Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 73: Can I Become Rich Living Deeply?

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.WORK QUESTIONS - What makes a day "productive" for a researcher? [5:10] - How do I get past imposter syndrome in academia? [9:29]  - Should I get a PhD to become a writer? [14:22] - How can I make my team less reactive? [18:06] - How do I make daily/weekly planning a habit that sticks? [28:12]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Is attention training going to become an important sector? [31:47]  - How do I organize my electronic files and folders? [37:26] - Where do I store random ideas? [44:46] - How do I schedule my podcasting and blogging? [48:35]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - What do I do about a significant other who wallows in the shallows? [50:45]  - Can I become rich while living a deep life? [58:00] - How do I cultivate a stronger sense of community? [1:01:56]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 73. Two quick announcements. Number one concerns questions. So the batch of questions that I have been polling from for recent episodes was actually from a survey I sent out in December. I'm almost out, so I'm about to send out a new survey to collect new questions for upcoming episodes. Now, the way this works is that I send these surveys to my e-exambers.

email list. I like to limit the survey to my email list because my email subscribers tend to have been following me for a while and sort of know the types of things I talk about and don't talk about and the types of things I know about and the type of things I don't know about. So we tend to get a higher quality class of questions that way. If you're not an email subscriber, you can find out how to sign up and take part in these questions surveys at calnewport.com slash podcast. I have the instructions there. The other quick announcement involves a world without email. As you know at this point, my new book is coming out soon and soon means next week, March 2nd. A World Without Email is released. As I've been discussing, I've been encouraging people to pre-order

the book if possible because that has a lot of positive benefits for the launch. to reward people who do pre-order, if you go to Calamnewport.com slash pre-order, you can register that pre-order and you'll immediately get an excerpt from the books. You can dive right in and access to this online course I created called the Email Academy that goes live on March 2nd. People were asking me, what is this online course? So I thought I would clarify real quick. It's a collection of short videos featuring me that cuts right to the chase of, okay, how do you take out the course? four actionable ideas from this book and put them into action right away. So as you're going through the book, you can watch these videos of me where I say,

okay, here's what you do, step one, step two. Here's how you get these things into action. So it's a nice compliment to the book for those who want to start to see some benefit in their own life, for their team's life, or their organization's life. But more importantly, I would just be thankful if anyone who's thinking about perhaps buying this book or supporting the podcast would consider preordering because, again, for lots of esoteric publishing industry reasons. It does make a big deal when people buy the book in advance. All right, so enough about that. I'm looking at today's show. No deep dive today.

But we do have a good collection of questions. I see here one about how I schedule my blogging and podcasting into my day. Another one here from a new faculty member suffering from imposter syndrome and a reader wondering about whether or not it is possible to become rich while cultivating a deep life. And those are just three of many interesting queries that we will dive into. But before we get started, I would like to thank a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions Podcast, and that is stamps.com.

I was actually thinking about them this morning. The DeepWork HQ is one block from the post office. office here in Tacoma Park. And it's cold here in D.C. this time of year. We've been having sleet. We've been having snow. It has been cold and slushy. And I noticed a long line outside of that post office stretching down the sidewalk.

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They work with the postal service, but also UPS. You get discounts on their rates. So even if you send a little things or big things or a lot of things or not that many things, avoid that long line outside of the post office during the snow. It is just a no-brainer. You save money, you save time, you save hassle, that's all Stamps.com. So stop wasting your time go to the post office and go to Stamps.com instead. There's no risk.

If you use my promo code deep, you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts required. So just go to Stamps.com. click on the microphone at the top of the home page and type in deep. And that's stamps.com promo code deep. Stamps.com never go to the post office again. All right, let's get rolling now with some work questions.

We'll start with a question from Chelsea who asks, how do you define a productive day as a researcher? I am a junior CS theory researcher. many days I am going in circles about problems or endlessly reading papers. Some days I cannot tell if I'm really being productive. How would you define a productive day as a CS theory researcher? Well, Chelsea, that's a hard question. There's obvious productive days.

In our particular esoteric field that we share here, the obvious productive days are progress on a proof. I'm trying to solve this problem and I solve it. or I make significant steps towards solve it that I capture and a proof or a lima or what have you. Then there's all the other days, which are most of the days when you're working on a problem. And that can be really difficult, right? It can be really difficult to spend a whole day where you're trying to understand a paper and you don't really understand it. Or a day when you're trying to solve a proof and you don't really make some traction.

So here's just a couple observations you might find useful. one, when I'm working on something and even if I fail to make quote-unquote progress, I take detailed notes in my research notebook. What failed? All right, so we looked at this. Here's why it doesn't work. Let me document why this approach didn't work. Like here's a case study example.

Here's a gadget that shows why this symmetry breaking method is not going to work in this class of graphs. Here's a quick back of the envelope probabilistic argument that shows why this algorithmic approach is not going to yield the desired asymptotic bound. Capture why something doesn't work and what lessons come out of it. That is going to allow you to extract more progress out of failed steps than if you just sort of give up. Like, I tried and I didn't get somewhere. Psychologically, it's also going to help you feel like something more substantial actually got done that. He says, look at my notes.

Here they are. I learned not to do this and this doesn't work. And here's an interesting insight. That is helpful work. A quick aside here because I can imagine the follow-up questions. What do I use as my research notebook? I have both grid paper notebooks where I'll dedicate one to a problem, if it's one I'm working on a lot and I'm working on outside or in the woods or something like this.

But ultimately where my notes end up, I like to start latex, usually using overleaf a paper skeleton for the topic. And I take notes from those notebooks and actually typeset them and format them into the laytec the latex document for that particular problem or project, because that action of actually formally writing something up, even if what I'm formally writing up is a good description of why what I tried today didn't work helps formalize that knowledge that makes it feel more productive. I work with other people a lot. I find if I've gone too many sessions without really making progress, and honestly, my trip wire on this right now is pretty tightly wound, so maybe like two or three

sessions without making progress. I want someone else to bounce ideas off of. I want someone else to explain where I'm stuck, a collaborator who might be able to unstick me. I just find that to be maximally efficient because you could then deploy on what you're working at every single thing they know. And they know a lot of things you don't know and you know things they don't know. And when those powers combine, it's a Captain Planet type situation. You can make you can make better progress. Finally, trying to read and understand papers, especially as a junior researcher, that's the whole game in CS theory, the very best theoreticians I knew from my cohort at MIT, from the theory group at MIT, became the very best theoreticians in the cohort because they read more papers.

