Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 80: Habit Tune-Up: Deep Work After Hard Days

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast. - On the value of expensive productivity systems. [3:58] - Phantom part-time jobs. [11:16] - Working deeply after hard days. [16:24] - Must all leisure be quality? [28:27]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions. Have it tune up mini episode. For those who are new to this podcast, these mini episodes are when I take voice questions straight from my listeners. We get into some of the nitty, gritty details involving the general ideas we like to talk about on this show. To find out about submitting your own voice questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. Now, this should be a fun challenge today. I have been doing quite a few interviews that have all stacked up together, and I am interleaving the recording of this podcast in between these interviews.

So just to give you a glimpse behind the book publicity curtain, I started this morning with a hour-long appearance on Iowa Public Radio. I had to jump right from that into a 45-minute interview with a major magazine. I grabbed some lunch, then did an hour-long online book club with a company out of London. I am now recording this in the 15-minute window between that book club and an interview for the BBC, which itself runs right up against an interview on Seattle Public Radio, after which I will then return to record the end of this episode. So, now there's life as a book author doing publicity.

get used to talking quite a lot. So actually, this is a nice relief because I can choose the questions here and I can choose topics that don't have to do with the same questions I've been hearing all day long. And I can take my time with the answer. So, you know, in a day where I have to spend a lot of time talking about ideas, this is probably this episode I'm recording right now is probably my favorite of the talking that I'm doing. So thank you for giving me that opportunity to at least have some control over what I talk about. So this should be fun.

We've got a good show. I'm looking at the questions I pulled here. We have something about hard day recovery, leisure activities. We revisit my phantom part-time scheduling idea, among several other interesting topics. So I want to get started right away with today's episode. So let's just first do a quick word

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That's Blinkist. spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, and you'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkus.com slash deep. And with that, let's kick off the episode with our first question. Hey, Cal. Having heard in your last podcast that you've stumbled upon Settle Kasten

and network not-taking tools, I'm very excited for you. Being a Gen Z, my knowledge for Greek references is somewhat lacking, but it might be like the time Percy Jackson discovered his demigod status and that he was embarking upon a thrilling world of danger up ahead. When coming upon an exciting new system for productivity or no-taking, there's a significant amount of activation energy to really get them started and maintained. Zetocastin, for example, when using a digital tool like room research can be quite complicated to work out how to implement.

There's quite literally courses where you pay hundreds of dollars for someone to teach you the basics of this program. So my question is this. For exciting and promising productivity tools and systems, how do we temper our excitement and be reasonable in trying to implement them, given that they can take significant effort to set up? No, no, no. Percy Jackson does not count as a Greek reference. That is someone who makes Greek references, which makes you a tertiary Greek reference, and that's not going to cut it.

I demand primary sources, so while you look up a direct reference, I will with great reluctance do my best to answer your question. So when it comes to tools like Zettlcastin-based Rome research digital network-based note-taking, that probably falls under the category of productivity pran, to use delete speak, that is really intricate and elaborate and difficult to learn productivity systems for which we have a lot of high hopes, that if learned, you're going to get a big benefit. I have a few points about these systems.

One, I think at least productivity pran aficionados, not everyone, but productivity pran officinados, overestimate what percentage of the difficulty of doing hard cognitive work comes from the tools being used suboptimely. I think it's easy to imagine 60% of the hardness is because I have inefficient tools. I'm taking notes in a poor way. I can't organize myself. And so if I take the effort to get, you know, Rome working and a good Zetelkastin system going

or if I'm really hardcore, I implement it old school style with note cards, then I'm I'm going to somehow make producing my novel or my computer game or my nonfiction book or whatever it is I'm working on, it's going to be way, way easier. I think that significant reduction of difficulty, that significant outsourcing of cognitive wear from your brain into a digital device was a real promise of productivity prong. The reality, I would say, is that maybe 10. of the difficulty of a hard cognitive effort is really dictated by the tools you use. All right?

