Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 83: Is Email Work?

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.WORK QUESTIONS - How do I concentrate in an open office? [5:27] - Do professors need to work 60+ hours a week? [9:10] - What's the best workflow for student reference letters? [17:38] - How does an MS student prepare to become a CS professor? [21:21] - How can a high school principal find time to do deep work? [25:28]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Can email itself be the work? [35:36] - Do I need constant pings and messaging to foster community? [43:27] - Must I stop watching TV and movies to be productive? [46:51]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - In what order should a teenager read the Cal Newport Canon? [53:42] - Are Peloton badges just another digital addiction? [58:48] - How do I stop avoiding the need to live deeper? [1:01:36]Link for my Clubhouse conversation with Kevin Roose (3pm Eastern on 4/1): https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/xeeZL4DEThanks 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 83. Quick announcements. This Thursday, April 1st, I am going to try a clubhouse. And no, that is not an April Fool's joke. I was doing Lex Friedman's podcast a few weeks ago. When he convinced me, I should try this thing. And I asked him, I said, what is clubhouse?

Is this like a social media thing? And he's like, not really. It's something different. I wasn't quite convinced, but he said, look, you got to try it at least once. So you can, at the very least, report accurately on it. And then around this time, I got an invite from the New York Times technology reporter, Kevin Ruse, to come do a clubhouse conversation with him.

So I'm going to try it. So Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern, I am doing a clubhouse, whatever that means. Kevin said there'll be some sort of link available that I can advertise. I don't have it yet, but I'll add it to the show notes once I get it. Look, I really have no idea what this is. so this should be an interesting experience, but if you are a clubhouse person, is that the word, come so that we're not just alone on whatever this thing is.

Let's also do a quick look behind the curtain here. All of last summer and this fall and through the winter, I have been more or less alone here in my Deep Work HQ, recording this podcast, writing my articles, doing my computer science research on my whiteboard. and it occurred to me recently that's probably going to change soon more and more people are getting vaccinated

I want to bring guests into my studio I want to bring fellow writers into my library so we can chat and bounce ideas around I want to bring other computer scientists here so we can work on problems together which means I probably have to finish decorating this place I'm looking around I had a couple people over here this weekend

and I realize it looks like sort of a college student's dorm room. And this is good news, bad news. All right, so it's bad news for me because I actually have to finish properly decorating this place. I have to hang things on the wall. There's a dead plant, all of whom's leaves are now on the ground in my library.

It has been that way for four months. I have to get rid of the dead plant and the leaves. I have to hang artwork up on the walls. I have some good artwork that readers have sent me, but I still have some more walls. So if you have some suggestions for things to hang in my library or in my hallway, let me know. Email me at interesting at calnewport.com.

I have to finish my studio if I'm going to have people in here. I have some cheap egg crate taped up on one wall. I have some really nice sound panels on another wall, but instead of mounting them because that seemed hard, I just have them leaning against the wall on top of a random piece of furniture. I got to make this all look nice. All right, so the bad news for me is I have to do some work. The good news is, hey, that means we are,

getting to a point in the tail into this pandemic where I can have people over to my Deep Work HQ. So, I mean, I think the good news wins out on the bad news here. Also, I think it's going to help just from a cognitive aesthetics perspective. It's going to help my ability to concentrate to think big thoughts, write good things, record good things, if the whole place looks better. Like one of the things I'm doing, which I'm excited about, and it's a minor thing, but I think it's just going to help put me in the right mind space. When you walk into my office suite, there's a hallway. As you walk down right, right to your left when you come in, have like a coat rack and a table to put stuff. And you walked down this hallway to the right is to library.

And then at the end of the hallway, it splits. And you go to my Maker Lab and my studio in the bathroom or on this, the hallway it hits. Well, that gives us a big wall. And I'm trying to find good little book rails that can each hold just a single hardcover book face out. Kind of having a hard time finding these. If you know about book rails for just holding individual books, you know, again, send me a link to interesting at calnewport.com. But I've published what? seven books now. And I think it would be nice to just have them kind of arranged asymmetrically just all on that wall.

You know, you sort of come into the HQ here and you can see all the different books I published. I think that would be motivating. I don't know. All right. So anyways, that's the peek behind a curtain. I realized as I was embarrassed showing people around the HQ this weekend, okay, I got to decorate this place. But good news means, the good news here, in other words

is, hey, I've got to decorate this place. That means things must be going pretty well. All right, let's get going with the show today. No deep dive. I'm trying to make the show a little bit quicker today just to test out a slightly faster format. I will see if I actually hit that mark. I've tried to also put a little bit more a little bit more weight on the deep life segment and a little bit less on the earlier segments this week since we've been doing the opposite recently, so I thought that would be fun to try. As always,

I want to remind you that if you want to learn how to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. If you like this type of content, also sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com where I've been sending out my infamous weekly essay since 2007. So you can get in on the infamous

Cal Newport weekly essay on all these type of topics by signing up at the mailing list at calnewport.com. And with that, let's do some work questions. Our first question comes from Fabio, who asks, the company I work for has moved to a new location. Before we had offices of about six or seven people. Now we are a 60 to 70 people in an open space. It's really hard to concentrate, even with headphones on.

Any suggestions to be able to achieve deep work successfully in this environment. Well, Fabio, there's two things I'm going to suggest your first, time block plan. So give every minute of your day a job. Here's where my meetings are. Here's where my appointments are. Here's the time that remains. What do I want to do with that time that remains? This allows you to be crystal clear about what work you want to be deep working

and what work you will not be doing deep work. You'll be working on something else. Now, once you have clearly identified when deep work is going to happen so that you're not just waiting and saying, oh, do I feel like doing this right now, do I want to get some work done now, you can then be much more systematic about asking what? is to write environment here. And what you want to really try to do if you're in an open office environment

is change your setting for the deep work once it's been set. Now you've got two options here. Option number one is used a conference room reservation system that most open offices support. Here's the desks that everyone sits at and then around the perimeter on other floors. Here's the conference rooms for meetings or calls, etc.