I should read more papers. I wish I had read more papers. Always think about reading a paper as productive. You don't have to understand every result, but what you want to do is gather tools for your toolbox. So this looks like an interesting result. I'm going to take the time to learn this. again, if you want to try to cement this knowledge and give yourself the appearance of productivity, write up your own summary, put it in a latex document somewhere to solidify your knowledge. But reading papers is always productive, even if it's not directly connected to something that you're trying to solve. All right, as long as we're in the mood, let's do one more young professor question here.

This one comes from young faculty who says, A big fan of yours. Like you, I'm a CS faculty in a research-focused university. While I do okay, I think I very regularly feel like an imposter. Like I'm not good enough. Very often, feeling like this, I end up wasting time refreshing my inbox. Well, young faculty, in academia, there's an official term for people who feel like they are an imposter.

and we call them assistant professors, which is all to say imposter syndrome is incredibly common. It's a weird fake job, young faculty. There's very little structure, incredibly high standards, and everyone is sort of putting on a show. I'm kind of lying about things and trying to move the conversation towards directions that make them look better. So imposter syndrome is incredibly common.

I actually think it's just a part of going through academic life. there's this psychological component. So part of the challenge is, can you master hard material and teach it? Can you master hard material and produce original thoughts? The third part of this young professor challenge is can you also manage the almost unavoidable psychological difficulties of doing such an elite job that has all these pressures? Which is all to say, you shouldn't be upset that you feel those things. That's just one of the challenges you have to get past. I remember once listening to a documentary

and it was about baseball and they were talking to a relief pitcher and this might have been a closer if I'm remembering correctly. So it's a very high leverage, high pressure role. And the way this closer talked about his role is, oh, a big part of what you do

as a closer is nerve management. Because of course you're going to feel nervous, you're coming out to try to save the World Series, you know, ninth inning. to close it out or something like this, of course you're going to feel all this pressure. It's not bad that you feel the pressure. What you pride yourself on is your ability to actually execute a pitch

even though you feel pressure. Not quite the same thing, but kind of it. It's like, okay, you're going to feel some imposter syndrome. You're going to have some highs like when a paper gets in. You're going to have lows when your papers get rejected. To this day, I still go through this when my papers get rejected. And that's just part of the job. So the question is, what do you do?

How do you deliver despite this unavoidable psychological reality? And what you need to do here is trust the process. and the process is as a young faculty at a research-focused university, your focus should be on research. You should be working with the best people you can, especially early on. It's completely fine to reach back into the collaborators you have as a postdoc or as a graduate student or to try to collaborate with some of the best professors in your existing department. Work with the very best people you can, on the very best problems you can. Give it deep work hours every single day.

Make that the center of your working life. and then fit in everything else in the time that remains. You know, so you're working on, by collaborating with really good people, you know you're working on the right problems, being pushed to the right venues, and you're just trying to be as useful as possible early on. I want to make progress. I want to bounce these things open. I'm going to read papers, going to try to break open proofs,

deep work every day, really focus on that work, use a time block planner, track my deep work hours, organize my time outside of my deep work so things don't get too out of control. lay low, say no to things, don't stick your head up, don't volunteer for things, have a quota on how many program committees you join, how many journal reviews you do, and just almost every day working deeply, a reasonable amount of time on the right problems with the right people. Trust that process. You just got to trust that process.

Keep doing that for a couple of years. That's what we'll begin to produce results. And while you're waiting for that process to play out, enjoy the nice things about being a professor, enjoy the flexibility. at least once a semester, take a weekday completely off because you can and go to a movie or I used to go to the movies and get lunch and go buy a book

or whatever it is, right? Like take days off because you can. When you have breaks, like the holiday breaks or the spring breaks or the summer breaks, really lean into that seasonality. Ramp things down during those breaks and then wrap them back up otherwise. There's a lot of things that are cool about being a professor.

Don't miss those now because you're worried about what's going to happen with 10 year later. but ultimately it's a trust-your-process type of move. Some days you'll feel great, some days you'll feel bad. You have to operate despite those psychological ups and downs and working with the best people on the best problems and just working every day on it. That's what adds up.

That's the best you can do. And that's what ultimately is going to help you actually make progress. All right, following the academic theme, let's move from faculty concerns to the concerns of the students they teach. Jimmy says, I have a dream of being a writer and consultant helping people live fuller lives through the great books of humanities. Do you think it is a better idea to first educate myself by getting a master's or PhD and then start writing and doing consulting? Or should I, as a college student, start doing these and grow my online presence?

Well, Jimmy, when it comes to nonfiction writing, what's important is that you need to be the right person to be writing the book that you end up pitching. So I have this semi-famous advice article on my blog study hacks that's called something like how to get a nonfiction book deal. I wrote it after my third book. So after I'd written my three student books, this was before I wrote my hardcover. It was before, you know, so good they can't ignore you in deep work. and digital minimalism, et cetera. But I wrote this article years ago giving advice for people who also wanted to write nonfiction books.

And this was one of the key ideas is you have to be the right person to write the book. So if you want to be someone who is writing books about the great works and how people can apply the great works to make their life richer, which, by the way, is a cool topic and a rich vein to mine, The question is, what is going to make you the right person to write that book? Now, there's a lot of answers there, but you actually have to pick one of these answers. So you mentioned getting a PhD. Well, you know, one of the answers to that question might be, yeah, if I'm a literature professor at Yale, I would be the right person to write a book about, you know, how to apply the classics to improve your life.

That's a book you could sell, especially if you taught a seminar on this and you had developed this curriculum. And so, yes, that's an answer that would require you to get a PhD. It would make you the right person to write that book. But that's also a really hard path. You better really want to become a literature professor at Yale. I would not set down that path just because you wanted to write a book because there's many other answers to this question of what could make you the right person to write that book. There's many other answers that don't necessarily require that.

