch their attention? You find places that are accessible. You find homes in which you can publish and then really try to become so good that you can't be ignored. Now, I did this with my newsletter slash blog. I also did this with book writing. book writing is a place where it can be idea driven, where you can be someone who is not well known, but you have a really good idea and you're the right person to write it. You can get that book published.

And that's really good. You published a book. Then it gets you seen that generates more opportunities for you to write other places. So that can be a virtuous cycle. So I focused on books and I focused on my own newsletter slash blog. And then I threw in years of very intentional work. Very intentional work. What's my point of view?

What's my style? How do I get my craft better? Repeat, repeat, repeat. All right. So anyways, I don't know if this is the most uplifting of advice because it does seem like a big lift. You know, basically just be so good that people come and ask you to write for them. But I think that really is how a lot of a lot of top-tier publications work. Now, you know, if you're a staff writer for a top publication, you're still internally pitching.

You know, oh, I have this idea. What about this for an article? but that's a completely different dynamic than a pitch coming in over the transom. So find the places where you can get a foothold, can be seen, and then ask yourself, okay, how can I make the stuff that is being seen as good as possible? And then keep up in that standards, keep deliberately practicing, keep your focus intentional on being distinctive, on having a style, and having a point of view.

and that's going to be your best bet to ultimately move up in the caliber of publications where you publish. All right. Well, as long as we're thinking about writing, let's do one more quick question here that has to do with habits for writers. Hi, Cal. My name is Angela. I'm an illustrator, a writer, and an aspiring picture book creator. I've been a big fan of your work for a couple of years now, and I've read deep work and digital minimalism, and I recommend it to most everyone I meet. I find writing for my blog valuable, but I have never been good at social media as it causes me lots of anxiety, and my work is way better when I don't concern myself with it.

But I still feel the pull to share my work on Instagram because it seems I'll miss out on being seen for opportunities and the chance to sell my work. Currently, I post a blog to a tiny handful of people, and I find that some people on social media say they like my work, but most are not compelled to get off the platform and subscribe to my blog. So my question for you is, how do I build relevance for my work if I don't post it on social media? Well, Angela, the first thing I would do would be to take that question about how you find relevance for your work and ask, how would an illustrator have answered that 10 years ago.

The job of being an illustrator has been around for a long time. It's not a very new job. Large-scale Instagram use is less than a decade old. So ask yourself this question. If it was 10 years ago, what were illustrators doing to get noticed to build their reputations, to advance their careers? because here's the thing, in many fields that have been around for a while, these existing channels for identifying and rewarding talent, they're still around.

Now, social media might have brought in other channels, additional routes to gain recognition. In a lot of cases, it just brings a plus to the traditional channels, maybe having a large following in this particular creative endeavor. It could be a plus to you succeeding as you go through a, an existing channel for promoting your work. But for the most part, the existing ways that your field function probably are still there. I mean, this is the case, for example, in writing. People have been writing books for a long time.

There's a very traditional path where you query an agent, an agent likes your idea and who you are. They help you craft the proposal. The agents bring these proposals to editors. The editors look at them, you know, do I want to make a job? an offer on this? Does this fit with this year's slate of books? Do I like this idea? Do I like this author? And in all of that, maybe if you have like a big social media following, it could be a bit of a plus, maybe less of a plus than you think. But it doesn't change the underlying dynamic of, you know, being the right person with the right idea, finding the agent, et cetera, et cetera.

So that would be the first thing I would say because there's actually an opportunity lurking here. a lot of people have in various fields, various creative fields, have diminished the attention they spend on the old and still existing channels through which careers are built, reputations grow, challenges identified, rewarded. They've diminished their attention on that to put more of it on social media. Usually because social media is easier. And it has this lottery ticket feel of, I don't know, maybe my account will go viral. You know, it's easy to do.

