Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 94: LISTENER CALLS: Battling Bothersome Bosses

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.  - Productivity with a chronic illness. [4:28] - Coordinating strategic plans with a partner. [12:44] - Getting your boss to bother you less. [17:56] - High quality leisure for students [25:59] - Feeling overwhelmed by Facebook Groups. [29:58]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 a Deep Questions, listener calls mini episode. The only quick announcement today is a quick update on the renovation of my studio here at the Deep Work HQ in preparation for people actually coming in here to be on the podcast in person. My first actual in-person guests are on the books already, so I have to get this studio update actually done. I had out to the studio the other day, the person who helps me, with my video set up to figure out how can we possibly fit more than one person in this relatively small space. And we have a design now that I think is going to work that we're getting started on. It's going to be a round table. I'll set at one side. My guest will sit on the other. We will have three cameras. So we can film face face wide shot. It should all fit in here.

The backdrop is going to switch from my now infamous existential void backdrop. Anyone who's seen me been interviewed during the World Without Email book tour knows I have this sort of white, blue tinted, infinite void background. I've been sitting in front of now. We're going to have sort of a more traditional curtain, perhaps spotlit curtain background on three walls in this room. So all the camera shots will just have a blank curtain background. Anyways, I'm excited about it. I've been talking about video for months. I've been filming video for months.

I have dozens and dozens of takes of questions and deep dives. All of this is coming soon. A lot of wheels are in motion. There's just a relatively steep hill. These wheels have to get up to actually get to the top. But coming soon will be lots of video and a lot of exciting news around the portal in which you can get that video, what I'm going to cover with that video, etc. All of that's coming. So I thought I would just give you a quick preview of what post-pandemic deep questions is going to offer.

All right, enough of that. We've got good questions for today's episode. I'm looking at my list here, my schedule. you've got something about the perennial question of how do I get my boss to bother me less, coordinating strategic plans between partners, someone overwhelmed by their Facebook groups, and some others. So these are good questions. Of course, calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how to submit your own questions,

calnewport.com to sign up for my mailing list to get my weekly essay I've been doing since 2007. I highly recommend that if you're not already signed up. All right, so this sounds good. Now, before we get started with the questions for this episode, Let's, as always, take a brief moment to say thanks to one of the sponsors that actually makes the show possible. And I'm talking about Blinkist. As you've heard me say before, ideas are currency in today's world. The best source of ideas is books, but not all books are created equal.

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That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkis.com slash deep to get 25% off and a free seven-day trial. Blinkis.com slash deep. All right. With that, let's get started. Our first question is about rethinking productivity when you're facing a chronic illness. Hi, Kal. My name is Jess from Nairobi, Kenya.

The Relo, podcast. So my question is on chronic illnesses and productivity. So I was recently diagnosed with a chronic illness and it has really put a dent on my productivity. And I'm just wondering how any advice on how to deal with this. Thank you. Well, Jess, I think you might be the first person to ask a question on the show from Kenya. I always like adding new countries to the list of countries from which we've answered questions. So that's exciting.

I also really like this question because we can apply it more generally. In other words, I think the general application of this question is, how do I grapple with productivity when facing a new or sudden restriction on time and or energy? So obviously a chronic illness can put in place a sudden and abrupt restriction on the amount of energy you have available, but there's a lot of other things that have been happening in people's lives, a non-chronic illness, a non-illness-related disruption, etc., that has all the same effect. The resources available to do work are reduced, and perhaps in an unplanned or unexpected way,

how do I still deal with the notion of productivity? So it's a good general question. To get to a useful answer, we have to move past an informal understanding of the term productivity. So there's this informal understanding that I think gets passed around, a lot or internalized a lot, in which productivity means vaguely trying to accomplish a lot of things, executing a lot of tasks, finishing a lot of projects by some sort of common measure of what a lot means, I guess, like more than the normal person. When you see productivity through