And as an aside, to become a literature professor at Yale, you also are going to have to be basically the top student at a really top school right now, probably in Ivy League school right now, a real standout star. And even then it's going to be really, really hard, you know, to actually accomplish that goal. So that's probably not the most consistent or reliable way to get to your goal. You know, what else would make you the right person to write a book about that? I mean, look, you could study these topics in college where you are now. You could go through some sort of personal life experience where you integrate the classics into a sort of extreme way and then you're able to mind that experience to write the book. You could, I guess, run some sort of organization

that pulls together these ideas. Maybe you have some sort of group you start where people gather to talk and discuss these books and it becomes really big and now you're an interesting person to talk about what that has taught you. I don't know that there's one right answer or one answer is better than the others, but you need an answer that's better than just I think this is a cool idea. So that's the more concrete advice I would give you is figure out where can I get that's going to make me someone that it makes sense that I would write this book. And then I would put all my energy into that, becoming that person. I would be less interested probably in my online presence right now. I'd be less interested in trying to get this book idea going right now. I really

put my energy into sort of living the interesting life that makes you someone that should write that book. All right, moving on here. Let's do a question about non-academia related work. This one comes from Adeline, who says, Hi, Cal from New Zealand. I have been following your work for years, and I am grateful you have started your podcast. I manage an HR team of 25. What practices would you recommend to me

in implementing my team, many of which are reactive roles to achieve some sustainable and substantial productivity gains? Well, Adeline, my short answer is, buy them a copy of my book, A World Without Email. It comes out in the UK territories on March 4th. That includes Australia. All of your problems will be solved. Though I do think it's important that all 25 members of your

team get their own copy. Probably two copies actually, because you know, you want one at work and you want one at home. And they might lose one. So here's what we need to do out of line three copies of my book for every member of your 25 person team problem solved. While we wait for those orders to get here, though, I can give you one big idea from the book that I think you will find useful. When you're looking at a team, and it feels very reactive, like you're in your inbox a lot, or you're on Slack all the time, what's really going on here is that implicitly, your team has decided that their approach to organizing their work on the various things that your team does is to use a workflow I call the hyperactive hive mind.

It's a term did I coin right in the introduction of my book for the people who have preordered my book and got the excerpt sent to them right away. That excerpt they got sent right away explains what the hyperactive hive mind is, but it's basically an approach to collaboration in the knowledge sector in which you just use ad hoc unstructured back and forth messaging

on the fly to sort of just figure things out. This is fine if there's a small number of people working on one thing. The problem in a real team, however, is that there's dozens of different things being worked on. And then there's dozens of different people outside of that team, vendors and clients who also are working on things with members of people in the team. And if all these different things are being handled with ad hoc back and forth unstructured messages,

everything spirals out of control and your whole life becomes dominated by an inbox. And you are evading those substantial and significant productivity gains that you're looking for. So how do you get out of this? Think processes. And in particular, your team is actually executing. many different processes. And by a process, I mean a something that comes up frequently that requires members of your team

to work together to produce some outcome, some positive outcome. So maybe there's a process for how you respond to customer queries. Maybe there's a process for how you do the paperwork for the onboarding of a new client or customer or member of your organization that you serve. Maybe there's a process for how you update compliance knowledge as HR regs, New Zealand change over time, whatever.

You probably haven't named them, but you can really break down your work into actually we have a bunch of these different processes. These are the things we do again and again. And if you're not sure what these processes are, the easiest way to identify them is to actually use your inbox. And for every email in your inbox asked a question, what larger process is this associated with?

Like this message, what's the thing that this is trying to do? Is it like a meeting schedule? process implicitly happening here? Is it the compliance process happening here? And just going through your inbox in this way, you could probably list out 10 to 20 processes that you're regularly involved in. Now the key to getting away from the hyperactive hive mind is to ask for each of these processes, how do we actually want to work together to accomplish this thing? And in particular, is there a way to do this that will minimize the amount of unscheduled back and forth messaging required.

That's the metric you want to optimize. Not how complex your thing is, not how much time it takes, not how convenient or hard it is, how many unscheduled back and forth messages are required to actually accomplish this process. And by unscheduled, I mean a message that could arrive at any time, and then once it arrives, you're going to have to send it back. If you start optimizing, and here's how we're going to handle this repeated work objective, here's how we're going to handle it in a way that minimizes that sort of informal back and forth messaging. If you do this process after process after process,

the pressure in your inbox or the pressure on those Slack channels will significantly diminish because what's killing us is not the number of messages that's in our inbox. It's the number of asynchronous ongoing back and forth conversations that are unfolding in our inbox because that's what forces us to have to keep checking again and again and again because if everything is happening in these unstructured, unscheduled back and forth interactions, it's ping pong. And when the ball comes back to you, you got to hit it back. You can't wait three hours to hit it back. And if there's 17 different asynchronous back and forth conversations going on, every hour you're out of that inbox is an hour where a lot of things are going to slow up.

So you have to check this thing constantly. And that's when we get miserable. That's when we lose our cognitive cognitive capacity. So you've got to starve the hyperactive hive mind beast by changing the underlying processes so it doesn't generate those messages in the first place. And this might be really easy, right? In some cases, maybe you have to set up meetings on a regular basis to whatever, discuss new updates to codes. And maybe it requires five or six back and forth messages,

usually on average, to figure out when these meetings are going to happen with your team. But once you know that's one of your processes and you're trying to minimize back and forth messages, you might figure out, huh, probably worth a little bit of pain to use one of these scheduling tools that allows you just to say,

okay, we got to meet first half of next week on this. It's urgent. Pick a time that works. Here's to link no more back and forth messages. So there you say four or five back and forth messages, right? Expand that to many more processes and you really begin to see a difference. More concretely, maybe you have a contract filing and review process.

You're in HR, you mentioned. Someone's hired at your company. There's certain paperwork that has to be filled out, checked, and filed. And maybe right now you just kind of rock and roll. Hey, did you get this? What's going on with this? Can you check this for me? What about this?

Like maybe there's just a bunch of back and forth messaging you do when these contracts come in from a new employee. But if you say, oh, this is a process. And our goal is to minimize the back and forth messaging. And you might do a little bit of work up front. Talk with your team. You figure out how are we going to do this. and you might end up with an optimization in which you say,

okay, here's how it works. We have a shared Dropbox folder. And any new employee hire that happens, their contracts go into that folder. And your job, you know, Stephanie, is Monday is the day to check that folder. You go and you check that folder and you go through, you have time put aside on Mondays.

