Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 95: How Do I Maintain the Will to Do Deep Work?

Episode Date: May 10, 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 WORK QUESTIONS - What challenges will I face switching to time-block planning for the first time? [3:43] - How do I time block very long days? [8:20] - How do I move external colleagues and clients away from email collaboration? [11:10] - How do I manage multiple email addresses? [18:57] - How do I avoid Slack FOMO? [20:21]  - How can I avoid Twitter if it's where important updates are posted? [25:49] - RANT ALERT: What do I (Cal) think about big tech data collection? [28:45] - How do you hit a bestseller list without social media? [35:57] - What were my (Cal's) early blogging habits? [40:21]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Do I (Cal) listen to audio books? [50:10] - How do I (Cal) remember thoughts from my walks? [51:31] - Will social media usage go down oner time? [54:10] - How do I be a digital minimalist in a maximalist family? [58:30] - What are the drawbacks of working more seasonly? [59:52] - How do I maintain the will to do deep work? [1:07:55]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 95. No quick announcements today. We have a good show that I'm excited to get to. Following the new trend that I introduced last week, I'm now just partitioning the questions into two major categories, those about deep work and those about the deep life. So we will see if we continue to enjoy that new way of breaking up our questions, And as always, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how you can submit your own questions.

And while there, sign up for my mailing list where I've been sending out my famed weekly essay since 2007. Just to give you a sense of what those are all about, my most recent weekly essay was titled, The Neuroscience of Business. It looks at some research recently published in the journal Nature about the additive nature, of the human problem-solving heuristics and wonders if that may have something to do why we tend to slide towards busyness in both our work and personal life.

So that's the type of thing you can get in your inbox if you sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. All right, so I am ready for the show, but before we get started, as always, we should briefly talk about one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. Our good friends at Magic Spoon. You've heard me say it before.

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All right, and with that, let's get started with questions about deep, work. Our first question comes from Tiana, who says, when changing from a reactive work strategy to a time block strategy, what are some things you can expect to experience during the transition period, and how can one overcome those challenges that come up? Well, Tiana, there's three big things that tends to happen when people first shift over to time block planning. Number one, they realize that their blocks are inappropriately sized. If you have not been, not been assigning specific jobs to your free time already, you'll find that you're probably pretty bad at it. Most people underestimate that tends to be the most common problem. They'll give

themselves much less time than it actually takes to get things done. This is especially true when it comes to administrative blocks. Oh, I have a half hour free between lunch and this meeting. Let me check my inbox for the first time that day. Probably going to take you more than a half hour to check that inbox. So you'll get used to this, Tiana, but my advice up front for that particular is give yourself 50% more time than whatever you first put down. In fact, you should build a plan and go back and immediately move over one column and say, okay, I have to expand everything 50%. Now, of course, it's not all going to fit at this point,

but that's sort of also the point of time block planning is getting a realistic assessment of what you can really fit into your day. Second common problem, you're not going to put in enough administrative blocks. You're not going to put enough time in for keeping up with emails and doing small tasks, the things that you need to react to in the day. When you're not time block planning and you're just being reactive, maybe going through a to do list,

you don't realize how much time you're actually spending, dealing with incoming. So when you go to a time block plan, you have to make that time explicit. It can be shocking at first how much time you actually have to spend. However, this is what I call facing the productivity dragon.

You need to do it. It's better to know the awfulness of what's going on with your schedule than to pretend as if the awfulness doesn't exist by covering your eyes. So you will notice at first that you don't have nearly enough administrative time, email time, task time on your calendar. You want to struggle to get that accurately reflected. We want to look at your time block plan and actually see in black and white how much time you right now are spending on shallower administrative tasks.

So you will get that wrong at first, but you will get better at it. The third thing you'll notice as you shift from reactive to time blocking is that you're doing too much. and too much of your work is depending on asynchronous back and forth digital conversations. So you're doing too much will be clear when you actually have to start putting in realistic size time blocks for your work and realizing there's not that much I can get done in a day when I have seven Zoom meetings. And I can't actually get these five different projects done at anywhere near a high level of quality. Again, we like to avoid facing the productivity dragon.