Okay, now you can really reserve those because you know exactly what time you're supposed to be deep working. You go in there, you do your deep work, you come out, just get used to that rhythm. You're not going to annoy people, you're going to impress people that you're so systematic about them. Two, go somewhere else. I think a lot of bosses will support this. If you're very clear about it, look, I time block plan, very clear about what I'm working on when. There's certain time I put aside for doing the really deeply concentrated stuff.

It's hard to do here. I have an alternative location. I go to that alternative location to do the deep work. I can tell you when it is. It's not going to interfere with the meetings. Maybe I have a scheduling philosophy, like the rhythmic method I talk. about in my book deep work that says it's always this time every day or every week so there can be some predictability. You're going to get buy-in for that a lot if you're showing that you're

very accountable and you're very organized. Different types of work I do. I try to maximize the deep work when I'm doing deep work. I try to be maximally efficient on the shallow work when I'm doing shallow work. If neither of those things are an option, just having the deep work block clearly identified makes a difference. Even though it's distracting, there's things around, your headphones are on. There is a psychological separation between just maybe I should try to concentrate now and you see all the distractions and your Microsoft Teams is firing up and people are walking by and it all looks interesting.

There's a difference between that and saying, I have 90 minutes put aside. This is my 90 minutes to get this deep work done. My brown noise on, my white noise on. I got my headphones on. I'm going to go for it. Psychologically speaking, you're going to get a lot more done there because keep in mind, And famously, a lot of people do a lot of deep work in very distracting environments. This is the cliche of the rider in the coffee shop.

It's a very noisy distracting environment, but because they come there just for deep work, they actually begin to associate it with focus. Well, you can kind of accomplish something similar if you have your deep work blocks really clearly delineated. Okay, now I'm just doing deep work. You'll find the distractions not to be so bad. So that's my summary. Really clear when you're deep working and when you're not figured out in advance with your time block plan. Two, to the extent possible, go somewhere different for those pre-planned blocks.

Your boss will probably be more on board with this than you realize. And even if you can't do that, separating this work from other work on your time block plan is going to make it easier to concentrate. Our next question comes from Maria, who asks, I'm a PhD student from Brazil, and I have heard colleagues from other countries, such as the U.S. and U.K., say that people who do not work on weekends do not survive in competitive environment, such as in those countries. So do these people work deeply while working 60 plus hours a week?

Is working 60 plus hours a week really necessary in academia? Well, Maria, academia is a very broad category. There's many different types of academic jobs, many different types of fields, many different types of positions. So it's hard to talk too generally about how much work is required to be a successful academic. I can, however, use myself as an example. I am a professor in the U.S. in a demanding field. I do not work 60-hour weeks.

I work roughly 9 to 5 to 530 and not on weekends. The one exception, as I often talk about, is if there is a big conference deadline, I will work past 530 or on a weekend. That happens a couple times a year because my collaborators don't share necessarily my productivity habits and you have to work with your collaborators to get papers ready for submission. But so outside of a few exceptions, I really do work within an old-fashioned 40-hour-a-week schedule. In fact, I actually have deployed, since I was a grad student, a technique I call fixed-scheduled productivity, where you work backwards from the schedule. I'm going to work nine to five.

Okay, what do I have to do to make that possible? And that actually led to a lot of productivity innovations in my own life because I was working backwards from the big-picture goal of keeping. my work within 40 hours. Okay, so is it possible to succeed as an academic in just 40 hours? I mean, I've done okay. I have tenure. I've published something like 70 peer-reviewed papers in theoretical computer science. I have an H-index of 29. I've been cited over 4,000 times. So, yeah, you can still be productive. I think I'm a pretty good teacher. I've been teaching my normal load through all of this, and I have taken on the normal load of service that you would expect. admissions committees.

I finished a stint recently as a director of graduate studies for our program, been on hiring committees, et cetera. And I do it within 40 hours. So it is possible. Not only is it possible, but I think this really should be the goal. See, here's the problem. A lot of people do work 60-plus hour weeks.

We really should not allow that to become the standard in academia because what happens then is once you're out of the normal work hours, you began to introduce inequities that you don't actually want in the system because they're selecting for things that aren't actually necessarily valuable. So, for example, if the standard is you have to work 60 hours for, you know, in a given department, all right, people with kids are now at a big disadvantage because their kids' child care probably ends around 5 or 530. And if they have to be home to watch the kids, then maybe they're going to be at a disadvantage.

I mean, this is part of the reason why I only worked till 530. I originally started doing this before we had kids, but because my wife had a normal job with normal hours. And I just wanted to align my work as a graduate student to her hours so that I wanted to miss time with her. I figured when she's done with work, I also want to be done with work. And so I started fitting at the 9 to 5. And then later when we had kids, I had the more flexible job. I don't have a boss that can force me to stay late. So it just made sense that when our kids' child care was up, you know, the nanny had to go home, that I could consistently be there. So again, the pressure was, okay, I need to be done by this time. Now, I happen to be really in the

productivity strategies and was writing books on this so I could figure out how to make that work. But if you can't make that work and you have kids, you'd be at a big disadvantage. But what has really been served if you say, okay, we've set up our department's workloads such that choosing not to have kids means you get a faster career trajectory. Or if you're in a couple, you know, not being the member of that couple that has fewer child care duties means that your career gets to go slower. You haven't actually selected there for anything good that you want to select for. In fact, you're probably leaving a lot of talent on the table for basically arbitrary reasons.

So I'm a big fan of the 40-hour work week. We can get a ton done in the 40-hour work week because we have the sort of child care infrastructure for the 40-hour work week, not so much for a 60- or 80-hour work week. All right, so how do you actually accomplish this? Like, how do I fit my academic work within 40 hours? Well, you know, first things first. Deep work is at the core. prepping good classes, doing good research is at the core of what I have been hired to do. That is the time I put aside first.

That is the time I protect. That has to happen regardless. Much more willing to have people get mad at me for being slow to respond to an email than I am to stop doing deep work. That is actually going to produce a new paper or produce a better lecture. So you got to start by saying this is what I prioritize first. Two, when it comes to service, you need quotas. You need to figure out what is a reasonable amount of service work for someone at your rank in your department at your institution. Again, this varies between different institutions.

