Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 81: How Do I Avoid Burnout?

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: What Are My Core Systems? [2:40]WORK QUESTIONS - How do I avoid burnout? [13:33]  - How do I measure effectiveness in a vague job? [19:58] - How do I teach myself to become a better programmer? [22:19] - What is a good way to become a better leader? [27:50] - How do non-fiction writers become better at their craft? [30:56] - What motivates a boss to promote you? (Plus a bonus digression on personal versus societal improvement) [34:27]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Does personal email make people miserable? [39:40]  - Should I quit social media for good? [42:09] - How do I help someone kick their TikTok addiction? [49:23] - Is it possible to succeed in business without a personal brand? [56:40]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do we teach deep thinking to kids? (warning: your kids will now like my answer) [1:00:36] - Why did I move to Takoma Park? [1:04:32] - How do I focus when dealing with emotional turmoil? [1:15]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 81. No quick announcements today. We've got a great show, a good mix of questions between our three normal categories, work, technology, and the deep life. There is also another deep dive this week. I'm going to talk about my core productivity systems and why you should have a document list in your core systems as well. You know, something I've noticed is that podcast often take a really long time to get started. I'm trying to combat that trend, so let's just roll right into it.

Let's do a quick ad, and then we will get started. On this podcast, we're used to thinking about the ways that the internet can actually keep you away from living a deep life. Well, what if there was a subscription service out there? Do it actually help your deep life become deeper?

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go to optimize.me slash deep and use that coupon code deep to get that discount. That's optimize. Dot me slash deep with the coupon code deep so they know you came from me. The topic of today's deep dive is my core systems. Now, the meat of this deep dive is going to be me actually reading to you from a document

that's right in front of you the list I maintain of the core systems that run my life. But before we get into the specifics about my systems, let me back up and give a little bit of a philosophical framework for what we're about to do here. Longtime readers of my newsletter know that I am a fan of what I call rooted productivity. The idea here is that you shouldn't just keep track of all the different systems you use to organize your life only in your head. A lot of people do this. It's, you know, I have this note-taking app. I use a time block planner.

I try to get in three hours of deep work every day. Whatever it is, they just sort of keep these things in their head. They try to remember to do them. And it's all just floating around. Now, we do okay with that. If you've used a system enough, you're going to be pretty consistent about it, but there is still some cognitive stress

from trying to keep track of this in your head. You will forget things. There are certain systems that you'll sort of not do because maybe it's a little bit harder. Maybe there's a little bit of friction because it's all just sort of chaotic in your head anyways. Why not just bypass that one to go over to the system that's easier to use?

It's also harder to really take stock of how you organize your life and see in black and white. Okay, I've been doing this, this doesn't really work, I should stop. And I'm not doing enough of that. So let's figure out a way to put that in. So if you don't have clarity about exactly what you're doing, it's harder to optimize what it is you're doing.

So rooted productivity says you should have a document that lists the key core systems and strategies that you use to organize your life. This is the root of your entire organizational efforts in your life. And now you have reduced what you have to keep. track of in your head to this document exists and here's where it is. Now you don't have to keep track everything in your head. That document is the root. Now why do I call it the root and not just let's say the master list of everything you do. It's because for rooted productivity to work, this root document

should not be too specific. I don't want to know about the actual tools you use in this document. Don't talk to me about a time block planner. Don't talk to me about Rome research. Don't talk to me about your bullet journal. It should be a higher level than that. It also should not capture the specific rules, perhaps, that you're currently deploying, that I'm trying to get three hours of deep work a day, that I'm trying to end my day at four and go for a long walk.

This should all exist in your system, but it's going to exist in more specific documents that you find starting from the root. So that's why we use the term root here. It's the big picture commitments that you really stick with. Then that root document can point you towards subsidiary, documents to capture the details of how you implement some of these ideas. And these details can be changing and mutating over time through experimentation. They can come and go. These documents have their

own subsidiary documents. You get a real computer science style tree here. But the root is where it all begins. All right. So your root document, again, should list the big picture commitments you have to organize in your life. And it should point as needed to subsidiary documents that expand on exactly how you implement when needed some of those ideas. Okay. So here's what I thought I would do. I have my root here, my core systems and strategies document that I keep track of this all in. I have it loaded in front of me. Let's go through it. So you have a real world case study of the root of my productivity systems. All right. So I'm looking at this document now. It's in three sections. Section number one, core documents. I list three documents here. Okay. These are

three documents I keep track of to help organize and shape my life. Number one is a value plan. And I elaborate on it here, just briefly, just a couple sentences by elaborate. This is where I keep track of here are the core roles in my life. Here are the core values I associate with those roles that I strive to achieve. Also listed here is my career and personal strategic plan. So I maintain a strategic plan for my career. I maintain a strategic plan for my life outside of work. So how do I know I maintain those two documents and a value plan? Because it says so right here in my core systems and strategies document. Okay, so it's listed here that these documents exist.

Also under this core documents section, I have some notes on how I maintain these three documents. So I do a value plan every week. I've done this for years and years and years, usually on Fridays. I go through my value plan. I reflect on what my values are and then, or I go through my value document, reflect what my values are. and then I create what I call a value plan. So it's a plan for the week ahead. Some of it might just be reminders.

Hey, remember to do this or this is important. You've been slipping on it. And sometimes it'll be experiments. Let's try to do this every day this week to try to practice this particular thing that we value that maybe we're not doing so well. So that's the value plan. And then I note here that my strategic plans get looked at once a week, preferably while I'm creating my weekly plan. So those get looked at every week. And that they themselves, so they can be.

updated at any point should get really a major overhaul at the semester level. We got the fall, we got the spring, we got the summer, okay? You've heard me talk a lot about this sort of semester daily, weekly planning. Well, this is where it's being captured here, is that once a season I should take these strategic plans and give them a good look. What worked, what didn't? What do I want to keep? What do I want to focus on? But it's spelled out black and white. That's when that happens. And beyond that, just look at it once a week to help guide your actions that week. And finally here I mentioned my my famed moleskin idea notebook that, you know, always have one of these notebooks with you. That's where I capture thoughts

relevant to the value plan and my two strategic plans. And I should review this on a semi-regular basis at the very least when I do my big semester upgrades. Look through that notebook, captures my thoughts and helps inform the updates I do to those plans. All right. Now, these are things I've been doing for years. It takes up a quarter of a page because it's just a sentence for each of these, but I've captured it in this root document. That's what I do. All right. The next section in this document is called productivity. All right. So it's a quick summary of how do I, what are the big picture principles for how I organize my work in life? Very simple here. I deploy weekly and daily planning. My weekly plan is based on a review of my

strategic plans as well as my calendar task list. My daily plan is time blocked during normal work week days and is informed by my weekly plan. right? So I just make it clear. Build a weekly plan. When you build that weekly plan, make sure you're looking at your strategic plans on normal weekdays. So days you're not traveling or it's like a really open day where you spend the whole day riding. Yeah, you should time block. Do a daily plan based on your weekly plan. I capture that here. Two other points under productivity. I have clear work shutdowns. All right. So shutdown complete. That ritual is very important to me psychologically. So I say it here. Also nod to David Allen. Full capture, right? Full capture of tasks.

everything gets captured, processed into a systems. That's it. So notice I don't say that I do my time block plan and a time block planner. Notice I don't talk about where I keep track of my tasks. Notice I'm not getting into really small scale details here about like where I keep notes for my books or how I schedule my writing or how much deep work I want to do each day for computer science work, for example. For me, I think all of that is much more appropriately handled in those strategic plans.

