Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 79: Should This Meeting Have Been an Email?

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Should this meeting have been an email? [5:30]WORK QUESTIONS - How do I recharge after a hard year of work? [17:14] - How do I write blog posts? [20:46] - How important is working from home for accomplishing deep work? [22:52] - How can I apply productive meditation to work that requires a computer? [28:52]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - How do I step away from WhatsApp? [33:13] - Are spaced repetition flashcard programs worth it? [36:47] - What should I replace social media with in my life? [43:24] - How can I start a business without social media? [51:19]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Why are kitchens such appealing work locations? [54:53] - How do I overcome deep procrastination during remote learning? [58:10] - Should I time block after retirement?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 79. Quick announcements. As I mentioned near the end of last Thursday's Habit Tuneup mini episode, my new book A World Without Email debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list. A little inside baseball, that has a lot to do with pre-orders, which all count during the first week. So thank you to all of you who put up with me talking about pre-order. and thank you to all of you who did pre-order.

It definitely helps a book catch attention if it does make it on the list. As promised, I have posted a roundup of some select articles I've written, some select interviews with me and some select reviews of the new book. I've posted that on my blog at calnewport.com. I've also sent it out to my newsletter. So if you still want to learn more about the book, or if you've enjoyed the book and want to spread the word and have some things to send to people you know.

As promised, I put that roundup online. Also exciting this episode, we actually have new questions. As longtime listeners know, the questions for this podcast come from my mailing list. I send out a survey link typically every two months and gather a bunch of questions, which I then draw from for these main Monday episodes. we had fallen a little behind because I'd gotten busy with the book launch and some other things. So we'd been using questions that I'd gathered in December until quite recently. So I finally went out there and gathered.

We have a new group here of five or six hundred questions that came in just a week ago. So I'm glad that we actually have fresh questions. No more having to contend with queries that begin as we approach this holiday season with all eyes towards the presidential election, etc., etc. We're actually now timely again. to find out more about how the submit questions, you can go to Calnewport.com slash podcast. Just to give a little bit more explanation, the reason why I like to solicit the written questions from my mailing list is that in general, the people on my mailing list have been around for a while. They know me, they know the type of things I write about, they know the ideas that I'm interested in. So we get questions that are usually pretty well suited to this podcast and to my way of thinking.

Now, if you're not a member of my mailing list, you should be. That's where all the Cal Newport old timers are. That list has been around since 2007. I've been writing weekly articles for that list for well over a decade now. I'm actually excited to get back to those. I've had to have my last two or three email newsletter and blog articles have been about the book. And I'm excited to get back to just straight up big ideas, new ideas, fresh ideas. So all of that's coming.

Calnewport.com if you want to sign up for that list. All right, we've got a good show. We've got a good collection of questions in our standard categories, work technology, and the deep life. We also have a deep dive. I've been enjoying getting back to these deep dives as well. And now that my book is out, I keep saying that I'm going to upload the videos. Maybe this time I mean it.

But again, I am recording all these deep dyes. I am recording key questions every episode. I have a huge pile of video. It's on its way soon. That will be available. So stay tuned for that. All right. So before we dive in, however, we should take a brief moment to thank

one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. I am talking about our good friends at Blinkist. Ideas are critical. In today's world, the best place to find really well thought through ideas is books. The problem is figuring out what books to invest your time into. Blinkist can solve that problem. If you subscribe to Blinkist, you get access to 15-minute summaries written or audio of thousands of best-selling non-fiction books.

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done. So right now for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for my audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can try it free for seven days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-days trial, and you'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at Blinkist.com slash deep. And with that, let's start the show with our deep dive segment. In today's deep dive, we are going to tackle the question, should this meeting have been an email. Now what I'm talking about here is a popular meme that I keep hearing about in interviews I'm doing for my new book. So I have a book out called A World Without Email.

And every interviewer likes to point out that right now, in our current moment of pandemic-induced remote work, there's this meme going around that says this meeting should have been an email. And I always get asked. Well, if email is so bad, why are people right now so enthusiastic about the idea of replacing meetings with email. Well, if we step back, what's really going on here, of course, is that people are becoming overloaded with Zoom. I got an email from someone today saying that their company was now doing Zoom so back to back that getting time to go to the bathroom at any point during the workday

is becoming difficult, right? So obviously we are drowning in Zoom or whatever digital conference technology your company happens to use. People are very frustrated by how much time they have to spend in Zoom. A lot of these meetings seem superfluous, banter back and forth unstructured, and that gave rise to this meme of couldn't have just just been an email. Another way of saying, do I really have to take up this time, sacrifice this time of my schedule for us to be here right now talking. So let's tackle this issue of Zoom overload. I want to get into briefly why I think it's happening. I'm going to talk about three ways that we might be able to help resolve it.

Now, what's really going on here in most cases is what I call meetings as a proxy for productivity. People are not good for the most part, and by people I mean people who don't listen to, deep questions, of course. People are not good at organizing themselves, keeping track of what's on their plate, making regular progress on hard things when they're not being forced to do so. One thing, though, that knowledge workers are pretty sure they will do is attend meetings that show up on their calendar. It's the one productivity tool that people actually universally deploy and follow. So the idea is if there's something that drops on your plate, you know, for example, we need to update our website for client acquisition, right? We have some new technology or we have some frequently asked questions we should add about the coronavirus pandemic and our product or whatever, right? Something like this shows up, it pops on your plate.

You get a little worried, you know, this is a complicated thing. I don't trust myself to make progress on it. Let's send out a Zoom meeting invite. Because you know what? When that meeting shows up, I'll attend. And I can make it a recurring meeting. And now I know progress will get made on this issue. I don't have to worry about it.

It's not an open loop. Good. I get some relief. You've now got four or five people who have just lost an hour a week for the next however many weeks, right? So it's a huge asymmetric cost. So I think this is why we set up so many Zoom meetings is it's easier than trying to actually keep track of and execute things on our own. Now, in the pandemic, this got a lot worse.

Why? The cost to sign up the meetings went down. My cost, I mean largely social capital. It's very easy. Once we're all just digital, it's all slack, it's all email, it's all Zoom, very easy to say, let's jump on a Zoom, send out an invite. We're all just in our home anyways. Who cares? We're in an office building.