Everything just builds up through the week. you check what's in there. You look for issues. You file the whatever, you know, I don't know, the New Zealand forms, the Alpha 17 forms. You know, you go ahead and file those. And then the beta 7 forms that need supervisor review, those get moved into this other folder. The supervisors who do that review, just know that those are in there by COB Monday. They have all day Tuesday to look at them to sign them.

And then Stephanie comes back on Wednesday. and there's whatever. Does the final submission? All right, maybe we're more complicated. Maybe sometimes there's some discussions. You're like, yeah, we have this open meeting and maybe in like a pandemic era, it's an open Zoom meeting that's just from 9 to 930

on Wednesday mornings. If you have any questions or issues, just swing by there and you tell them to Stephanie and then she files the things on Wednesday afternoon. Obviously, I'm making this whole process up, but that type of process I just described takes a little bit of time to put into place. But once it's in place,

now every single week this contract checking and filing this hypothetical process that you didn't even realize was a name the process that your team is doing again and again and again is executed with basically

no back and forth messaging and I can't emphasize enough it is the back and forth messaging that there's a message that I have to respond and you're going to hit that ball ping pong right back to me at some point and then I have to hit it back to you ping then you're going to hit back to me ping

and I have to just keep checking my inbox and moving those back and forth that does not scale. Once you have three or four conversations like that going on, you've devastated your ability to work. So you take three, four, five different processes and optimize them the way I'm talking about to get rid of those back and forth messaging.

I'm telling you Adeline's going to feel completely different. If you do this for most of your processes, I give case studies like this again and again in my book. Once you've done this for most of your processes, that inbox, it shrinks. And no longer is it this thing that dominates, your life and makes you helplessly reactive. It becomes like a better version of the physical mailbox that you used to check once a day in the office of 20 years ago. Oh yeah, I'll check my inbox maybe

today just to see, I'm expecting some file, you know, my accountant is sending an invoice and there's an announcement from parking operations about new fees for the parking garage. Great. I'll check that at some point just to see that information. And it becomes this thing. It's just convenient source of a little bit of information and it does not dominate your life. So that's a long answer to a quick. question, but obviously, there's a lot on this I've been thinking about. There's a lot on this in my book. And it all comes back to processes, rethinking processes, and reducing those back and forth messages. All right, let's do one more work question here. This comes from Caleb. Caleb asks, how do you ingrain the habit of weekly and daily planning? I find that even though I have enjoyed your

planner, there are times when I inadvertently fall out of the habit of filling in days. One day suddenly becomes four days without me knowing. Well, Caleb, it's expected and fine that you miss days when you're doing a time block planning habit, and it's fine if you occasionally go through periods where you miss your weekly planning. There's a lot of reasons why that could happen. It's not a failure if that happens any more than it's not a failure than when you're in the middle of a time block plan and you have to break your schedule and at some point go back and build a new schedule the next column, that's not a failure. We can just scale that up.

You know, I didn't time block Tuesday. Not a failure. It's expected. Didn't do a weekly plan. Not a failure. That's expected. The key, however, is to just get back to it the next time you can. So that exact same advice I give for what happens during a day holds for the weekly scale.

If you fall off your daily schedule, I've always said, next time you get a chance to fix your time block schedule for the rest of your day. Same thing with your week. If you fall off time blocking for a day or two, next time you get your head back around it, start time blocking again. Just come back to it. You can. Don't be self-recriminative.

Don't be too upset. Just get back to it. This is actually one of the big motivations for having a physical planner. So when you have the physical planner, you have a time block planner, which, of course, you can find out more about it, timeblock planner.com. When you have a physical planner, you can just leave it right there on your desk where you do your work.

And it is this great reminder, time block, time block, time block, right? So it makes it much easier to pull you back in the time blocking because let's say you get really busy. This happens to me sometimes. I'm on deadline and it's like, I'm just writing all day long. Like I'm working. This happened to me earlier this week. An academic deadline trying to get these papers done.

and that's all I'm doing and just some like survival mode emails for like really urgent stuff that people need to make sure that the light stay on but it's just 10 hours of research work. I might not time block those days but my planner's right there

and I know every day I'm not time blocking every hour I'm not time blocking. I am really aware I'm not time blocking that planner sitting right there that gravitational pole helps me come right back into the habit again as soon as I get a little bit more breathing room. So it's a huge advantage

to have a physical planner somewhere visible because it keeps you in orbit around these habits. If you're just doing this informally, let's say digitally, you're doing it on your Google calendar or something like this, there's no concrete anchors or reminders that you're not doing the habit. And I think it can be much easier to allow the habit to go away. Or to stick with the planetary metaphor to actually spiral out of that orbit.

So as long as you have that planner there sitting there, you're going to feel its pull and just get back to it as soon as you can. If you fall off again, that's okay, get back to it as soon as you. you can. Some periods are harder than others, but if you are mainly time blocking, if you're mainly doing weekly plans and you have good quarterly seasonal plans, you are going to be much better off than someone who doesn't. Right? This is one of these dose responses where just the more dose you get, the better things get. It's not a big, just continuous jump. So don't be too hard on yourself. All right. Let's do some technology questions. Let's start with Jacob, who asks,

do you see attention training as something distinct from mindfulness becoming an emerging sector? What's your take on brain training apps in this regard? Well, Jacob, I think yes. I think we're going to see more of a formal structuring of this idea of training your brain to concentrate more. We're going to see more businesses and technological tools that are focused on this goal, just like we saw in physical fitness, starting the late 1970s, where the masses got more interested in things like jogging and gyms and diets, et cetera. So I do think it's going to be an emerging sector. It'll be driven in part, at least this is my hypothesis. It will be driven in part by this whole generation,

this first generation of young people who had sources of consistent, highly optimized distraction in their hand throughout this entire crucial phase of adolescent brain development, they're going to be addled from a concentration perspective. At some point, there's going to be this reality that hits of, oh, I guess we're not all going to be social media brand managers or Twitch streamers, and the ability to sustain thought is going to be important, who can help me. And so I think there's a lot of market opportunities there. But here's the thing.

I can give you a regimen right now. that does not require tools that have not yet been invented, that does not require a mental gym, which, by the way, I think is a great idea. Someone should try that. Just things you could do right now. So for one thing, if you want to get that brain back into shape, you cannot live your life in a distraction reactive mode.