And notice those strategic plans, we have this root document, it points to those strategic plans. That is where I think it's appropriate to talk about in my system, more concrete details about use this planner, work this much this week. Because I can experiment, I can adjust, I can, you know, this is what I'm working on right now. If it's not working, I can make a change there. I don't like to change this root document that much. That churn of like we're going to try to use this scheduling philosophy this week. We're going to try to write every night. We're going to try to do whatever.

I want that not in this route, but in the strategic plan. So I'm very high level here. It's like, look, weekly plan, daily plan, shut down complete, task capture. You want to get into tools and get into the tools in your strategic plan. If you want to just remember what tools you use, that's okay. The key is the commitment, though, to this is how I organize myself. What I'm focusing on specifically and how exactly I implement this. Again, that's an issue for the strategic plans.

All right. Last category, discipline. I maintain in my. strategic plans, a list of what I call the core disciplines. These are things I try to do every day. I track them. I have metrics for each of them and I track them. At the moment, I use the metric planning space and my time block planner, but I don't actually get into that detail here. It's just you should have a list of the things that you try to do every day that you track with clear metrics. I'm a big believer in you have to track it for the important core behaviors for a good deep life.

You have to just do tracking. It makes you much more likely to do it. It also gives you good feedback. If you're not doing something that you learn you're not doing something, you can find out why. And so that's a big part of my system that I put in place a few years ago. Discipline is important. The things that matter you need to do, I don't want to just remember those. So I have a list and I track them. Now key, in this root document, I don't list them out here. I point from the root to another document. And I say in this strategic plan is where I keep my up-to-date list of things I track, that can mutate. the idea that I track things is a much more stable idea. And that's it.

This fits on one page. That is the root of my entire system. Again, different tools come and go, different scheduling philosophies come and go, different productivity heuristics, what I'm trying this week, what I'm tracking, how many hours I want to work, how many medians I want to do, that all goes. If we look at my strategic plan for work right now, for example, I have what I call my spring five-point plan where I have five things I'm doing this spring as I leave my book deal, but I'm still on a research fellowship, five aggressive plans to try to really shape my experience of the spring. That all belongs

in a strategic plan. But this core document just points me to those plans exist. And here's how I look at them. Here's the foundation of how I organize my time with weekly, daily planning shutdowns. And I have this disciplined approach of tracking certain metrics. All right. So this is my recommendation for you. If you take organizing your life seriously, if you want to be more intentional, have one of these core systems and strategies documents, make it the root of your system, come back to it regularly at first. It will give you some peace,

and it will allow you to keep optimizing the things that matter when it comes to living a deep life. And with that in mind, let's move on now to some work questions. Our first work question comes from software engineer, who asks, can you talk about ways to prevent, or handle burnout. Every day in software engineering,

I hear people get pretty burnt out and they don't want to work anymore. Any advice on how to tackle it, since you are regularly juggling between your book business, your job as a professor and dad, have you ever felt enough is enough? Well, software engineer, burnout is an interesting question.

It's something that we need to study more closely so we can understand how to avoid it. Now, as far as I can tell, there's two major sources that can lead you to professional burnout. one is actual cognitive exhaustion. So if you have a cognitively demanding job like producing code, and you are trying to do the 23-year-old Stanford recent grad startup thing

where you're going to produce code for 15 hours a day and just sleep for four hours and survive off of Soylient and throw around kettlebells in an optimal way to keep your muscles from atrophine, there's only so much of that you're going to be able to do, especially if you're not 23 and right out of college. and you could actually just physically burn out your brain, right? So if you're doing something that's demanding too long, you're going to burn out. And we have an easy solution to this.

We know the best way to produce cognitively demanding output is with a relentless day-by-day-by-day approach. Not, oh, today I'm going to be a hero. It's for the next 30 days. Three hours, four hours, three hours, four hours, three hours, four hours, just again and again and again. peak mental capacity, not long enough that you burn out, just like an athlete does when they are training for something. I'm not skipping training days, but I'm also not going to run 26 miles on day six of 30 of my training for the triathlon, right? So easy fix there. Work very deeply, but in a

reasonable amount of time, and then repeat that again and again, it will build up to good results. The second source of burnout is overload. Having more on your plate than you can easily keep track of or can easily imagine how you were going to get it done. The Paleolithic productivity circuits in our brain, which are important and which are often overlooked, do not like when we are committed to something and we don't get it done. Now, this has a really good purpose in our ancestral environment, right? We are driven for action.

It's why boredom feels so bad. It's why if we also don't finish something that we're working on, it feels distressing because our brain is trying to get. get us to build fire and invent tools and put together society, right? I mean, humans have this very useful instinct. But if you have 70 different things on your plate that all are arriving from emails and people grabbing you in Zoom meetings and saying, hey, Cal, just do this, it overwhelms that completion detector in our brain.

And then you feel distressed and anxious and overloaded. It's a very uncomfortable sensation. And that can really lead to the burnout. So having too much to do than you can easily keep track of. also will cause overload, which leads to burnout. What are the solutions here? Well, there's two pieces to the coin here. First is you've got to do less.

Read Greg McEwen's essentialism to get some inspiration about saying no, taking more off your plate. You can't have more than you can easily keep track of her handle on your plate. This is not good for the human brain. It's going to affect all the other work you do. So you need to start trying to clear stuff out of there. He gets into it in the book. I talk about it a lot as well.

two, you need to throw hardcore organization at the stuff that remains. See, if you can take the work that remains, and even if it's a fair amount, you've got a good productivity system to capture it, to get it out of your brain, a good rooted productivity system, let's say, so everything is captured, you know your systems,

things are put together actionable, you have certain times you work, you have certain automated processes, you just have the whole thing really dialed in. This is not just an exercise in system fiddling. It is a way to trick that completeness detector into not being concerned. It's like, oh, I have these systems I execute. Things are captured.

It's not in my head. I have a weekly plan. I do time block planning. I find time for the things. And look, I can keep up with it. The stuff that needs to get done gets done. Your completeness detector is going to be a lot less hyperactive. And if you're just rock and rolling, look in your inbox stressed out,

someone's bothering you in Slack. like, shoot, I got to get that done. That's going to stress out that completeness detector. Now, this is an important point because, you know, we're going through this anti-productivity backlash right now, which is a very complicated backlash because the word productivity is very complicated, and it means many things.

But often one of the targets of this backlash is if you're talking about productivity systems, this is somehow negative. This is somehow an acquiescence to some sort of industrial culture, some sort of cult of production. Usually they're going to inappropriately mention in Frederick Winslow Taylor here, though that's a much more complicated topic than I think people actually give credit.

That's not what we're doing here. Look, in an age of autonomy, when how we organize our work is all on us, which is a problem, and I talk about it in my book, and I talk about it in my New Yorker piece on the Verizon fault of getting things done, but when everything is on us, we have to fight this rearguard action against overload burnout and stress, minimizing to the extent what we can, what's on our plate, and then really trying to organize the hell out of what remains, this is about fighting off psychological distress. It's not about some sort of acquiescence to the ghost of Frederick Winslow-Taylor. All right. So that's my summary. Don't do too much of the hard stuff in any

one day, but do a lot of it over time. And on the flip side, minimize the other stuff to the extent possible. Be more radical about this than you might feel confident doing. No, no, no, no. And then what remains, get your organizational game together. Again, this is all about tricking that part of your brain that's going to make you feel distressed into thinking that stuff is handled than it won't make you feel so distressed. All of these things combined should help you sidestep burnout. It's for sure what I do. I think about overload and burnout all the time,

and I'm constantly applying these ideas. It's how I keep my, whatever it is, 37 different jobs rolling without having to work past 530 most days and avoiding most significant senses of anxiety or burnout that most people maybe in the situation might feel about their work. All right, our next question comes from EA. A, in my line of work, which is government admin, I have to learn new policies, agreements, concepts, laws, etc.,

and I also need to be able to use them when needed. While it's easy to measure deep and non-deep tasks in some jobs, it's incredibly difficult to know and measure the effectiveness of the knowledge and utilization of such knowledge within the administrative Leviathan and the inevitable red tape. Well, EA, if you have a government administrative job, I agree, it's pretty amorphous. There's going to be a lot of hoops you have to jump through in bureaucratic nonsense. It's not going to be a type of job where you can say these are the two deep things I'm doing.

