Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 93: Am I Overcommitted or Bad at Time Management?

Episode Date: May 3, 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 happens if you stop using your phone for a year? [3:55]WORKING DEEPLY: - How do I avoid the hyperactive hive mind in a new job? [11:36] - How can the author of A WORLD WITHOUT EMAIL have an email list? [14:02] - When did personal productivity become a thing? [16:25] - Am I overcommitted or bad at time management? [25:47] - How do I decide on roles for my task boards? [29:23] - How can I become established as a content creator? (Or, the perils of "checklist productivity") [33:16] - Recreating the water color in a world without email? [38:44]LIVING DEEPLY: - What are some good biographies for deep life inspiration? [46:38] - What are my top 3 recommendations for someone looking to live deeper? [49:12] - Can a commute be contemplative? [54:50] - Where do I (Cal) write about "the deep life" in my books? [58:51]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 93. Quick announcements. One, I am experimenting with a slightly consolidated question categories for today's episode. Instead of doing work technology in the deep life, I'm going to try just two sections. One about working deeply and another about living deeply. Seems like that's simpler and really gets at the heart of what. what I mean when I talk about the deep life, you have your professional life, your personal life, and in both, you're trying to focus on what matters and not get too distracted about what doesn't.

So we'll see if we like this new categorization. Second quick announcement, news, I'm having my first actual meeting in the Deep Work HQ. I have been here daily since August, but now that I am fully vaccinated and more people I know and work with are also fully vaccinated, I can actually start to use this AQ, not just as a hermit retreat, but an actual office. That's kind of exciting. I mean, I've had people here. I've shown various people at the office, but I've never really had a long sit-down meeting. One of the issues I'm going to have, I'm realizing right now is I need another chair. The simple things we forget during pandemic times. So anyways, that's exciting. As I've mentioned before, the big push I'm

doing right now is to get the studio renovated and configured for having multiple people in the studio at the same time. I want more people joining me here in studio for some of these episodes. So more on that as it happens. All right, we have a good episode. We're going to do a deep dive and then we have our deep work and deep life questions to follow. As always, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions. And while there, sign up for my mailing list, my email list where I've been sending my famous weekly essay since 2007. Okay, so it's all good. Before we get started, however, let me briefly mention one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible, and that is Blinkist. Blinkist has been with this show since almost the

very beginning, and for good reason, they offer a service that I find to be really useful. Now, here's how it works with Blinkist. You subscribe to their service. You can then access it through the web or through an app, it gives you access to summaries of over 4,000 nonfiction bestselling books. These are summaries that allow you to get the key ideas and insights from each of these books in only 15 minutes. Over 15 million people are using Blinkist, so you know they're doing something right. How I recommend using it, you've heard me say this before, is as a way to do a surgical strike on a topic area you're interested in, quickly get the key insights from multiple books about that area, get the lay of the land, and figure out which if any of these books

you then want to buy and read in more depth. It's a way of not wasting time on books you don't really need to read and figure out which books you definitely should. Now right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can start a seven-day free trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep. They get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep.

All right with that, let's get started with a deep dive. Today's deep dive is on the question, do I need a phone? Now, different than most deep dives, instead of me just talking about a topic, I actually want to share a story from one of my listeners that I think gives us a lot of insight, both into our malformed relationship to our devices, but also some insight into how we perhaps overinflate the necessity of these devices in our lives and underestimate the harm that these

devices are causing. So I want to read you this story, and I will interject as we go along. I will anonymize it. I won't use this listener's name. I won't talk about what his job is specific. or where he lives. He did mention that he was going to write up something about this. So if he does and publishes a more detailed account, I will point you towards it. But let's get to the account I have here. So this reader starts by saying, my relationship with my phone was

one that I always struggled with. I tried many different tactics to create a healthier relationship. The phone foyer method, which is one of mine. Airplane mode, delayed responses, you name it. as a Sabbath observant religious Jew, I knew how good it felt to turn my phone off one day a week, and I dreaded each time I had to turn it back on. Quick aside, a very common thing. People who take regular breaks from their devices

often report how much relief they feel during those breaks, be it a weekly Sabbath or an annual detox. But the thing that always confuses me is that even though they feel how good it felt, they still return to what they were doing before. I've said it before. This is my issue with detoxing as a method to dealing with phone overuse. Just taking breaks from something that is persistently causing harm in your life is not sufficient.

You actually have to reform your life so that that harm isn't present at all. Just an aside, let's get back to this story here. All right, so my listener continues. I decided that a challenge I would take on would be to turn my cell phone off for an entire year. as you can imagine there were some logistical issues with making this work right he talks a little bit about his job he has a director role at an organization I'll say that so not having a cell phone made me anxious as you might imagine I also have a wife two young kids and have a leadership position on boards in our community so all of

this was intimidating but the prospect of having my phone off permanently was too appealing so I move forward with the project right he elaborates he basically spent all of 2020 with his smartphone off. Look here at the conditions. It's a director job, so a lot of people who report to him and people he reports to, as a wife has kids, very involved in his community. All right, let's see what happened.

He says, the results were fascinating. Were there some lows and I get burnt a few times? Absolutely. But the year, even with COVID arriving in March, was one of my most growth-oriented years. Here are a few observations. One, the relationship with my wife strengthened considerably. I was often distracted in the evening

when I should have been spending more quality time with her and with my phone off, we were able to connect on a much deeper level. Two, I didn't tell any of my colleagues that I was disconnecting, and as far as I know, they still don't know. I gave colleagues my home phone, and on a couple occasions they used it, but for the most part, we used alternative communication methods for connection.