that lens, then yes, any restriction on your time or energy says, well, how am I going to produce lots of things when I don't have the timer energy to produce lots of things? If, however, we replace that informal colloquial definition with something that I think is more precise, we can make some progress here. So let's look at my productivity funnel concept, which to me is a more formal way of thinking about the entire landscape of productivity. And if you want to see a large discussion and image of this, you go to my blog at caldnewport.com slash blog. I also talked about it in a deep dive on a recent deep questions episode maybe a couple weeks ago, so you can find more discussion there, but briefly summarizing, my productivity funnel

framework for understanding productivity says, okay, what is productivity? Well, you have a universe of things you could be doing. I have a constellation of points, each of which is like a task or project or whatever, and then you have every day you actually executing work with whatever time you have available. How you get from this space of all the things you could potentially be doing in your life to what you're doing And right now, that's productivity, how you navigate from everything you could do to what you're actually doing in the moment. Now, I think of this as a funnel because you're starting very broadly with all the possible things you could be doing.

And at the end, you're much more narrow down to the one thing you're doing in this current moment. This funnel has three levels. The top level is activity selection. This is where you figure out whatever your philosophy or system or rules are for figuring out, well, which of these things are you actually going to do? some of that's under your control, some of that's not. The next level down the funnel is organization.

Well, how do you make sense of and clarify and keep track of the things that you have committed that you are going to do? And then finally you have execution. That's at the bottom of the funnel. All right, once from however you're organizing what needs to be done, you figure out what you should be doing right now, if anything, what's the right way to actually execute that work so that you make the most of that, you're effective, you're not distracted, you have rituals,

timing, tools, etc. Those three levels form the productivity funnel and is my framework for understanding productivity. All right, notice nothing about this framework says what needs to come out the bottom is a artificially large amount of things accomplished. Nothing about this framework says all of this is in service to moving as much stuff as possible from the top through the bottom of the funnel. No, it just says, look, somehow you're going from stuff you could be doing to actually doing stuff. Here are the things that you have to keep in mind. All right, so now you have some new restrictions. You have a chronic illness. So maybe the time you can work, your energy to work has been greatly reduced. Okay, that's what we have. How do you define your

levels of the productivity funnel now? Well, maybe now there's a lot more care in the activity selection. Well, there's less you have time to do, less you have energy to do. You need to figure out how do you reconfigure your life and your criteria for selecting what you work on to make sure that you're not overburdening yourself. And it might be a much smaller number of tasks or commitments than before your chronic illness. It's the reality what you are. Let's just be clear about it. Organization is still really useful. So now you know what you've selected and why you're selecting it.

keeping track of it in a way so it's not just in your head, so it's not a source of stress, so that things get more than enough time to get done, this becomes even more important, because you don't really have the option perhaps anymore of just saying, oh, a bunch of stuff is due tomorrow, let's just grind it out, let's just all nighter it. You probably are going to have to be much more careful. All right, and if I'm going to do this, I might want to start this pretty early and work on it a little bit at a time, give myself a little bit of margin. You know, I do this sometimes because I have insomnia issues.

for a lot of work, I like to give myself some margin so that, you know, hey, if there's a couple tired days in there, it's not going to be a disaster because I'm spreading this work out of enough days that probably most of those days will be good enough that I can get good work done. You could be thinking similarly. So organization, that level of the productivity funnels

can be very important in your situation and then also execution. Again, if time and or energy is limited, you want to be careful about how you execute to get the most out of it. Okay, if there's something cognitively demanding you do, having a ritual investing in a location you can go to just for that work, it's scenic, you go for, you know, you hike through a field and there's a cabin, you know, I'm being kind of metaphorical here, but you know what I mean, you probably need to care more about

that than someone is just, you know, let's get after and just grind, just grind all day, just crush it. You might want to be a little bit more careful. Maybe the smaller administrative task you really want to consolidate. At a good time of day to do that, type of work. And let me just get that done real quick so it doesn't distract me and exhaust me so I can really rest how you actually execute is going to matter. All right. So that's the broader point I have here. Productivity is just about how you navigate from what you could be doing to what you're doing in the moment. The amount of work you're doing, the intensity of the work you're doing, the balance between professional and non-professional efforts. None of this actually is prescribed in the productivity