Give me accountability and in exchange, I'm going to do a lot less. It doesn't work that way. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming your way. Being able to actually manage that administrative Leviathan, as you call it, to manage it well to figure out what matters, they get results where results actually are needed. That's really the effectiveness that you're trying to measure. Now, how do you measure that you're actually doing that? Well, people come to you.

They trust you. They're putting you in charge of bigger things. You're the person that the deputy administrator comes to when there's something that needs to get done that falls within your wheelhouse. Basically, in these complex government jobs, the way other people treat you and use you and depend on you is often your best indicator of how good you are. So you have your act together. You have your act together about regular time to keep up with new information. You're very organized about the request that come in that could otherwise sap all of your time.

Maybe you have an internal ticketing system. You have your role-based trello boards, really tight planning, daily planning, weekly planning. You start each day before the day even begins learning one new admin or policy. You build out new systems for your team to reduce unnecessary back and forth hyperactive hive mind style unscheduled communication so certain things can get done better. You innovate systems that you know well. Like you're this type of person doing those type of things. People are going to come to you. They're going to trust you.

They're going to try to promote you. And that's how you know that you are actually doing what you are supposed to be doing at an effective level. The next question comes from Ashish. I'm a self-taught web designer, currently working in a small firm. I need to advance my career as a full-stack developer. You mentioned in your book Deep Work, a guy named Jason Bin. Can you elaborate more how he studied with just books and notes? So for those who don't remember, Jason's story is from the introduction of Deep Work.

And the idea was he had a job that he was stuck in. He was basically filling in spreadsheets at a financial research company. He wanted to become a programmer. So he went deep, locked himself in a room, actually literally locked himself in a room, and began to study, focused deeply, built up new skills, and was able to move on. This is the short version of the story, and get a much better job as a developer. All right. So how did he do that?

Well, two things I want to emphasize here. One, if you'll go back and read that story, what Jason did is he studied on his own so that he could get to the point that he could then successfully enter a demanding boot camp program. Right. And then he did that boot camp program and after the boot camp program he had what he needed to get that entry level job. So he wasn't learning everything from scratch. He was learning enough from scratch to make it into the next higher echelon of, intense training, right? So if you're like a computer science major, you could probably just jump straight into a boot camp program and learn, you know, whatever particular development paradigm you needed.

But if you're starting from scratch, like you are like Jason, is there some self-education needed. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. He went to an intense elite, well-respected boot camp that really built his skills, but he knew that it was going to take time to get there. All right. Two, what did he do in that locked room? Well, active recall without distraction. That's the key. Let's look at both of those parts. Active recall meant you have to be trying to apply the thing you're learning from scratch without looking at your notes.

It is in the doing that you learn, not just the passive consumption of information. And when it comes to programming in particular, what does it mean to actually do or to active recall? It's usually producing code. This is the tried and shrewd method. All right, I'm going to produce a program that does X. because the next thing I want to learn is the techniques needed to do X. So maybe I am

trying to understand object-oriented programming. I'm early in my Java training. You know, I am going to build whatever program it is. You know, maybe it's not that sophisticated, but I'm going to do, I'm going to have some objects here. Maybe I'm going to do some basic polymorphism.

The project is going to force me to apply the skill. And I have very clear feedback in programming because it compiles or runs or it doesn't. And then I'll look at my textbooks and some tutorials and the internet that try to maybe, how does this work, or what's the notation for referencing methods within an object, right?

You know, looking up stuff as I try to produce until it works. Now I go on to the next harder program. My longtime friend Scott Young has been talking about this recently. He wanted to learn, this maybe was a couple of years ago. He wanted to learn how to do some machine learning development, So he didn't just sit there and read books about machine learning. He wanted to write a game, I think it was Scrabble.

He was like, I'm going to write a Scrabble game that can beat me. Because it's going to require that I have to figure out how to build some basic machine learning models because he was going to have a statistical based Scrabble player, right? So it's using machine learning optimized recognizers to make its moves. And that goal pushed them to stretch, learn these techniques mathematically, learned these techniques programming-wise, clear feedback. Works, doesn't work, works, doesn't work, until I had a game that could beat them.

Very effective way to learn skills. So that's what you should be doing at first as she used to get up to a moderate novice level learn by doing active recall. Now, the other part of that I said was no distractions. Well, that's just classic deep work. When you were doing this work, do not context shift. I'm in my proverbial Jason bin locked room. I'm not looking at my phone.

I'm not looking at other web. websites. I'm not doom scrolling. I'm not looking for motivation on Instagram. I'm letting my mind just do this. And maybe at first you can only do it a half hour at a time. And then you can do it 45 minutes at a time. And then you can do it an hour at a time. You can do it 90 minutes at a time. You will get better at it. But if you context shift, the rate at which you learn things and the effectiveness with which you learn things will significantly downgrade and it will take you a lot longer. So when you do this work, do this work without distraction. Build up your tolerance for how long you can do that. And then focus on active recall. So actually build programs that push you to learn

new skills. And once you get to a good novice level, then I would suggest jump into a structured online learning environment, a boot camp style thing, and do the course, do the work, put aside the time for it. If you need to temporarily go down to part time so you have time to do it, do that because that'll make you more motivated because you took a radical step to commit to it. You're more likely to actually follow through. Do something that costs money for the same reason. I'm spending money on this, so I'm more likely to stick with it. This whole process, we're talking about if you're hardcore about this six months and you're going to be at a much better place. All right, I hope that helps.

D.H. asks, could you share your opinion on how to improve leadership skills? Well, D.H. leadership is very important. My particular professional roles don't put a huge emphasis on it. They're largely pretty isolated and autonomous roles as a researcher or a writer. but in many roles there's a huge difference between a good leader and a bad leader, and it's something that's worth practicing. Now, something I'll say, here's someone I've come across who surprised me by how nuanced and effective I think he is at offering leadership guidance. That's the former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink.

Now, it might give you some pause because there is, of course, a whole cottage industry of former Navy SEALs who use their SEALs. status as the foundation of all sorts of different businesses and podcast and companies, which, by the way, I'm completely fine with. A lot of those guys get a really raw deal because it's an incredibly physically demanding job. It's like being an NFL player. A lot of these guys can't even make it to their 20-year mark in the Navy, which really

ups your retirement commitments because literally their knees give out, their back gives out. I mean, it's a really brutal job, except for unlike an NFL player, they weren't banking a league average of $600,000 a year during those periods they can fall back. on is a cushion. So a lot of these guys are having to leave the seals, you know, at the 15-year mark, at the 13-year mark, their bodies are broken. Their minds might have a lot of stress on it. They've burnt out their amygdala so they can't feel stress anymore. There's PTSD going on. And they've just been on a Navy salary and they're thrown out without full benefits and it's rough.