Figure out some quotas. I mean, they'll do this many program committees, this many journal reviews per semester, this many letters, this many committees, whatever. And then you got to stick to it. And stick to it means being able to say, I appreciate the request. I have a quota of how many X, Y, or Zs I do per semester to keep my service robust but reasonable and I've already filled that quota, so I can't do it right now. And then you have to just be willing to be quiet and not resist the urge of like, but maybe I can help a little bit.

Okay, maybe I'll do it. Just sit there, be willing to have that silence and then the person will move on. So you have to be able to actually put your service into a reasonable bucket. And then three, you have to be very efficient about the shallow work you do need to do. A lot of reasons why I think professors end up doing 60 hours of work is that they spend the first 4D in a hyperactive hive mind state of constantly going back and forth in context switching on communication channels, trying to keep up with all the incoming information, all the chats, all of the emails, can't get any good academic work done in that state.

And then once they get home at night or early in the morning or on the weekend, it's when they actually get their academic work done. But that's not a great formula. You're better off doing all that academic work at your prime intellectual hours, let's say the first thing in the morning or at work, and then be much more efficient about the other thing. So reading a book like a world without email will be very helpful here.

It's all about figuring out here are the processes I have to come back to again and again as a professor, dealing with my students and TAs in the class I'm teaching, dealing with my colleagues on this committee, hiring committee that I'm a part of, working on collaboration with my colleagues on this research paper. And for each, say, let me step back and figure out how I actually want to structure how this work gets done,

including how the communication occurs, you can restructure this communication so there's much less unscheduled messaging which requires constant inbox checks and much more scheduled messaging which is much less disruptive even if it's more time, even if it's less convenient,

even if it's a pain. If you're a professor, your brain is your instrument. No one gets mad at the professional athlete for saying, look, I can't eat that because being in peak fitness is crucial to my success. I perform it an elite physical level. You need to get comfortable saying the same as an academic,

using my mind at its highest capacity is the most important thing. So yeah, the system with which I coordinate with my TAs and students is a bit of a pain, but you know what? I can't just be doing email all day because the entire thing I'm hired for is to think and I can't think if I'm doing that. So yes, I think in a lot of fields, 40 hours a week is completely reasonable. Start with that as your goal. Insist on that being your goal, work backwards from that goal, and then be really aggressive with your habits and routines to try to accomplish that goal. The final thing I'll throw in here, Maria, is time block planning is going to help you a lot. You can find out more about that at timeblockplanner.com. Professors really should have much more control over their time. You cannot go

into a day. You can't just show up at your office, the university, open up an inbox and rock and roll. That is a recipe for 60 hours weeks. You can't avoid it. You need to say, here's what I'm doing today. Here's my time. Here's the best way to use it. So I don't know. These are a lot of things I'm throwing at you. But hopefully the underlying message is more clear, which is basically, you can get this job done in a more reasonable number for hours, but it's not easy. It's not easy, but it's worth the hard work. Continuing this academic theme, we have a question from Sparky, who asks, what's the best workflow for a professor who gets lots of reference letter request? Well, Sparky, this reminds me that I have to write a reference letter right after

I finish recording today's podcast. So first of all, Thanks for that reminder. I'll tell you what I do. So first of all, I have a standard ask. If a student asked me to do a letter, I say, okay, here's the information I need from you. I need to know the places that you are applying and what their deadlines are. I need to know your resume. And if you have your personal statement that you're sending as part of your applications for whatever program you're applying to, send me that too.

so I can see the way you're thinking about you in your career. And I need your CV so I can see, what year are you? When did you take my class? You know, and I, et cetera, right?

That's all the information I need. I then have rough templates for different letters. So basically the different relationships for the student. Like, is this a student who I just had in class one year? Is this a student that I've done some work with? Right. And I'm talking here mainly about undergraduate letters.

Obviously, writing a letter, for example, a graduate student who is going up for a professorship or something like this or way more seriously, like a 10-year letter. I mean, these are very serious things. These are going to be long letters where you have to give expert analysis of their research and research potential.

But most of the letters we write as professors is an undergraduate you had in a class needs three letters to apply to a master's program and is asking you. And so I sort of have templates to start with. And then I can look at the CV and I can look at their personal statement and sort of fill in the details. And then what I do is, you know, once I have that information and the deadline, I will schedule when I do those letters on my calendar, like an appointment or a meeting. That's just my way of handling it.

I mean, sometimes it's a one, the easy ones is where it's just, here's one letter. Oftentimes, if a student's applying to grad school, they have maybe 10 different schools, you're going to have to send that letter to, and there might be a little bit of changing, like, the name of the school each time. and in that case, you know, I'll put aside an hour, usually pretty close to the first of all the deadlines. I'll put on my calendar. And if it's one letter, it's just going to take 20 minutes, but I'll mark it on my calendar kind of near the deadline. You know?

And then I don't have to think about it. It's just when I get to that day, I see that's one of my things to do like a meeting. I'm like, oh, it's not a meeting. It's writing letters. Great. I already have all the information. So let me just go do that. I don't let it hang out on my to-do list.

It's something that I keep ignoring or deferring. I just, it's there on my calendar. Now, if you get a ton of request, you know, and I have some colleagues who I think get way more requests than others, it depends what classes you're teaching. Or what relationships you have with the student. I mean, some colleagues, for example, maybe run a very major club for the undergrad, so you have a lot more one-on-one interaction with undergrad. You might have a lot more letters to write.

You know, this calendar method makes it really clear when you have too much. I mean, if you're getting a request and someone, yet another student has 20 letters to write, and you're trying to find an hour or an hour and a half to put a side on your calendar to write those letters. And all these days are full. There's lots of other letters. You're writing lots of other stuff. Then you have really concrete metric, real concrete back pressure right there to say, you know, I'm just too bogged down. I can't do it.

Or again, if you're just abstractly saying yes or no, you don't have that back pressure. You end up close to the deadline and say, shoot, I have to write these letters, but I have no time. So, all right, that's my advice. Get the information you need, including the deadlines right up front. Once you have that information, put the time on your calendar right then. Forget about it until you get then and then execute once you get there. All right. Let's do one more academic question once we're on this role here.