funnel. That's up to you. The funnel just helps you execute whatever it is that you want to do. So hopefully moving from that informal output maximization, understanding productivity to this framework, helps not only you just, but anyone else who's thinking, how do I deal with a sudden restriction on time on energy and still be quote unquote productive, but help anyone in that situation say,

okay, it's all just this game of given what I have now, how do I want to implement this funnel? It can look really different for different people. But the one thing that I really believe in is having that funnel figured out is always going to be better. You will be happier. You'll be more satisfied. You'll be more effective. Your life will be richer than if you just play it by ear. If you just throw up your hands and say, I'm going to wing it. It's not going to make you happier. It's not going to use less energy. It's not the answer to dealing with times that are hard.

All right. That was a good question. Let's move on to one now about coordinating your strategic plans with your partner. Hi, Cal. My name is Matt. And I'm a professor. at a small liberal arts college. My question today is about strategic planning, mostly about when you're writing a strategic plan, how do you balance someone else in your life having a strategic plan? For example, my partner. So if I have a strategic plan with certain things I'm hoping to accomplish and my partner does as well, how do you all work or how do you suggest working with somebody to make sure each person gets enough time or each person has the right amount of tasks that can fit into everybody getting the time that they need? Thanks so much.

Well, Matt, this is another good question because I don't think we've talked about this one yet before either. Just to quickly clarify for the new listeners, when Matt's talking about a strategic plan, he means a plan you have for the current, roughly speaking, season or semester. You then look at this plan every week when you build your weekly plan. Your weekly plans what you look at every day when you build your time block plan. Just to keep things confusing, we sometimes also refer to strategic plans as either semester plans or quarter. Quarterly plans, it all means the same thing. So, Matt, if you're like me, you should probably have at least two strategic plans, one for work. Your job is a professor, and one for your life outside of work.

Now, when you have another person involved in your life, you have a husband, you have a wife, you have a girlfriend, you have a boyfriend, you have a boyfriend. You do have to think about the other person when building these plans. Now, this coordination is easier, I would say, for most people, for the professional strategic plan. Typically for standard jobs, the right way to think about coordination with a professional strategic plan is what you really need to need to work out is when are your working hours. When typically are your working hours?

When are their working hours? And then your strategic plan is all about what do I do during that time? Once these times are established, you don't have to get into with each other what you're doing during those hours, that, you know, I'm working on this academic paper and I'm trying to get this grant through, and I have a committee commitment that I need to get done this quarter. It doesn't matter. What matters is this is when I'm working. This is when you're working.

Okay, we're in agreement about this. Now, where this type of negotiation about hours becomes really relevant is when you have kids. So, for example, when my oldest boys were really young, we had a nanny to watch them. and my wife and I had to figure out what our schedules were going to be because the nanny only came, I know, like at 9 or 930 or something and then was gone by 430 or something. So the way we worked it is that her hours started earlier.

So she would leave pretty early in the morning. I'd have the kids in the morning, but because she left earlier, I'd be starting later, but then my hours would go later. So we just, she would start earlier, end earlier, I'd start a little later, into little later. We had to figure out in advance, like when our working hours are, right? typical arrangements like this have to happen, but once you figure out when you're working, the other person doesn't really need to know much about what is actually in your plan for those hours. When we turn our attention to a strategic plan, however, for your life outside of work,

more coordination might be necessary. In particular, if there's anything in your strategic plan that's going to require the regular commitment of non-trivial time outside of working hours, this should be coordinated. You know, you don't want to just drop this bomb. By the way, I'm now doing an hour and a half of CrossFit, you know, every night. And I've gotten into golf now. I think it's important for me. So I will be gone from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Saturday.

It's in my plan. Got to execute. You know, like, Matt, that's not going to go over well. So I think that is a good idea that when you're updating this plan, your partner can update their plan at the same time. you can have a discussion about the things that need to be discussed. I think exercise and fitness is the obvious example here, right? That if there's an exercise routine, for example, that's going to take time on a regular basis, hey, where do we fit that?