So if you just let your phone at every down moment, at every period where you don't have direct stimuli, if you just allow it to feed you distraction, chosen by algorithms, very flashly designed just there in that glowing piece of glass. And that's really bad for your brain, the cognitive equivalent of smoking. So you need to schedule your internet time. You know, this is when I go look at YouTube. This is when I do my social media stuff.

This is when I look at online news. It's schedule time. So it's fine. You know, whatever you're interested in, if it's, you know, TikTok-treating cat tweets or whatever it is, it's fine. whatever, but it's during set times, not something that you're constantly doing, because again, that teaches your mind. I always get stimuli. Your mind's going to lose its ability to focus. If you're constantly participated in text chains or WhatsApp chains, so the sort of communication chains, again, I think you need long periods of your day where you're free from that. It's just too

much. It's just too much. Your brain's constantly shifting context. It never gets comfortable with sustained concentration. Three, you need solitude on a regular basis. You need time alone with just your own thoughts in the world around you. Go for a walk every day in which you're just looking around and seeing things and thinking, making sense of your life, making sense of ideas. Again, you're not reacting to things. You're not reacting to the information that's important. And then finally, you can actually do things to specifically stretch your concentration ability. So everything I've talked about now is general cognitive fitness. How do you get your mind comfortable with boredom? How do you get your mind comfortable with not having all this

constant flesh and distraction, but on the other side of this brain fitness coin is how do you actually get those proverbial muscles stronger. And here you can do things like productive meditation where you go for a walk and work on a problem just in your head. And when your attention wanders, you notice it and bring it back to the problem. You'll find this to be very hard at first, but it's like picking up a pull-up habit for your physical muscles. It will give you a lot of results if you stick with it. Also do interval training. Here is a timer. It's a physical timer. It's a kitchen timer. I bought it on Amazon. The numbers are really large. I set it for 15 minutes. When I start that timer, I try to concentrate really, really hard on this one thing I'm doing. If I let my attention

wander and check something else, I have to restart the timer. So you're doing these sprints, these cognitive sprints on something hard for 15 minutes. That's it. So your brain's like, I can do it because I know relief is coming. And when you get used to that 15 minutes, you add five more. When you get used to 20 minutes, you add five more. And just like someone who's trying to get their 440 time down lower, and look, I speak from experience as a former 400 meters, intermediate distance sprinter used to run the 400 meters,

so I know how terrible it can be. But as someone who's like trying to get that time down farther, you've got to do those really hard sprints of capacity. And that extends, that extends. So if you do both those sides of the coins, have a sort of good cognitive hygiene, you're not constantly exposed to distractions, not constantly looking at Twitter, not constantly on text messages or TikTok. And on the other side, you actually put yourself in situations where you

artificially strain your concentration. Just through those two things. And that's like the gold's gym of your mind. Your ability to concentrate will get better. Your anxiety will go down. Your insights about yourself and your life will go up. Creative insights and work will go up. your general contentment will go up and you will see professional benefits as you start to really get after it with, ooh, I got this done quicker, I got this done better. I'm really producing good work.

So Jacob, yes, all of these things are going to become a bigger issue, but there's some pretty simple advice that can already write away get you results. All right, let's do a more nitty-gritty details question here. Steve asked, how do you organize your electronic files and folders? Well, first of all, Steve, let's divide out notes from files.

So I've talked about on the show before for my article, blog, and book writing. I lean heavily on Evernote. I have dozens of notebooks and Evernote that each have dozens of notes in them, and that's where I collect lots of thoughts that are related to my professional endeavors. In terms of actual files and folders on my computers, I keep them all in Dropbox. So I have a lot of computers. I think we own like five or six computers. I go through computers a lot.

I upgrade computers a lot because I do demanding things on them, like podcasting and video and streaming, etc. So I don't want to copy files between different machines. I don't want files just to live on a single machine. So I have basically my entire file folder hierarchy. It's stored on Dropbox. And then I use Dropbox sync. So on any computer I use,

it has a copy of that. And if I update a file on any computer, all my computers get it. And so when I buy a new computer, it's really dead simple to get up and running, at least from a file perspective. I just turn on, download Dropbox, put on sync, give it an hour, come back, and it has all my files that I've always ever had. So that was a really big move in my life from an organizational perspective. Then in terms of the actual structure of those directories,

it's nothing all that exciting. I'm loading this up now as we talk. So within Dropbox, I would say, okay, so I have a research folder and a writing folder. Are two of my major folders. And then an administrative folder. So at the high level administrative, so inside there, there's going to be like household stuff. There's going to be, okay, here's the forms from our mortgage. Here's the tax information from our lax taxes.

Here's paperwork from, you know, my W4 that I used for whatever, right? anything administrative is going to just be under administrative and under that it goes down two layers so like Georgetown family finances etc and then under them there might be some subfolders then I have research here I'll have a folder for every sort of major project I've worked on interestingly I don't use add folders here as much anymore because the the other place I take notes which I didn't mention before is Overleaf a shared late tech text editor So now more and more when I have a research project at Georgetown, I'm going to start a project in Overleaf in the Overleaf service.

So that's where I'm going to have all my latex. We're going to keep all my notes and I can share it with my collaborators who come and share it and I upload relevant papers. So actually that research folder used to be very active. Every paper had a directory. Now that's all on the web. That's all with Overleaf. Then there's the writing folder. And under here I have an Articles folder.

And under articles, I have all the different articles. You know, I work on for different publications. I have a folder here for each of my books. I have podcast stuff in here as well. And course stuff here, so my online courses. So pretty simple, right? So there's nothing super fancy about my directory hierarchies. The cool thing I do there, I think, is this Dropbox sync so that I can really access

these files from any computer or on the web. I can download any file from any other computer even without syncing. So I find that to be really useful. And all my notes live for the most part in Evernote for writing stuff. overleaf for computer science stuff. Now I may use Dropbox to help organize my files, but when it comes to organizing my neurons, I rely on one of our sponsors.

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and use that code cow to save $5. Our next question comes from Vivian. She says, when working on a research project, I often have ideas that I will not include in the final paper. For example, possible objections and replies to these objections or another way to frame the problem. I usually write down these ideas, my paper notebook or in one note, but because these ideas pop up so often, my notes are a huge mess. Therefore, I end up thinking about the same things again and again because I don't know where my notes are stored. Do you have any advice, thanks?