So if you have very inefficient note taking and you're working on a book and you move to really, really smart note taking that took you three months to learn, you might make it 10% less difficult. Similarly, if you're a novelist and you're kind of just hacking away in Microsoft Word and, you know, it's kind of slow to load as your document grows longer and the formatting is kind of messy and you switch over to Scrivener, it takes a while to learn, you've got to pay some more money. It's going to help, but it's going to be 10% easier to write your novel, which means it's still going to be really, really hard. So I think that's an important calibration. I wrote about this in

my New Yorker piece from earlier in the fall, the rise and fall of getting things done. I really talk about productivity prong and when it arose in the early 2000s and his promise and how that promise and it really completely pay off. And so you can get a deeper treatment of that topic in that long form article. But this is a, I think the TLDR summary, if we're going to really throw the Leet Speak at each other here, it helps, but not as much as you think. So part of this is calibration. Don't go into learning a new tool like a Zettelcast and note-taking system software, thinking that the hard thing you're doing is going to feel a lot less hard. It's not, it's going to be a little bit easier. And that might matter. You know, there's drag, right? So 10% improvement when you're

doing something every day, year after year, product after product, maybe that makes a difference, right? So I don't want to dismiss it, but I don't want your hopes to be too high. So when is this worth it? Well, I think if you're into it, if like me, and I got to say, I mentioned before in a recent episode, my friend Shreeny Rao from the Unmistakable Creative, sent me these videos about Rome and maybe Notion, and he was really going on about some of these setups he has. I love this stuff, right? I mean, I'm a productivity geek. I love the prawn.

And so I want to learn this, and I probably will, at some point if I can find a time. So if you're really into it, then yeah, there's just a pleasure in learning the system. There's a pleasure in that 10% improvement. You feel better about it. You feel more professional. There's a psychological boost there, but still just not going to make it super easy. Hard things are still going to be hard. You're still going to have to at some point break out your Stephen Pressfield, get into the war of art and do the work.

So if these complicated productivity tools don't call to you, it's okay. You're probably not missing much. And if they do kind of call to you, but you're like me and you just don't have a lot of time to learn them, you know, go easy on yourself. It's that 90% of the hard work of thinking hard and trying to produce new thoughts and capture them in the world. I mean, that's the hard stuff is always going to be hard. And there's not a miracle cure that you're missing. So I think this is reflected in my systems.

I keep a lot of things pretty simple for my first. theory work. I have a stack of notebooks for working out rough notes, and then I use latex documents and overleaf to capture and polish those notes and share them with collaborators for my writing work. I just have a simple Evernote set up, a ton of notebook stacks, a notebook for each project, like article or book idea. I'm working. I just throw stuff in there. And I just kind of throw stuff in there. And if I have files, I usually have a directory in my writing directory and my shared dropbox directory tree that I access with a bunch of different computers and just here's a directory for this book, they're the PDFs that are relevant.

They're the scans that are relevant. You know, it's very straightforward. It's not a complicated note-taking system, but it's fine. It doesn't create a huge amount of friction, and it's fine for what I need to do, and writing the book is still hard, and that's where most of my focus goes. I'm thinking about switching to Scrivener

for my non-fiction writing. It might make some of the organization easier, and I'll take that 10%. And also, I think it's fun. It's not mission-critical. I might move to a Zetelkastin system like Rome offers because I think it would be fun and it might actually help me with some of my writing. Probably not a lot. It's still going to be hard to write, but I like that type of thing.

All right. So that's where I would leave it. Complicated productivity systems get you small wins. They're not wins that you should ignore, but they're not wins you need to chase if they're not calling to you. All right, with that in mind, let's go on to a question now about Phantom part-time scheduling. Hey, Cal, how you doing? This is Jesse. I was listening to your podcast on Monday and you were talking about an example where somebody has a full-time job with a flexibility to also have that phantom part-time schedule that applies to my situation exactly i have you know i do a good job of checking my buckets of the other stuff that you talk about so i'm happy with that i also have a side gig so i work on that but i was wondering specifically