Sahn says, I am a master student in CS and looking to take the same career path as you to become a professor slash researcher. Curious about your perspective on research in computer science. Well, San, research is really the thing that makes a computer science professorship interesting. It's what makes it fun. It's why people remain in this field in academia, even though in theory their salaries could be much larger doing computer science and industry. It's the autonomy to do your own work, the intellectual thrill of producing new work at such a high level that it survives peer review for very elite venues. Makes a difference. Other people start building on it and citing it.

there are a few intellectual challenges I think that are more, let's say, compelling or difficult in that challenge of making an impact in elite level of research. It's why I like being a computer scientist and like being a professor and have no plans to

leave this profession. Is that intellectual challenge and thrill of doing this type of work? So you're right to ask about research because that's what makes this that's what makes this position so compelling. So if you're thinking about becoming a professor, that should be compelling to you.

You should love that idea of being autonomous and doing your own work. Right? It's a very entrepreneurial position. You have to have that mindset. No one's going to tell you what to do. They're just going to take away your job after six years if you haven't done something great. That's how the whole tenure line tenure system works in academia. So if that makes you nervous, then you might want to go make some real money using your

computer science degree elsewhere. If that makes you excited, all right, let's keep talking. There might be something here for you. The other thing I'll point out is that the, the value you derive from research and computer science is really directly correlated to how good of an institution you're a professor at. You need to be at a research institution,

an institution with doctoral students, a lot of grant funding, and a real tradition and emphasis on producing original work. It should be an institution that has really talented other faculty there. If you're going to an institution with very big course loads that doesn't have PhD students, that doesn't have a lot of any real big names, in any field within CS, you might be frustrated.

That might be more of a teaching-focused position, and that's becoming a really different trade-off now, because, again, you have this CS degree that can make you a lot of money, you can be involved with a lot of interesting projects at big companies. So that trade-off becomes a little bit more murky if you're not going to a good research-focused institution. So the only thing to check right now is that you are on that track, and the right thing to keep in mind is if you can go to a,

top 10 program to get your PhD, a research-oriented professorship is at least possible for you. You then need to do great work in the top 10 PhD program, and then you can get potentially a good research-focused professorship job. If you don't think you can get into, let's say, a top-10 program, just the reality check here is that it's going to be much, much harder to get a 10-year-line CS professorship at a reasonable research-focused university. It's better to accept that reality now than to somehow drag on more years of graduate education that you don't actually need. Again, in general, I don't typically advise getting a doctorate in computer science unless there is a very specific research focus path that demands it. Industry, for the most part, does not need a

doctorate. They will reward a master's. And they will reward a doctor with more money, but not enough money that it doesn't make more sense just to go straight from your master's into the industry and get raises there. So really make sure you are on that trajectory. I can go to a Stanford. I can go to an MIT. You know, I can go to a Berkeley and really give a good shot at shiny in a PhD program at one of those institutions. Make sure you are on that path before you put too much emphasis into the possibility of a real research-focused, exciting computer science professorship. Let's do one more work question. I don't have a name here, but it is a good question, so I'll ask it anyways.

It reads, Cal, I love the podcast, and the new book is excellent. I am a high school principal. While I have experienced the benefits of deep work, it always has to be after hours and on the weekends. Is there a way to cultivate time to do deep work in an environment like a public school? Well, I think the key thing here is that if you're a high school principal, if we're going to use a corporate analogy, you should think of yourself as a manager. Now, this terminology is important. In a world without email, my new book, I break up knowledge work into three rough categories. Makers, and these are the people that do the sort of traditional style of deep work I talk about in my book, deep work, that is long periods of unbroken concentration. so you know, you're writing computer code or you're solving a proof or coming up with a new marketing

strategy for a company. Then there's minders. These are administrators or support roles. And then there is managers who I manage large groups of people, make sure not only that they have what they need, but that I'm deploying them in ways that gives us the best return as well as setting the long-term strategic vision for my team group or organization. So high school principals are managers. Now, in this book, I talk about what is cognitively optimal for each of these different types of jobs, and the commonality they have is sequentiality is how you get the most out of your brain. Now, what do I mean by sequentiality? I mean one thing after another, no distractions during each thing.

So you work on the thing in front of you until you get to a reasonable stopping point without context shifting. no glances at inboxes, no glances at Slack, no glances at teams, no glances at your computer. You do this thing until you're done, then you move on to the next thing. Now, that next thing might be, now let me tackle my inbox. And then the next thing might be, let me talk to this person. Then the next thing might be, let me try to book this flight, whatever. That's one thing after another without context shifting during each atomic target of focus. All right.

Now, this kind of unifies these different knowledge work positions. Where they differ is how long these atomic tasks actually are. So if you're a maker doing one thing after another, well, your one thing might be three hours long because you're trying to write computer code. If you're a manager, it's probably going to be shorter. It might be, okay, I'm sitting down with this employee to figure something out.

It might take me 30 minutes. If you're a minder, it might be 15 minutes. I have to file these forms. Okay, I'm done with that. What's next. What they all share is our brain does best when it's focused on one thing at a time, And where they differ is just how long that focus might be.

So this is a way of unifying different types of jobs and not getting too caught up, not getting too caught up on this idea of duration of concentration is somehow always necessary. Because again, managers and minders don't always have long duration levels of concentration that they need. A quick aside, I'm realizing now as I talk that my use of the word atomic here might seem non-standard. I should probably clarify it's a computer science term. So in distributed systems theory, my field, an atomic action is an action that happens at an indivisible level. So if you're looking at concurrency in system execution, an atomic action cannot be interleaved with another action. It just sort of happens instantaneously.

So my use of the word atomic here has nothing to do with atoms or nuclear energy. It just means an indivisible task. All right. So a little nerd, little nerd lingo there for those of you who are not professional, theoretical distributed system researchers. Okay. So if you're a manager, what you need to focus on probably is sequentiality. You just want to make sure that you are not trying to service communication channels at the same time that you're also trying to do your core managerial duties, which tends to be making decisions, taking an information, working with individuals.

you're in a meeting or talking one-on-one with various staff members or teachers to understand what they need and make sharp decisions. You need to give each of these things your full attention. Now, to do this, you have to actually tame the demand of these communication channels, the demand that they demand on your attention. So you're reading my books, you know some of this terminology, but if you're running your school on a hyperactive hive mind model, that means everything's being worked out on back and forth unscheduled messages. And if there's a ton of these different asynchronous back and forth conversations going on, there's a ton of these digital ping pong balls being hit back over these metaphorical ping pong table nets that you have to hit back pretty quickly, so you have to check the channels all the time.