Well, Vivian, I lean towards simplicity here. when it comes to organizing notes, I have very few levels of organizational hierarchy. So for computer science, for example, it's a two-level hierarchy. I have projects, and under projects, there's notes for that project. When it comes to my writing, it's three levels. I have notes, notes go into notebooks, and I arrange those notebooks into stacks. So there might be a stack of notebooks about book ideas. There might be have a stack in notebooks about article ideas, etc.

and that seems to be about good enough. There's much more complex note-taking systems. There's a lot of energy right now in semantic web-style systems where you can cross-index notes from one document to another. There's tools out there, software tools that have become popular recently

that build on things like the Zettl-Castin method that allow you to have these complex cross-reference note style libraries. And that's fine if you're into it. I tend to think that the overhead of trying to maintain those systems sometimes actually reduces what goes into it. So I keep it simple. Now the issue of keeping it simple, as you point out,

is that you might sometimes come back to the same idea again and again, or forget where you stored notes on a given idea. I don't think that's a big issue. for me, I actually look for the fact that I keep returning to an idea again and again as a sign that there's an interesting idea there. Like that's my heuristic for, oh, there's something here I might want to write about. I might want to write an article or write a book about. I keep coming back to this idea. If I lose it, then maybe it wasn't so important.

And going to look forward and to find ideas, that's also not so bad either because you're forcing yourself to go through that thinking again. As you go through the thinking again, you're laying down stronger networks around that idea. and you have stronger networks around the idea, you're going to be more easily able to connect it to other ideas. In other words, I'm not a huge believer that we're trying to remove all friction from the storage and retrieval of ideas, because in that friction, I think we get a lot of useful information and we actually make the configuration in which we are cognitively storing this information itself

more accessible and useful. So a little bit of friction is fine. I keep it simple. Two or three levels. Do your best. you'll typically remember where most things are. And here's my final caveat, Vivian. When it comes to note taking,

80% of the work is actually taking the note in the first place. Taking that note in the first place, writing it down and storing it somewhere, even if you never go back to it, even if you never find that note again, by writing it down, you have cemented it in a way that you can make use of it, whereas if you had just thought about it once

and never wrote it down, you may lose it. So even just writing it down somewhere, even if it's not in a beautiful cross-reference semantic web system, you've gotten 80% of the benefit, at least for most of the things you're going to write down. So I keep it simple with notes, capture a lot of things, do my best to find them, pay attention to what keeps coming up in my mind, don't sweat it too much if I keep thinking about the same things. Eventually good thoughts come out.

All right, let's do one more quick one here. Gonzalo says, hi, hi, Cal, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. I would like to better understand how you manage blogging and podcasting. In particular, do these activities fall into your nine to five schedule? Thanks. Well, first of all, I'm recognizing that my definition of what makes a question a technology question is pretty loose. I mean, I guess technically blogging and podcasting uses technology, but the real answer is, I don't know. I'm pretty non-rigorous in how I split up questions between these.

category, so I hope you'll all indulge that. Gonzalo, getting to your particular question, podcasting, I do put within my 9 to 5 schedule. I'll schedule these when I do my weekly plan. I will schedule the recording sessions on my calendar. They're not hugely time consuming, but they're also not quick. So if that time is not really thoughtfully put aside and scheduled in advance, it's not going to get done. A typical heuristic I play there is I don't like to record on Monday. I like my weeks to start a little bit slowly. I like to come out of weekends into a Monday that does not have a lot scheduled. I will often, however, record on Fridays or Friday morning. So I'm recording today's podcast, for example, on the preceding Friday. If that makes sense.

Blogging, you know, my articles for my blog slash email newsletter. Traditionally, I do write those in the evening. Sometimes I will write them during nine to five, but my habit there for the last I don't know now. I've probably been doing it this way since 2012. Actually, it's probably exactly 2012. That's when I had my first kid. So at some point after we had kids, I realized like, okay, the blog post is something I do after they were in bed. That used to be the original plan. Now the older ones go to bed later, but the habit maintains, I tend to do that in the evening one day, one day a week. I'll sometimes do that in the morning as well. So Gonzalo, I hope that answers your question.

Speaking of questions, let's do some now about the deep life. My first question comes from Kai, who says, My significant other of more than two years does not seem to share my interest in leading an intentional life. They are stressed in this pandemic and from work that they need to spend all their downtime. Oh, they're so stressed from this pandemic and their work that they spend all of their downtime on YouTube videos, Netflix shows, and Twitter. I tried to lead by example, talk about you and your philosophy, suggest they join me in meditating before bed, etc., to no avail.

But after a few months, I became unhappy of constantly hearing and seeing their online consumption. We live in a small apartment. And of trying to get their attention to talk to them. They say I'm being judgmental of them, and they are just too tired to live productively outside of work. I am not perfect either with online consumption, but I am frustrated that they don't seem to share my level

interest in getting better. What do I do? Wouldn't it be ironic if this was actually a question for my wife? This was me being outed as being on Twitter and Netflix and YouTube videos all day. All right, Kai, first of all, let me just validate that, like, what you're talking about is this is a real thing. And I think you are right in the way that you are living. And I think there probably is an issue with giving in to mindless distraction as a way of numbing yourself. And I think you are right. from difficulties and stress and anxiety. Numbing doesn't solve problems. Numbing just generates stronger problems.

It cuts you off from the things that makes a good life good. It diminishes your resilience. It exposes you to other numbing habits. It could have much stronger consequences like drugs and alcohol. And it makes you much more susceptible to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. So your concern about your significant other is a real concern. The right reaction to times of anxiety and uncertainty is to get more certain about committing yourself to living a deep life, focusing on the things you can control and finding gratitude

in that and finding meaning in that and finding satisfaction in that and finding pride in that. That is the way to have post-traumatic growth. That's the way to try to maximize a chance that you keep some stability under you while the world around you is unstable. And so I'm glad you're doing that, Kai, and I completely validate your concern that you your significant other isn't. So what should you do?