We like to pretend like this is not true. The time block planner makes that true. you're also going to notice the degree to which too much of your work is unfolding with back and forth digital conversations. You're going to notice this because it's going to keep breaking your blocks. You're going to have to keep jumping back to an inbox or Slack or teams, even though you're in a block for something else because there's just too many back and forth conversations that can't wait for you. They can't wait for you to be gone for two hours working on this deep thing before you come back to your inbox. Your time block plan is

going to make that clear because you're going to see how impossible it is to be away from those inboxes. The solutions here are not time management solutions. In other words, there's nothing you can do with your time block planner to make those problems less. You actually have to fundamentally change the nature of your work. One of the biggest signals people get out of time block planning is that they have to take more off their plate. Too many projects are on their plate. They say yes to too many phone calls and Zoom meetings. They need way more unbroken time to actually get things done. Without the pressure, that pressure being put on you from the time block planning for seeing that schedule, you might not ever notice that. Also, this pressure of, I can't ever stick in a block

because there's so many asynchronous ongoing conversations will push you to say, I need better ways of organizing my work. I need better workflows and processes for coordination and collaboration. That doesn't just depend on we'll go back and forth on email or slack. Now, my book, A World Without Email, is all about why that's bad and how to get away from it, how to move past it. So if you haven't already read that book, you know to read that book, but you were going to get the crystal clear signal

as you move to time block planning that this really is a problem. And that's one of the hidden benefits of this type of planning. It's less about what you get done and more about what you learn about how you are getting things done. All right, our next question comes from Thomas.

I'm trying to cluster questions today together into themes. So sticking with a time block planning theme, we have this question from Thomas that says, I am a postgraduate law student, and I'm doing an internship at a law firm three days a week. Now, I wake up very early to study and have to do some extra work in the evening to catch up on classes. I have just bought a second copy of your time block planner, but I still haven't found a way to use it properly because my first block is at 5 a.m. And I run out of blocks for late in the afternoon and evening. Then I have to cross out a redo my schedule multiple times during the day.

All right, so what Thomas is talking about is in my planner, which you can find out about at timeblock planner.com, I give you a pre-formatted time block grid to make your time block schedules, but that only has so many rows. I think it's something like 11 hours worth of rows, and Thomas is saying, I work more than that many hours some days. So there's not enough vertical space to time block my whole day. Well, Thomas, one hack that I think works here is compression of long blocks.

So take any long blocks you have in the day. And instead of actually using the accurate amount of space, you can compress it, right? So let me be a little bit more clear about this. Let's say from 12 to 4, you are in class and studying for that class. Now typically that would be four blocks worth of time blocking on your time block schedule. The block for 12, 1, 2, 3, and 4 would all be apportioned out to class and study. Well, what you can do is actually, okay, you mark 12 o'clock, and you're going down the left-hand column of your time block grid, putting the hours of the day, you put 12 o'clock, and then you jump ahead to 4 o'clock.

So you now have one block that's actually containing four hours. You want to indicate yourself that you're compressing this block here. So in between the 12 and the 4, where you're really compressing a lot of time into one block, you can do a little zigzag lightning bolt symbol. It's often used when compressing graph axes in certain types of mathematics, but a little zigzag lightning bolt signal there that shows that, yeah, there's a compression happening between 12 and 4. There's a jump happening here in time.