what do you think a good number of deep work hours in that phantom part-time schedule would be per day? I try to get in two to three, but I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. Thanks. Well, Jesse, I'm glad you bring this up. This topic of phantom part-time jobs has become increasingly popular, especially during the pandemic. I also get a little bit in trouble for this topic sometimes, but I'm going to persevere and I'll explain why in a second. So for new listeners, the idea behind the Phantom part-time job is that if you're in a fully remote setting where things are a lot more results oriented, you know, because it's just what you produce, they can't really see if you're in your office or not. If you can be very productive, so if you can apply, for example, the type of ideas we talk about here on this podcast,

you do quarterly, weekly, daily planning, you time block, your capture, configure control. You're really in charge of what's going on and organizing things and managing your time and getting the most out of your time and having systems to try to reduce back and forth messaging so you don't have as many contact shifts, all the type of stuff we talk about, you might find, oh, I can get the same amount of work I used to get done in less than a less than a day. Now you have a couple options here. You can take this newly found time and you can invest it in trying to get ahead faster. I will do extra work. I will take on extra projects and I will use that to move up the ladder faster, that's fine.

You might use it for non-work-related purposes, which is what it first really came up because there's so many people who during this pandemic, you know, had their kids at home. The local elementary schools where I live in suburban D.C., they opened yesterday. All right? So there's been a lot of people who have had their kids at home, Phantom part-time jobs have allowed them to basically say, yeah, I'm going to get most of my work done in half of a day because I'm incredibly on it in terms of my organization and most people aren't. And I'm going to use the rest of the time because I have to watch my kids and educate my kids

and do all this dumps or fires type stuff that's happened during the pandemic, which has been terrible for a lot of people and a lot of jobs. And some people like Jesse's talking about use this time for another job. Now I get in trouble for this a little bit because there's this old fashioned mindset of, hey, I'm paying you for nine to five. But I don't buy that when we're at home. And we place no standard. or process or systems for how people organize their work or how productive they are.

And I say, look, if you're more productive than everyone else, you shouldn't be penalized by being forced to do more work. If you're getting what you need to get done done, who cares exactly when you get it done? Use that extra time for how you want to use it. So, Jesse, I think that's very smart of you, actually, to take advantage of your productivity gained extra time and work on some sort of side hustle, which can gain you more autonomy, more mastery, whatever, you're trying to get out of it, more money. two to three hours.

Okay, we're finally to your original question. Two to three hours is great. That's very normal. You can do a ton with those two or three hours a day. I would just caution you one thing, though. You said two to three hours of deep work. Keep in mind this sort of phantom part-time job, if you're aiming it at a side hustle,

it's not all going to be deep work. I mean, a lot of this might actually be relatively shallow stuff. Setting up a website, gathering market research, setting up and configuring software, you know, maybe a podcast as part of your phantom part-time job. Actually, podcasting can be deep work, configuring stupid audacity settings so that you don't get echo or something. It's not deep work. There's going to be a lot of that, too. So don't think of that just as deep work, which means what I'm trying to say more specifically is when you have those hours for your phantom part-time job, treat them like your hours for your main job in the sense that you want to have a time-block plan for it, you know?

let's get five things done real quick and then do this deep thing before I jump on this call that's also relevant to the side hustle. Don't waste those hours, in other words. Just because the Phantom part-time job work is optional and it's entirely self-directed,

you still want to get the most out of it. And so be very careful about those hours, time blocks, shallow work, deep work, processes, weekly planning, quarterly planning, apply the same system to the Phantom part-time job as well. I think a lot more people should do these things, right?

I think the work set up this year during the pandemic has been terrible. So here's what you get in return. At the very least, some flexibility that if you can get after it, that you can use to freed up time for things that is going to be better. All right, Jesse, I hope that answers your question. Let's move on now to one about hard day recovery. Hi, Cal. This is Laura.

I'm teaching faculty at a top university, currently working from home due to the pandemic. My issue is that I am currently teaching quite long days on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I typically have my deep work plan for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays I still teach in the morning with the option for planning of next week. But with the 12-hour days, I teach first thing in the morning at 8am, and then I teach again at 6 p.m. until 7.30 p.m. I'm finding it really difficult to unwind at the end of the day, which is causing a problem for my deep work because when I go to start Tuesday or Thursday morning, which is typically my most productive time, I still feel like I'm recovering from the long day before. So what I'm hoping for from you is how would you suggest

that I best manage this fluctuating schedule so that my deep work time is optimized? Thank you. Well, I like this question because I really empathize with it. I have a similar issue during my normal semesters. My teaching load is less than yours, I'm sure, but I also teach typically on two days out of the week. And back in the pre-pandemic days when we were on campus, what I like to do is get all of my meetings scheduled on my teaching day. And my thinking was, well, I know I'm going to be on campus for sure on those days to teach.