I'm just posting stuff. and I'm talking to people and it's kind of fun and maybe that funnness will alchemize into career capital. Maybe that funnness will alchemize into value that will be rewarded. It might happen, probably won't. And though they diminish their efforts on the things that actually used to be important until just a minute ago in their field. So if you are actually focusing on like, well, this is really the path that illustrators often take and I'm going to really understand this path and put a lot of energy into here's where I am and how do I get to the next step? You might actually have an easier time of this today than you would 10 years ago because your competition in some sense is being distracted

by follower numbers. That's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is artists have a complicated relationship with Instagram. I talk about this in my book, Digital Minimalism. But one of the things I discovered working in that book is that visual artists, for example, who are doing like fine art, they have found Instagram to be very useful. because it exposes them to a lot of work by other artists in their general genre. The exposure to other work is the fuel for the creative process.

This democratized in a regional sense, the ability to produce fine art at a high level, because it used to be you had to live in a city that had a big gallery scene so you could see enough art that your creative juices could flow and you could produce something new and novel. A lot of artists now post their work on, Instagram, so it's possible to get that exposure no matter where you work. And so it's a positive example of a place where social media, in this narrow instance, has a big boost. All right? So artists have a

complicated relationship. But what happened with those artists? Well, when they became more minimalist about their technology habits, the ones that I talked to, they realized if that's the main reason they were using Instagram, then they could put rules in place to minimize a lot of the anxiety-inducing cost. And so the digital minimalist artists that I worked with and talked to, for example, took it off their phone. And they unfollowed most people. They only followed, let's say, 10 artists whose work really inspired them. And I'm just looking at this work as the main value they're getting out of social media. They said, well, I'm going to do this on my desktop. I'm going to do it once a week. It's Friday, late afternoon, spend an hour, look through everything that's been

posted from my 10 people I follow. Boom. Hit a creativity before my weekend studio hours. hours. It's one hour of my life I'm spending on Instagram. I'm not interacting. I'm not distracted by it. It doesn't get into way of my work. It's not causing anxiety. And I'm getting this benefit out of it. So you might want to approach that mindset that if you decide that, okay, for whatever reason, the old ways of building a career as an illustrator don't work. And I have to rely to some degree on Instagram. And you convince yourself that's true. You have evidence that's true. Use that minimalist mentality of once I know why I'm using it, I can build rules around how I use it to minimize those costs. And for you, if you feel like you need to post your work, because you

have evidence that really does make a difference. And again, I want you to have evidence before you set any foot into the social media ecosystem. Have real evidence. This particular behavior creates this particular benefit. You have that evidence. Set rules just like the fine artists do. There's no reason for it to be on your phone. Have a regular schedule on which you post whatever art you're posting on Instagram, that's fine. Do it on your computer on a regular schedule. You might even want to use one of those software tools where it holds to post for you and then does it at the time you've scheduled so you don't even have to see a live

Instagram account. Don't interact with people. Don't get in the back and forth. Don't follow a ton of people. You know, it's just a part of your professional life, like buying new inks for your painting or buying new paper or paying your taxes. is it's like I do two things a week. They're posted on a schedule.

I do it on my desktop. It takes about seven minutes out of my life to do the posting. I have almost no interaction with the social media channel. So if you find a reason that social media is valuable, and again, I'm saying for artists, there's interesting intersections with Instagram as a case study. You can now optimize because you know why you're using it.

You can optimize this in a way that you're not anxious. You're not distracted. It's not causing more harm. It's not causing more harm than good. Right. So that's classic digital minimalism. that applies to any field in which you think social media might be important. Find evidence of what specifically is important and how important is it.