Now you have one small block on your page that says, you know, whatever, take class and studying for class. and you're capturing four hours in one block. So if you compress one or two longer blocks in your day that take up less physical blocks on your time block plan for the day, you can actually save a lot of space. And Thomas, that's what I would suggest doing on those very long days. All right, moving away from time block planning,

let's do some questions here about the hyperactive hive mind. The first one comes from TAMS. Tams asks, how can you implement email-free project collaboration tools if you work with an ever-changing cast of colleagues outside of your institution? How do we do this without trying to make them all sign up and log into your chosen tech-based solutions? Well, Tams, the first thing I'm going to notice is an issue with the way you even ask the question. You're referencing tech-based solutions, and in that reference I think you are encapsulating

a common way that people think about how to get away from email overload, which is, well, there's some other tool, a tech tool, that will solve the problem. So all I have to do is get me and the people I communicate with to sign up and use this other tool, this alternative to email, and then we'll be happier. Now, a big point in my book, A World Without Email,

is that the situation here is both more complex and in some ways more simple. What is the issue we are having? The issue we're having is the use of the... hyperactive hive mind workflow as the primary way that we collaborate with others. Now, the hyperactive hive mind is where we figure most things out through unscheduled back and forth messaging. For all the reasons I outlined in that book and talk about frequently on this podcast,

that is a cognitive disaster. So the key, the key to getting away from that problem is replacing the hyperactive hive mind workflow with other bespoke processes that allows commonly occurring collaboration processes to unfold without all these unscheduled messaging. Various lightweight tech tools can play a helpful role in constructing these bespoke alternative processes, but it's rarely as simple as here is a new tool we use instead. It's about rewiring that underlying processes to move away from unscheduled messages. This is less about there being some magic tool that once you sign up for,

everything is good, and much more about actually thinking through for this particular type of work, how do we want to collaborate? And answering that question in a way that's going to be much more friendly to the operation of your brain. That is in a way that requires many fewer unscheduled back and forth messages. So let me give you an example. Let's say you are working with a colleague to get together a report that has to be formatted and released, right? Some brief report. You have to work on it together. There's some discussion to be had.

A designer has to then at some point take it and format it and it has to be posted somewhere. The hyperactive hive mind approach here would be rock and roll on email or slack. Hey, what about this? What do you think about this section? Did you see that? Hey, do you want to take a stab at this? I'm not sure about that.

Just this back and forth unscheduled messages. This one task now working with a colleague to get a report ready. might generate 10 to 20 back and forth messages, each one requiring quite a few inbox checks by you, because let's say you're on a tight deadline, this needs to get done by midweek, so you can't wait four hours between every response. Now you have to check your inbox all the time

to keep this back and forth going. This one project has now created a massive number of context shifts, which has made you mentally exhausted and really reduced your ability to think clearly and almost anything you're working on. So here is an alternative, an hypothetical alternative to the hyperactive hive mind here. Imagine, you know, you send a note to your colleague.

You say, yeah, we've got to get this report together by Wednesday. Here's what I'm thinking. I will take it and do the first stab at it on Monday. And my Monday close a business, I will put it in this Dropbox folder, a shared Dropbox folder that we both use. Then you have it. Go through and see, make any polishes you want. If there's anything we need to discuss, noon to 1 o'clock on Tuesday, I hold office hours. So here is my Zoom meeting.

You come in here, we can chat about it. You don't need to call me an advantage or just call me on the phone. I'll just be here. Stop by any time during that hour. If there's any things that come up, we want to discuss. Okay, and I've CCed the designer on this message. Hey, designer, expect that, you know, colleague Bob will have this done by close of business. Tuesday.

You can grab it out of the Dropbox format it and post it by Wednesday at noon. Okay, sounds like a plan. Let's do it. You've sent one message. and this message lays out a process to get this report done, including collaborations and discussions and questions, et cetera, to get it done with zero unscheduled messages.

From you sending that message to that report being posted, there is zero times you need to check an inbox to see if there's a message. Now, there is tech involved in this solution. You're using some sort of shared folder like Dropbox or something like this to leave the file in, and you have an office hours for discussion. You're using some tech like your phone or Zoom. Fine. But it's light touch technology.

There's not some magic tool like, oh, the key to doing this project without the hyperactive hive mind is that we all use base camp or something. No, it's the process. And the process might use tech, but often that tech is going to be light touch. Another example, this comes from the book,

U.X design firm, really demanding clients. It's constant pinging for. from their clients was burning out their engineers. So they switched their policy for how they interact with clients. And they said, okay, here's what we do now. They actually made them sign this in their contract. Committing to this.