Now, keep in mind, during the work day, he was still using normal work communication tools, email and Slack and meetings or this or that. This was his personal phone. So basically he was saying, outside of work, it didn't really come up that often that someone needed to call him,

but when they did, they used his actual home phone, if you can remember what those were like. All right. Point number three, observation number three, I learned to embrace solitude. I got into the ritual of taking a walk every evening around our neighborhood. Without technology by my side, I tapped in the memories

I hadn't thought of for years. I found myself with more time each evening after our kids went to sleep. I started to play chess again, a hobby I haven't invested much time in since high school. This is pure digital minimalism here. When you reduce this screen as your default activity

at the slightest hint of boredom, it opens up space. cognitive space. And you can use that space for solitude where you make sense of information in your life, put into a structure that gives you insight and self-reflection and allows growth. You can also invest this cognitive space into high-quality leisure activities. Everything slows down. The benefits become more pronounced. So I love that piece of it. All right. Even better. This is observation number four. I grew closer to three of my dearest friends. Without texting, we were forced to call each other.

low effort communication habits were replaced with high quality conversations. As a side note, my wife also appreciated this because when they called our house phone, she got to catch up with them as well. Remember how this is what it used to be like? You didn't hear from everyone every day a little bit, but you'd hear from on a semi-regular basis and really get to know, really get to talk to them. If they came to the house, everyone in the family could say hi. This is another big point from digital minimalism.

My book, Digital Minimalism. High-quality conversation, real-time back and forth. dwarfs the benefits you get out of very low, low quality, low friction text-based communication. What about casual friendships? Well, the final observation, more casual friendships fizzled.

And of course, that was exasperated by the pandemic and not being able to text and not seeing each other in person. I counted about a dozen friends who I would normally have texted with who I didn't connect with as much because I didn't have a cell phone.

So there was the cost. There were people he talked to less. He lost touch with. But the people that he was closer to, he got stronger relationships with. Look, I don't want to generalize too much from this example, but I think there are some underlying insights there that you are probably feeling as you hear this story. The life this listener described without his smartphone, I got to tell you, sounds like a better life. The problems were minor.

I mean, he doesn't get into other type of things like how do he listen to music or podcast. What about navigation, you know, without having maps on his phone? But the fact that he didn't mention the meant that it probably wasn't that big of a deal. He said, yeah, there were costs, but what did he get? He got a much slower life. He's connected with his wife. He's connected with his kids, I'm assuming. He's connected much more with his friends.

He has space to reflect. He's playing chess again. He's back to these high-quality leisure activities. This sounds like a very enviable life. One variable made that all possible. Not having this glowing piece of glass. in your hand as the default activity at the slightest hint of boredom. Take what lesson you want to take away from this, but I think an answer to the question of,

is a phone actually necessary in today's modern world is no. So then why are we using them all the time? Even if we don't go all the way to getting rid of the phone altogether, seeing that more good than bad happens when you do should tell us that serious reform is possible and something we should pursue. So thank you anonymous reader for sending this story. I hope we all learned a little bit something from it. I know I found it aspirational.

All right. Let's do some questions now about working deeply. Our first question comes from Stephen. Stephen says, I'm starting a new job soon, leading a data science team. What is my game plan? From the interview process, I get the impression that the hyperactive hive mind is well established. in this company. Well, Stephen, it is useful to begin with a process-oriented mindset.

In other words, this is the big idea from my book, A World Without Email. Your job, if you're a knowledge worker, can be decomposed into multiple processes. That's my word for the things you come back to and do again and again in your role. Now, the question is for each of these processes, how is it implemented? If no one has really thought about this before, the default answer is probably the hyperactive hive mine. We just work things out with email and Slack and teams back and forth on the fly. Your goal is to get alternative implementations in place. All right?

So one thing just means is that you are not coming to your new job and thinking about inbox habits or hacks. This is not going to be about here's my rules for when I check email or my subject lines. It's going to be instead about I'm going to identify processes. I'm going to put in alternative implementations through the hive mind. so there's many fewer unscheduled messages, back and forth messages, playing a key role in how work gets done. The fact that you are new and you are leading a team

is an advantage here, not a disadvantage. It means right off the bat as you get there, you can say, great, I want to learn about this organization, how we run, what are all the different things we do? Let's list them. I want to learn about it. Great, how do we do these different things? Now, you might get some weird looks at first.

Your fellow team members, like, well, what do you mean? How do we do it? This is just something we do. We just figure it out. And you can very gently be like, okay, well, how do we want to do this? You know, what should our rules be around this? Do we have a standing meeting? Do we keep track a task somewhere?

When do we coordinate? Where's the information store? Let's figure this out. So it's actually a great opportunity when you are new to a team and you're leading that team to actually run everyone through this exercise of here's what we do and here's how we tentatively want to do it. I say tentatively because it takes experimentation and time to figure out how these things work best, but allows you to be really clear from the beginning.

No just default back and forth here. Let's be more explicit. And as you get more explicit about how this work gets done, you're going to find better and better ways to do it. All right, let's do a question here from Mark. Mark asks, How do you write a book about a world without email, but then continue to use email to engage your listeners?

Mark, you got me? I'm really not that smart. I didn't notice that. I don't know what I'm talking about. Let's all use email. or let's read the first few pages of the book, which would make really clear what I'm talking about in that book

and what it means about an email list. If you read the first few pages of the book, right off the bat, I say the enemy here. The thing that is causing problems in our current world to work is what I dubbed the hyperactive hive mind workflow. This is something that followed email spread. It's not fundamental given the email exists,

but it pretty universally followed email spread, and it is an approach to collaboration in which you figure things out on the fly with back and forth messaging. I argue that has a lot of problems and we should find better ways to collaborate that doesn't require so much unscheduled back and forth messaging

like we were just talking about in my previous answer. The Steven. Now other uses of email, great. Email spread in the 90s because it replaced fax machines, it replaced voicemail, it replaced inner office memos, it replaced office to office mail,

and it was a great replacement for that. I don't want to fax a contract back to my publisher. I would much rather than send it to me as an attachment on an email. I can sign it and send it back. I used to get manuscripts for my publisher that were printed out, sent in big FedEx envelopes, and had red pencil marking up the different changes. Now those changes come and track changes on a word document attached to an email. That's great.