If you have an answer there that's compelling, build rules around your use of those tools that gets that benefit and avoids almost every cost. All right, Angela, I hope that helps. So I have to say, based on your question, it kind of sounds like you really don't want to use it. So maybe I really should just give this simpler summary here. It's okay if you don't want to use it. it's okay even if like maybe there's some value but you just don't like it you can join me we'll be the two people we'll be the two people under the age of 65 who do creative work who are not on social

media we'll survive you and i together angelo we'll survive all right so so i'll underscore all of my answer by saying look if this stuff just makes you anxious just don't do it right life's too short to force yourself to do things that make you unhappy for moderate benefits at best. Social media may be of moderate benefit at best, but I'll tell you something that is very beneficial, and that is ExpressVPN. Now, a VPN, the way it works is not that hard to understand, right? You connect from your machine to a VPN server. So if you use ExpressVPN, you're actually connecting to one of their servers on a completely encrypted connection. That server then goes out to the internet on your behalf. So if you're trying to access a website,

that server will access the website on your behalf. The website sends the information back to the server. Then the server passes it back to you over a secure channel. So you are hidden from the people you are talking to, the sites you are talking to, the services you're talking to. There's a lot of reasons why this is a good idea, but as I mentioned on Monday, one particularly cool thing you can do with ExpressVPN technology is access streaming services like Netflix from different countries. These services show different content depending on where you're connecting from. But see, ExpressVPN has servers all around the world.

So you want to see the Japanese content on Netflix. You can log in to a Japanese server. That server then talks to Netflix. on your behalf. As far as Netflix is concerned, it is talking to a machine in Japan. You get the Japanese content. One of you, the BBC eye player, but you don't live in the UK. Connect to an ExpressVPN server in the UK. It talks to the BBC on your behalf. The BBC thinks you're in the UK. You see the UK content. So this is just one of the many cool benefits you can get from having a VPN service. And if you're going to do any VPN service, ExpressVPN is really

best in class. I've tested this. It's fast. It's fast enough that you can even access these services on your big screen through an ExpressVPN and are not going to notice the lag. All right. So be smart. Stop paying full price for streaming services and only getting a fraction of their content and get your money's worth at ExpressVPN.com slash deep. Now don't forget to use my link so you can get three extra months free. That is EXP-R-E-S-V-P-N.com. slash deep, expressvPN.com slash deep to learn more. I also want to talk about longtime friends of the show, Blinkist. You know the drill here. Blinkist is an app.

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slash deep. All right, moving on, we have a non-work question about hobbies. Hi, Cal. I'm Steve, and I'm a software engineer. After following some of your advice, I have developed some high-quality leisure hobbies, one of which is a sporting activity, and the other is learning a musical instrument. I'm getting joy out of both of these, and I want to commit to both of them with a regular practice schedule. The problem is, doing both often leaves me without enough slack in my schedule, to the point where I think something has to give. What does a healthy approach to hobbies look like? Thanks, Well, Steve, of course, as you know, I'm a big believer in high-quality leisure. I'm also a big believer, as you are doing, that structuring some of these pursuits,

so being more systematic about it is good. Because you experience yourself making progress, you see yourself getting better, there's real satisfactions in that. You also build up a connoisseurship around whatever it is you're doing, which allows you to get just more appreciation out of life. general, so if you become better at an instrument, you can now really enjoy listening to music that features that instrument, for example, at a higher level, because you understand a craft. You understand what goes into it.

Right, so I'm a big fan of what you're doing, as you might expect. But in your case, the issue is you don't have enough time. You do not have enough time, it sounds like, for you in your current configuration to do both of those high-quality leisure activities concurrently, and with a high-level of, attention and structure. So you could get rid of one of them, what I might suggest instead in the short term, you might consider a seasonal approach. Right.