They said, we're gonna have this weekly call. And in this weekly call, we'll update you on your project. You can ask any questions you have. We will immediately summarize that conversation in writing and capture and writing everything we committed to do and we will send that to immediately after that call. All right, this is a process that gets past the hive mind. The clients now have a peace of mind.

All right, I know how to get questions answered. We do it at the call. I know things are getting done. I don't have to bother people because I know I'm going to get this update at the call and that'll have a written summary of what they committed to so that they need to get that done. If not, I have a written summary of it. So now I don't have to just be bothering people.

What about this? Is this happening? And the clients loved it because they don't like bothering you. They just had no other way of keeping track of things or feeling reassured that things were getting done. And obviously it was much better for the firm. Now, yes, there's technology in there. there's a phone call and you're emailing a written summary,

but there's no big magic fancy productivity suite that's solving the problem here. And we see this example again and again. When you move past the hive mind, it's all about alternative processes for the things you do again and again that get away from those unscheduled messages. It's not about replace email with X.

Not a one-size-fits-all solution, certainly not a one-size-fits-all technological solution. It's instead a consistent focus on trying to reduce unscheduled messages in the everyday work that you do. It's those unscheduled messages that become productivity poison. We have to reduce them.

And I don't care if you're using smoke signals or agreeing to drive your car over to their office once a day and knock on their window and have them put Post-it notes on there about what you're working on. I don't care how you do it. The tech is not the interesting part. The interesting part is having enough intention

laid out clearly. Here's our rules, our guidelines, are systems for implementing these processes, that gets you away from all those unscheduled messages. So in some sense, this is easier because you don't have to convince your external colleagues or clients to sign up for complicated systems, but on the other hand, it's harder

because now you're going to have to very carefully retrain the people you work with to use much more smarter implementations of these recurring processes than what we are currently used to. Keeping with our hyperactive hive mind theme, Siaabhane says, I run multiple freelance businesses

with more than one email account. How do I manage this? Well, see, that's good. I think having multiple email addresses is better than having one. Once we realize that the culprit here, as we just talked about, is cognitive context switching.

Having all of your different businesses have all of their communication go through one inbox is a great way to maximize context if it's not great. So it's good that your multiple businesses have multiple addresses. In fact, each of those businesses itself could have multiple addresses.

Don't tie these addresses to your name. Tie them to different types of request or processes or functions. We really want to focus when we're doing one thing, we're just doing that thing and not having to think about other type of work. Now, if you find that there is too many messages and too many inboxes,

the issue, again, is not that you have too many inboxes, but that too much of your work relies on these unscheduled back and forth messages. So just like we talked about in the answer to the last question, start looking at the things you do again and again in these businesses and asking, how can I put in place alternative implementations of these processes that reduces unscheduled messages? That's going to reduce the pressure from these

inboxes. You don't have to come back to them too often. And when you do come to them, you're in one unified cognitive context, which is going to be great for your brain. All right, let's do one more hyperactive hive mind question. This one comes from British anti-slacker, who says, I've developed a real anxiety about slack, to the extent of really not being able to do actual work. This seems to stem from a fear of missing out on information, on opportunities, on helping people, on not being seen. At the same time, I also rely on it to request help and information from people when I'm blocked. All right, well, British anti-slacker, let's first acknowledge to some extent if your organization depends on the hyperactive hive mind, one of the consequences of that is that

you do have to check these things quite a bit, that you can't just give up Slack if that's the main way that your organization is organizing people collaborating or sharing information. Now, I think this is a problem. Your organization is getting a fraction of the possible productivity from all of these brains that it employs. But let's start with that basis. This is why too much focus on just the individual solving all problems on their own, I think is misguided. If the organization has no alternative to the hive mind, then I get it. You do have to go back to those channels to get. and again. That being said, as I talk about in my book, just focusing on what you can control can make a big difference. It's not going to solve the problem completely, but it can make a big difference. So now that we know that the real game we're trying to avoid here is cognitive context shifts, so having to glance at that Slack channel again and again and again, each time creating an expensive shift, we can ask the question, what can you do to reduce the frequencies of those shifts. So I have a few ideas here.