It's very difficult to do things one at a time because you also have to service these back and forth. So the key is to replace the things that happen all the time, decisions that happen all the time, requests that happen all the time, check-ins that happen all the time. You have to add some structure to how that happens so that it's not just unscheduled messages that could show up at any point that you have to answer. answer. The more unscheduled messages you eliminate from your processes, the less demand your inbox and channels have on your attention in the moment, the easier you will have giving each thing the attention it needs in the moment. And this really does matter. In that email book, I cite research

that looks at managers and shows that as their email load goes up, and they spend less time on leadership activities and more time on productivity-focused activities. And eventually their job devolves into, can I just keep up with communication? Well, guess what? When you're just trying to keep up with communication, you're not being a leader. You're not seeing the bigger picture of where your school needs to go. You're not seeing what do people need. How am I going to deploy my resources better? How am I going to, let's give a relevant example here, reopen this school, even though it's complicated and even though there's a virus circulating, right? Leadership activities diminish if you have to keep servicing unscheduled ad hoc messaging.

So that be my main advice. Reduce the pressure of the hive mind, give things attention one at a time. I think you'll find that my case study of George Marshall, who led the U.S. Armed Forces, was in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II and never worked past 530. You will find his case study very instructive

about what it means to be doing real leadership in a very demanding environment with lots of decisions to be made by putting in place strong processes. I think you'll find that part of the book really useful here. Also, as a principle, will be other times where you need to do deep strategic thinking, which maybe looks more like maker style deep work. Like I need to just give two hours to thinking about, you know, how are we

going to revamp our whatever, our curriculum, our hiring, how are we going to rework our ventilation so that we can do this opening plan? Like you might have some maker style really deep thinking to do. You are right. That does not fit easily within the public school day style schedule, which tends to be a lot of your time is already spoken for. That probably is going to be, it's going to be more occasional, you are going to have to put aside time for that in the morning, maybe on the weekends, but just put aside the time very specifically and give yourself the best possible cognitive aesthetic environment to get that thinking done well. I would suggest walking, walking somewhere scenic, having a clear prompt you're thinking about when you're done walking, capture your thoughts right

away so you'll have them. So you might have to interspers these moments of extended deep thinking outside of your workday, they get big think. But then in your workday, sequentiality, sequentiality, sequentiality, one thing at a time without distraction, reducing the pull of the hyperactive hive mind is how you can succeed with that strategy. Now, before we move on to doing some technology questions,

I first want to take a moment to talk about a cool technology that is also one of the sponsors of the Deep Questions podcast, and I am talking about grammarly, premium. My entire career is built on my ability to express myself clearly. Clear expression is an indication of clear thinking, and clear thinking is at the foundation of the deep life. Now, I've been fortunate enough to have professional editors help me express myself more clearly,

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Our next question comes from Tom, who asks, can email itself be the work? He then elaborates, I've been enjoying reading a world without email, and I was talking about it with my wife, who is an associate dean at a law school. I've often noticed that her work involves constant communication. her calendar is often packed with full days of 30 minute back-to-back meetings. Meanwhile, she is shooting emails, text messages, and instant messages, back and forth during meetings, as well as before work in the evenings, etc. When I presented some of your ideas to her about pitfalls of the hyperactive hive mind,

her response was that sometimes in her line of work, the email is the work product. All right, Tom, this is a good example because it generalizes a very common response. when people are confronted with some of the issues with our hyperactive hive mind style of work. See, what happens is if you're, let's say, an associate dean in the law school, and like at many academic institutions, the main way you coordinate and collaborate with your colleagues is using the hyperactive hive mind, which means, if you remember from the book, that unscheduled ad hoc back and forth messaging is how you mainly collaborate.

If that's the way you work. and then someone comes in and says email is bad. Where you go in your mind is you say, well, what would happen if I sent less emails? And the answer is very clear, I couldn't get things done. Because if the main way you collaborate is with unscheduled back and forth messages, to not be sending and receiving many back and forth unscheduled messages

means you couldn't do your job. So your wife is right. Given that they use the hyperactive hive mind, this email is how their work is getting done. but this brings us to the real big idea in my book A World Without Email, which is once we recognize this, we see that this is not a problem that we can solve with your habits. It's not a problem we can solve with your notifications.

It's not a problem we can solve with you committing to spend less time in your inbox. We have to replace the hyperactive hive mind with specific concrete alternative ways of collaborating that require fewer unscheduled back and forth messages. the vision that you would bring to an associate dean of a law school who's constantly emailing is a vision in which they they get the same work done but they have different methods of collaborating and again and again it comes back to I want fewer unscheduled messages. Why? Because the more there's messages that could arrive at any point that require me pretty quickly to hit it back across that virtual ping pong table net

because otherwise we'll never get to a decision in time. The more of those type of messages that could arrive, the more necessary it becomes that you have to check instant messenger, you have to check email, you have to do it during the morning, you have to do it during the evening, you have to do it during meetings. Now, as you probably pointed out to your wife, you don't want to have to be checking email and instant messenger all the time because if you have to context shift that often,

your brain is operating out a fraction of its capacity, it's exhausting you, it's going to cause anxiety. It's a terrible way to actually produce value with your brain, so we don't like it. But we can't get away from that unless we give concrete alternatives. there is no one alternative that can solve this problem. It's process by process, job by job. Let's do this for this.

Let's do that for that. Let's do this for that. But once you have the mindset that what we want to do is reduce unscheduled back and forth messages, at least you know what you're trying to optimize and innovation becomes possible. So for example, you mentioned in your more extended elaboration that your wife gave a particular example about a curriculum project and a colleague was working on this curriculum project and you had to get feedback from various people and then it had to come back to your wife

and she had to approve it. And this was an example of like, well, all this stuff happens over email. We have to send email how will this project get done. But that's a great example where you could put in place an alternative to the hive mind. At the very beginning of this project, you could step back and say, here's what you want to do. We've got to get this curriculum done. That means this person has to create it. These people have to get feedback. That feedback has to be acted on. A final version has to be submitted. Great. Before we get started, let's figure out how we're going to actually communicate about this. Because if we don't, it's just going to be emails will show up whenever.