So for the athletic endeavor, maybe there's a season or two seasons out of the year where that is really getting a lot of your focus. And then the music practicing doesn't go away. But you find a low impact but regular place in your schedule that keeps your skills okay. I do a half hour practice or I get 20 minutes of practice around lunch during my lunch hour or right before work or I do it on the weekend. And you know, you find a way that you're using that instrument, you're playing that instrument, you're keeping your skills, maybe learning things a little bit, but not a huge, like,

I'm going to get twice as good. It's just like I'm going to get a little bit better over time. I'm going to keep that epsilon strictly greater than zero in terms of my skill growth. But it's not taking up a lot of time. And then maybe there's another season like the winter where you pull back that athletic endeavor. Instead of putting a lot of effort into learning that skill, you're just into maintenance mode. There's some, some exercising I do on a regular schedule, and now you put aside more time for, okay, I'm going to push my skill level at this instrument to a new level. I'm going

to practice every day. I'm going to get a teacher. I'm going to really try to push to the next level. Then in a different season, it swaps. Maintenance mode on the instrument, pushing hard on the athletic endeavor. So that might help you balance these two in a way that doesn't make you feel completely overloaded. The bigger issue here, however, is that they're all too busy, you know? The option that's rarely suggested in this case, but I think should be openly discussed, is, well, is there a way that you could work less so that both those activities fit? I think we're really lacking both nuance and flexibility in our thinking about constructing

a deep life. And this might be an American cultural thing more than it is in other countries. I'm not sure about that. But we don't put enough thought into, all right, what role should work play versus other things? We tend to just let work expand

until we're a little bit uncomfortable and then say what can we fit into what remains. It's somewhat socially unacceptable to artificially limit or pull back on work to say, okay, I built this skill, and instead of using it to get more money and more work, I'm going to use this skill to actually gain more free time so I can do high quality leisure pursuits

or be with my family or invest in my community. Those options aren't discussed enough. One place where they are discussed is my 2012 book, so good they can't ignore you. In that book, I talked about autonomy as what I called the dream job elixir. Having control of when and how you work is crucial, I argued.

It's crucial for building a life that is very satisfying When you find people who love what they do for a living, they often have a lot of autonomy. How do they get that autonomy? They get really good at what they do. That gets them career capital. They leverage that career capital to get more autonomy in their life. So let me give you a particular example from the book that might be relevant to your situation. You said you're a software engineer.

I profile a software engineer named Lulu in So Good They Can Ignore You. She got really good. I documented how she built up career capital. It took a little while. You know, she wasn't from a computer background. She actually got started in QA, so doing quality assurance after college and then automated a bunch of those tests and picked up more skills and became an expert in certain types of database systems. She became very good. She could have traded that capital for maximizing income.

You know, like, let me start, negotiate for really high salary or start my own shop with a few people and do really high price contracts. It was an in-demand skill. She instead used that career capital to gain autonomy. She spent an extended portion of her career in a freelance mode. So she had control over her schedule. And she did an on-and-off style schedule. So she would take six weeks, sometimes more time off at a time. And you know what she would do in that time?

She would go after high-quality leisure. So she would do an engagement for six months, right? Really valuable. makes good money, because she built that capital. And then she might go to Thailand for six months where her family was from. In some of these time off periods, she learned how to fly, she learned how to scuba dive. And she built this really interesting balance of she does work at a high level that she finds engaging and she's good at and is well compensated for it. And she uses that to have a life where she has way more leisure time than might otherwise be possible.

She could be richer You know She traded all that capital For I wanted as much income But she's like look I can make enough money I can make enough money in six months That I could spend the other six months off

And wow, that's going to make my life Way way, way better Than if I worked really hard 12 months a year but had a nicer car So what I'm really arguing here There's this deeper point I talked about it back then But it's really come back to me

More recently I've been toying around With some article and book ideas That are very vaguely in this space but busyness, the corruption of our instinct to want to go do useful things and how that gets overloaded or corrupted when we make ourselves too busy and how it adds these stresses and anxieties to our lives and rethinking what a quote unquote productive life looks like. All of these are big issues.