And so, yeah, use what you can. Use what you can to try to build a career for you. But Jocko is really good at leadership. And this really surprised me until I began to hear some of his speeches on leadership. I read a couple of his leadership books, extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership. I'll listen to some podcast episodes he does on business. So he has the Jocko podcast. The main episodes are usually military related, but he does these other episodes where they dive into more leadership or business type issues. Anyways, he seems really solid, very smart and intuitive on these issues. He knows what he speaks of. He ran task force. bruiser during the Battle of Vermont. That was a very complex task force. It was a very complex

operation. He had to deal with a lot of personalities above and below him in life and death situations. And from what I understand, he did really well at this. He was very respected for it. Also, as a silver star, I mean, come on, this guy, this guy has earned it. But anyways, very good leadership advice. So I'm not an expert on leadership. A lot of people have written on this. I know a lot of people like Simon Sinek, for example, leaders always eat last. There's a couple classic books, but this is the wild card I'm going to throw at you. See what Jocko has to say. It's pretty no nonsense and it feels intuitively like he's right. He's kind of just getting to the heart of the matter of here is how you rise. Here's how you lead. Here's what really gets it done

even under hard circumstances. Our next question comes from Elliott, who asks, what are some good habits, nonfiction writers practice to improve their craft. Well, Elliot, I've always been a big believer in writing for editing. Now, what I mean about this is you're writing for a publication or a book or something where if the writing's not good, it's not going to be published and what you're writing is going to be pushed back upon and attempted to be improved by an editor. writing in that context makes you better, right? Because you're trying to stretch to be as good as you can so that your piece gets accepted and in print, and you're trying to impress the

editor. Also, you're trying to work back and forth with the editor. The editor is pulling you and stretching you. You get better. Especially if you design the piece or design your approach to the piece to stretch particular skills. You know, I did this when I was trying to improve my nonfiction writing between my student books and my hardcover books. As I've talked about on this podcast, before. I went through a long period of training. I found an online magazine with good editors. And they would publish something from me if it was good. But they were good editors. And I would pitch them particular pieces that would allow me to work on a particular skill that I wanted to get better at. And I found the skills I wanted to get better at by just studying writers that I

admired looking at their pieces, breaking them up and be like, you know, they do X. I want to try X. Okay, let me pitch a piece that would allow me to do X. And they're going to really push myself to do X well and get the piece accepted and then the editor is going to pull me even farther to get that piece better. Now I have developed. Now I'm a little bit better. Repeat that again and again and you really get some skill. Now I contrast this against writing for non-editing. So I've been writing, for example, you know, a blog since 2007. It makes me somewhat better to do this blog writing, but the amount of skill improvements I get from writing for editing versus writing for my blog is incomparable almost.

If you're just writing your own newsletter, writing your own blog, that's fine. You'll get a little bit better. But you've got to stretch, and you're not going to stretch unless you're trying to get a piece accepted at a place that is not going to accept stuff that's bad, and they're going to push you when you get there. That's like hiring the coach

that puts your fitness to the next level. Of course, the key here is to find a publication that's within your grasp. So if you're new to writing, you know, don't say, right, here's my goal. I'll write for, you know, the Atlantic or the New Yorker, and that'll really push me because maybe you're not there yet.

You need to find a thing that is near where you're starting. So when I first got started writing as a college student, writing professionally, I was aiming at publications that were largely online and focused at college students.

And a lot of these were like website-based publications, right? I mean, really low stuff. They'd give you $100 for the article, but they weren't going to publish anything. And you wanted to impress them, and they give you a little bit feedback, and then I moved up to harder and harder publications as I went along. So you find the publication that's a little bit of a stretch for you right now. Use them to stretch your abilities once you're too good for that publication, move up to the next.

I'm a real big believer. If you're not working with editors, if you're not writing something that could be rejected, you're not training that hard. So no matter how much you write on your own blog or for your own newsletter or you post essays on medium or whatever happens on social media these days, that's all fine. but that's not going to get you nearly as much improvement as actually trying to get in the real game. All right, let's do one last question here. This one is from JW. How do you motivate your boss to promote you?

Well, longtime readers of mine who might be listening to this podcast know 100% what I'm about to say. A piece of canonical advice first uttered by Steve Martin, a piece of advice that was so profound to me that I wrote an entire book that used the advice in its title. It's a simple directive, Be so good, they can't ignore you. Now, even if there's lots of things that annoy you about your boss and your job,

that there is too much busy work, that she interrupts you all the time with emails and requests to be on Zoom, even if there's these processes and bureaucracy that's a huge pain, and if you were in charge, you would do things differently, and no one here knows how to run a company, and it's so frustrating to have to be around such fools, even with all of that, be so good they can't ignore you.

On the positive side, to quote Steve Martin, if you do that, good things will come, even if you can't predict what they will be, but on the negative side, if you don't do that, there's only so far you can go. If you have rare and valuable skills, if you can do something that's demonstrably important, demonstrably valuable,

you will gain autonomy, you will gain control, you can craft a job you like, you can down the line, change those systems you hate and not be so annoying to your employees and change the way things are run. But to get to that point, you have to first be so good they can't ignore you. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition to doing cool things in your life. So the quicker you get started on that, the quicker you can start getting to work on some of the more and cool and exciting things. Anyways, my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you really gets into detail. on the sort of economics and psychology of that advice, but it's something I come back to again and again. If you build up rare and valuable skills,

really interesting things will come to you in your job. Now, as a quick aside here, some of my fellow sort of over-educated peers get upset at me when I talk about this advice, and their reasoning is such, if you talk about what an individual can do, you might distract them or distract the narrative in general

from larger issues that are beyond the scope of what an individual can control. We don't want to distract from these narratives about the larger issues that are beyond the individual because we want to solve the larger issues. And so stop telling people, here's what you can do because then they might not pay attention to these bigger issues. So I've heard that advice. I hear that take a lot from again that particular group of my peers.

But on the other hand, you know, I've been out there speaking on these things my entire adult life to a variety of different audiences and a variety of different socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups. And what I consistently find when I'm out there talking to real people is that they find that take to be condescending, that they are perfectly capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. They're perfectly capable of finding motivation. And what can I do in my life to try to make something better? How can I stretch myself, while at the same time recognizing that there are larger issues that are unequally impactful on different crowds that need to be decried and pointed out.

We need to be aware of them and we need to fight them. And this idea that they can't do both and that they will be distracted if you talk too much about one and it won't distract the other, they say, listen, not only can I do both, doing both as critical to a flourishing human life. So that's the stance I take. We have to work on the personal and we have to work on the societal. Both are important. If you take away just one, it usually leads to problems. So if you have no awareness of bigger issues, no awareness of societal issues that could be, let's say, unequally impacting different groups, and you just focus on the personal in your life, it's easy to become callous. It's easy to become uncaring. It's easy to fall into that caricature of conservative

philosophy where you just wonder why other people's bootstraps aren't long enough for them to pull themselves up by, and no one really likes those people. On the other hand, if all you focus on, if all you focus on is the societal issues without looking at what you can do in your own life, how you can stretch, how you can improve your life, you're worried about getting yelled about on Twitter, and you've learned to mock or dismiss anything that seems a little bit too positive or aspirational or actionable. And that can lead you to existential despair. You just see a world that everything is bad.

Nothing's going to get better. You're mad at everyone. Everyone's mad at you. TLDR, that story does not end up with a happy, flourishing, well-rounded life, right? So you have to have both of these components when you're thinking about improving yourself and improving the world. So, you know, hopefully when all of our powers combined, we end up. in a better place. And the place where we're heading now is some technology questions.