Similarly, if I want to broadcast an essay to my readers, aren't we all happy we can do that via email as opposed to me having to make 55,000 Xerox copies and individually mail them to everyone. Guess what? I wasn't going to do that and so the newsletter wouldn't exist, etc. So email is great for a lot of things. What it's not great for is as the primary

means by which you collaborate, interact, coordinate, and come up with decisions. We need better ways of doing that. It doesn't require so much back and forth hyperactive unscheduled messages. That's the point of the book, a world without email, but calling the book a world without the hyperactive hive mind workflow playing such a large role in how we do modern knowledge work coordination doesn't quite roll off the tongue as fast.

So we went with that more provocative shorter version. All right. Here's an interesting question from Georgia. Georgia says, when did personal productivity become a thing? When did all of the articles, coaches, books, conversations on personal productivity start? Can we say, if that, not that,

then we'd not be in this productivity dance, such as if not for the computer and the drop in the, in the cost of microchips to pennies, there's no productivity movement. All right, well, Georgia, that's an interesting question. I did a little bit of research in this when I was working on that New Yorker piece, the rise and fall of getting things done. As part of the work on that piece, I went back to try to read some of the original personal productivity books.

I think an important distinction to make here in this conversation is you have to put self-help or self-improvement aside. that's a perennial topic that humans have basically been grappling with since the very beginning of humans writing things down and probably before. But I'm just saying this is one of the most fundamental questions. Philosophy is self-improvement. Theology is self-improvement. We have secular self-improvement, non-philosophical self-improvement books come up in the 19th century. We see him in the 18th century.

Ben Franklin's autobiography had tactics for self-improvement. you get Napoleon Hill, you get How to Live in 24 hours a day, you think get as the man think us. I mean, there's a long complicated history of self-improvement. So let's try to focus here on what we think about is modern personal productivity, this idea of managing your time, managing your tasks, trying to get more things in your own life done. That's a narrower topic that has a much more recent history. One of the earliest books I could find on this dates back to the 1950s. I went back to,

so when I saw this question, Georgia, I paused a recording and went to my library here in the Deep Work HQ and pulled a couple books. So I pulled one. I have a original edition of, actually. I think this might even be a first edition. Let me see here.

It's called The Management of Time. And this, okay, actually, this is not a first edition. This is an eighth printing. But its first printing was in 1959. So it's an early book. It's called The Management of Time

by James T. McKay. And here's what it says on the flap. This book sets forth a practical method for overcoming time pressures today and preparing for the much greater time demands of the coming decade. Going beyond superficial time-saving techniques, the author James T. McKay underscores the intimate relationship between time pressure and rate of personal growth. If a man is chronically short on time, he says he is probably being swamped by the growing challenges of his job. So if you read this book, it's clear that James is addressing the, at this point emerging class of knowledge workers, people who made a living with their brain, either directly producing things with their brain or managing those who did. There's a real focus

in this book on industrial R&D. So you really get a sense that McKay is influenced by observing these research and development labs, like you would see at DuPont or something like this, where you're coming up with new research-based innovations that's going to become the foundation for continued industrial growth. His contemporary Peter Drucker, who had just introduced the term knowledge work earlier in that decade, earlier in the 1950s in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow,

also had an interesting preoccupation with research R&D. So there was something about industrial research and development, which it's a very autonomous, sort of driven, skilled creative knowledge work that was really influential in some of this early writing.

Okay, so if you read McKay, he's introducing that notion that was new back, So if we go back to that flap, and I'm opening this back up again, he says, we have to go beyond, quote, superficial time-saving techniques. Well, what he has in mind there is industrial manufacturing, where the whole game is doing things faster. I install steering wheels on the Buicks. If we can come up with a better way for me to get that steering wheel on faster, that's better. And what he's saying here is, okay, we're in a different world when we go from assembling Buick's to trying to figure out Scotts.

tape in the research R&D lab, the work is autonomous and it's creative, and now you as an individual have to figure out different demands on your time, right, and figure out what am I going to work on today? What should I not work on? How do I spread this out? These are some of the fundamental questions of personal productivity. We see them emerging here in the late 1950. So I think that's a turning point book. Another influential book that comes after that is Peter Drucker's the effective executive. Arguably, this is the first really truly modern business-focused personal productivity book. I'm flipping through my copy here. 1967 was the first edition of the effective executive. Listen to the subtitle here. The definitive guide to getting the right things

done. All right. So now we're really getting into productivity like we know about it. This book, it's very explicit about choosing what to work on, triaging time, putting aside time for things. Peter Drucker has an early form of time blocking that he recommends for how to make the most of your time. I talk about this book and the introduction of my time block planner. You can find out more about it at timeblock planner.com. And then we're really off to the races. So we get more of these books in the 70s and the 80s. It really starts to take off.

You start to get Stephen Covey and some of the other big players emerge in these periods. This is the period in which David Allen was beginning to bring in ideas about taskless and organizations, et cetera, et cetera. So I would really say, yeah, mid-century. And Georgia, that makes sense because, again, this is when knowledge work as a thing, a distinct sector, not just a small role that was involved in large manufacturing companies, right? Just, well, there's some managers at the Buick plant. But knowledge work as a thing. Here's a company that only produces value with its mind. That emerged in the 1950s as a thing and then really took up speed.

And so I think a lot of what we think of as modern personal productivity type thoughts about organizing your tasks, time management, etc. A rose in this period as we grappled with, well, how do you organize your work if you are autonomous and creative and skilled and not just executing a task and assembly line that some other manager higher up already figured out for you? So then you say, is there a way we could have avoided this? Yes and no. I think my big argument, both in my book and that New Yorker piece, is the defining issue, the defining property of this shift towards knowledge work is we stuck with autonomy. In other words, we left this all in the individual. As I've argued, Peter Drucker is the main source of this autonomy influence all throughout the effective executive. He emphasizes again and again, leave the knowledge worker

alone to figure out how they're going to get their work done. I argue that we applied that concept too broadly. We expanded it beyond just autonomy of how we execute our work and said also you should have autonomy and how you organize your work and how you figure out what the work on, how you keep track of what you're working on, how you communicate and coordinating with other people to get that work done. All that should be left to the individual. So there we get the whole personal productivity industry arise to help us try as knowledge

workers to make sense of this autonomy and still try to get things done. We more or less could make it work. Though you see even as early as 1959 in James McKay's work, people felt like they were overwhelmed and had too much to do, but certainly with the arrival of low friction digital communication in the 1990s, the wheels came off the bus. If you leave these personal productivity issues up to the individual and you give them all email inboxes, it's not too long until we're in a hyperactive hive mind type situation. So, Georgia, the counterfactual here would be if Drucker, when he coined the term knowledge work and was really midwifing this concept into our economy writ large, if Drucker had said, look, this work is different than industrial work.