Well, you know, now you're going to physically all move to the space. I'm going to see you all. We're all going to have to go into a conference room. There's more of a social capital cost of pulling you all together, and I might think twice about doing those. meetings. Also, if we're in an office, there's many different ways I might actually get quick resolution on this issue that doesn't require me having to reserve a conference room and sit down the invites, get everyone to come, maybe get coffee to the room. I could just grab you in your office

and say, hey, what do you think about this? New website thing. In another meeting, I could just tail on the end of that meeting. Hey, as long as we're here, can we talk about this? There's a lot of ways I could have pretty efficiently resolved this issue if we were in person, but virtual I can't do that. And it's very easy to set up the Zoom meeting. It all seems like the same, all part of the same vanilla digital back and forth. So why not just shoot out the Zoom invite? So we end up with Zoom or whatever meeting technology you use is spiraling out of control. All right, so obviously this is not good. This is not a good way to get value out of the attention capital represented by all the human brains working together in your organization. So what can we do about it? Well, idea number one I want to

offer here is first of all, just get your act together in terms of your personal productivity. 50% of these meetings would go away if people were just more organized. If you follow the type of ideas I talk about on this podcast, you should have a strategic plan at the quarterly level. You should have a weekly plan for each week. That plan should inform then a daily time block plan. All of your obligations are captured in whatever to-do system you use. Maybe you have like I advocate a somewhat complex Trello setup where you have different boards for different roles and different columns for different statuses

and all of your task and related information or on cards on these boards in these columns. You know what's going on. Every week you look at these, you get a sense of what you should be working on that week, and then when you make your daily plans, you put aside time to make time for what needs to get done. If you're organized, you find that you do not need

nearly as many meetings because you don't have this concern. If I don't have a meeting on the calendar, I might forget this, I don't want to forget this, and the only thing I trust is that I'll go to meetings. So trying to foster a culture of personal productivity does help. Guys, let's get our act together on organizing tracking and making progress on things. Our calendar is not a primary tool for inducing action on projects. Okay, so that could help.

That can help. What else can we do? Well, status meetings that are multifunctional can also make a big difference here. So if you look at software development firms, you look at teams within these software development firms, so using agile methodologies, they tend to have these daily, highly structured status meetings. They're often called standing meetings to emphasize that when they were done in person, everyone would stand up. They try to keep the meeting short, so they're highly structured meetings.

The goal of these meetings was to ask everyone, one after another, what did you do yesterday, what are you working on today, what do you need to get that done? Now having these daily status meetings, again, highly structured, it's not shooting the breeds, it's not, let me give you, you know, a soliloquy on what's on my mind is, okay, your turn, now your turn, now your turn,

can allow you to very quickly coordinate on new things to show up. So, okay, we have to update the FAQs on our website to talk about the COVID pandemic for our product. Next, already scheduled status meeting. That's one of the things you can quickly mention once your turn. This project showed up.

I think it's important. Let's quickly settle on how we're going to make progress. Okay, everyone, what I need from you is your suggested questions. Put them into this shared Google Doc by Friday. COB on Monday, I'm going to pull those all out. And I'm going to build a draft language. And, you know, Kate, you deal with the web stuff. That will be ready for you by noon on Monday.

and you can format it into the website. Or something like this, right? Let's not get too specific here. But you see what I'm saying. Very quickly, we come up with a plan. Here is how this is going to happen. And again, you have these meetings each day, and they're very quick.

But when it comes to your turn again two days later, if people have not submitted questions, you can say two days ago, we said this is what we need. We agreed this was important. People have not submitted your questions. We need the questions, let's go, right? And if you have some sort of team task board

in which you keep track of who's working on what, you could have added this project to that taskboard. People can see it clearly. It's under what we're working on this week is the FAQs and everyone needs to submit their questions. This gets done and you've used about three minutes of meeting time total. And it's a meeting that was a standing meeting.

So it's not everything has their own meeting. You just have this one standing meeting in which any of these things can be quickly coordinated. So you've got this one standing status meeting that can take up one footprint in your schedule but take care of lots of different things, quick coordination on lots of different things. Okay.

Office hours is the third thing I want to suggest that everyone has regular times which they are available for real-time interaction. It's clearly posted. Everyone knows when it is two or three times a week. If we are talking about a in-person environment, it's literally your office door is open. In a remote or hybrid environment,

it is whatever communication tool you use, you'll be monitoring. I'll be on this hashtag office hour Slack channel. I'll be in a Zoom room for the entire 60 to 90 minute period. So just jump over there. You know I will be there. I'll have my phone on. You can just call it.

Here's my number. However you want to work it out. All right. If everyone has clearly marked office hours, now if you are the person who would have normally just initiated a Zoom meeting because, again, in our example, you're in charge updating the FAQs on the website for coronavirus or whatever. now you can actually sit down and think through okay what needs to be done who do i need help from what questions do i have what do i need to discuss great is now up to me individually to stop by each of

these different people's office hours and take 10 minutes of each of their time and now we make the coordination that needs to be done occurs progress gets made on this project but i have not increased the footprint of people's meetings for the week they were already in their office hours I had to do a little bit more work to go to each of their office hours, but it's better that me, the initiator, actually pays more than the asymmetric opposite in which an initiator can very quickly take a lot more time from everyone else. Make everyone else's life more difficult to make my life easier.

That is not a fair trade. Make my life a little harder, but keep everyone else's life easy to get this thing done that I need their help with. That is usually a better asymmetry. All right. So there's just three ideas for how we get out of this zoom trap Again, just to briefly review. Number one, if people are actually just organized about keeping track of what they're working on and making plans for how they're going to do it, you can minimize

a lot of meetings as a proxy for productivity. I'll get rid of half of the meetings, too. You have some sort of fixed team status meeting in which many different things can be very quickly coordinated on, so you don't need separate meeting footprints for different obligations. And three, individuals have office hours. If you are the initiator of a project, you go to each of the people's office hours who are relevant and talk to them during their office hours, getting the necessary coordination done without having to add separate meetings to each of those people's lives. Look, we can't work this way. We cannot have meetings through every minute of the day. It is not sustainable. All right, it's not going to get it done. It leaves no cycles

free for actually executing work. You got to get away from these meetings. Hopefully those three ideas help you get away from the problem. Hopefully the proxy for productivity idea helps understand why the problem occurred in the first place. So should this meeting have been an email, well, maybe the better thing to say here is, should this meeting have been a better process? Should this meeting have been a part of a better process? That would probably get you closer to a much better way of collaborating and getting work done. And with that in mind, what we're close to now is time for some work questions. Our first question comes from Panda, who asks, I just got promoted, and I want to spend the next

month or so recharging my batteries after a productive year. In the absence of a travel vacation and time off from work, you have tips that can help one recharge and be rejuvenated before chasing the next big goal. Well, Panda, first of all, I'm glad you're thinking about recharging. That is just as critical to knowledge work as it is to physical athletic endeavors. We've talked about this before on the show. We've talked about the book, Peak Productivity, which I recommend that really gets into these ideas as well. So with that foundation set, what particular advice do I have for you?