Let's start with Lawrence, who asks, is personal email also making people miserable? Will you be thinking much on email for personal use in the coming years, or will you stick to writing on workplace productivity? Well, Lawrence, I'm not as worried about personal email, and I'll tell you why. If we dive down into my book, a world without email, we see the specific thing that is the villain. The source of the misery, the source of the greatly reduced productivity is a workflow called the hyperactive hive mind. Now in the hyperactive hive mind workflow, you say the main way that we collaborate is through unscheduled back and forth messages. You know, I'll just shoot a message off the you. You can shoot one back. So you collaborate with your peers. It's how you

collaborate with your clients and vendors, the HR department, other administrative groups. it's a problem because it creates a huge overload of messages that are not just coming into your inbox but requiring a response and so you have to constantly check your inbox to keep up with these back and forth asynchronous communications the context switching exhaust your brain makes you miserable makes you anxious and that's the real problem not how many emails you have not the content of those emails it's this hyperactive high mind demand

that you need to service these asynchronous back and forth conversations that are happening at an unsustainable scale. For most people, personal email doesn't have this. You don't receive 126 personal emails a day that require responses. Most people do not check their personal email once every six minutes, as is average in one big data set I talk about for work email. So when you take the hyperactive hive mind out of it, personal email is just a more convenient form of a letter.

And you might have a little bit of hyperactive hive mind stuff. going on in your personal email where people are trying to go back and forth and plan a trip that you guys are going to take or plan a meeting and you're like, oh, this is, I don't want to have to keep servicing these conversations. But usually there's not that many of them and they're easily short-circuable with, let me just call them a text, like let's just work this out, call me when you get a chance, right? So it's much easier to get away from this hyperactive hive mind demand.

So no, I'm not going to write much about personal email because, again, it's that constant need to service asynchronous conversations that is the killer, not the tool, not the messages. not the inbox size, and we really just don't have those issues at nearly the same scale in our personal communication as compared to our work communication. Our next question comes from Victor. This is actually one of a series of questions here that are all about social media, so this should be fun. Victor says, should we quit social media for good, or is it a matter of degree? I temporarily suspended my Instagram account last week, and I noticed a substantial improvement in my ability. to focus and work.

I've been reading more books and thinking deeper. However, as a young fellow, I'm 26, I feel that social media is a tool that I must possess in order to be social. Invite friends to events or to be invited to events. All right, young fellow, based on even the wording of their question,

it is clear that you are not in any way convinced that being on Instagram is key to having a social life. You're reading more, you're thinking deeper, your life is better. And you're like, but maybe I need to be on Instagram to invite someone like to come over or like go to a party. I think you know the answer there. And I've done enough of these questions.

I can tell when there's someone who really is worried about quitting social meeting when someone else just needs a little bit of a stamp of approval. So, you know, imagine your mind the sound of a large stamp saying you are good. Yeah, you're going to have to do a little extra. work maybe, to organize social events to see your friends on a regular basis to communicate with them, but it's not going to be that much extra work. There's only so much that happens on Instagram. Do the extra work. You know, the 20 extra minutes you have to spend each week to help arrange things with your friends is worth it for the calm, for the peace, for the ability to read, for the ability to think deeply. Now, we have the larger framework you can apply here,

digital minimalism, right? We've heard this a bunch of times on the podcast. Figure out what you want your life to be like, then work backwards and say, what's the best way to use technology to support these things I value? Then you can bring back personal technologies in very limited ways to support things you really care about and ignore everything else. Victor, if you go through this exercise, you will probably are not going to end up with unrestricted Instagram uses, being crucial to anything that matters to your life. Now, if there's some social network somewhere that in some very specific ways is crucial for a social aspect of your life, like a Facebook group, that your local bike riding club uses to organize their bike rides. Well, great. Use that tool in a very focused

way to support that goal. It's on your computer. You bookmark the groups page. You bypass the news feed. You check it once a week to see when the ride is. You know, when you know why you're using these tools, you can use them in a way that has really good benefits and very small costs. And of course, do that. But I'm just telling you based on your question, you don't need Instagram. I'm glad you quit it. Most social media networks you probably don't need. And the ones you do need, you should be using not on your phone in very specific ways to get very specific value. So keep reading, keep thinking deeply, don't scroll Instagram on your phone, and probably the most important thing you can do to make sure that your social life stays vibrant is to not refer to yourself as a young

fellow in public. Let's take a moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. I'm talking about Magic Spoon. You've heard me talk about Magic Spoon before. It's one of my most nostalgic memories from childhood is eating that treat cereal that as adults we feel like we're no longer allowed to consume. Magic spoon gives you a way to do that without all the junk. Great tasting cereal that's zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein and only four net grams of carbs in each serving. Keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carb, and GMO-free. They should add guilt-free to that list. But here's the thing I wanted to tell you about today. New limited edition flavors are available. This is pretty exciting. Peanut Butter was the last

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How do I help someone snap back from an obsession with social media and TikTok reels? As an aside, I have no idea what a TikTok reel is. When it is mostly a way of escaping the stress and boredom of life in lockdown, yes, super strict lockdowns is still very much happening here in the UK. Well, first of all, first thing first, Marcus, this question was submitted early March, we're now getting towards later March. Those super strict lockdowns are on their way, on their way away in the UK.

In fact, in the UK, because they have such a rapid rate of first dose vaccination going on, they've been able to release step by step. This is when we're going to remove this step of the lockdown and this step and this step. This is a plan that has you back to basically entirely normal life by early June. So, okay, good news first.

The restrictions, the artificial, restrictions are leaving. In fact, they're going to be getting better every two weeks starting from this point. So that is positive. And I point that out just to say, like I say, on a lot of pandemic-related issues, they are temporary and they are bad. And I say that on a lot of different issues we talk about social media overuse here, but also when we talk about struggles with work because your kids are at home, struggles with focus, struggles with, you know, you're feeling like your push to live deeper or to build a better career, get promoted, like these things are being disrupted by the pandemic. I emphasize this point to point out yes, because it's a dumpster fire,

and it's okay, and give yourself a break, and it's going to get better. All right? So this is yet another example of this. It's okay that things suck right now, but it's also important to realize it's going to get better. All right, foundation. Now let's get to the meat of the question, which is using social media too much. Well, it's hard to, when we're dealing with someone you know and not yourself. We know this from the addiction literature. When someone is motivated to make a change, they're then going to look for and act on useful information.

If they're not motivated to make the change, there's only so much you can do. But the big thing I'm going to preach here is digital minimalism. You cannot come at this issue when you're talking to your friend from, this is bad, you need to do less of a bad thing. You can't come at this from TikTok reels

are not adding anything to your life. You're doom scrolling on Twitter is just making you unhappy. Come on, do less of that. That's not going to be very successful. What we need to do here is focus on a positive vision. What do you want your life to be like?

Let's have a positive vision of your life. Then we can ask, okay, what role does technology play to help that vision of your life and don't be really cool ways you can deploy tech that's going to help here. You know, I'm able to have a group text message chat with the people in my hiking club I put together

where we go and hike the Moors of Scotland or whatever, right? So that's great. You can use tech very strategically. But when you're using tech to support a positive vision of your life, probably spending three hours a day on TikTok reels is not going to make a cut. Probably doom scrolling past people

who are yelling at each other on Twitter about epidemiological advice. By the way, none of whom are epidemiologists. That makes it even more fun, but they're all quite certain. doing that for hours. It's not going to make the cut. It's very, or much easier I should say to say, I want this positive thing. And therefore, I'm willing to stick to the plan to get that positive thing. That is much more powerful than, I don't think I like this thing. Maybe I should do it less.