The first involves helping people. So you answering other people's questions and you getting answers to your questions from other people. Now when it comes to people needing to get help from you, you know that I think the ideal solution here is office hours, right?

Like they run at base camp where you have set times clearly posted in which you are available to answer questions when people have a question from you, they can come on the Slack or call you or walk into your office during those times and ask you that question.

If it's not one of these times, they have to wait. As Jason Freed told me when we did that event surrounding the book launch for a World Without Email, they worried when they first put office hours into place that people would not tolerate having to wait to ask their question. But actually, people didn't really care.

They just wanted clarity. If I need a question answered from this person, how does it work? Okay, they have office hours and I can for sure get it answered then. Great, I don't have to worry about it until then. Now, if you cannot unilaterally put in place office hours, and what you should do is reverse office hours. This is where you individually and privately schedule a couple blocks each day,

relatively short, for answering other people's questions. Now, you don't necessarily tell people this is when you're checking their questions. It's just this is when you are going to look for questions and answer them. twice a day, you go into the various Slack channels, who's asked me something, let me get them an answer, right? Mid-morning, maybe mid-afternoon. That's usually enough of a frequency that people can't complain too much. And if they really complain, like, hey, I asked you a question at 3.30,

and you did your check at 3. And I didn't hear from you until the next morning. You can say, yeah, I was locked into something. All right, but I saw it the next morning. Like, they can't get that mad about it. So I call it reverse office hours because it's still an office hours. There's set times in which you're sitting there and answering questions. it's just that they're not there in real time.

You are artificially batching the questions together for your answering. But in both cases, what you're getting is a very discreet amounts of time when you're actually looking at that information, as opposed to the hyperactive high-find alternative in which you are constantly checking to try to answer those questions right away. Now, another thing you talk about is information and opportunities. All right, well, you know that this is a little bit of nonsense. check your Slack channels once a day. This is how I end my day for 20 minutes to see what's

been posted that might be relevant. And any opportunities or interesting information you will find 99 out of 100. That is completely fine. It's very unlikely that you're going to see a Slack chat. It's like huge promotion opportunity if you get back to me in the next 20 minutes. You know, come on, it's not the way it works. Information opportunities, that's a bit of nonsense. Check it once a day. You'll be fine. Finally, not being seen. seen? Here is my recommendation for being seen. Be so good they can't ignore you.

Produce really good work. And you know how you produce really good work by not doing a cognitive context shift once every five minutes? I know it is annoying to see the performative people on Slack that are constantly on their chattering. Great. While they're doing that, produce 10x output. Really high quality, really great output.

Be reliable. Everything you say you're going to do, do and do it by the time you say you're going to do it. Never drop balls and execute the stuff you do at a really high level. That ultimately is the stuff that matters. You'll be seen, again, if the work you produce can't be ignored. So I would not worry about this performative nature of Slack or you want to try to show that you're on there and busy. Just be really good. And it's this irony that you can't get really good if you're spending all your time on Slack. So it works out in the end pretty well. All right, let's move on to a couple questions here about the intersection of work and social media.

Sainath asks, I am a software engineer, and after reading your book, I am practicing the stay away from social media, but seeing others using it as their knowledge source makes me feel the fear of missing out, especially Twitter, which is where most of the technology updates are posted. So I'm assuming the book in question here is probably digital minimalism. And of course, the big idea behind digital minimalism is to be very intentional about how you deploy your technology. Figure out what's important to you. Figure out the best way to use tech to support that and then ignore everything else. What digital minimalism is not is a list of good and bad technology, where you never use the bad and only use the good. So in particular, if there's some very specific information you need from Twitter for your job. So I don't know what you mean by technology updates,

but I guess maybe a particular software vendor or company will post updates or patch notes, etc, on Twitter. That's useful for you to know as a developer. I get that. So what comes next? Well, in digital minimalism, once you figured out that I'm going to use technology X, the support important thing, why,

you can put rules around how you use that technology. Because once you know why you're using something, you can optimize it. So in your case, you're looking for these occasional updates on Twitter about certain software that you work with. That's great. Put aside some time. In this case, it sounds like 15 minutes, three times a week, maybe at the end of your day. You have a Twitter account in which you follow no people. Your timeline is empty except for these software companies where you need to see these technology updates. three times a week, you load it up on your browser, on your computer. It's not on your phone.