Well, I'm going to start with a warning. A lot of people in your situation think, okay, what is a question? is going to recharge me is to let go of structure. You know, just show up that day, let things kind of roll, have a big preamble to my day getting started, do some email, look at some social media, like, let's just take it easy, let's take it easy on the scheduling, let's take it easy on the time management. I just kind of go through these days in a lot more relaxed fashion because you're probably coming out of a period, especially if you're a Cal Newport type.

you've probably been weekly planning and daily planning with time blocks and executing, executing, executing, and you just like the idea of saying, I don't even really have a plan for today. I'll just roll. I'm going to recommend don't do that. That's actually not going to get you the rest or rejuvenation that you're hoping. Keep your productivity systems in place. Hopefully if you listen to my podcast, you are quarterly, weekly, daily planning. Keep doing that. Just plan a lot less. So a structured day in which you don't have much scheduled will actually be more refreshing than an unstructured day in which you do that same amount of work, but just sort of let it arise naturally or be prodded by emails or being prodded by deadlines. Keep the structure. Use the structure to take the baseline stuff you have to do, the meetings you have to attend, the small things that need to get done, the questions that have to be answered, and really handle those efficiently.

freeing up more time for you to do other things. And where you would have then scheduled and work on your next big project, now in your daily time block schedule, you can, for example, have hours off in the afternoon when you're going to go hiking. You can go for a long walk. You're going to go for a trip. You're going to go see a movie.

When you do this type of weekly planning, daily planning, etc., you can also take full days off sort of informally. Now, I'm looking at my weekly plan. There's some stuff that still has to get done. done, but if I move, if I look at this week ahead of time, I can keep Thursday clear. Don't actually schedule meetings on Thursday. And I'll get this done on Wednesday, this done on Tuesday, I'll catch up on Friday. Normally take that whole day kind of virtually off, even without telling anyone,

I'm going to go to the movies, I'm going to go to the beach, whatever. You can do this. You can unlock this if you're actually structured about your time. So do that. Stay structured. Just don't schedule so much stuff. Use the structure to consolidate the stuff you are doing so it gets done really fast on daily basis, put aside large blocks of time to do things that's interesting, refreshing,

and rejuvenating, try to take at least one day off a week, most weeks in a virtual way. You might still have to check in. Do that for a month, and you're really going to find yourself not only recharge, but probably chomping at the bit to get started at something new. Steve asks, how do you write your blog post? What is your process? Well, Steve, I've been writing blog posts for a long time. I started my blog in 2007, probably by around 2009 or 2010.

I switched over to my roughly one post per week schedule, which I've done ever since. And at this point, I do not have a big process. I'm very used to just saying, okay, I'm going to write a blog post now. Taking an idea I've been thinking about, and I think about a lot of ideas, or maybe looking at the list of ideas I keep an Evernote if I don't have one straight at the top of my head and I just put something together, it usually takes me about 60 to 90 minutes. Even the really long complicated blog post, even those usually just take 60 to 90 minutes. Now for the longest time, I had a really clear ritual. I would do this in the evening after my youngest kids were put to bed back

when I only had two kids. At a certain place in my house, I would go and I would sit next to the record player, my big leather chair, and it was very consistent. Now things are a little bit different. I have more kids. My kids are older. There's not necessarily this clean time at night as long as I used to have. So now the blog posts get slotted in where they can. Sometimes it's during the workday. Sometimes it's right after the workday. Sometimes I'll stay at the Deep Work HQ one day a week and actually get the post done after my workday is over. And so it can really differ. I like writing blog posts. One of the things I've done here in the town I live now at Tacoma Park is I also like writing blog post at restaurants or coffee shops or bars, that type of thing. It's just a, it's a

ritual. This is an activity I associate with the ritual of being somewhere interesting. I try to disassociate it from work in the sense of like, let's sit down and grind through this. But anyways, that's the process. I just grab an idea. I'm very good now at turning those into a post. It takes about 60 to 90 minutes. I try to do it in an interesting environment if possible. So sometimes I don't have that luxury. And it's just a discipline that I've been sticking with. next up is chan who asks how important or not is working from home to enable deep work for most knowledge workers working from home has given me more high quality time and energy due to my lack of commute i've used the time and energy to go deep on business problems for my clients I am a management consultant.

Well, Chan, there are both advantages and disadvantages to working from home when it comes to deep work. So the question's a little bit complicated. However, if we know the advantages and the disadvantages and we can focus on trying to eliminate the disadvantages, we can put ourselves into a much better situation. So the two advantages to working from home vis-a-vis deep work is first what you mentioned. more time available. If you have a long commute, you know, you live in the suburbs of New York

and you take a train in the midtown and then jump on a subway every day to get to your job and a high rise and now you're not doing it, that's a non-trivial amount of time. Not just a time spent commuting, which is long, but also there's the time spent having to get up earlier to get ready for work to make yourself presentable, they get dressed, et cetera.

So yeah, that's a good advantage. If you have more time, you can put that time towards deep work. The advantage of commute time is that it typically takes place before the workday begin. So there's not going to be meetings there. There's not going to be expectations of responses to messages. So if you take commute time those particular blocks and put it over the deep work, they're often uninterrupted blocks.

So that's great. The other advantage is location shifting. When you're not in an office, you can have special locations you go to do. do your deep work. This, of course, makes a big difference. Environment makes a difference. Ritual makes a difference for obtaining higher levels of focus. These locations could be in your house.

You know, I go from my home office to the shed outside or by my fire pit or into the attic office or into the kitchen, whatever. You just have a different location you go to do your deep work. But it also could be, you know, if you're not at an office, you have the flexibility to go leave your house and go to interesting places. You can do adventure work, you go into the woods or to a stream or somewhere really a nice field that's dappled with sun

to do deep work. I'm a big believer in somewhat radical environmental transformations to help induce a state of concentration, but also, you know, coffee shops and restaurants and bars, and maybe a bar is going to get in the way there. It's depending on what you're working on.