That's the mindset I would take. Let's overhaul our lives. Let's make our lives deeper. Let's do it together. Okay, what do we want to do? And what role this technology play? Now, here's the thing I'm going to say, and I think it's important. Quote unquote, strict lockdown or not. Don't wait till June. Don't wait until June. Say, okay, what are our constraints right now? Great. How do we build the best possible life with these constraints? And then when they lift some more, let's update that and make it even better.

Don't enter a sort of mindset of, well, it's better just not to do anything. And let me just stay in my apartment and let me not go do things. Let me not go outside. Come on, if you live in, let's say, London, in springtime, it's beautiful, man. There's these parks. I mean, I don't know. You could be doing a walking tour. I'm going to hit all of the parks.

I'm going to do five miles a day. I'm going to document it. I'm going to, here's my goal. I'm going to read a book in one park per week. These beautiful sort of semi-private parks. Like right now, basically, all of this is my knowledge of these parks right now is coming almost entirely from a combination of Mary Poppins and the Hugh Grant movie, Notting Hill. So I kind of assume that's what London is basically like. I'm going to go and go to one of these parks every week.

every day because it's beautiful now, like the better weather's coming, and I'm going to read one book in each park. I'm going to write a, you know, I'm going to write a novel and I'm going to do it in the countryside outside of Kent. I don't know what Kent is. I just know it's a something in England. So it's like the details here don't matter, but you know, you get what I'm saying here. You say, okay, given what I have right now, how do I build the best positive is my life execute? feel that passion of I'm stepping up and doing something proactive and good. Oh, what role should technology play in this vision? It could be obvious.

And then that's the role tech plays. All right. Start that today. Do it with your friend. A month from now update. A month from now update again. You know? But don't wait until everything was quote unquote back to normal and then just hunker down in the meantime.

And what I'm hoping will happen here is a virtuous positive feedback cycle. Here's what I want. You have your initial plan you do with your friend for what do we want to do in April because it's a beautiful month and we want to be outside and we want to live a deeper life. We want to get in shape and read and think big thoughts and whatever, right? Once you have that initial plan, that's going to get them off of, let's say, being on Twitter all day. You get off Twitter, you get rid of that negative reinforcing cycle about how the world's all bad and it's awful of bad people and are all going to die. You get unplugged from that, surprise, surprise, you feel a little bit better. You feel a bit better and you go for more aggressive, positive.

of things in your life, that vision gets refined. That makes you feel even better. Now you don't even really have much of a taste for TikTok reels. Because you're trying to read Dickens in various spots in London that inspired various Dickens novels or what have you, right? And that's actually seeming more interesting now. And you're having, you know, you can't go to the pub right now. So you're doing sort of like outdoor pub stuff.

You're on your balcony, your friends on the other balcony. You have the pint in a paper bag and the parks. I don't know, right? I mean, again, I'm embarrassing. myself by trying to give UK specific suggestions, but I think you get the gist of what I'm talking about. And you get unhooked from that spiral. Life gets better. You get more unhooked, life gets better. By the time you get the June, you will be participating in large musical numbers on the streets of London, because again, all of my knowledge of your city comes from the movie Mary Poppins.

All right, so I hope that helps. And I hope some of this gets through. But just to summarize, focus on the positive, do it with your friend. Let the tech serve the positive. That's how you get changes. All right, let's do one more technology question on our theme here is social media. This one comes from Aisha. In an economy that now rewards personal brands online, do you think there's room for deep work leading to success and fulfillment without having an online presence and keeping up with the trends? Oh, dear Lord. Isha, I'm like in that anti-littering commercial from the 70s, where there's the pan to the Native American with the single tier. falling down his face, that's kind of me right now.

I'm sort of standing stoically with a single tear falling down my face. This is crazy, but this is where I think a culture, young people culture shaped by the social media bea myths has led to this belief, which is just not true. This belief that these like online social media influencer style brands is basically synonymous with what you need for economic success. here is the reality. It's got to be like 0.001% of, let's say, American economic activity that has any real meaningful dependence on an individual social media presence.

There are a vanishingly small number of jobs, and yes, they did not exist 15 years ago, but they do exist today in which having a lively following and brand on social media is important to that job, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of all the economic activity on which most people, build their lives and raise families and find fulfillment. So yes, if you want to be a social media influencer, then you need to spend time on social media and have an audience. If you want to do basically anything else, it doesn't really matter.

What you do on social media is just a matter of personal preference and entertainment. So, of course, focusing on hard things, using deep work to build up rare and valuable skills is going to be the path of success and fulfillment basically everywhere. even though social media influencers who care a lot about their personal brand are incredibly hardworking and incredibly focused and have these complex production schedules

for what I'm going to produce how I'm going to produce, how am I growing my audience, they're working incredibly hard, a lot of deep work thinking through their ideas and scripts, a lot of shallow work to master new technologies to keep up with things. I mean, hard work on things that are rare and valuable

is the foundation for fulfilling work and success. And so don't, Don't place so much emphasis on these online personalities. I know it's very flashy because if you're on your phone all the time, you see them all the time, but I can tell you as someone who's just a little bit older, I'm guessing. It's not what's going to move the needle in almost everything that you actually are going to do. So it's fine if your digital minimalist vision of a fulfilling life

involves some social media for inspiration or entertainment, but it is not nearly as central to our lives as the social media companies would want you to believe. You do not need to have a robust, well-serviced online social media presence to succeed in your job almost certainly. Also, almost certainly, if you have even a little bit of success in that endeavor, it's going to bring you a lot of stress, it's going to bring you a lot of anxiety, and might make things even worse. So, relegate your phone to a supporting role. Relegate these networks to a supporting role. Deploy them intentionally as needed, but for the most part, be so good they can't ignore you, build up rare and valuable skills,

ship stuff that people care about, be on time, do things that are good, do things that are creative, live a deep life, and rest assured that your sort of competitors out there that are spending four hours a day on Instagram because they think that they are going to be the next Kardashian, well, they're just slowing themselves down and giving you a bit of a head start. And this should give us a start moving on to our next topic, which is questions about the deep life. We start with a question from Sunip, who asks, how can we teach deep thinking to our teenagers in this highly distracted world? The deep thinking mindset is not being taught in school these days,

and due to a lot of distraction these days, kids and children are not able to focus on anything, and it is now a challenge for parents. Well, Sunnipe, I have an answer here that is not something that makes me popular among a lot of teenagers, but I don't think teenagers should use smartphones. There is a lot of research that informed our decisions years ago to make, let's say, smoking, something that is illegal until you're 18, to make drinking, something that you can't do until you're 21. Why did we do this? Well, in part because of the developing adolescent brain.

It's just much more vulnerable to these psychoactive substances than an adult brain. It made us worried, and we said we really want to try to keep this stuff, which really goes through the blood brain barrier, cause some issues. Let's wait until your brain is more fully baked before we allow you to marinate your brain in this, right? You start smoking as a teenager. You have a very strong addiction. You drink throughout your adolescence years. It's going to have much more problems than if you sort of pick up drinking later in your 20s, etc. I think social media delivered through smartphones is very similar. It is incredibly manipulative of our brains, especially the social centers of the brains, which in an adolescent are sort of hyper-acutely developing.