The actual execution is creative and skilled and cannot be broken down into assembly lines or step-by-step instructions. Me and James McKay are hanging out at all these R&D labs. I don't know what these engineers are doing. I'm not going to tell them what to do. Give them autonomy. Great. But we are going to need brand new ways to think about how this work is actually organized, how we identify. identify what needs to get done, how do we assign what needs to get done, how do we keep track of what's being done, and how we facilitate actual communication coordination between people working on things to make sure that things get done. This is going to require a lot of innovation. We should have names for these systems. We should have tools for these systems. We should be innovating organization-wide philosophy systems and rules for organizing work, much like we just spent the last 50 years doing the same thing for industrial manufacturing and got giant growth because of it. If he had said that,

We wouldn't need the effective executive. We wouldn't need getting things done. We wouldn't need seven habits, a highly effective people. When you showed up at a knowledge, work, job, there would already be a very well-established philosophy about how the work was organized. That overhead would be off our plate. I think that would probably have been a much better world.

The overemphasis on autonomy led to the hive mind, which now is just causing a ton of problems. All right, this next question is from Miles. It's a question from a student, but I think it applies much more generally. So Miles says, I am a master student studying peer mathematics and plan to go to obtain a PhD. I also have various part-time jobs. I want to be able to give my best to each of these areas of my life while also ensuring that the shallow work task do not pile up. In particular, I want to be able to devote deep work to my research and my classes every day.

I often find it difficult to tell whether I am poorly scheduling my days or whether I have overcommitted myself. That has spread myself too thin. So Miles, the advice I'm going to give you is advice that I used to give to undergraduates years ago back when I was primarily advising students. And because I was at MIT and in Boston, these were often students from elite universities that were highly scheduled and had a similar issue. They were trying to figure out the what in can your efficiency-based habits help me keep track. of and on top of everything into what extent of my maybe over-scheduled. And what I used to have these students do is build out what I used to call the student workday. I said, well, let's take the regularly occurring academic work, the stuff you know that happens

on a regular basis, week after week, month after month, the reading assignments, the problem sets, the labs, when you actually have to be in lecture, et cetera, the essay prompts that are do every class, and schedule time for them to show up at the same time on the same days every week and put it on your calendar. Let's put aside this time. This is when you work on your math problem sets that are due this week. This is when you do the essays. Here's your lab. Maybe we do the lab right up right afterwards, right? Get that on your calendar. So you are explicitly facing the stuff you know you has to get done and you're seeing how much time it takes and you're trying to find time for that work. Now going forward as you layer other things into your life, you would say,

can this all fit? And if not, you had too much stuff. And I used to do this with students, and they would begin to try to layer extracurriculars and sports and their part-time job, and sometimes they would come back and say, oh, I can't make the student workday fit anymore.

There's not enough time for everything. I say, great, that you're overcommitted. Other times, they're like, oh, I have enough time for everything, but I'm blowing past the time I'm putting aside. Then we could really study that and say, well, yeah, it's taking you too long to do this problem set, but that's because you're doing it with your computer open

and you need better habits, and we can get the time down. But once you figure out how much time things took, if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. That's what you need to do. Do a reasonable plan, whatever you want to call it, student workday type plan.

Here's what I'm doing my research. Here's what I'm doing my deep work. Here's where my job is. Here's where my classes are. Make sure there's a reasonable time estimates and be efficient and make sure that you're not wasting time. And if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit.

If it fills all your time and goes into the night, then it's too much stuff. It requires to weaken. is probably too much stuff. So just face that productivity dragon in the face. And if it's a little bit too big, you need to move a couple caves down

and find one that's a little bit more reasonably sized. But you don't know what you're fighting until you look. And the only way to actually see it, the clear the, if we're going to follow this metaphor, to clear away the smoke, the nostril fire-derived smoke at the mouth of the cave, the only way to clear away that metaphorical smoke and see if what's beyond it is something that you can smite,

in this case, is to actually sit down and face. everything you need to do, see if you can find time for it, look at that plan. If it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense. And it's time to make some changes. Now, right, our next question comes from Rob. Rob says, you mentioned that you have a Trello board for each of your roles. Could you expand upon how you decide on your roles and then develop that specific board? For example, as a professor, we have three major role categories, research teaching service. So within each, how do you tease out a specific role and then develop your board? Well, Rob, there's no really specific formula here.

You know, there's not a right way and a wrong way to divide your work up into different roles beyond just that it's good to do because different roles are going to have different types of goals and different types of systems and there's going to be a context switching cost to move between the roles. So here's a couple rules of thumb,

based on what I just said there. One is a role should have a consistent style or type of objective. So research is a role as a professor or the objective is publications. Publications and grants dependent on your field. Whereas teaching, you know, the objectives there is much different in research, effectively delivering pedagogy to your students, right? then you have service is going to have a certain different type of objective there, but it feels a little bit more similar there.

It's fulfilling your various sort of logistical or administrative roles to which you've been assigned on behalf of the university. Those feel sort of similar style of objectives, whereas research feels different, right? And that's why my professorial life, I have research as one role, and I call it professor as the other role, but it's teaching and service-related admin. Because the mindset of I want to produce new research and what that takes is very different than the mindset of I have these various obligations. I've got to prep classes, get problems that's graded. I got to sit on this hiring committee and make sure that we get a recommendations.

That has a different type of administrative feel to it. It's not so much about pushing your mind to its limit so much as it is effectively taking care of obligations that are part of your role and that are useful. Now, if you're at a big teaching university, you might separate out service separate from teaching. because there might be some really intense pedagogical innovations that you really push on in teaching and you want to separate them. Again, it's all taste. There's no right or wrong answer there.