When do we exercise? When do we exercise? When do we can exercise? That could be important or if there's some sort of classes you're taking, what nights you're going to be gone, etc. I think it's a really great idea to coordinate that so everyone's on the same page and that it seems reasonable. Right. Now, the other advantage of coordinating strategic plans is that if your partner doesn't do strategic planning, this is a great way to nudge them towards this particular deep life hack, which I think is an important one,

because when you sit down to kind of walk through what you're working on in your life outside of work, and that's a good inducement to, well, what are you going to work on in your life outside of work? You should take some time. You should figure out some things that are interesting. Let's make time for it. That conversation might not otherwise happen, so I think it's really useful in that regard. All right. So Matt, I think it's a good question to quickly summarize, then if you live with someone else,

when it comes to your professional strategic plan, you don't really need to share the details beyond just making sure you have a good agreement about when you are working. And when you're not, for your plan outside of work, yeah, it's worth discussing every quarter or semester as you update that. Here's the non-trivial regular time commitments I want to add to my plan. Does this make sense? Will this fit? How are we going to make it work? All right, moving on now, we're going to do a question that is almost cliched how often it comes up. Hi, Kyle. I have a challenge in my university.

I am under a fellowship that covers my professional development, but the director and the administrator don't really know how deep work actually works and how actually professional development works according to a lot of the things you. recommend and a lot of the things my professors recommend. I was wondering, what is a way for me to help the administrator and the director directing the program, the fellowship, distract us less with useless or maybe not very good use of our time activities, like filling out forms that are not very important and, you know, meetings and videos that we have to watch that don't really add anything. Well, this is a good opportunity to go back to my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you and apply a concept from that title, Career Capital Theory. So what you're looking for here is a desirable trait in your job, which is increased freedom. from sort of busy work style distracting administrative work in meetings that you find annoying.

Career capital theory says, okay, that's valuable. In order to get that valuable thing, you need something valuable to offer in return. And in particular, it's going to be rare and valuable skills. So the better you get at what you do, the more valuable you are to the marketplace here, the more leverage you will get, for example, to extract yourself from some of this, change your position so you don't have to do as much of it, etc. My concern is, judging on your answer, you're a university, I guess, I don't know if you're a student or a grad student, perhaps a grad student, you're on a fellowship. So you're young and new to your position.

You likely have very little career capital. You know, you haven't yet been in the position long enough to really prove yourself to develop rare and valuable skills that are in demand. So you do not have a good foundation upon which to say, I demand this nice thing in my career. I demand that you change the way that you manage me, that I get basically exceptions from having to be a part of these administration. rate of chores or being a part of all of these excessive meetings. Now, let's follow through this career capital theory. Let's say that you put your head down, I really do well in your fellowship. You develop a good research program.

Maybe you get hired as a professor somewhere at a respected university, and you begin to make a name for yourself. Now you're at a point where, like, you have large autonomy. You're able to transform this career capital and having a lot of autonomy. then you can begin to negotiate. I'm not going to do that. I'm changing. I'm not going to do this committee.

I have a quota. I just am going to ignore you. Like, just all sorts of autonomy you gain. As you gain to career capital, it gives you that leverage. Without that, there's not much you can do. If you go to a boss, this is true of any entry-level position. If you go to your boss and say, you were bad at your job, let me teach you how to be better. You're not going to keep that job very long.

You're going to hear muttered curses about millennials under their breath, and things are going to go well for you. So what you can do right now is first of all get your productivity act together. Think about the productivity funnel in particular get that organization and execution piece of the funnel really tightened up so that you can reduce the footprint of this nonsense that's being put on your plate. You keep track of it. It's out of your head. You get it done ahead of time. You work around it very effectively so that it's not you're minimizing the impact of the stuff that you can't avoid. Also really focus on that activity selection and execution aspects of the of the funnel to make sure that you're working on the things that matter most and you're working

on them intensely and as deeply as possible when you can work so that you begin to build up that capital that's going to help free you from this nonsense. In other words, instead of thinking about how much you dislike this nonsense and how upset that makes you, let the nonsense be fuel for, man, I want to get better so that I can earn my way out of it. Adam Grant uses the term idiosyncrancy credits to talk about this. The better you get at things, the more idiosyncratic you earn the right to be in your work or in your work habits, but until you earn that right, you basically have to be responsible, get things done, do the things you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do