It's not something you can do as a quick distraction. And all you see is tweets from these companies. You can quickly see if there's a new update. See, when you know why you're using a technology, you can optimize it in such a way that the cost-benefit analysis goes drastically in your direction. And this is a great example of it. The footprint on your ability to think clearly and produce good work is basically zero.

if three times a week for five minutes you load up Twitter on your browser just look for update tweets and yet you get that great advantage out of it. So I think anyone can use this same idea for whatever uses of important technology they have in their lives. Deploy tech for particular reasons

and then once you know what that particular reason is, go back and optimize how you use that tech to maximize that benefit, but ignore or avoid or sidestep all of the unintentional consequences. Again, this really moves that cost-benefit ratio decidedly in your advantage. Our next question along these lines comes from Alessandro,

who says, what is your opinion about the data collection tactics from big tech firms like Google and Facebook? Well, Alessandro, I have a complicated relationship with this topic. On the one hand, I don't like the data collection practices of these firms. I think it's one of the things that you have to fear when you take that original decentralized, democratized ethos of the internet the way it was created

and said, okay, what we're going to do instead is build private versions of the internet that a small number of companies owned that everything goes through because it's going to be more convenient for everyone involved. A lot of old-time internet boosters like myself were very suspicious when companies like Facebook came along and said the old internet's too messy and slow,

we have our own private internet, we own all the servers, everything happens on our servers. Yeah, one of the big issues that people, old-time internet people raised when this was happening, the Douglas Rushkoffs of the world, the Jaron Laners of the world, one of the issues they raise is,

hey, wait a second, if you're using a private internet owned by one large company, they can watch every single thing you do. And guess what? They started watching every single thing you do. So, you know, don't say that the old timers didn't warn you. So why is my relationship complicated?

Well, in some sense, I think this issue, surveillance and privacy, big data, big tech data collection, obfuscated an even more fundamental issue, which is the way we were using these tools and the way that many still use these tools is fundamentally unhealthy. That this urge we have to check our phones all the time, this urge we have to constantly allow our analog experience

to be mediated through the digital in which we are obsessive about positive comments or negative comments. Retweets. How many views did this TikTok get? The filling of every moment of downtime or boredom with this algorithmically generated and delivered slurry of in the moment satisfying digital soylent.

None of this is good and all this is unhealthy and I was railing against this. This is not a deep life. This is not a satisfying life if so much of it is being spent on these phones looking at these services. The problem, of course, is that the people who write about this technology,

the media columnist, the tech columnist, even the politicians who rail against these issues, they love looking at their phone all the time. Being on their phone all the time is at the center of their job. If you're a reporter for a major magazine or newspaper or website, Twitter is the sun at which, around which, I should say,

that your journalistic universe actually rotates. It's also where maybe you have a lot of your social capital. I have a lot of Twitter followers. I get retweeted a lot by important people. This group, which is the group that's going to control most of the commentary, the cultural sense of these tools, again, was not going to say, man, we should just use our phones less. So as we began to sour on social media around 2016, 2017, which should be expected because again, technology goes through these cycles where there's an initial period of exuberance where we embrace things openly with almost no restriction just to get used to and feel them out. And then we enter a new phase of the technology adoption cycle

where we begin to become more nuanced and intentional about how we use or don't use technology. And social media was beginning that transformation away from exuberance around that period. So as we got a little bit more skeptical about these tools, and an online. obviously the 2016 election didn't help. Liberals were really upset that Donald Trump used Facebook and conservatives were really upset that these companies didn't like conservatives and were more likely to censor their material than other material. So everyone was starting to get upset about social media about five or six years ago. The people who write about this tech, instead of saying, why are we using this so much, said,

why are the companies doing this wrong? Like, the companies must be doing some things wrong that we need to fix so that we can continue. doing what we're doing in terms of looking at our phones all the time and being online all the time. We can continue what we're doing without the bad things. And so privacy, data collection, this was one of the big things they began to look at. You must be doing something wrong. You know, it's bad what you're doing with our data. It's also where content moderation became a big issue.