And because I want the project to move forward, I'm going to have to keep checking the inbox. Let's come up with an alternative. And then you could. And I don't know what the particular answer would be here. But you know, these are all professors. So, for example, they all probably have office hours. And you could imagine working this out with your colleague. Like, okay, here's the way it's going to work.

Put together your draft. I want you to get feedback from these five people. here's when their office hours are. So over one week, you can go person by person, show them and discuss back and forth, nuanced feedback right there real time, get the feedback from the five people. When you're done,

you can put the finished draft for me to review in this shared folder we use on our universities box or Google Drive folder. I won't touch it until Monday morning, so as long as it's there by Friday into business, it's fine. Monday morning, I'll go over, I'll put in my notes. by noon on Monday

I've already put the time aside on my calendar by noon on Monday an annotated version of that will be back in that box folder I plan to take that edit it submit it and that submission should happen by Wednesday yeah it's a pain

you had to have this conversation with someone which hopefully maybe you're doing during their office hours or doing an actual synchronous meeting you make this plan it took a little more time up front than just shooting off an email like yeah let me know when you have a draft

but this whole project will now be executed without a single unscheduled email message. Again, in the moment, it might not be as easy as I'll just shoot you a message, shoot me a message when you get back, but you've just eliminated a lot of unscheduled messages, each of which would have generated a lot of inbox checks

for you to wait for it to send it back. That has cleared up a lot of attention capital to do other things because you're avoiding context shift cost. Now imagine repeating that thing after thing after thing. Yes, it's a pain in the moment to figure out these processes. that don't just rely on rock and roll in the email. But pain in the moment is synonymous with work.

I mean, work is not supposed to be what's the most convenient way to do this. Work by definition, right? Work by definition is that you are applying force against resistance. It's supposed to be hard. The question is what's the most effective way? And my message is, whatever way does not require

unscheduled messaging is the most effective if what you do is use your brain to make decisions, if what you do is use your brain to add value to information, if what you do is knowledge work. So, Tom, this is a... really specific to your wife. I'm just using this question to get to this broader point, that the hyperactive hive mind is a real problem, but the only way to solve this problem is to replace it. And so when we want to talk to people about the issues of the hive mind,

these conversations have to be about alternative ways of collaborating that have more upfront cost, but long term or much better for your brain, and whether or not that's worth it. Academia needs a lot more of this. I've been trying to put these things in the place on my own academic life, I'm in my own administrative positions. I know the really high-level administrative positions, like associate deans or vice-provost, etc., have a ton of this communication.

It's a pain, but we really have to get past the hive mind if we're really going to make the most use of our brain. And if there's any place in our economy where we want to show people that actually prioritize clear thinking, that prioritize treating their brain like an athlete treats their muscles, it should be academia. So we should be the examples. So now you've got me giving a whole sermon,

but it all comes back to this sort of homily at the end here, which is the hive mind's bad, but just pointing out that it's bad is going to get you nowhere. Pointing instead to alternatives, that's where we begin to get traction. Scott asks, at what point have we automated too much and risk the loss of the human touch?

I feel like my company is doing a lot of the right things when it comes to reducing communication loops so that we can all work remotely and independently without issues. But I want to keep a strong sense of community, and by eliminating the physical office as well as the minor pings back and forth, some of my more extroverted staff is feeling isolated, and it's impacting their performance as well as their natural skill set to effectively communicate with clients.

Scott, this is a good question because I hear it often. People say, you know, one of the advantages of the hyperactive hive mind workflow is that all of this back and forth pinging on Slack, on Teams in email, makes us feel connected. You have the water cooler chat. It's why there's so many emojis flying around on Slack. It's a way of feeling connected when we're otherwise remote. Now, I acknowledge, and I think we should underscore that when you are remote, a sense of community among your employees is something that requires a lot more intentional energy than if you're all still in the same office and it happens more naturally. You now do have to give that a lot more attention.

However, my argument is we should not intertwine two different things here. A, the sense of cohesion among my remote staff, and B, the processes by which we collaborate about work. These are two different goals. When it comes to actually doing work, you want the most effective strategies for collaboration, the strategies that allow people to get the most out of their brain. And that's not going to be the hive mind. People need to be able to work without distraction for long periods of time on the things that matter. They can't do this if the main way they coordinate is with unscheduled back

and forth messaging. So if we then also want to have cohesion, plan special other ways that happens, specific ways unrelated to how I collaborate about my work for that to happen. Okay. And I don't, I'm not an expert on this, but if you need to have chats just for that, have chats just for that. If you want to have a chat channel, like a water cooler chat channel, that's fine. As long as it's something where there's no expectation that you're there while you're working, right? Because you're not, it's not messages about your work. It's just where people can go when they're in between work to chat. That's fine. Just as long as your employees are, when they're working, they're working, when they're not working, they're over here. You can have virtual

happy hour events. Fine. People who are in the same geographic region, you need to get them together. Not every day, but on a semi-regular basis, you need to also bring people probably back to the mothership. Base camp, Jason Freed's company does this. They bring everyone back to Chicago in a semi-regular basis. You can be with people and meet people and see people and know your colleagues. So events, gatherings, virtual and in the real world, specific digital places to collaborate, specific places to have conversations. All of that is great. And you need to give a lot of attention to that if you're remote. In fact, read Jason's book, remote, it gets into some of that. But don't mix that with how you collaborate about your work. Don't let that be the excuse for why

the main way that you do projects is Slack messages back and forth. Don't allow that to be the reason why your employees have to check their inbox once every six minutes to get their work done. because now you have sacrificed at the altar of social cohesion the ability to actually effectively produce work output. Whereas if you separate these two things, you can do both very well. And that's what I recommend. Let's do one more technology question. Furial asks, is it a must to stop watching TV shows and movies to be productive, or should I watch to avoid burnout? Well, you know, I'm an amateur cinephile. I'm also very productive.