them, organize your work. You got to just do the stuff while also building up the rare and valuable skills that's going to earn you out of it. All right. So that is my answer. Minimize the footprint of this nonsense with really good organizational skills and focus on using this as fuel to get as good as possible as quickly as possible so that you can earn your way past having to do this stuff as soon as that becomes feasible. And to help keep this podcast feasible, let's take a brief moment to talk about one of our sponsors 4Sigmatic. Now, 4Sigmatic is a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee.

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So you'll save up the 40% off and get free shipping if you go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C-E-S-E-S-I-C. dot com slash deep. Let's also take a moment to talk about policy genius. All right, this one is a no-brainer. If you have auto insurance, if you have home insurance, and you haven't thought much about it recently or since you initially signed up for it,

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So head to policygenius.com to get started right now. PolicyGenius, when it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. And now let's get back to the show. Our next question comes from a student. Hi, Cal. What's your best recommendation of high-quality leisure for a student? And what are your favorites? Well, assuming that you're a college student, one thing of long recommended is essentially blurring the lines between the subjects you're studying and your voluntary leisure activities. right? So this means, for example, reading books about big figures or big ideas in the fields you study or fields you're taking classes in, going to lectures on academic topics, pretentiously bringing your Nietzsche book to a pub, you know, you have a pint while you read it and there's a fireplace going on.

In other words, what I'm saying is make part of your leisure life. if you're a student, be academic. Not tied to particular assignments, not tied to particular grades, not tied to particular internships or job offers, but just saying, yeah, I want to read philosophy. I'm a computer scientist.

I want to go to lectures by computer scientists and read popular books, popular-facing books from computer scientists. Or if I'm a mathematician, I want to read biographies and get inspired by great mathematicians and go into the library and find old books in the stacks

and be a little bit pretentious. And I think for sure you need to wear a beret, for sure you need to wear a beret, For sure, you need to wear a scarf in inappropriately warm temperatures, whatever it takes. Now, this is not just an affectation and it's not just random. There's actually a hidden benefit to this type of what I used to call romantic scholar lifestyle. It is a good way of basically signaling to your motivational systems. That your pursuit of academic work that you have to do as a student is something that is intrinsically motivated.

being someone who thinks, at least during this part of your life, as part of your identity and your motivation to do academic stuff as intrinsic, which means when it gets hard, as it does, as you move through a university career, you will have the locus of control on the scale of motivation towards the intrinsic end as opposed to the extrinsic end of the relevant axes here, which means you're much less likely to burn out. You're much less likely to suffer things like deep procrastination. So I think all university students should have some aspect of their lead your life in a semi-pretentious embrace of an academic scholarly style milieu because it's going to do great things for your relationship to the work you're doing anyways and then have something else you do that's completely unrelated. If it's an athletic-related thing, that's kind of great.

If there's some sort of thing you do and it's outside and with other people and it gets you exercise and it's skilled, I think that's great. But it can be whatever. I did a lot of writing, for example, in college. I did humor writing. I wrote for the Jackalanner at Dartmouth, and by the time I graduated, I was the editor of that publication. And that was completely unrelated to my studies.

It was nice to be around other people, learning about humor writing, talking to the humor writers that had been there before and left. I mean, whatever it is, just have some sort of activity that you're into that's interesting and social and skilled and fun and completely non-pragmatic or functional. It's not about a job.

It's not about your great. It's not about impressing anyone. It's just something you can do to let off some steam, to put your energy in something that's non-functional, non-instrumentalist, just to have some good leisure. So I'm glad you're thinking about these questions. My only other piece of advice, though, is when you're choosing this activity, you're choosing this thing you want to do, this leisure activity unrelated to your studies. Almost anything is going to be a good idea here with one exception, and that is Quidditch.