There's an incredibly crucial period in the development of those aspects of their brains during the teenage years. We do not yet know all of the issues caused by exposing this developing adolescent social brain to these highly manipulative, carefully attention engineered tools. Us adults have enough trouble with these. It's not surprising that when we look to teenagers who have access to these phones, you can't get them off of it. And if you try to get them off of it, like it's time to do dinner or it's time to do

homework, they'll fly off the handle. It's causing real issues with families right now, especially if their kids have been at home, so they see them doing this all day long. So I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I really think five years from now, it's not going to be so rare. This idea that we say, no, a 16-year-old should not have a smartphone with a TikTok account on it. Are you kidding me? I'm not going to give them a flask. I'm not going to give them a pack of marble reds. They're not going to have TikTok on a smartphone in their bed that they can use whenever they want. Right. So that does not make me popular among most teens, though I will say I learned during my digital minimalism book tour, and there's a non-trivial number of teens out here who like that

message because they find a whole thing damn exhausting. And they want permission to not have to be involved in it. They want to just, you know, go to soccer practice after school and hang out with a couple friends and like watch a TV show, you know, at home before going to bed and not have to monitor all of this junk all the time and this constantly. emotionally fraught and manipulative, social network manipulative style applications in every waking hour. So actually, teens might be more on board with that than we might imagine. And then also, yes, I think schools need to focus on deep thinking as a tier one skill.

We need to help kids get comfortable with sustained concentration without context shifts. We can do this through actually teaching them the meta skills of how do you, for example, read a hard book. We should be taking kids out on hikes and walks so they can just be out in nature and alone with their own thoughts and just seeing the world around. them. We should get them used to long, constructive conversation. You have to stick with the thread, keep track of what's going on. I think kids at the high school level should be doing productive meditation. I think that's a skill that really helps your thinking. We live in a cognitive economy. Clear thinking is critical to economic success. If we think of our schools as being, at least in part, pre-professional, then we cannot omit that skill. It can't just be subject matter

expertise. It has to be teaching our kids how to actually use their brains. That's another issue I've talk quite a bit about. Our next question comes from Sonny, who asks, how did you and your family select Tacoma Park, Maryland, is the city in which to establish your home? Well, Sonny, that's an interesting question, somewhat timely, because during the pandemic, there's been a lot of people who have, in response to the disruption of the pandemic, really sat down for the first time and asked, where do I want to live? you know, people who ended up somewhere just because whatever, their first job took them there.

That's where they went to school. And then they kind of just settled. And at some point, just got used to, I guess this is where I live. The pandemic came along. And they say, well, where do I actually want to live? And then they moved to Austin. Or wherever. Actually, I have friends who've moved to a lot of different places.

But I think I have five or six friends who moved around the pandemic intentionally. Like, going to a place because they were. We're starting from scratch with a question of like, what do we actually want our lifestyle to be like? And a lot of these friends are trying to get me to move to the various places that they have moved to. And my response is often, I already went through that process of starting from scratch and figuring out, okay, where is it that we really want to live? What do we really want our lifestyle to be like? We did that three years ago. We ended up in Tacoma Park.

So I encourage people to do that. But as I tell people, I've already done it. So let me tell the backstory about how we ended up here. So my wife and I moved to D.C. in 2011. This is when I was starting my job as an assistant professor. At Georgetown, we were living in an apartment near the campus. She got pregnant with our first kid, and so we figured we probably need to not be in a one-bedroom apartment. And sort of just randomly chose a location.

We bought a nice Cape Cod little house in Silver Spring, Maryland. So sort of right over the D.C. border in Maryland. This was the book advance money from So Good They Can't Ignore You, my first hardcover idea book, the first book I got a real advance for. That's what paid for the down payment for that house. And so we moved out to this sort of close in suburb of D.C. And I have a lot of nostalgia for that time because, well, things were pretty simple out there in some sense, right? I mean, I wrote So Good They Can Ignore You. Didn't make a huge impact when it came out.

And I wrote deep work while at this house as well, but I was writing deep work from a place of like, I just want to write a book. Expectations were low. They actually paid me less for deep work than they had paid me for so good they can't ignore you. So I was doing my Georgetown thing, writing papers, working on tenure, teaching classes. At some point, we had a second kid. I actually finished deep work after the second kid was born. So there's a little bit of a tiring period there where I was editing the book with an infant on my shoulder. but you know we got it done

I sort of submitted that book that book came out you know it didn't roar out of the gates by any means I mean I think we my email list was big enough now for my blog that we were able to inch it onto the Wall Street Journal bestseller list but the thing about the Wall Street Journal list

is they're based just on sales but they have a lot of categories that's why you see a lot of Washington you'll see national bestseller or Washington Post bestseller a lot it's because it's easier to get on to because they have a lot more categories than, say, like, the New York Times. So they have a business category.

And I think we preordered a couple thousand copies, at enough readers for that. And that, you know, so it got on that list. But otherwise, it wasn't a huge launch. I mean, I remember having a phone call with my agent and just not being very happy about this book is not really being promoted. They don't really, it doesn't seem like a lot's happening. It's not even in all the Barnes and Nobles. Like, I had relatives going to the store to buy a copy and they couldn't find one. And, you know, her response, which was accurate, was basically like, yeah, but, you.

you know, they didn't pay a ton of money for it. Your other book did okay, but it wasn't a blockbuster, like how much, how much effort you expect him to put into it, right? So this was just a time where I was writing for the sake of writing. So I was tired after deep work came out because I finished it with a second kid. And so I was just taking, you know, taking it easy. We had this cute little house at a neighborhood we liked. I was taking a break from writing books.

I was just doing my weekly blog post for study hacks. I got tenure right around this period. So I was teaching my classes, writing papers. The kids left the infant stage. So, you know, we had sleep again. And so things were kind of good. And then I got antsy. And I started to see deep work do better.

And it never, like, broke through and was suddenly a number one New York Times bestseller or something like this. It just started to sell more and more. There's just a word of mouth thing happening. It was just sell more and more. and it made back its advance, and then it made more money, and the royalty check started to get bigger, and there was some energy around it. And I had done podcasts. When I moved into this house, is when I started doing podcasts.

I would just do one every couple of weeks or so, but just all the time. I was doing more and more podcast, and I don't know, the word was just getting out, and this book was selling, and I got antsy and was like, you know, maybe I should write, maybe I'm ready to go back to work. And I remember using that phrase, I was talking to my agent. I said, I'm ready to work. And we put together a two book deal. we took it out to the market and it caught some attention

because I think Deep Work had some heat around it and we had a multi-day auction and the price kept going up the price kept going up and okay so then we we sold digital minimalism in a world without email

with a pretty good deal and I might have this sequencing a little bit wrong but this was around the same time that my wife got pregnant with our third and these two things kind of happened around the same time

and we had two realizations happened the same time. One, oh, I don't know if we have enough bedrooms in this house. Like the house we were living in, we had kind of two bedrooms upstairs that shared a bathroom. We were in one, my two boys shared the other room. So now we're going to have a third. We were trying to figure this out. Like, how is this

going to work? Or we're going to have one kid downstairs somewhere. And we were trying to configure, like, how is this house going to fit three kids? So maybe we should think about moving. And we had this realization at some point of like, you know, we just signed this big book deal. kind of for the first time in our life, we do have some money. Really, most places are on the table.

We don't have a huge financial constraint in terms of what we can't afford to live there. And so that kicked off, like what a lot of people have been doing this year, that kicked off a similar type of exploration of, well, if we can live anywhere, where do we want to live? And, you know, the first decision we made is like, do we want to stay in D.C. Do we want to stay at Georgetown? I said, yes, I like being a professor. I really like Georgetown. Our family's all around here.