But that's really what I would look at. If it's a consistent type of objective on a consistent type of work, that should be its own role. The other heuristic I would throw at you is I really like to separate out roles that are primarily deep work focused from those that have a lot of logistical components to it

because I treat my roles as different jobs. I have a part-time job as a research. I have a part-time job as a lecturer and administrative, whatever you want to call it, participant in an administrative heavy organization. That latter role has a lot of shallow work in it. The former role is primarily deep work. I like to separate those two because I treat them both as separate jobs. And when I'm, when I put aside part of my week or part of my day for the research role,

then I can really be in that mindset. Let me go through my rituals. It's all about focus. It's all about thinking. and then when I'm in my admin roles, I can focus just on the admin. If roles are really mixing these two things together, then you're going to have a lot of context switching

during the time you've put aside for that role. So that's the other heuristic I would give. But don't overthink it. Get some reasonable roles, get some boards up there, do some organization of your task into different types of categories. You can quickly get the gestalt of what's on your plate, what needs to be done, what you're waiting for. Treat each role as a separate part-time job.

When you're doing one role, don't do another. compartmentalize your brain when you're going through your work, when you're thinking about your week, when you're thinking about your month, et cetera. And in general, even if you don't get it quite right, because there is no quite right here, you will end up okay. All right, we have a question here from Rinn.

Rinn says, hi. I'm a 21-year-old college student. Researching, writing, podcast, and content creation in general are passions of mine, and I'd love to incorporate those things into my career. what steps can I take now to make a place for myself as a content creator? I'm a bit overwhelmed by how much is out there and not having much experience with freelancing or work to show for myself besides college papers.

Thanks. Well, Rinn, my first suggestion, it's going to sound glib at first, but I'll elaborate because there's actually something deeper I'm trying to say here. And that first suggestion is don't describe yourself as a content creator. And that's your first problem. And what do I mean by that? Well, there's a mindset that surrounds that term content creation. It's what I used to call checklist productivity, which was this concept that the main thing

getting between you and whatever it is you're trying to do is you don't know the right steps, right? You haven't found these optimal steps. This was a concept, I think, that was first really popularized, more like the West Coast School of Lifehacks during the first decade of the 2000s. I think Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week was one of the big proponents of this idea early on. It's this notion that if you can figure out the right steps, you can vastly shorten the distance between you and the goal you want to have. You want to do this thing, and there's these long ways to try to get there that may or may not work, but if you're really clever and life hacky, you can find these steps.

They're going to get you there really quick. Checklist productivity. The excitement was in finding the checklist and then be having the discipline to actually execute it. A lot of the instructional content surrounding content creation really has this flavor of checklist productivity. Okay, here's how you're going to set up your YouTube channel and you've got to curate your channels this way and you have to ask for likes and subscribe. And here's the optimal schedule at which to promote these pieces on social media. And let's talk about your funnel because you've got to have an email funnel that's going to get a larger conversion rate of people coming into your funnel. And you put all these pieces together.

But the actual act of creating something that's so good, it can't be ignored, gets reduced down to, oh, I make sure. your content adds value. I gotta say, Ren, that gets it all backwards. Like, all that stuff is fine at some point, but the core engine to this entire metaphorical vehicle is producing content, be it writing, be it music, be it film or video, that's so good it can't be ignored.

And that's incredibly difficult that most people fail to ever get there. If you don't get there, nothing else works. Nothing else matters. I mean, no matter how disciplined you are with your checklist productivity, your best bet is that you're going to be a vaguely scammy internet marketer that does okay. You know, and maybe actually does really well, but it's not what you're, that's going to be really rare.

It's not really what you're thinking about. I would suggest at this early age, putting all your focus on the craft, creating stuff that's so good, it can't be ignored, that you then have the problem of, oh, maybe I need better channel curation, maybe I need a funnel for people who are interested. Let that be something that the quality of your work forces as an issue. So what's the world? What's the mindset you need to surround yourself with right now? More of the artist mindset. Forget content creation. Go to the artist mindset.

Read people who focus from a nonfiction perspective on the art of creativity and the production of things that is authentic and valuable. Read and Lamont, bird by bird. Read Stephen King on writing. Read Stephen Pressfield. the War of Art. Read Elizabeth Gilbert, the Big Magic. You need that more creativity craft-centric mindset right now. And you want to be thinking about how do I go through this incredibly difficult process of becoming good at this craft.

You also want to really harness empathy. The key of my writing process, the sort of foundation for my success as a writer, I'm very empathetic. I feel very strongly. I can mind-read other minds and feel very strongly what those other minds would feel. So I'm constantly when thinking about ideas, when I'm thinking about concepts with books or articles or podcasts or whatever, constantly trying to put myself in the mind of the listener. If I can't invent in this simulation, this sense of either a pain point being reduced or an aspirational heartstring being plucked, I can't recreate that really strongly like this isn't right.

again, all this is lost in the content creation literature, which just says simply, oh, add value. And you get this vanilla bland stuff that no one cares about. It's not going to create a movement. So we really want to see what in my mental simulations of other readers really gets me going. Have a strong point of view on things that people care about, deliver that point of view consistently with conviction, all the while building up your craft so you can deliver that point with skill.

that is the combination that will make you into a successful writer or filmmaker or videographer or whatever artistic expression we're talking about here then deal with the other stuff, the checklist productivity stuff, once the problem can no longer be ignored. You're just getting started in, so you have a lot of time ahead of you to build up the skills. It takes a while, so I'm glad you're starting early. That's the way I would suggest approaching this. All right, let's do one more question here about work.