I learned this when I was in Boston and grad school. there are intercollegiate quidditch teams. You put on, you put a broom between your legs. Someone dresses up in gold like a snitch and runs around. I just can't endorse that. All right, let's do one more question here. This is also leisure related. Hi, Cal. My name's Naomi, and I'm a coordinator at a university.

I heard the episode of the Food Heaven podcast you were on, and I've been devouring your work ever since. During my digital detox, I've spent so much time sewing. And I've realized that crafting Facebook groups are important to me. The problem is when I post about my finished work, I'm overwhelmed by the responses. Should I just not post? I still would like to share my crafting with like-minded people. What would you do?

Well, Naomi, I would suggest giving up sewing to start playing quidditch. I can't shake the image now. I can't shake the memory of people on Boston Commons playing intercollegiate quidditch. I'm going to get a lot of angry letters, I think, from Harry Potter fans. So maybe I've really stepped in it here. All right, what's this actual question? Okay, you're asking about, you have a particular crafting hobby that you like to share, you like to share your results, but there's something about the Facebook group you're using that's overwhelming.

I don't know if you're talking about the sheer quantity of responses or if it's the tone of the responses. I mean, social media does have a way, the dynamics of it does have a way of nudging human interaction towards extremes that tend to be not pleasant. So I can imagine that could be playing a role as well. This sounds like a classic digital minimalism case study. You have an activity that you find important, doing craft and sharing your work and interacting about the craft with like-minded people. And now you're working backwards to ask the minimalist question, what's the best way,

if any, to use technology to support this thing I care about. Now, it sounds like you had one proposed answer to this question was, well, maybe Facebook would be a good technology to use to support this thing I like, because there's Facebook groups associated with this craft. But on further experimentation, you've discovered, all right, this particular application of technology to this thing I care about,

maybe it's not giving me good returns because there's something about the interaction dynamics or the volume of interaction. it's not quite working well for me. Okay, that's great. So let's not do Facebook groups. But let's keep asking the question, how else might technology help here?

And the answer might be non-technological at all. It might be actually just finding or putting together a local group of people that you can, you know, sit around with and show your work and sit around and sew and chat. And, you know, they used to have sewing circles was a thing for good reason because often with sewing projects, like a lot of other manual tasks,

it uses one part of your brain but allows another part of your brain to be open for interaction and conversation, sort of like walking is really good for talking or thinking, whereas other types of activities or not. So, hey, you could just say tech is not great here beyond just, I have a text message thread I use to arrange a group of physical people to meet. Or you want to find, okay, let me look through my technological options, and maybe there's a long-tail social media solution here, a group or network just for people who work on crafts that's more curated, less people. the conversation seems more rich, and that could be a better solution, etc. Maybe you have a text thread or WhatsApp group with people you know who's so

that you can post things on there, just literally putting a photo into your thread and other people can see it, but it's not a large group or a group of pseudo-anonymous people like you would get on Facebook. All these are options. But what's important here

is the general digital minimalist approach. You know what's important. You like this craft and you like sharing that craft with other people. But now you have a ton of options of, okay, how do I amplify that with technology in the best possible way. And once you have, that's great. That mindset is great. Like Facebook groups was a plausible hypothesis. It doesn't seem to be working well. Let me try

something else. My contrast, if you did not have a minimalist mindset, if you had a maximalist mindset instead, you'd probably just still keep using Facebook, the groups and lots of other features of Facebook because of just general notion that, you know, I might find something valuable on the sewing group. But when you flip this on its head and say, I want to figure out what I'm all about, and then find the best way to use tech to amplify it. And if something's not great way to amplify it, I don't want that in my life at all. It's very clarifying.

So I think this is a great case study of digital minimalism and action. Stick to your sewing. Stick to the commitment to being able to share this with people who are familiar with the craft. You can share your work, talk to people who are working on this, but be incredibly flexible in experimenting to find what's the best way to do this. Don't settle for a way that has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages.

and whatever you do, even if you leave sewing, for God's sakes, do not play intercollegic quidditch. All right, well, as I wait for the onslaught of howlers that are sure to come, I should probably wrap up this episode. Thank you for submitting your questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you too can submit questions for the podcast. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the show.

And until then, as always, stay deep.