I don't watch a ton of TV, but there are times where I do watch series, and I think it's all fine. There's nothing about video media that is necessarily standing in opposition to being productive. What I worry about, and this really comes from my book, Digital Minimalism, is when these media, just like any media, be it YouTube, or be it social media, or be it excessive web surfing, be it video games, whatever. The thing I worry about is when these media get in the way of things that are more valuable, that you're doing so much of it that it is keeping you away from other things that would be more valuable to you, and you feel that, and you feel bad about it. Now, this often happens with things like streaming TV shows or movies when you begin to use them as a numbing agent. You feel exhausted or sad, or there's things about your life you're not happy about,

and you say, you know, if I just put on a dumb show and binge for hours, I can numb. I can avoid it. I can avoid the hard things. I can avoid doing hard things and confronting hard things. In general, when you use any type of thing, be it media, be it a substance, be it another type of behavior, to avoid things, that's when you get into trouble. So I always come back to the core philosophy from my book, Digital Minimalism, which is

start with the image of what you want your life to be like. These are the things that matter to me. These are the things that I want to spend time on. This is my vision of a life well lived. and then work backwards and figure out how technology can best support this vision. All right. So in this vision, you might be, hey, I'm in the movies and I have a movie night with my friends or on Wednesday nights.

I always, I, halfway through the work week, I put together a movie night, I have a nice TV screen, and I make some popcorn, and I read a bunch of reviews of a movie and then watch it. Like, you can come up with how I want movies or TV shows to fit into my life well-lived. Now you're deploying technology on behalf of a positive vision. That is much better than deploying technology defensively to avoid things or to numb. Now your vision might be like,

yeah, one of the last things I do at the end of the day is I watch an episode of this series I like, it relaxes me. That's fine as long as it's intentional. So the key thing I come back to with any of these tech, deploy it for a purpose and get good out of it. Deploy it haphazardly, it can cause bad. And Furiel, that's the right way to think about TV shows. That's the right way to think about movies.

And I would like to think about questions about the deep life. But before we get to that final segment, I want to briefly talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible, and I am talking about stamps.com. Now, my DeepWork HQ is on the same block as my local post office. Now, it's not the post office's fault, but the issue with doing anything in person right now

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who is about to start high school in the fall. I would like him to prepare for a life of knowledge work. In what order should he read your books? Well, Mike, I think he should start with how to be a high school. school superstar. This basically adapted advice from my first two books, which are for college students, that adapts them to the high school level. But then it goes really deep on the question of college admissions and impressiveness and on the possibility of having an authentic, relaxed high school experience and yet still have very good college options when it comes time to apply for college. So if you

really internalize these ideas now before you even begin high school, you can probably save yourself a lot of undue stress as you over the years prepare for the college admissions process. So that would be the first book to read. A little aside, that's one of my favorite books. The story I like to tell about that is I sold that book and then the merger happened between Penguin and Random House, which led to a lot of consolidation. And so a lot of people were getting fired. And that book got bounced from editor to editor to editor, I don't know how many it went through. It was like four or five.

And by a time it got to its final editor, it was so far removed. She was so far removed from the original acquisition. No one even really knew or remembered or cared what that book was supposed to be about. And it allowed me to write a really sort of radical book. It's technically for high school kids, but it reads like a Malcolm Gladwell,

a Malcolm Gladwell title. I mean, I get into countersignaling theory. I get into the psychology of impressiveness. I have the failed simulation effect in there. I'm talking about peacocks. I'm talking about horseshoe crabs. I'm all over the place. It's big ideas.

All of it around kind of a cool question, which is, is it possible to be relaxed in high school students, still do well in college admissions? But buried in there is also really good advice about how to study, how to take notes, how to think about time. Anyways, great book. Start with that. Then have him read digital minimalism.

There's probably no bigger threat to a high school student's happiness and academic success right now, then constant attention economy driven digital distraction. One of the pieces of feedback I've gotten during my book tour for digital minimalism a couple years ago is that actually teenagers respond quite well to that book, especially if they come to it on their own and read it on their own. Teenagers don't like this idea that they're being manipulated, which the social media companies are doing. So hearing that story is really important, especially if it's not coming from their parents, but from an outside source. Also, a lot of teenagers are exhausted with this always-connected digital lifestyle that their peers

lead and are desperate to have permission to try something different. So I think digital minimalism, you have a chance here of saving your son from a lot of undue anxiety and cognitive drag that would be generated if he follows the status quo path of simply, here's my phone, I'm on it all the time. So those two books get you started, get you ready for high school. At some point in high school, I would then give him a copy of so good they can't ignore you. This is going to push back on this advice that all you need to do is follow your passion, you'll be happy. It gives a more nuanced and critical understanding of how people end up building work they love.

High school is a good time to start to build up this more realistic understanding. So you don't get too caught up in traps when you're thinking about college and what you want to study and what you want to do. you're not getting caught up in this trap of, well, there's one thing I'm supposed to do, and if I can't find it, I'll be unhappy. That type of thinking can often be quite an obstacle to actually doing the work of building a working life that you love. So that book will be good.

This leaves the trio of deep work and a world without email. These could probably come later, you know. I mean, deep work certainly might be inspirational by the time your son gets towards the college level, so they really understand, oh, my mind is a tool. that I need to respect.

So you could read that a little bit earlier. A world without email is what you'd want to read as you're about to enter your first knowledge, work, job. So you understand, oh, my work is not to answer emails. It's actually to do other types of valuable stuff with my brain. Emails is how we coordinate this. Is there a better way to coordinate this? So that would probably be the last book to come into canon.

I mean, I guess it's also common sense to say, when your son gets to college, my college advice books should be helpful. and they will be, but if he's read how to be a high school superstar and internalized that throughout high school, he might even find my college books to be a little bit redundant. But that's the best ordering I can give you.