This one comes from Montaigne. I appreciate the reference there. I work in a small company of less than 20 software developers and data scientists. We follow a scrum workflow. We also use Slack. It feels like a side effect of following deep work principles and minimizing ad hoc communication has been a reduction in serendipitous water cooler interactions I have with colleagues. In the interactions I do have, I appear curt and aloof,

probably because it takes time for me to adjust from deep work mode to human-social animal mode. Am I doing this right? Well, Montaigne, you're doing the work part right. So if you follow the ideas in a world without email and you identify your processes and you replace them with implementations that are not so dependent on the unscheduling messaging that characterizes the hyperactive hive mind, there will be much less informal interactions happening with people as part of your normal execution collaboration surrounding your work. You find yourself having to switch modes and that takes time. That's good. that means you're not in a constant state of convoluted overlapping context shifts, but you're actually tackling things one at a time.

It takes time to shift from one mode to another if you're actually staying within one mode before you switch to another. So all of this is good. But you're pointing out an important point, which is in most work-related teams or organizations, socialization is important, perhaps even more important during a period of forced remote work like we're doing now in the pandemic because there's a lot of safe. that happens in physical space that no longer happens. The point I keep going back to on this, however, and I've talked about it several times on the podcast now,

is let's not mix together these two objectives. Objective number one, how do we effectively collaborate and coordinate to get work done? Objective number two, how do we build a social culture, a culture of knowing each other and interactions and personality within our organization? treat these as two separate problems. It cannot be the right answer to say, let's make A really bad. Let's make how we collaborate bad. Let's make us very ineffective at getting work done because that will make us more social. That can't possibly be the right answer.

There has to be ways if you are specifically focusing on the problem of how do we keep a social culture alive in our organization, what can we do to boost that? But you can solve that problem without having to also impact how you collaborate around doing various work processes. And there's a lot of things people do. I'm not going to spend too much time right now, at least in the U.S. context where a lot of my audience is. My audience is pretty heavily U.S. and U.K.

So for both those audiences, I don't want to spend too much time talking to different innovations people have that try to increase sociality in an age of remote work because an age of enforced remote work in those two countries is rapidly coming to an end. Vaccines are defanging this pandemic. People are going to be seeing each other more. So I'm not going to get into digital tools.

I'm just going to say this. We've learned a lesson during the pandemic. You have to prioritize the social. But let's just do that orthogonally to how we optimize how work gets done. More meetings in person, the happy hours, the brown bag lunches where people just get together and someone gives a talk and people just chat about it, off-sites, excursions. All of these things that we kind of roll our eyes at are pretty important because it's a time for people to be together. for people to chat. You need downtime for people to be around each other, to interact,

to get to know each other as people. But just make that a standalone crucial objective that is a completely different solution than how should we best collaborate and communicate coordinate around specific work processes that have to be executed. Before moving on to our next category of questions, I want to briefly talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. And that is Four Sigmaic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmaics mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin,

arabica coffee with lion's mains mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. Coffee tastes great. It has a kind of a nutty flavor. It's not really tastes like mushrooms. it tastes sort of nutty. It's a little bit lower caffeine. It's smoother.

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Why is that useful? You can build good, deep work rituals around that physiological hook. If you train yourself to drink four-sigmatic coffee before you go into deep-examatic coffee before you go into deep work sessions, your mind will eventually learn, oh, that unique physiological footprint means deep work mode. I'm a big believer in deep work rituals.

This could be a great aspect of a deep work ritual. And I get my mushroom coffee from 4Sigmatic. It means it's time to think. It's also just a great cup of coffee. Now, I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on this best selling mushroom coffee. It's just for deep questions listeners. You can get up to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee, bond. but to claim to steal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com

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Our first question here comes from Patrick. Patrick says, what are your favorite biographies for deep work inspiration and lifestyle ideas? Well, Patrick, as longtime listeners know, I don't do favorites. It's not a political stance. I'm just unable to. My brain is unable to actually take things like books or foods or movies and rank them and say what I like best. I don't know why I can't do this,

but I'm very hard at doing this. So let me change your question here to what are some, what are some interesting biographies you would recommend for deep work inspiration and lifestyle ideas? Okay, that lowers the stakes. I'm not rank ordering. Now I can actually give some interesting information. Let me theme some of these answers.

So I'm a big American history buff, especially presidential history. So a few books here that I think will really give you some good ideas to chew on when cultivating your deep work, your deep life, rather, that comes from this very narrow niche of American historical figure biography. I would recommend Lincoln's virtues. I would recommend the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. I would recommend Grant.

That is the recent Ron Chernow biography. These cover different aspects of the, they're beautifully written, but they cover different aspects of the deep life. that I think are in a powerful way, because these are powerful figures that got through hardship and had certain things, perseverance, virtue, empathy, a focus on intensity and experience. And look, there's a lot of really good lessons in those books, if you like that style of book. If we want to pull from quirky academic circles, I might suggest genius, James Gleek's biography of Richard Feynman. I might also suggest a mind at play, a great biography of Claude Shannon. What you're going to get there is more of a profile of intellectual curiosity,

great minds that are constantly pushing themselves to experience and expose themselves to new things, come with new innovations, produce new thoughts in the world that are valuable. So look, I don't know if these are the best or not the best, but I'm going to give you these narrow niche categories to maybe come up with some ideas and it'll give you some deep life inspiration that are different than the standard things that people would normally tell you. So there are some books off the top of my head and some relatively niche categories

that I think are useful reading when you're thinking about making your life deeper. Roberto asks, I'm wondering, what are the top three productivity recommendations you would give someone looking to get started living the deep life? All right, that's a good question.

Well, Roberto, first I would say metric tracking, you need to have some key, metrics that you are tracking in your life every single day, these should correspond to what we call keystone habits. That is, habits you do every day in the key elements of your life, the key aspects of your life, the areas of your life you find to be most important. Make sure that every day in a disciplined way, you're trying to actually make some progress and signal to yourself you care about these aspects of your life. Some of these could be fitness related. Some of these could be community and interaction related. Some of these could be deep work related. Some of these could be

ethics related. Some of these could be religion related. The key is just to be in that habit of there's certain key things I do each day that associate with what I care about that I do and I track that I do and I write it down. My time block planner has a big space every single day for writing down your metrics for that day. Number two, time block plan, for the very least your workday on the work days. Give your time a job. Don't just move reactively through your day. figure out what you want to get done. If you want to take a break, schedule the break.