Museums are a big one. We overlook. Museums often have really good spots so you can get some really good deep work done because it's aesthetically really pleasing, etc. It's harder to do when you're in an office and there's an expectation of you're here in this building

until the day is over and it's weird if you leave for two hours. When you're working from home, no one knows. So that's another advantage. The disadvantage is that when you're working from home, especially if your whole office is working from home, as is often occurring during the pandemic, the rate of this hyperactive hive mind interaction to use a term for my book, a world without email,

the rate to which all this unscheduled back and forth ad hoc messaging goes on increases. You can't grab people in the hallway. You can't see if someone door is shut. You can't grab someone after a meeting to ask them a question. So you have more messages going back and forth on Slack, on teams, on email. And like we talked about in the deep dive, you get much more of this Zoom as a proxy for productivity going on, more meetings, more time taken up, less time left free under your control to be dedicated to

things like deep work. So this hyperactive hive mind style of collaboration that I talk about so much in my book becomes much more hyperactive when everyone is working from home and now you have less time to get really deep work done. All right, so we have advantages and we have disadvantages, but here's the good news that disadvantage is solvable. And it's solvable using the big idea from my book, which is you have to replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow with other ways of collaborating that clearly spell out how you communicate, how you coordinate, how the work gets done

and does so in a way that requires many fewer unscheduled messages. Now again, I've talked about this a lot. What these systems look like just depend on the type of work and the team, etc. There's no one size fits all solution. There's no one tool that's going to save you, but it's a mindset of, okay, if putting together responses to client proposals is something

we do often. Let's come up with a process for doing this. Here's how we collaborate, get the information around so that we're not just rock and rolling on slack and Zoom. Okay, if putting together, you know, decks is a thing that we need to do on a semi-regular basis, here is our process for doing it that doesn't require, again, a ton of slack going back and forth all day in 17 meetings. You put inside these more structured workflows again and again and again for all the things that you do and your team does, and you can actually really tone down that hyperactive hive mind's footprint on your workday. The schedule gets a lot more clear,

and the pressure to constantly contact shift and check email, check, check, check, teams goes down, and you have more room for deep work. So that's probably the sweet spot. I'm working from home, so I have the extra time. I'm working from home, so I have the autonomy to go to other places and have real rituals built around my deep work.

And I've coupled this with a team commitment to stepping away from the hyperactive hive mind for giving us the autonomy required to actually take advantage of what is offered from this new configuration of work. You get those two things working together, then I think, yeah, Chen, you're in a much better situation

when it comes to getting cognitively demanded efforts done. All right, we actually now have two questions that are on basically the same topic. So I'll read both questions and answer them in one go. So the first question here comes from Julia. She says, how do you do productive meditation when your workflow requires writing and taking notes. I love walking and I live in the mountains,

so have really good conditions for that. My work often requires creative thought and long reflection, but I'm used to doing that with pen and paper. I find it difficult to make progress without jotting things down. What would be your advice for productive meditation for creative endeavors? All right. And then Tyler asks a related question. How can walks be productive if I need a computer to do my work?

he notes that he is a computer programmer. So quick primer productive meditation is an idea for my 2016 book Deep Work. It's a way of training your brain to concentrate and a way of also inducing creative insight where you go for a walk, you try to make progress on a professional problem only in your head. As with mindfulness meditation, when you notice your attention wandering away from the problem at hand, you just notice that and bring it back to the problem. And when it wanders, you notice that and bring it back.

back to the problem. This way of working entirely in your head is complicated at first. It's demanding at first. You won't make much progress at first. You'll be surprised by how much wandering your mind does, but if you keep doing this practice, your ability to hold complex variables in your working memory, make inductive leaps based off those variables, then update your state to actually make progress, in other words, on hard problems in your head. It gets better and better. It's like really intense training, but for your ability to concentrate. So Julian and Tyler are both asking about the entirely in your head aspect of productive meditation. My answer would be, it's fine to have a collection mechanism that after you have pushed a thought

through to a natural conclusion that you think capture it. I do this all the time. Long time readers of study hacks will have probably gotten used to in years past. I would do sort of photo essays of some of the productive meditation I was doing, including the locations I was at. And you would almost always see in my hand or in the tableau that I was taking a picture of.

Usually it's by a streamer in the woods somewhere. You would see a marble composition notebook in which I was taking notes. So I would often work on proofs in my head until I thought I had something and then I'd write down notes. I'd sit there literally on a rock. Write down notes, think of through,

walk for another 20 minutes, capture my notes. That's completely fine. right? Because you're still doing the thinking in your head. You're still trying to hold variables and make progress on them only in your head. You're getting that training. You're getting that insight. You're just capturing the results. So what about Tyler's questions about computer programming? Well, you just need to bring with you, Tyler, a particular problem relevant to whatever you're working on that you can make progress on in your head. I'm thinking here like an algorithm design. I'm thinking here like a system structure. You know, how do I want to break this up? in the classes. Do I want to just inherit? Is this going to be a big polymorphic type solution, or can I just have separate, completely separate classes here? Should I be interfacing this using sockets, or is the faster play here going to be this? You can be figuring out a system

structure. You could be figuring out an algorithm. You could be figuring out a data format. So I capture this information in XML, then use a different engine, whatever, right? Things you can make progress on in your head. You make progress on them in your head. And then when you're done, capture your results, write them down, however you want to write them down, and then go do work on them. So productive meditation, the key here is that you're in your head thinking and bringing your attention back to what you're thinking on. I just do this again and again and again.

How you capture this and then use those insights is completely flexible and completely up to you. Julia, I'm particularly jealous about your description of working in the mountains. I love it. Take advantage of that. Be out there every day. Get really good notebooks, get really good pins, get some fresh air, smell the pine trees, and get some deep thinking done.

And with that in mind, let's move on to some technology questions. Our first technology question comes from Ron. Ron says, I've dumbed down my smartphone and removed apps that caused distraction. I don't even have a browser. My phone is not very smart. and the only one I can't get rid of is WhatsApp and I find myself checking it too often. I really can't get rid of WhatsApp

as I use it for texting family and friends. Any suggestions would be awesome. Well, we've talked about WhatsApp recently so I will just briefly review my answer. Partially why I wanted to include this question is just to help give more and more examples for everyone out there about people who have really significantly dumbed down their smartphones

just because it has become common in the last seven or eight years to have all these social media apps on your phone and look at them all the time doesn't mean it's necessary. There are lots of people, including young people like Ron, who really do dumb down their phones. They take off social media, they take off the browser, they use it for the maps, they use it to listen to podcast. It is possible. He is an example. What about WhatsApp? Well, you probably know the answer. You've heard me say this before. When it comes to the sort of group text-based application, be it WhatsApp or be it even just iMessage on your iPhone.