Well, we can talk tactics. Then we can talk bigger picture strategy. So tactically speaking, probably telling them about me is not the right move. All right. This is not to be self-deprecating. This is probably not going to help your cause. Right. So, you know, I don't know the gender of your significant other, but if it's a guy,

their immediate instinct is going to be, who's this guy you're talking about? he sucks. I think I need to fight him. All right, what's going on? That's going to be the initial guy reaction. That's not going to work. And if they're,

uh, and if it's a girl, you know, that you're talking to, they're going to be like, who is this bro? What is this Ivy League guy who rode? Like,

I don't need some bro telling me about crushing it or what have you. So that, that's probably not going to work. But even more generally, I think a nice framework here. A nice framework for persuasion is one I heard, discussed recently on the Rich Roll podcast, and Rich was talking to Adam Grant, and they had this interesting distinction between being a lighthouse and being a preacher. So to be a lighthouse

means you're just demonstrating in your own life the values that you really believe in. To be a preacher means I am trying to evangelize for a lifestyle, right? I am proverbially saving souls here, so I'm going hardcore. This is it. This is the lifestyle. I believe in it. Here's why you got to do it, right? Rich was talking about how in his own veganism, he has adapted the lighthouse model. He doesn't actually talk a lot about it. He just says, look, I'm a great athlete. I'm an empathetic person. I'm obviously very healthy and interesting. I don't make any secrets about the fact that I'm a vegan, but I'm not trying to preach to people to become veg. I'm not trying to have debates with people about why you should be a vegan. I just sort of am the change that I want to see in the

world, and he's found that to be more effective. That's probably the right play in general when it comes to something like the deep life. Live a deep life. Like really commit to that. Let people see what it brings you. The meaning, the satisfaction, the resilience, the interestingness, the gratitude. It is really appealing when you see the deep life up close. And then someone might get a little bit more interested. Okay, so what's going on here? Tell me a little bit more about this bro. tell me a little bit more about this guy who I still need the punch. I still need the punch, but I guess I'll also hear a little bit more before I do so, et cetera, right? So that might work. And it might not, but it's kind of your best play. Now, if we zoom out here and talk strategically,

there might be a bigger long-term issue here. Now, I don't know you and I don't know your significant other. You probably have to get out of the uncertainty of the pandemic before you really know what's going on. Because obviously, a lot of things are being strained and shaken up this year in a way that's not really representative of most normal years or how people normally would behave. Abstractly speaking, however, this is a place where having some alignment is probably important for relationships. And the place in particular I'm talking about is seeing life as something that is both hard and interesting.

And you want to build resilience to the former and make the most of the latter. That's a mindset. And it's a really good mindset when you're when you're trying to you see what the deep life could be and you're trying to pursue this life. So it's a good mindset. Obviously I'm a big preacher of this mindset. If someone is a hundred percent not aligned with that, it's a pretty fundamental incompatibility. I mean, there's a reason why when we see that person who's just staring at that phone all the time and just vaguely upset and on Twitter and look at this and I'm just going to do this and let me just watch this and I'm on YouTube and just we have. we have a visceral reaction of, I'm not super impressed by that person.

There's a reason why we have that visceral reaction is because they're not exhibiting any of the traits that we associate with someone who is going to be a leader in life, someone that we're going to respect, someone who's going to be a partner through the thick and thin. So, again, this is not specific to your situation, Kai. I don't know a lot about your details. And again, pandemic is not normal life. But the more general point here is that the pursuit of something deep, even though things are hard, as a general trait is an important trait. And if someone doesn't have it and you do, and that doesn't change,

you might have a respect issue down the line. And when you have a respect issue, that eventually becomes a resentment issue. And when you have a resentment issue, then it falls apart. Right? That's poison to relationships. So keep doing what you're doing.

Do it well. And we'll see what happens. All right. Tanvir asks, can I become rich while cultivating a deep life? A deep life requires a balance and hitting certain areas of life like craft, constitution, community, and contemplation. Coming from a not-so-well-off family, I have an urge to earn money and become an affluent person. Meanwhile, I really like the idea as you communicate and want to cultivate a deep life.

How can I integrate these philosophies? Well, Tanvir, I think the key here is to realize that you're not talking about two different philosophies here. Like, I think you're, you have a picture of the deep life that is somewhat antagonistic to affluence. So like the deep life is maybe contemplative. You know, I'm in a cave and reading and above the concerns of the material world. But because of that, it's an aesthetic type lifestyle in which I don't have, I don't have much resources. and then the alternative is to go make money and these things are in opposition.

They're not really in opposition, right? So the deep life includes craft. Like when I think about the deep life, I often talk about, as you know, there's these different buckets that represent the different areas of your life that are important and you're trying to craft

the deepest possible existence in each of these buckets. Almost everyone has craft as one of those buckets. Craft is what you actually do professionally in the world. And when you live deeply in craft, I mean, you're trying to become really good at what you do. You're trying to produce things that are useful. You're trying to do this

on your own terms. But trying to have financial security is a completely legitimate goal of craft. There's like part of what I do in the craft bucket of my life is I want to, you know, autonomously work on what I want, how I want to work on it, but be well paid for it in such a way that we're not stressed about money or that I have options for my family. That's completely valid, Henvir, to be part of what you're trying to do in that craft bucket. And you approach that bucket the same way as any of the other ones, right? You figure out what's really important. You focus on those deep things that matter. You try to stay away from the shallow things that don't matter as much. Start with a keystone habit just to get your head in the right direction and then do

that overhaul to the craft portion of your life. And completely reasonable for that to have a financial security component to what you're pursuing. Now, if you're trying to, let's say, like maximize the amount of dollars you can possibly make, that's probably not compatible with the deep life because the equation that's going to maximize the potentials, the potential dollars you can make. I mean, that equation is going to likely require that you take time away from many of those other buckets. And maybe that's the distinction you're thinking about.

So, yes, there is some opposition. I'll say this. There is some opposition between the goal of being as rich as you could reasonably become and living the deep life. Those probably are in opposition. But there is no opposition between making good money and being financially secure and not worried about money and being able to be flexible and handle the issues that come up in your family and eliminate financial stress as something that's weighing down on you and be able to go to interesting places and meet interesting people completely compatible to have that goal with the deep life. Now, you might get lucky and get both. You might be like my friend Mark Manson who thinks about a lot of things and lives a deep life and decided to write a book.