So why don't I put all of my meetings on those days? Because that leaves open the option on the other days that if for some reason I don't want to come to campus, I don't have to, right? So, I mean, I still do on most days, but I like that idea of keep the stuff that has to happen on campus on days I have to be there anyway, so now I have this flexibility. And if I want to then spend a whole Monday, you know, in the woods working on a math proof, I can. The effect of it, though, is that those teaching days, those two teaching days a week are killer

because it's nonstop, you know, it's a prepping, teaching, meetings, meetings, meetings, and I come home exhausted. So I have a very similar, a very similar situation to what you're describing. So I have two types of things to suggest, and I'll try to keep these things general enough that it's relevant to people who aren't professors as well. The first category is about reducing the cognitive impact of the hard days, right, so we can bring down the degree to which it drains us. and then the second category of advice is about compensating on the next day, how to compensate for some exhaustion or draining and still get good stuff done. All right, so let's focus on reducing the sense of exhaustion on the hard days.

One of the things I've learned is that exhaustion is less about the actual deep stuff you're doing. Like actually, it's less about the lecturing, you know, like the actual, I'm thinking hard in lecturing to the students. That's not what leaves us exhausted as much as all the context shifting in open loops. So, like, what really gets you exhausted is you finish a class, and maybe some stuff comes up right after the class. Like, a student has an issue, and you know you need to publish a problem set, and you forgot to send the solutions for the upcoming exam to your TAs.

Like, there's stuff, but you don't have time to do anything about that because you have to run to your next class. And now that's in the back of your head, taking up 20% of your cognitive. negative space while you're trying to teach, and then that generates some more issues, and you have the sense of just stuff is building up and you're not getting to it, you're jumping on email in between class, and it's really all that context shifting and holding of open loops that can make those hard days super exhausting. So one of the things I learned is simplify those hard days as much as possible so that there's

very little being kept in your head, very little that gets generated that needs to be done that you have to remember. And there's a few things that help there. I have these buffer periods, you know, after class or between any meetings so that I can process and get out of my mind anything that came up during that class or during that meeting. And I do this like literally if you're at Georgetown and for Georgetown people there will know these references. I often teach in Healy Hall because it has good blackboards and I teach on blackboards. That's the castle, the Georgetown castle, right? You'll often find me after class. I have to leave the classroom because the new class is coming in.

but I'll be set up on my laptop on one of these benches in the hallway right outside there on the first floor of Healy because I want to process and shut down everything related to that class and be done with it before I then go on to my next thing. Like that makes a big difference. I try to automate as much as possible things that surround my classes so it's not generating new context shifts or new open loops. I'm very structured with how I deal with my TAs, for example, because I don't want to just be shooting emails back and forth with them. It's, you know, here's when we meet. This problem set comes in.

We meet at this time. You get these solutions. Here, I bring you this rubric. You then bring the greater problem sets back to me by this date. You know, we figure out these systems with how we interact and get our work done so that we can execute without me having to make decisions on the fly. Without them having to figure out on the fly, how do we do what comes next? Seems trivial, but these things create a big drag on your brain. So the more you can automate the stuff surrounding your class, the less drag on open.

and loops to less drag created by context shifting. Right? So, I mean, I think that helps as well. So, I mean, summarize, shut down and capture everything after every class or meeting, automate as much as possible. So what needs to happen, the class gets done. I'll add to the automation. I mean, everything from when do I prep class, when do I write problem sets, when do I work

on an exam, when is that exam going to be graded? All this is figured out in advance. I don't have to think about it. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to make decisions. I don't want open loops. I don't want contact shifting. I want to just be executing and not have to worry.

What am I missing? What else needs to be done? All right? And add time at the end of your day to shut down any final loops. Shut down complete rituals is the final thing I want to mention here about drain reduction. Have this good final process. There's no open loops. Everything's been handled.