I think we need more thinking, more radical thinking, more flexible thinking, more nuanced thinking. and then when we look at a problem, when we look at a problem like yours, Steve, in which you say, look, I just don't have time to do two hobbies instead of just having my original answer,

which is like, yeah, you don't, so you might have to switch between them or be very careful about your scheduling. One of our default answers can become, oh, well, maybe we can work less. Create a working life where you're comfortable, you're financially secure,

and you do an athletic endeavor, and you're learning an instrument, and you don't feel overloaded. There is an interesting. interesting topic lurking here. I think there's interesting new ideas lurking here about how we figure these things out. Something I will probably return to, but Steve, I welcome this opportunity right now in this early stage to do some roughly formed ranting. All right, speaking of ranting, let's do just one more question. This one is about creative work. Hi, Calam. My name is David from Maryland. I wanted to ask if you had a standard way that you

approach creative endeavors. Do you have any standard focusing questions that you use or kind of like a brainstorming procedure? That's for the Greek reference. I'm trying to give my creative ideas wings, much like the Pegasus, so I can ride them to greater heights.

Thank you. Well, David, it's always great to hear from a fellow Marylander, Old Bay, Ravens, etc. I enjoy your mythological reference. Let us also hope, though, that as we give these creative ideas, wings, they do not turn out like in the story of Icarus to be waxed and therefore melt as we

hubristically push towards higher aspirations. All right, so how's that for a complication? Getting to the meat of your question here, when it comes to hard creative work, working on a, for me, working on a proof or working on a hard article or book chapter, etc. There's some structuring I'll do. First of all, it should be time blocked. This is when I'm doing it. It's on my time block planner. It's deep work. It's deep work during this time. Right? You're not waiting for inspiration to hit.

You're not working, having to have a conversation with your mind every minute about, is this enough? Should we do more? Should we take a break? It's no. I'm doing it from this time to this time. It's clear when it's done. It's done.

So you can give it your full attention. I'm a fan of deep work ritual. So if there's some little ritual you do ahead of certain types of hard, creative deep work that helps. Go for a walk. You go to a particular place. You brew a particular cup of coffee. You clean off your desk.

You have a dedicated location that you use just for the deep I think that's all great. That helps. None of it is a magic potion, though. None of this is going to make hard creative work seem easy. None of this is going to throw you into a flow state consistently or make hard creative work seem effortless. It all takes the edge off. It all conserves some cognitive resources that you can now reassign to the work at hand, but it's still hard and some days are going to be better than others. And that's okay because beneath all of this, The secret to hard creative work is that it is work. You treat it like a job. You clock in for your shifts. You produce what you can. When your shift is over, you're done. Repeat enough times and you end up with something that you're proud of.

So do the time block and do the rituals. But ultimately, go back to like Jerry Seinfeld talked about in the comedian's documentary that he did. where he noted at some point, you know, he was early in his comedy career, I suppose it was, and he saw some construction workers. And he was thinking, look, that's a job. They have to show up whether they feel like it or not, often earlier in hard conditions and just do their work. And he had this realization, okay, even though what I'm doing is creative, I'm writing jokes, I can do the same thing.

You show up and you do your work. And sometimes you're not into it and sometimes you are. But the construction workers don't have the choice of saying, I'm not feeling inspired right now. I want to just look at Instagram instead. Don't give yourself that choice either. So ultimately, it's going to come back to this mindset of creative work is work. Work is hard. You know, be a grown-up, do your work, much time to do work.

Some days it's rainy out and you have to get up early because the construction site is up open early. And that's okay because the road still needs to get built. the pipe still needs to get connected. We'll be a little bit specific here in this metaphor. But David, I think you know what I'm getting at here. All right? So structure fine. Ritual fine.

But ultimately, you put in the hours and you pile those up. And in the end, you start to get stuff that you're pretty proud. You're pretty proud of producing. You give those ideas wings that will not melt as you get close to us metaphorical sun. All right, well, given that I'm getting too close to metaphorical overload here, we should probably wrap up this episode. Thank you for everyone who submitted their questions to find out how you can submit your own questions. Go to calmewport.com slash podcast for instructions.

We'll be back next Monday with the next whole-length episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.