And he wrote a book and then the books sold 18 million copies. So that's a nice sort of lottery ticket element to the deep life, is that because you're so focused on what matters and trying to get away from the distractions that don't, you might end up producing something that makes you quite wealthy, but I want to count on it. All right. So that's my summary 10, Vier. Your craft bucket can completely have financial security, reasonable affluence in it. But if you want to be as rich as you can possibly be, you're probably going to need

a lot more shallowness in those other parts of your life. All right, let's do one more question here. This one comes from Paniadus, who says, in the craft constitution, contemplation, and community motto, how does community fit in exactly? Could you offer some examples for things

one could consider improving in this area? Could you elaborate a bit, please? Does community involve relationships with friends and family, or does it have a broader scope? it is a bit vague when I try to pinpoint something specific about it. So, of course, we're talking here about those same buckets that we were just discussing with VanVir. Long-time listeners know that I like to divide the deep life into these buckets that each correspond to an important area of your life. And then you're trying to reduce the distraction and lean into the high return deep activities in each of these buckets.

We talked about the craft bucket in the last question. Piniatus is asking about the community bucket. And like, what does that mean? Okay, so let's say I want to emphasize the community aspect of my life. What does it mean? It seems a little vague.

Well, it is kind of purposely vague because it can cover different scopes. It for sure means your family. It for sure means your friends. But then beyond those two inner rings, you have what I call affiliated communities. And this is where we get some difference between different people.

So it's communities that you belong to and these could be somewhat idiosyncratic to your own life, but the groups you find important. So these could. be physically proximate, right? So if you, if you're in like a small town like I live in, your town could be literally a very important community. Just you know your neighbors, you know the mayor. It's like Gilmore girls, right? I know the person who runs the

store. Everyone says hi to me when I come into the coffee shop. And you take seriously, this is where I'm raising my kids. This is where I live. And so you could have that literal definition of community. It could be professional related. Right. So as a professor, for example, I might imagine my university, my students, my grad students, my grad students, my undergrads I teach, my fellow faculty, that this is a community that I take seriously. I believe, let's say in my case, I believe in the Georgetown mission.

I believe in what they're trying to do, and it's a community that's important to me I want to serve. Obviously, for a lot of people, there will be a religious community that plays a big role, your church, your temple, etc. Right?

So there's different communities. Some people have virtual communities, right? This is the social internet at its best. You know, you have a Facebook group but people who have been through something similar or share some characteristic, but it's very important for you to be part of that group. If you're in recovery, your AA community could be a very important community. So you have these affiliated communities that are going to be idiosyncratic to the person, but everyone has some. So you've got family and friends, and there's some small number

of affiliated communities that you take really seriously. Okay. So to focus on the community bucket means that you need to sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of the of these different, let's call them circles, just to try to have a different term here from the broader term community, each of these different circles of people and causes you care about. You have to sacrifice non-trivial time and attention,

and you need analog interaction. We'll take those one by one real quick. When I say you have to sacrifice non-trivial time and attention, what makes you feel connected to an individual or a group is that you actually invest energy on their behalf. That's what tells your mind that you take it seriously.

it's also where you get that real benefit of feeling like you are helping other people and connected to other people. So what does non-trivial time and attention mean? Well, I get into this in my book, Digital Minimalism, but shooting off a quick text is not non-trivial. I guess an easier way to say that. Let's give it the double negative is trivial. Putting a comment on a social media post is trivial. These aren't bad things, but don't really count that. as socializing in this context.

You know, if a friend of yours has a baby, it's fine, of course, to say congrats for exclamation points under their Instagram photo. It doesn't really count from a community-strengthening perspective unless you actually do something that requires more time and energy.

Like, you get together a basket of stuff they need and you bring it over. And what do they need? They need a lot of towels. I don't know why this is true. I just know from experience. You just need a lot of towels when you have a new kid

and probably some wine. You could text back and forth with a friend. That's nice. But if you really want that to feel like a strong connection, you need to go do something with them. Make plans with them, spend time with them, right? And then the other aspect here is the analog communication aspect. Our mind takes very seriously being around people that we care about. We don't see a circle as being crucial to us unless we're regularly around people in that circle. We have to see them.

You got to see their body language. You've got to hear their voice. You have to be there in person. This is a really important thing. This may sound like a no-brainer, but a. course during a pandemic, during our current pandemic, it's something that a lot of people are missing, and I think they feel it. And I think you need to get out and see people in person. You know, as I say, even if there is a mask covering half your face, it is still exponentially better than seeing that face on a screen, right? So we probably need to do more of that regularly. Like, let's go for a walk. Let's gather at a fire pit, you know, go to like an outdoor restaurant.

Like wherever your risk level is, that's fine. Adjust to the risk level. The key thing is actually being able to be in the same physical location as these other people you care about. If you haven't been doing this over the past year, you are going to know what you're missing as soon as you do. Because it's going to feel so much different. And, you know, again, I'm not a doctor, but unless you're in a really serious risk group, if you have some separation, if you have masks, if you have good ventilation, especially if you're outside, you can see people and you should do it.

And the fact that it's hard, it's going to make it feel more medieval. All right. So I hope this is useful. Those are the things I think about. So you have these different circles. You want to regularly sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on their behalf. And as much as you're able to, as much as it fits your risk tolerance, you want to try to see people in person as much as possible as well. That is going to help you have a sense of stronger community.

this actually reminds me of a point that, you know, I'm going back to our original Deep Life question from Kai and the significant other who was just on Twitter and YouTube and Netflix all the time. You know, when I am talking to someone who's in that state, you know, they're just anxious and numbing and it's getting worse. Like one of the number one things you can recommend if you could convince someone to do this, the thing that's going to help the most is really, let me get outside of my own head here and go do something for someone else. you know, let me go bring a friend something, let me go for a walk, let me go volunteer to help at the vaccine clinic or whatever. It is like a miracle drug for human mood because we need to be sacrificing on behalf of our social connections. We need to see these people on our social connections. And I don't think we realize how painful it is to be in that absence until we're actually in an extended period of that absence. And so I think this was a good question to ask right now

because community is something that a lot of people are in a state of deprivation from. It is probably time to start treating that deprivation. These are the ideas that I would suggest. All right. So with that in mind, let's bring this podcast to a close and, you know, get out there and say hi to some people. Do you want to find out how to submit your own questions? Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast. You want to support the show. Please consider subscribing or leaving a review.

Be back on Thursday. with a habit Tune Up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.