Instead of taking an hour midday to just go down a rabbit hole on YouTube, how about you finish your day an hour earlier and then you have more time to relax, right? So start to get intentional about how you spend your time. You probably want to, of course, accompany, I'm kind of cheating here by expanding item two to have a lot of sub-itemes.

Expand that to also have a weekly plan and a quarterly plan. So you have a vision for your quarter. every week you make a plan to figure out how to execute it, then every day, time block, give every minute a job. If you're going to do just one of those, start with the daily planning, that time block planning. Again, it's all about intention. Shifting from reactivity to intention makes a big difference.

Finally, if I have to reduce this down to three, my third recommendation would be read two book chapters every day. Partially, this is about the information you will get by reading those book chapters, which could be useful, but also partially, this is a high-quality, leisure activity that takes time, but not an impractical amount of time, that it's easy to really get used to doing and find some value in doing, and it pushes out some of the other lower quality stuff that's causing you anxiety, that's keeping you from the things you care

about. This is really one of these habits, and again, to overuse this word keystone, it's one of these keystone habits that once embraced can really, really help lots of other intentional deep life type activities unfold. two chapters a day. It's quite simple. Now this is on my mind because just before I was recording this episode, I was doing an interview about a world without email for a popular YouTube channel aimed at Koreans. It's called That Korean Girl. Shout out the Sunny. And Sunny was telling me that in response to a question she asked on this podcast, rather back in the fall, she'd asked a question

about a reading habit, and I had given her this advice on the podcast about two chapters a day. It's just a simple way to reintroduce reading as an important part of living a deep life. And what she told me is after that answer, she began talking about this with her subscribers, and it's a popular channel. You know, they have 120,000 subscribers. And it led to the formation of these reading group challenge groups, I guess, so this two chapter a day reading challenges where the groups would all come together on one of these challenge apps where you have to actually go on the app and check every day, I did the thing.

So you can join as a group and see, I guess, if the other members of your group have accomplished it. I think she said the app was called Band, B-A-N-D. Anyway, she said this thing, this two chapters a day reading challenge, has kind of taken on a life of its own. And as of most recently, she says there's now 4,000 people doing these two chapter a day's reading groups. She said there's 27 different groups.

It's all volunteer-led. And it's a lot of chapters being read every day. And I think there's a reason why this is catching on is because that's just the right amount. It's hard enough to matter, but tractable enough that you'll actually do it. And the thing Sunny said in this interview when we were talking, which I thought was important,

is that she said once she began doing the two-chapter-a-day challenge, she spent a lot less time on her phone. Right? Because now there was an alternative. this became a meaningful part of her life, and it took time. The time that she was spending on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, increasingly got changed towards getting through those two chapters, which is something that's been much more deeply meaningful, feels much more satisfying,

you feel much better about it when it's done. And, of course, there's the value of the actual wisdom you're extracting from these books. So I like this advice. This is good real-world data that this advice works. So that would be my third hack there, two chapters a day. So let's summarize. The three easiest things you can do, Roberto, if you want to start shifting towards a deep life,

is you need to start tracking metrics every single day. Those metrics should be keyed in on keystone habits, things that are very important to you, signaling to yourself that you take intentional living seriously. Two, time block plan, your days, at least your working hours. Get used to being intentional about your time instead of being reactive. And three, join the two chapter a day challenge. All right, Brett says,

my one-way commute time is about an hour each way. I find it hard to get a walk in, but I was thinking about trying to make my commute more contemplative. Any reason that this time doesn't count the same as a walk. Well, Brett, I think car commutes can be contemplative, and you should do that with them. You know, especially, okay, I should put a disclaimer here, especially if it's a route that you can kind of drive on autopilot,

that you're not weaving in and out of complex traffic it requires all of your attention. You're not driving a manual during rush hour up the hills of San Francisco or something. If it's a pretty automatic commute, it can be contemplative. One thing I used to do back when, you know, college campuses were open

and one could go to said college campuses is on my commute to Georgetown, I would do great courses. And when I would get to the parking garage at Georgetown, I would take out my laptop and I would keep a document of my notes and right there while it was still fresh, I would summarize the main ideas from the great course.

So I was doing a lot of philosophy this way. So I did great ideas from philosophy, a lot of those lectures, and then I think American political philosophy, and I did a lot of those chapters. So I like the philosophy great courses because there's a great way to get up the speed on the players and their main ideas

without having to go so deep that you could endlessly cul-de-sac on any one of those great thinkers. So that's an example of a commute being contemplative. I would sometimes work on proofs, you know, especially during traffic portions of my commute work. Literally, there's very little going on driving. I would sometimes work on proofs and then try to capture things on my notebook when I got home or to the office.

And I think also listing the books on tape or podcasts like this one is plenty contemplative. One of the key things you get out of a commute, be it on a bike or on foot or in a car, is psychological transition. So I do want to recommend, you know, before you leave work to commute home, do a clear, shutdown routine. So you're not thinking about work. And then you have that hour long commute to be listening to an interview, listening to a book, listening to a great courses lecture, maybe 30 minutes of a great courses lecture, then some inspirational music and then a lighter interview. That can actually be pretty meaningful time. Even though commutes are frustrating, that's a way to extract some meaning out of those commutes. All right. So I think that would be good. Don't, however, give up on walking.

Yeah, you're giving up a lot of time for this commute. So you're going to have to be pretty radical and pretty aggressive about finding time to walk, but you need to get outside. You need to walk. You can do better reflection walking than you can in the car. I don't know why walking is the ideal activity. The preambulation precondition for philosophy is something that just seems to be true. I don't know why. But you're going to get better solitude and reflection being on foot, especially around nature, more so the being in a car and being around other cars. Also, you need the exercise and the fresh air. I'm a big believer in 10,000 steps a day.