There is two approaches you can take. You can be the type of person that is there in real time monitoring and responding to all conversations. Your friends and family get used to this idea that hey, Ron, here's a question, here's a thought that you will respond, you will answer

the questions. It's kind of convenient for people. It's kind of nice because you feel like you're connected, especially if maybe you're isolated during the pandemic. The other model is the occasional checker model. a couple times a day you do come in, you look at your text messages, you look at your WhatsApp channels, if there's something in there from someone, you try to get back to them, you know,

if there's some complicated discussion going on, maybe you call them. Ron, you basically have to be the occasional checker. Now that transformation can be a little bit difficult at first because your friends and family at first will be annoyed that you're not answering. It was convenient for them and it was nice for them from a social perspective that you're always there and you're not going to be that person anymore. They will get used to it. check it a couple times a day,

respond to what you can. They will learn and adapt pretty quickly. We don't always expect Ron to be there. We don't expect him to answer right away. Maybe we'll call him. Maybe we'll just say, hey, let us know when you get a chance. Whatever, people adapt.

And you gain a ton from that. You gain freedom from this constant context switching-inducing distraction of having to switch from what you're working onto the chat, what you're working onto the chat. That's terrible for your brain. It's exhausting. It's anxiety-producing.

It lowers your cognitive capacity. You don't want to be doing that. As I talked about last time, and again, I'm going really quick here because we've talked about this before, when you switch over to be an occasional checker on these group messaging tools, you have to accompany that with actually going out of your way to introduce alternative richer social interaction opportunities with your family, with your friends. You need more real-time analog discussion where you can hear people's voice or see people. You need to do more things in person.

there's really no substitution for the human social brain to actually be in the same physical space as someone else. And so you should accompany your shift from a constant checker to an occasional checker with a bigger commitment to these harder but more rewarding social interactions. You will come away from this with deeper connections, feeling more socially connected, but also saving your brain from the cognitive catastrophe

that is constant context shifting. Our next question comes from Carl Do you think spaced repetition flash card software like Anki is useful for solidifying knowledge gain during deep work study sessions? Well Carl, I'm pretty indifferent to the space repetition software packages.

I'm not against them. My concern is when the overhead of actually setting up your information into these cards and parameterizing your repetition, etc. When that takes up enough time that it actually gets in the way of just getting the work done,

that's when I become a little bit wary. But look, if you're good with these programs, that overhead can be minimized, it's fine. It's not going to hurt. The huge gap in terms of effectiveness when it comes to studying is between passive recall and active recall. So it's really the shift from

I'm going to read my notes and sources silently to myself. Jumping from that to I'm going to try to recall the necessary information out loud without looking at notes as if I was lecturing a class, that is the leap that takes you from very inefficient to incredibly effective.

Space repetition software like Anki adds like a little epsilon improvement. A little epsilon improvement to that very effective status you've gained by moving from passive to active recall. So that's what I always preach. That's what I preach in the red book. Active recall, active recall, active recall. It's much harder, but it's much faster. It gets it done.

If you can explain something out loud without notes, it will imprint, you will learn it. And so if you're a tech guy that it makes it more exciting for you that you're using smart software to do that active recall, do it. If you're not, and that worries you, don't. I mean, I'll tell you a quick question, I mean, a quick example for my own life. So as longtime listeners know, when I was working on the Red Book, so how to become a straight-day student, the original motivation for that book is a series of experiments I launched through the fall quarter of my fresh. year when I said, I want to figure out how to study better, and I'm going to launch a lot of experiments for different techniques for studying, see what works, see what doesn't. I was an art

history minor. I was really into art history, and there's a lot of memorizing. A lot of memorizing in art history. You have to know the title, the artist, and the date of lots of classic pictures, because part of studying art histories have a good foundation of common cultural knowledge. as a computer science major I basically programmed my own sort of onky style tools I wasn't so sophisticated about the space repetition

but I would put the information into these text files and back then I was probably using something like Pearl and I would go through and I would randomize them and I would keep track of what I got right and what I didn't get wrong

and I enjoyed writing the program and it was kind of cool but I'll tell you what that didn't stick because there was overhead to it and it was a pain and what was the lowest possible overhead way of implementing active recall here they just gave a software

where you could view the pictures like for copyright protection reasons and I would just go through them on there and I forgot exactly how I did it I think it was on like a computer screen you would block even physically with a piece of paper where the information was or you could hide it

I think there was a program where you could hide it and turn it back on I was like this is fine the main thing is I need to just look at the picture and say here's the artist here's the date here's the title without looking at any of that information either got it or I didn't And if I didn't, I would market and come back to it later. And if I got it, then I got it.

There was no overhead here. And getting rid of all the overhead actually made it easier for me to study. I didn't need the complex software program that I was trying to write. I just did it with whatever tool they had already given me. Because the key jump here was going from passive, just looking at it, looking at the title, looking at the artist, looking at the date, and hoping you remember, which is terrible, and going to active. All right.

So that's what I'd say. As long as you're doing active recall, you're doing the right thing. how you want to implement that active recall is up to your own taste. I want to take a moment to talk about another sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast. I am talking about ExpressVPN. Let me explain briefly how VPNs work. All right. So if you use ExpressVPN, here's what happens.

Let's say you want to access a website like Netflix. Instead of just directly connecting to Netflix's servers, you instead are directly connecting to an express VPN server. That server will then, on your behalf, talk to Netflix. And Netflix will send the movie stream back to that ExpressVPN server, which will then turn around and send it back to you. So Netflix doesn't know that it's talking to you. It's talking to this Express VPN server instead.

And this is true for any website you want to visit. You're having ExpressVPN servers talk to that website on your behalf. There's a lot of reasons why you might want to do this. first of all, you don't want every server out there to know everything about you. Second of all, it's very secure on your end because your connection to ExpressVPN has state-of-the-art encryption. So if there's someone nearby, you know, in the coffee shop trying to sniff your packets or what have you, they're just going to see really well encrypted gobbly gook that they aren't

going to be able to cipher. So you're protected on your end. The people you're talking to don't know everything about where you are and where you're coming from. This seems to be to me a safer, more private way to serve the internet. And there's also little advantages. So this copy that ExpressVPN sent me, for example, notes that one of the cool things you can do is you can choose where your ExpressVPN server is in the world. So let's say you want to access Netflix in Japan.

You can connect to an ExpressVPN server in Japan, which then talks to Netflix on your behalf. And Netflix thinks you are in Japan. So now you get to see all of the anime or other types of shows. that are only approved for the Japanese market, right? So that's a nice trick. Now, here's the thing about ExpressVPN. There's a lot of services like it. Their tech is great.

It's fast. Because their tech is so great, it's fast. It's seamless. You don't even realize you're using it. It's not going to slow you down in a way that's noticeable. So if you want to do an AVPN, ExpressVPN is a great one to use. All right, that's the end of my computer science lecture here. But let me tell you that if you're interested, go to ExpressVPN.com.

slash deep, that slash deep at the end will give you three extra months free. Now that's EXP-R-E-S-S-V-N.com slash deep, expressvPN.com slash deep to learn more and get your first three months free. Our next question comes from Aditya, who asks, what is the replacement activity that I should do instead of scrolling through social media. I try to delete all of my social media, but then I tend to change my mind. I get really bored and nothing feels entertaining after four to five days. I have the urge to go back, even though I hate social media. I'm just doing it because I have nothing else to do.