So just to summarize, how to become a high school superstar and digital minimalism right away, at some point in high school, so good they can ignore you and maybe deep work. The world without email can wait until they're about to enter the current working world

that is, of course, full of email. Our next question comes from Kevin. Kevin says Peloton offers badges that users can chase, which are unlocked with X miles or minutes of working out. In the past few months, I find myself paying a lot of attention to unlocking these badges, making sure I remain ahead of my friends on the Miles ridden leaderboard, etc. I justify this to myself as a worthy investment in my constitution bucket,

but I am a little afraid that I am simply substituting one digital addiction for another. Well, Kevin, I'm not necessarily worried about this. You know, I don't have a blanket concern about digital technologies. And when I use the word addiction, I use it in a very specific way. So if you look at my book, Digital Minimalism, I identify that the issue people have with digital technologies is where they get a moderate behavioral addiction,

which is defined in part by saying it's an activity that you do more than you know is healthy when you have access to it. So if you're spending too much time on your Peloton bike or whatever Peloton tool you have, you feel like you're exercising to the point as getting in the way of other things, then that's when it qualifies as an addiction. And you say, yeah, maybe I want to back off the leaderboard. Maybe I want to back off the badges. Maybe I want to give myself like an internal goal like this many miles per week or get

an online trainer, like with my body tutor, one of the sponsors of the podcast, where there's someone who gives me a reasonable plan that I want to follow to get away from this sort of obsessive work. But if it's just, hey, it's encouraging me to do what a good amount of exercise or a lot of exercise, but you like doing a lot of exercise. It's making you happy. It's making you healthy. It's not getting in the way of your life.

Then I don't care what induces you to do it. I mean, most of athletic endeavor is inspired by competition. I want my time to go down. So I run a faster 5K. I, you know, on my softball team, I want to hit more home runs. I want to be a picked more for my ultimate frisbee team. I mean, the idea that you have some sort of measurement and you're competitive, that's just sports. And I don't really care if it's digital or not.

More importantly, I think this gives us a chance to review the right way to think about technology through a minimalist framework, which is figure out what you want to do in life, figure out how to deploy technology to get towards those things you care about and ignore everything else. if your health is an important part of your life, which it should be, and doing these Peloton workouts is a great way to stay very active and healthy, then that's a great deployment of technology. So I am fine with it as long as you don't feel like it's somehow inducing you to do so much work that it's starting to cause problems. And let's apply that same framework to basically any place technologies or technological inducements do show up in our lives.

All right, let's do one more question here. This one comes from Joe. Joe says, I'm experiencing some avoidance towards looking at my potential life buckets and identifying the big rocks within those buckets. This avoidance trickles downstream to the quarterly planning with trickles downstream to the weekly planning.

Any advice on reducing the avoidance of attending to the big life buckets. Overthinking may be a problem, so limiting the buckets and also limiting the big rocks within them may be a solution. Well, Joe, let me give some clarifications here for listeners who don't know what you're talking about, about, you're mixing a few different metaphors here, rocks and trickles and buckets.

Let's get all on the same page and then I'll give you my thoughts. So what Joe is referencing is my common advice for how to live a deeper life, as I say, it's useful to break up your life into what I call buckets, the major areas that are important to you, your work, your community, your health, contemplation, which captures philosophy or theology, etc. Right. And then you think, about overhauling each of these buckets to focus more in what matters and so that you spend less time on things that don't really matter that much, right? That is the general recipe for making your life deeper. And okay, so Joe is saying here, I just can't get to it. It's

overwhelming. I overthink it. I never actually make any progress. How do I get through it? Well, Joe, I'm going to point you back to the process that I've been preaching since this podcast first began since the early summer, the process that came out of the pandemic when we began to talk a lot about the deep life. You first identify the buckets. That's easy. I'm sure you've already done that. Two, here's how you break the ice.

This is what I've always been saying, but there's a reason why I keep saying this. Start with the keystone habit in each. That's all you have to do is bucket by bucket. Just find one thing you do every day. And you write it down, your little metric symbol, you write down in your time block planner in the metric tracking box or whatever you use to track metrics. One thing per bucket every day. simple. You don't have to change your whole life. You don't have to crack the code. You don't have to

figure out the meaning of a life well-lived. Just in each bucket, one thing you do. In work, what's one thing I do every day to help me focus on what matters there? In my health, what's one thing I do every day? It can be simple, you know? I start every day because I'm working from home for work, eight to ten deep work every morning. Never schedule a meeting until 10. I'll figure out later what to put in there, but I just want to mark on my thing every day I did two hours. And my health, it's outside 10,000 steps every day. It's got to figure out how to do it. I write down how many steps I take is just one thing, right? So this is simple. We're diffusing avoidance by lowering the stakes here. You're not figuring out your life. You're just trying to

figure out one habit that seems on point in each of the major areas of your life. Caviot, it's not easy to figure out the right habits here. They have to be hard enough to matter, but not so hard that you stop doing them. You're trying to find that perfect point of tractability. You're balancing tractability and impact. So yeah, you might have to experiment with these. But, you know, just every Sunday, here's what I'm trying. Check back in on Sunday.

This work, this work, this work. But for contemplation, my plan that I was going to, whatever, read Torah for three hours every day didn't happen. Ooh, maybe that was a little bit too far on the difficult side. Let me try something different. So just do that. A handful of habits you mess with once a week until they stick. And once they stick, just let them stick for a while.

Now you're in a place where you can start to do some bigger changes. And I suggest going bucket by bucket, give yourself two to six weeks per bucket. And take a break in between if you need to. And then all you're doing is thinking about that bucket. What things we want to amplify? What things we want to get rid of? Are there any major changes I want to make? You rotate through all the buckets, take a break.

Next year, come back, do it again. All right. What you're going to find is the Keystone habits are pretty simple to get started with, easy to sidestep avoidance. Once those are all going, now it's much easier to go bucket by bucket and start overhauling. It just changes your mindset. When you're doing things every day that you don't have to do, but by doing them, you show a commitment to what matters, the areas that matter in your life, completely changes the way you think about yourself, how you live, and your capability of being intentional about how you live. That mindset shift is on the foundation on which you can do these bigger changes.

So this weekend sit down and just write out for whatever, how many buckets you have, four, five or six buckets, one habit for each. Very simple. Try it. If it doesn't work, fix it.

It's an easy place to start, but it's like you roll that pebble down the hill and it gets faster and faster and faster. That's what big life transformations, that's how they unfold. You start with the pebble, and the pebble is these little habits. All right?

These small pebbles end up the big rocks that right now you're having a hard time starting with. And with that, let's wrap up this episode. Remember, if you know what a clubhouse is, come check out me and Kevin Roos, clubhouseing at 3 p.m. Eastern this Thursday. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to learn more about submitting your own questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a habit, tune up mini episode, and until then as always, stay deep.