Everything's in my system. I've updated everything. My trellabords have new cards. My TAs have the stuff they're supposed to have. I know the plan for my classes. There's nothing in my head. There's nothing that's open. Shut down complete.

Check that box in your time block planner. And then you can get more enjoyment out of your night. By enjoyment, I mean rest and recharge because every time your mind wants to drift back to think about all the stuff that was going on, you can say, look, I checked the box. I would not have checked a box if I wasn't satisfied that everything is handled.

If everything is handled, I don't have to worry about it. And you save a lot of extraneous cognitive fatigue that come from just thinking about your work all evening. The shutdown complete really helps you there. All right, you do all those things that will reduce the drag. And this stuff is really important.

I mean, it's what allows me to keep my sanity as a professor and still write books and still do podcasts and still do other things and still not work past 530 on most days. This really helps. Now you get to your off work days. You need to start those days probably with a recharge type ritual. Start your day earlier than normal. Don't go into the office or campus.

if you can at all avoid it. I would suggest getting outside, having a ritual surrounding a walk in fresh air and nature, you should end up at a cafe and you should be reading a book that has nothing to do with your work over a breakfast at a cafe.

You need some sort of rest and recharge ritual. This is not superfluous. This is critical. It's exactly the same as an athlete who needs to do an ice bath the day after an athletic event because they need the swelling in their muscles not to get too bad

so that it can recover properly before the next time they're on the mound and have to pitch again, right? Same thing. It's just your brain, not your elbow. Ritual outside, relaxing. You look forward to it. You're reading a book. Then you can go from that into some sort of deep work.

Now remember, because you kept on top of everything during your hard day with a final shutdown, there's nothing open loop in your mind that you're worried about. You're clear here to actually do work. And you can do your deeper work. Do it in an aesthetically pleasing location. if possible. Do it outside. Do it in a deep work shed you've built in your backyard. Do it in the attic office that you set up that look like a Victorian study. You know, I'm doing my deep work and here's my tea. And I do it and it's calm and I finish and capture my thoughts. And then I have like a highly

organized sort of to-do task block where, all right, let me catch up and get prepped for tomorrow. Whatever needs to be done, shut down complete. So having the right rituals around your day, the right recharge ritual first thing in the morning, you'll get more out of the next day too. I think more work should be like that. Seasonality is critical on lots of different scales. Busy days, need soft days, hard months, need easy months.

Hard seasons need easy seasons. Rest and recovery, rest and recovery. That's actually how we operate. So to the extent you have autonomy over this, like a professor with teaching that's consolidated on certain days, take advantage of this. If you're an entrepreneur that runs your own business, take advantage of this.

If you're a freelancer that runs your own schedule, take advantage of this. When you do the hard, minimize open loops and context shifting, a company hard with easy, a company busy with deep, I think that's going to be an optimal balance. All right, so Laura, I hope that helps. I mean, look, I'm on leave this semester. Research leave, I'm on a fellowship, so I'm not teaching.

But I know the fall is coming, and I'm going to be back on campus, and I'm going to be teaching classes, and I'm going to be commuting back to Georgetown, and I'm going to be right back into this again. And so basically in answering your question, I'm psyching myself up to get ready for my return to my academic life. And we will return soon to our questions, but first I want to tell you about ExpressVPN. A VPN, if you will allow me to put on my computer scientist hat here, is a secure and private way to surf the internet. Instead of your computer directly connecting to the server you want to talk to, the website or the service.

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Don't forget that slash deep. That's what's going to get you the three free months. That's expressvpn.com slash deep to learn more. All right, moving on here. Let's do a question about leisure. Hi, Cal. My question is, what do you do to zone out when your mind and body is tired? When I've been doing deep work and had a busy day,

I find I'm craving an hour just to watch something mindless or scroll on my phone, which I'm usually very difficult. disciplined about. I don't have the energy to do anything which requires engaging in my brain. And it's too late, dark, cold to take a walk. Does all leisure have to be quality leisure? Thanks. I think mindless is fine for leisure, especially if you are exhausted. Maybe you're a little bit sick or you had a really hard day. And there's only so much more you can muster out of your brain. I get that. I'm there sometimes. Two things I would point out. One, intention. Matters, even if what you're doing is not demanding.