Well, Adisha, there's a topic I know something about when I was working on my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism. I ran an experiment. in which over 1,600 of my readers took 30 days off from tools like social media, video gains, online videos, etc. I called them personal, optional, digital technologies in an attempt to transform their relationship to these tools to something that was more healthy. And I got a lot of feedback and anecdotes from these participants. And one of the things I learned from this feedback is that a big predictor of,

of failing to make it through the 30 days and then induce sustainable change to their digital habits was white knuckling. Those in the experiment who said, I am just going to white knuckle this 30 days because I don't like social media and I want to use it less because it's bad. I'm just gonna sit here and try not to use it.

They were very unlikely to succeed. Who did succeed more often? Those who use those 30 days through experimentation and reflection to aggressively figure out what would I rather be doing? And those who are able to actually identify positive alternatives were much more likely to create and sustain changes to their digital life. This is the issue that's happening here, Aditya.

You need meaningful alternatives for your time. You can't just white knuckled and say, I don't want to use social media. If you don't fill that void, that void becomes yawning, a big gap. in your life, and it's very difficult to confront. All right, so how do you find these more meaningful activities? Again, I mentioned experimentation and I mentioned reflection. That's what you need to do.

You need to try things. You need to reflect. Be alone with your own thoughts. Think about yourself, your life, what matters to you, try to make sense of all the things happening in your life and put it into a cohesive structure. That's going to give you insight into what's meaningful to you and what you need. And experimentation is going to give you more direct exposure to different activities

and how they make you feel. Now it's going to take some practice and it's going to take some time, but you seem motivated, so I think you can do this. There's a couple broad classes of what these replacement activities end up looking like. Those surrounding craft is a big category. So the deliberate training of a useful skill and the application of that skill is something that we get great meaning from. So I'm trying to get better at doing this and I'm trying to apply the skill. I'm trying to get better at cooking and I'm going to cook a really nice meal. I'm trying to get better at playing the guitar,

and then I'm going to play a show with the new guitar. I'm trying to master DIY circuit design and then actually apply that skill to build an interesting electronics project. It's very meaningful for humans. We like to get better at things. We like to apply our skills to build things. There's usually a little bit of motivational hump up first

where you have to convince your brain. It's worth expending energy on something hard, but once you get rolling, that's very satisfying. Another satisfying thing is think of as self-improvement. It could be physical or cognitive. So, you know, having some sort of physical training you're doing a set program, a community that you're a part of, getting better at a sport, getting better at a certain type of athletics, getting better at a certain type of endurance activity or strength activity. It feels really good.

You get good chemicals and you feel good about making progress. Same thing with mental training. I'm going to go through a program of reading these hard books, being helped along by these commentaries. I'm going to master new knowledge. I'm going to read more fiction. I'm going to train my mind. That is very useful. Then there is, you can think of it as awe and gratitude related activities.

I'm going to go somewhere beautiful and enjoy it. I'm going to go hear music that I really appreciate. I understand why it's good and just revel in that appreciation. I'm going to go to a great movie in a theater that has really good projection and just enjoy the filmmaking. So it's sort of awe and appreciating. and gratitude, admiring what the world can produce as good. That's also a great thing to fill time with. And then finally, and probably most important of all,

is non-trivial social interaction. By non-trivial, I mean you're actually making a non-trivial sacrifice of time and energy to support the interaction. Social media tends to be too low friction. So your mind doesn't take it seriously. It gets you little chemicals. It distracts you. It numbs you.

But it doesn't make you feel very socially connected because it's just too easy to put an emoji under someone's Instagram post. It's too easy to reply to someone you know's tweet or just to shoot back a text to someone. Not saying those things are bad, but your mind doesn't take it very seriously. Now, spending time with someone in person, that's a pain. Non-trivial time, non-trivial energy, your mind's going to take that more seriously. Talking to someone for an hour on the phone while you hike, your mind's going to take that more seriously.

Doing something on behalf of someone, I'm cooking you a meal because I know you're sick or you have a new baby. I want to help you. Your mind's going to take that seriously. We crave these social connections. We crave being a part of a tribe in a way that is mutually positive. It's going to make you feel better. It's going to make you feel more connected. So these are some classes of activities.

Okay, so how do you get these into your life? Well, do a little bit of scheduling around it. Like, look at your week. What am I going to do? You know, every day. right after work, I'm going to work on my guitar. I'm scheduling in advance these social activities. I have a standing call now, you know, with my cousin where we talk once a week at this time. I have a walking date with some friends in town. We do it every Saturday morning and we go and we go to this coffee shop and we do whatever.

Like put some energy into this in advance. Maybe, you know, Friday night is DIY night. Every Friday night, there's some sort of project that you are doing, right? I mean, put some thought into it, put some structure into it, put some energy into it. Don't just say, what do I want to do next? Because in the moment, your mind's going to say, let's numb. You instead want to have some bit of a plan. And let's just finally end on that numbing point, because this is what social media is probably doing for you. It's numbing.

You feel bored. Bortem is uncomfortable. You don't want to confront perhaps your own thoughts or some hard things about your life. Or maybe your life is going fine. You just don't have much that you feel like you want to do in the moment. You will get a little bit of a chemical hit from social media because it's designed with algorithms to show you what you need

to give you that sort of in the moment numbing, but you're going to end up feeling worse when it's done. It's really not that different than numbing with video games or online videos. It's also not that different than numbing with drink. It's not that different than numbing with drugs. It's just something you just associate for how do I get away from this current moment

that's uncomfortable. Numbing's not the solution in the long run, meaningful activity is. Those are some categories. Schedule it at first to get used to it. Aditya, it is worth it. A life built around high quality, social and leisure activities

is a life that is going to be much more resilient and meaningful and satisfying than one in which you just try to numb your way through the hard moments. All right, let's do one more technology question. This one comes from Elizabeth. I was recently chatting with a

solopreneur friend of mine. She was telling me that it was impossible these days to start a business without being on social media. I believe the opposite, but I lack arguments. Thank you and keep up to good work. Well, Elizabeth, obviously I'm on the same page as you. Here's how businesses tend to work. In order to get other people to give you money, which they are loath to do, you have to offer a good or service that is rare and valuable. and if it is sufficiently rare and sufficiently valuable, they will give you reasonable money in exchange.