Now, you might have to do this before, you know, 5,000 steps early before you take your shower and go to work. You might need to take a midday break and get another 3,000 steps in. You might need to pull that car, you know, 15 minutes before you get home, you stop first at a park and get in 15 or 20 minutes or maybe 30 minutes, you know, before you get home, you stop and walk through nature. Then you drive the final bit to get home. Now you might be saying, but wait a second, I can't.

take 30 minutes away from my time at home. And that's true. But I bet you can get 30 minutes more efficient at your office and leave your office 30 minutes earlier. I have a lot of books and a lot of podcast episodes and a lot of essays I can point you towards. It'll get you 30 extra minutes. So what I'm saying is find potentially radical ways to make sure that you get a reasonable time outside walking. It's harder for you than it is for, let's say me right now, a professor working from home with a lot of flexibility and nowhere to go, but it's worth it. You need the fresh air, you need the exercise and you need that sort of pre-ambulated pre-conditioned philosophy that only walking can give you. All right, good question, Brett. All right, we're coming up to the one

hour marks. Let's just do one more question here about deep living. And this final question comes from Gary. Gary says, what book of yours do you go into detail about the deep life? I hear about it all the time on the podcast. I would like to read more, but I don't remember seeing it in any of your books. Thanks for all you do. Well, Gary, you're not going to see the term the deep life show up in any of my books. And for good reason, it's too new. So here's the backstory of that term. And a lot of the ideas you've heard about on this podcast about the buckets and the

keystone habits and spending one month per area and a lot of the ideas like the two book a month habit, etc. A lot of this was pandemic induced. Right. So here is the timeline. Pandemic hits talking last March. one of the things I do right up front is I decide I want to write every day

I just went into a more reflective type mode and there was a lot of shock to the system and I wanted to, I was thinking a lot more and doing a lot of solitude. One of the great advantages of solitude. You had two options for this pandemic hit. You could doom scroll. And if you went big on doom scrolling,

where are you right now? Well, you're probably in your bunker. You've probably locked in three doors and you're never going to go outside again. So, okay, you could doom scroll or you could go to solitude. Time alone with yourself and your own thoughts and the world around you,

trying to make sense of information in your own life. And out of this increased solitude came this notion of the deep life. It was a unifying idea. A unifying idea for a lot I had been writing about but without terminology.

I talk about distraction and depth and meaning and work. I talk about distraction, depth, and meaning outside of work. All of it I put under the umbrella of the deep life. You will see blog post in March

and early April where the term is introduced and it's discussed heavily. So if you want to see, the big initial discussion of the deep life, look at my blog archives during that period. Then in May, I started up this podcast. When I started up this podcast, we were still, I think, under a shelter-in-place order in Maryland or maybe just in my county, and we kind of got out of Dodge.

We rented 60 acres on a river down in Southern Maryland to just sort of get out of Dodge on the weekends. And that's where I recorded my first podcast. It had tile floors, terracotta tile floors. that's why my very first episodes are echoey. And just instinctually, I went there. And a lot of my initial questions, I was selecting a lot of my initial answers

were surrounding the deep life because it just seemed very relevant suddenly. We'd had the disruption. When you have a disruption, historically, what happens? You get a lot of introspection. Why? Because the disruption actually knocks away some of the noise and distraction

makes underlying intimations about what you really crave and want and aren't getting. makes these intimations very clear. So the disruption happens. We get introspection. Out of introspection comes to this clarified deep life philosophy. So between my podcast and the heavy blogging I did during the early pandemic,

I begin to actually put structure around this notion. Now, you can find obviously big elements of this worked out in my book, my books, I should say, right? So if you look at deep work, for example, or a world without email more recently, which had been finished, by the way, more or less before the pandemic, and that's a lot about the deep life in craft and work. So good they can't ignore you as well. So good they can ignore you deep work

and a world without email is all about working more deeply focusing on what matters getting value out of the craft of construction not getting bogged down by the shallow work that can make work tedious

and get you away from that deeply human yearning to make their intentions manifest concretely in the world you see that in those books. You just don't see the term of the deep life. Digital minimalism, right?

Pre-pandemic, one-year pre-pandemic, 2019. There you really start to see ideas work through about the deep life in the world outside of work. Now, of course, the whole point of that book is to make sense of our increasingly negative relationship with our personal technology like our phones, but what was the answer? The digital minimalist philosophy says, yeah, the way to get past that negative relation is to get a positive image

of what your life should be, what you want your life to be. And then figure out how technology fits into that image, and then you can stick with that plan much easier. But that really required me to get deeper into these questions of, well, what should your life be? How do you figure that out? And that's where in digital minimalism, you hear about solitude. That's where you hear about high-quality leisure. Right. That's where you hear about what happens when you get away from this distraction and can get tuned in to what really matters to you. That's where you hear about conversations, sacrificing, non-trivial time and attention on behalf of the people you care about. If it's not hard, you don't feel very social. You don't get the reward. It's only when you

actually do something hard on behalf of someone else that you actually feel connected. All of those ideas are in digital minimalism. So I've thought through a lot of these ideas pretty carefully in my book, but to actually give them a term and to put some structure around it and to be more explicit about it, that took a global pandemic. Will this show up in future books? Yeah, probably.

I mean, I don't know what I'm going to write next, but some of the ideas I have might get very explicit about these notions. I mean, one of the thoughts I have is really maybe right away writing a book that maybe steps out of my my techno cultural cycle, which has been focused on technology and the world of work in our lives and gets right at something like the deep reset and the deep life just because it's on everyone's mind. And I might have something to say.

Before getting back to my standard style, I don't know. I might. I might. Not sure. Not sure what the future holds yet. But anyways, that's where it is. So you're going to see the deep life throughout all of my books, but you're not going to actually see that term or the explicit

structure until you get to March or April of this year. You're going to hear it on my podcast. You're going to see it in this blog post. And you're for sure going to see it and hear it and hear me develop and cultivate these thoughts and much more details. Here are my show in my weekly essays that people subscribe to at Cald-Newport.com, in my books, in my interview appearances, you're going to see this concept for sure in the months ahead continue to be developed.

But for now, at least, I need to go live my own deep life. So thank you for listening to this episode. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode, calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how to ask your own questions for these shows. Until the next time, as always, stay deep.