I like the DC area. Let's stay here. Okay, question two, where do we want to live? We looked at a lot of different neighborhoods. We also looked at, well, what if we have like kept this house but had another house somewhere on the beach and we went back and forth? Like we looked at a lot of scenarios and we were doing this kind of fast because, well, the baby was going to come. We wanted the move before the baby came because that was the whole point. And that's when we settled on Tacoma Park. So what is Tacoma Park? It is a, it was a streetcar town in the late 1800. So back when DC was much smaller, Tacoma Park was out in the countryside. And it was started as a Sylvan retreat. So it was Victorian-style houses built at the tail end of the Victorian period with big lots. And you could take a streetcar from D.C. through farm fields and countryside out to this sort of oasis of Victorian houses out there in the countryside. Well, D.C. has since expanded way past Tacoma Park, but you still have this pocket right here. It's right across the D.C. border in Maryland.

You have this pocket of this old town with old houses and a big tree. canopy in a small old-fashioned downtown with some restaurants and coffee shops and independent stores, quirky independent stores. And it's a place where there's a bunch of sidewalks and everyone knows each other and you sit on your porch. And I had grown up with that. And I like that idea. But I also, my brain needed the stimulation of university. My brain needed the ability to hang out and meet with smart people. And this was a small town that also happened to have a metro stop. So you could feel like you were living in whatever small town, Ohio.

with the exception that you could walk four blocks, get on a subway, and in 20 minutes be at the Senate, talking to a senator, or go another 20 minutes to be at Nat's Park for a playoff game, or go 15 minutes and be at the NPR headquarters so that you can jump on and do those interviews, or commute 30 minutes to be at Georgetown and be among professors. And so it had this real balance of a small town

where everyone would know our kids and they could walk around on the sidewalks and know the people that run the different stores, know them. I mean, here's a case study of what it's like, like to live in this town. A month or so ago, the water main that comes into our house, like from the street, so all the water for our house, it comes into our house, and then there's like the cutoff valve, and then it goes into the rest of your house.

It broke above the cutoff valve. So all of the water coming to our house was just pouring, gushing out into our basement. My wife happened to be home and solid. I was on my way home from a doctor's appointment. By the time I got home from the doctor's appointment, three different neighbors, Three different households of neighbors were there, having set up a bucket brigade and looking for the cutoff valve in the street. Within 50 more minutes, the people who sold us the house were there, you know, the people who lived in it before us, they had shown up because, hey, maybe they knew something about what was going on. And that's classic Tacoma Park, you know, very small town.

Everyone knows what's going on. Everyone knows each other. I have my deep work HQ offices above a restaurant on our small main street, so really lean. into this sort of small town lawyer, you know, hometown pride type thing. But it's all good. And I think it's great for our social well-being and definitely good for our kids that just feel like they know a ton of adults and know a ton of other kids and you really feel like you're part of a community.

But it's also, again, 40 minutes door to door to Nat's Park for a playoff game, 30-minute door-to-door to be, you know, listening to Mark Zuckerberg giving a address at Georgetown and being around other scholars, 15 minutes to the NPR headquarters. So we really have a good balance here. So that is the long story of why we ended up in Tacoma Park and why we're not moving to Austin. All right, let's do one last question here. This one comes from Brandon. Brandon says, how do you focus on deep work and concentrate while dealing with emotional turmoil in your personal life?

As he elaborates, he recently got out of a long-term relationship, a five-year-long relationship and is at, quote, rock bottom, in quote, in his life. He says, I really want to be successful, but I have such a hard time focusing right now because all I can think about is my ex and some love ones that I've recently lost. Well, Brandon, when you're going through times of deep emotional turmoil, the goal is not production, right? The goal is not I'm producing at a high level, I'm moving ahead in my career, increasing my personal. best in my fitness endeavors, et cetera. Because you have a huge chemical drag on your actual activity, which is the sense of loneliness

and loss and heartache over what you're going through right now in your life. So what is the key here? Well, something to keep in mind is what I often call fundamentals despite chemicals. So building a foundation of the fundamental things that are important to you in your life that you pay tribute to through action every day. Regardless of what it produces, because what you're looking for here is some sort of scaffolding

on which to be attached while you have the weight of all these chemicals pouring over you. Without a scaffolding, you're just going to be tumbled. You're being tumbled down a hill by a flood. And what you want to do is be grasping a scaffolding built out of your values that gives you a secure purchase

while these metaphorical waves crash over you. So what does that mean? Well, there's a lot of different ways to do this. I mean, one thing you might keep in mind is working the deep life buckets. What are the areas of your life that are most important? What is your keystone habit in each? And grasp those keystone habits. The goal here is not to make the chemicals go away tomorrow.

They won't. They're there for a reason. You care about these people. That's why you feel bad. That's a good thing. You should be worried if you didn't. Two, you know, they will go away. eventually. It will die down, right? The waters that are rushing over you will get less. It'll be the

occasional big wave, but they will get less. So in between, work to Keystone Habits. I'm going to do this walk every day for my fitness and I, you know, I worry about me drowning my sorrows and drinking, so I'm not touching a drop, not touching a drop or whatever. In my work, well, look, I'm not going to be writing the great American novel or coming up with the brilliant marketing strategy when I'm so overwhelmed with emotion. But I'm going to time block my days. I'm going to do one hour of deep work every day. Even if it's not very good deep work, I do it. And I control my time. I do a shutdown complete. I'm going in the social community aspect, I'm volunteering for something. I'm going to get out there and be around other people and be useful because I feel really bad, but I want that part of my life

to be registered as important. I'm going to sacrifice non-trivial amounts of time and attention on behalf of other people so that that social aspect of my life at least is getting serviced. And so on, right? Here's the buckets. Here's the keystone habit. I'm doing those habits. I have no expectations of chemically feeling better, but I'm also not despairing because

I know that eventually will. I'm not going to demand that I feel better tomorrow, but I am not going to worry that I will still feel bad five years from now. There's, of course, lots of other aspects to go into dealing with emotionally turmoil or traumatic type times. There's professional psychotherapy can be very helpful here. If you're religious, there's a lot of theological structures for how you deal with these times. This is a common refrain in the human experience. So philosophers and theologians have thought about this. If you're more philosophical than you are theological, you can look to the Stoics, you can look

towards other types of philosophical schools. This is stuff that's been really well thought out. But that's my pragmatic core. You need that scaffolding of my fundamentals I stick to despite chemicals, I do it not to make the bad feelings go away, but to keep myself stable while the bad feelings are washing over. It's hard to do, but it is how you grow out of hard times. It's how you get post-traumatic growth as opposed to post-traumatic lasting stress. All right. So, Brandon, things will get better. Don't demand that you produce like you, you were producing before, you're in a crisis, so you want to go into crisis mode, but don't let go of all scaffolding. You need to stick with the fundamentals of what makes a deep life deep, even when it

doesn't feel good, work to buckets and have a keystone habit in each, draw from theology, draw from philosophy, draw from professional psychotherapies, throw everything you need to throw at it. You will get through it. If you do this, you will get through it probably stronger than you were before, but it's no fun while you're in it. So you have, look, you have all of our empathy as you go through this place. You're not the first one to get there, but no one likes it when they're there. You won't be there forever. And with that in mind, we should note that this show can't last forever, so we should wrap things up. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to figure out

how you can submit your own questions. We'll be back on Thursday with a habit tune-up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.