Most of the effort of succeeding in a business is figuring out how to produce that. Once you do, you have to find customers. Some of this is through marketing and some of this is through word of mouth recommendations. For most businesses, word of mouth is really the primary way that you find new clients, that you find new customers, people like it,

people talk about it, people recommend you. Some amount of marketing can also help. Some of that marketing might use social media, and I think that's fine. But this idea that you as an individual need a vibrant social media presence in order for your business to succeed, it's just rarely true. I mean, if you're Caitlin Jenner, okay, yes, your whole business is built on an influencer status. But Elizabeth, your friend, I'm assuming, is not Caitlin Jenner. They're probably doing something that's much more mundane. You know, I have a consulting business.

I'm an accountant. I have a product I'm trying to sell. Good. Create something rare and valuable. Be good at what you do. Really delight your customers, really delight your clients, and they will tell other people about it. Market to the degree that marketing helps and the customer acquisition costs makes sense.

And then repeat. I mean, that has been the formula for succeeding in business for a very long time. I do not think that radically changed in the last 10 years in which social media use became quite heavy. I think we tend to overestimate the degree to which people seeing us on social media is going to alchemize into all these different types of values. For the most part, it doesn't. We think it does because we're having all these interactions, but the interactions are often

quite shallow. You're being chopped up by algorithms and being fed to people as part of a large slurry of emotionally peaking optimized content snippets. It's not necessarily a deep relationship. It's not necessarily where people go to try to figure out who they're accountant should be or what consultant they want to hire, that tends to happen again in these more traditional means. I think we like the idea of social media being really important for business because it's fun and it's easy. This is a consumer-facing product that has been optimized

to be very pleasing to use. It numbsy in the moment. It's entertaining. It's exciting. It takes very little effort. You know, so we like the idea that, yeah, this is crucial. That's why I'm on here all the time, but we're basically lying to ourselves. Now, again, there's a are exceptions, but those exceptions are probably way more rare than we think. Whether or not you have a lot of followers on social media is not going to be the thing that makes the difference about whether or not your business succeeds. And if it does, it's probably going to be in the negative sense in that I spend so much time on social media that I'm not actually producing stuff that's valuable. So I would say, Elizabeth, tell your friend,

figure out what's valuable in her market and get after producing it. The other stuff will work itself out. With that, let's work ourselves towards some questions. about the deep life. Let's start with a question from Jejark, who asks, what is it about kitchens that make them so appealing for work? Well, it's an interesting question. I've been hearing this a lot. People have a house.

They have their bedroom. They have a home office. They find themselves often in the kitchen to actually do their remote work, especially during the pandemic. Well, I think one of the things this is evidence of is. aesthetics matter for cognitive work. We don't care enough about what our surroundings look like and the impact of our surroundings on our brain.

But this does really matter. So for a lot of people, kitchens have a probably one of the more pronounced aesthetics in your house. The rest of your house might be kind of boring, you know, like you have some furniture and some semi-blank walls with some paintings. It's like nothing that's going to catch your attention, but maybe you have a nice kitchen. It's white and it's clean and there's these nice counters.

and the cabinets are painted in an interesting color. It's very intentional. It's a very intentional aesthetic because there's one part of our house that we tend to actually, whether we did this or not, it tends to have a much more intentional aesthetic

and that induces a better work mode than just being in our room with the laundry on the ground and there's like one poster hung on the wall. There's a bigger point here, which is we should care more about aesthetics. Location matters. I mean, at the moment,

I'm going through a big wave of redecoration of the deep work, HQ. When I first launched the HQ last fall, I just got it up and functional. Got my books here, you know, got my desk here, got my podcast studio set up. But now I'm going through a second wave where I'm trying to really get it decorated. I'm putting artwork on the wall. The entry hall when you come in, I'm getting these little book, one book shelves where you can put an individual book face out. And all seven of my books are going to be arranged in a sort of random pattern on the wall there as we walk in. I have a really nice piece of original artwork that a listener sent me.

I'm very excited about. I'm getting it very nicely framed and printing up a little museum style information card to go on the wall next to it. Re-decorating the studio. So it's not just sound blankets and sound panels taped to the wall, but actually looks nice because I want to bring people in here as the pandemic starts to wind down and do more in-person stuff. And I want it to look nice and feel nice. This type of thing matters. So think about it when you're designing a workspace. It might seem superfluous to say, well, I'm going to convert this shed into a deep workspace, and I'm going to put a little stove in it, and do really nice woodwork,

and get this old lamp from an antique story. Well, who cares? I can just, you know, I have a desk in my bedroom. The aesthetics matter. It's why, when you look back at the sort of gentleman scholar of the Victorian era, that they put a lot of money to those leather chairs and those drawing rooms with the fires going and those libraries and rich mahogany wood because they wanted to create an aesthetic

that would induce a cognitive state that is well suited for insight. So anyways, this is my thought. Yeah, kitchens sometimes are the most intentionally designed room in your house. The degree to which it is possible, keep this in mind with designing where you want to do your best work. All right, our next question comes from Thomas.

Thomas says I'm a college student, and I have done, I've been remote since last March. I have really fallen off in classes and I will miss assignments and will choose watching YouTube even when it's an important assignment. I have heard you describe deep procrastination and how you help students out of it at MIT.

What is your advice for me? So for those who haven't heard me talk about deep procrastination before, that's a term I came up with back when I used to do a lot of one-on-one consulting with elite students back when I was a grad student at MIT, and I was writing books of student advice books at the time. And I began noticing this phenomenon where students would lose the ability to do work, even if it was really urgent, even if it was they're going to fail this class if they don't hand in this paper and they just can't do it. They can't get started. And it was so striking, and it showed up enough that I gave

it a term back in the old days on my study hacks blog, so we'd all be talking the same terminology, and we called it deep procrastination. Now, Thomas is suffering from deep procrastination, and I'm not surprised, given the current circumstances. So let's talk about it. Let's give some advice here. First of all, let's give two caveats. Caviote number one, clearly deep procrastination overlaps quite heavily with well-known mental health syndromes, the lack of motivation and the difficulty getting started with

action, sort of intense apathy, is a common, that is a common side effect of clinical depression or momentary or shorter depressive episode. So, Thomas, first things first, I can give you some thoughts, but a psychological professional can give you professional tools because you may be in a depressive state, which would make sense given your circumstances, and we have hard-won data-backed tools for how to work through these psychological moments. Caviat number two, your school situation is bad and it's going to get good again. you will be back on campus in the fall. Things will get back to the way they were.