So in other words, if you have an idea of what you want to do and you get kind of excited about that idea, you're going to get a lot more relaxation out of it than if you just sort of fall into the couch and say, whatever. All right. So let's say, for example, what you're going to do is it's a guilty pleasure TV show. There's nothing intellectually demanding about it. But if you just build up with some intention, this anticipation, I'm going to watch this show. It starts at eight. You know, maybe I'm going to do it with my friend. I'm going to have a drink with it.

It's not a hard, convally demanding thing, but by just anticipating it and sort of building up a little bit of a routine or some special circumstances around it, you'll get more relaxation out of it. Or there's, I'm just going to read a book that's not very hard, a thriller book or something like this that's not that demanding. But I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to make this snack and go to my chair and put my feet up and just really get into it. Or I'm going to do it in the bath and, you know, whatever I mean, right? You know, you can put some intention and planning, a little bit of intention and planning into a non-demanding leisure pursuit, and you'll get more out of that pursuit. So that's a hack.

The other thing I would say is be wary of your phone in this instance. So I'm completely fine with things that aren't demanding that's not reading great literature or carving wood. That's fine, right? you're trying to recharge. But if you go to your phone and say, entertain me, you're putting yourself at the mercy of some pretty merciless algorithms. Right. Now you are throwing yourselves into Jaron Lanier's machine of meshing gears that's going to convert you into a gadget that can be chewed up and spit out the other side and some sort of metaphorical monetizable soylent. It feels kind of like it's react.

It's relaxing, but in a manipulative way. it's pushing your buttons, it's showing you outrage, it's showing you humor that then goes into the weird. It's playing your brain stem like a fiddle. And it's going to keep you on there and you're going to use it, and it is diverting, and it is distracting. But it's having all of these side effects psychologically and emotionally. While there's also the just philosophical side effect of that you are being converted into a gadget,

your attention is being harvested, all your information is being gathered, And so I put a asterisk around that one particular activity. Numbing with your phone is something that I'm very, very wary about. The internet is fine, right? It's like, okay, what I'm going to do during my mindless reaction is I'm going to watch YouTube videos of, you know, Adam Savage on tested.com building DIY projects, right? I know a lot of people during the lockdown portions of the pandemic, those brief periods with their shelter in place orders depending on where you lived, Adam Savage, the former Mythbuster, would live stream him like building something.

And sometimes it would literally be like building Legos or a model. And there's a real comfort in that for a lot of people and they would follow along with them or just have it on and it was a positive, nice force. Like, that's great. Like, that's the internet, but that's not exposing yourself and just, saying let me scroll, numb me. It's like, here's this thing that's accessible through the internet that I know about and I like and I'm going to go.

It's not that the manding and it makes me feel good and I'm going to go look at that, right? So there's some intention, some focus on what you're actually looking at. So Twitter can be really devastating in this way. It's really hard to do Twitter in a way that you don't get as much harm as good. Instagram can be pretty devastating in this way. You see some inspiring photos, but also some envy-pricking photos and some other photos that make you upset. TikTok is incredibly manipulative.

It's pure algorithmic. Like, let me just feed you things that's just, you know, I've sticking an electrode straight into your brainstem. And I'm going to overtake you. And that type of thing makes me nervous, right? So be wary about letting in particular social platforms just have your attention to entertain you. Be a little bit more intentional. Build up a little ritual, too. If you do that, I think you can get a lot of pleasure out of mindless.

I set these things up all the time for myself. A little thing I'm going to do that's kind of mindless. with a little ritual, and here's the snack I'm going to have, and here's where I'm going to go. And it's really important for me. So do that. Just be wary of turning on that phone and saying, I'm all yours.

And with that, maybe we should wrap up this episode, so we can all go do some non-quality, mindless, but intentional leisure. Thank you, everyone, for submitting questions. To find out more about submitting your own questions, go to Kylenewport.com slash podcast. I will be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. So until then, as always, stay deep.