A lot of the pressures of remote work are going to dissipate as vaccines and natural population immunity, at least in the U.S. context, is going to drive this pandemic down to something much more manageable. These changes are coming much faster and much more quickly than I think a lot of people realize right now. A lot of people who are plugged in the certain news coverage feel like things are just bad

are going to continue to be vad, and that there's these things called variants, which are basically boogeyman, that just do all sorts of supernatural things, and no one will ever be healthy again, because this is the first pandemic in the history of all of humankind that can never be stopped and will always go on forever. It's easy to fall into that mindset. It's not going to happen. Things are going to get better. I think that's important to recognize when right now you feel like what's happening is hard. So what we're talking about now is kind of short term. Your psychological context is going to be better this summer for sure and then when the fall semester starts up for sure as well. Okay.

With that in mind, what can we do right now about deep procrastination? Well, as best as I could tell, it tended to be a combination of two things colliding. One, just work being difficult, right? I mean, like, I have to expend energy. This is difficult stuff. The classes are hard or I don't quite get it. The work is ambiguous or the work is demanding. Combined with a sense of low motivation because, like, why am I doing this work?

do I care about this major? Why am I at this college? What am I even doing here in college? Why am I an econ major? Is it my parents that wanted me to be a doctor? Why am I in this orgo class? It was usually that combination of feeling very extrinsically motivated

combined with the work itself being hard that would trigger deep procrastination. So the right response here is to work on both sides of that triggering equation. So on the work being really hard side, What you can throw at this is much better student study habits. Make the work more controlled, make to work easier. This is where you read a book like my red book,

How to Become a Straight Day Student, and you get really serious about how do I organize my time, how do I organize my assignments, how do I take notes, how do I write papers, how do I study for tests? You transform it from this ambiguous, just, oh, it's got to do hard stuff and I don't like it into, I have a very structured week, a very structured approaches to this work.

It works pretty well, and I'm kind of proud of my skills. That'll help. That'll help because you lower the stuff as just hard aspect of the equation. On the other side, we have to try to regain some intrinsic motivation for education. Now, there's a series on my blog from back when it was a student-focused blog called the Romantic Scholar. It was addressed at this issue of regaining intrinsic motivation for higher education studies. Google this. Just Google like Study Hacks Romantic Scholar.

You'll find these articles. And they give you a lot of ideas about how you can reclaim your education as something that you want to do and you get real enjoyment out of and it's more than just instrumental. Right. It's here where you were going to get advice about bringing some other learning into your life that is not needed for a grade. Reading this book, I'm listening to this lecture. Just because I like this topic. It's here where, you know, depending on how old you are, it's like I'm going to have, if I'm reading a German, I'm reading Heidegger, right? I'm going to read like a German philosopher.

I'm going to do it with a hefa-wise in a beer garden somewhere. Like I'm going to make an over-the-top, you know, environment. Or if I'm reading the transcendentalist, I'm going to go hiking and I'm going to read Emerson by a stream. You know, like going over and beyond to create these aesthetically exciting environments to engage with material that basically convince yourself that this is stuff I care about and I like and it's good for my life, even if it's hard and the life of the mind is important. Read books about thinking. read the intellectual life. I'm reading a new book called Lost in Thought, which I'm enjoying.

It just came out, Princeton University Press, about the pleasures of an intellectual life of just sort of reading and engaging in information. So in which, that series, a romantic scholar, that advice is going to be really,

really well suited for right now. So you want to bring down the difficulty with better habits, be more organized. Hey, by the way, let me add to that. Do less, if at all possible. So one of the big triggers

of deep procrastination is the reason why things got really hard on just to work as hard side of the equations because people do too much, too many classes, too many activities. So the raw difficulty level gets too high. So do less. Less classes, easier semester, more balance of classes, less extracurricular. So that's an easy way to help bring down the hardness equation. Then on the other side, work on the know why. Foster an intellectual life, engage with these ideas outside of class, teach your mind that I like this stuff and I do it. Those two things help you over come deep procrastination. It's not really that hard anymore. It's not as hard as it was, and it's part of something I feel intrinsically motivated to do. You'd be surprised about how

how much of an inoculation against deep procrastination those two efforts can create. All right, so Thomas, I hope you find that useful. All right, let's do just one more question here. The final question comes from Julie. Is time block planning and deep work the keys to a fulfilling retired life, or is this going overboard? My quality leisure activity is machine knitting, and I have a podcast to discuss that craft. My goal has always been to continuously improve the podcast to make it interesting, inspiring, and just better. My day sometimes just slide by. I often wonder what I could have done if I had spent some time in deep work with the knitting

or continuously improving the podcast. Is time block planning the answer for someone who is not in the knowledge work world anymore? Julie, yes. Yes. I talked about this earlier in the question about someone who was going through a recharge and rejuvenation period after a hard year. Similar ideas, I think, apply for being retired. Having some control over your time allows you to get more satisfaction out of your life than no control. We overestimate the positive benefits of just playing things fast and loose.

What we end up doing is just dissipating a lot of, energy, falling behind on things, numbing more than we need to numb, and we don't feel happier. So I think it's completely appropriate for someone who is retired to do some time block planning. I mean, I've talked about this before on the show. You sort of have kind of a workday that you time block plan and then a clear shutdown when the workday is done. And after the workday, you have some ideas for the activities you're going to do, but it's not time block down to the minute. Now, of course, when I use the word workday, I just mean the portion of your day where you're doing productive activities with intention. You could be working on your podcast,

It could be working on your knitting. It could be volunteering. It could be the committees you're on at your church. It could be physical fitness. It could be reading and journaling. It could be awe-inspiring gratitude walks, whatever it is. But you just have a portion of your day that you are intentional about your time to make sure you get the most out of it. And then you have a clear shutdown that goes into a period of relaxation.

But you even have an idea. Like tonight we're going to get dinner from this restaurant and watch this movie. We're trying to make our way through the AFI list of the 100 Best Movies and we're on number 17 or whatever. So you have some intention, but you're not planning. every minute. That's what I think is appropriate. And in general, and I think this is the broader point here. Structure breeds relaxation. Structure breeds recharging. Structure breeds happiness and meaning. A lack of structure, you know, you're on the beach, you're in the hammock that only lasts so long before your sun burned and bored. So if you want to enjoy your life, if you want to

make, have free time and do fun things with it and engaging things and recharge and feel like you've grabbed life by the hands you're making the most of it. You have to have some intention that requires some structure. A little time block planning will get you there. So Julie, that would be my suggestion. I look forward to seeing soon. Your machine knitting podcast blaze its way up the podcasting charts. As you now approach your retirement with some structure, with some energy, you get after it, you go deep. good times are ahead for you. And what's ahead for us is winding down this week's episode.

Thank you, everyone who submitted their questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a habit tune-up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.