Like, it's not that we shouldn't be looking at Facebook all the time or Twitter all the time. It's just that those companies aren't doing the right job of moderating the stuff we don't want to see. If they could just get the bad stuff off, then we would be bad. to this information utopia. So that's why I have a mixed opinion about it. Because I worry about it. I don't love the data collection practices of these companies. I think it really is a problem.

But if that's all we focus on that plus content moderation, we never get to the other issue, which is more fundamentally important, which is humans shouldn't be using these services all the time anyways. So that's why I'm a mixed opinion. You know, this was the number one critique, I would say, sort of more elite media sources had about digital minimalism is this is too personal focused.

You need to be attacking the companies more. Why are you talking about people radically rebuilding their relationship with their devices? That might trick people and they're not realizing that we should be going after these big companies because they're doing systemically the wrong things. My response to that was people radically changing their relationship to these devices can generate a massive positive benefit almost right away. a campaign to change privacy legislation surrounding how these companies operate probably will barely move the needle if it ever gains traction at all.

And if it does gain traction, the text will be so convoluted and ineffectual that really won't have much of a change on people's day-to-day life, except for maybe they have to click, you know, accept, I accept cookie buttons more when they go to websites, right? I'm trying to focus on where we can actually get things done. But I think that critique emphasizes the degree to which a lot of the sort of elite cultural conversation around tech is really focused on what the companies are doing wrong,

be it with data, be it with content moderation, etc. And very little of it's focused on the individual's broken relationship with tech. And so I have carved out a space of caring a lot about that in individuals, at least when it comes to things like social media, but the individual's broken relationship with this technology. And so there is my mixed opinion about the exploitative data collection practices

of social media companies. I don't love it, but I also don't like that being a smokescreen from all these deeper, more important issues we are also having with these technologies. It's always nice to get a rant in every once in a while to get the blood going, but let's bring things down here a little bit. We can wrap up deep work questions with a couple queries on a topic. I haven't talked about a lot recently, which is my own writing career. The first such question comes from Connie.

Connie says, what have you found to be the most effective way to promote your work and your book? You're a big role model and inspiration. I find it so fascinating and promising that your book, Digital Minimalism, hit the New York Times bestseller list without your being on social media. What did you find to be the most effective and viral way to spread the word about your book? Well, Connie, since you asked this question, my more recent book, A World Without Email also hit the New York Times bestseller list. here's the thing though. A, I know very little about book marketing. I'm not seen as being a very savvy book marketer,

so take all of my advice with a grain of salt. B, I don't know that agreed for most authors that social media is super important for book sales. My last two books hit the New York Times bestseller list because my email list. And that's a pretty consistent finding. Your email list will convert pretty well in the book sales because it's people who like you and your content

and are engaged in reading that content on a regular basis. These are much more loyal followers than a social media follower, which is much less valuable. So if your list is of a certain size, it will get a certain percentage to buy your book and pre-order, which all goes against the first week's sale. And that's how you get on a bestseller list. That really has nothing to do with social media. Beyond that, again, I don't know what moves books.

Other than the book itself being so good, it can't be ignored. I think a good example is my book of that name. Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012, my first hardcover idea book. We did promotion for it, but not a ton. It's not the fault of the publisher. It's just, you know, I was a unknown quantity at that time. I did have a New York Times op-ed, which was fun, but it only tangentially connected with the book. And we did some standard but non-national radio.

Podcasts weren't really a thing yet. I began doing podcasts for this book a couple years later. I think by 2014, I was doing podcast on a more regular basis, but in 2012, when you and so good they can't ignore you came out. We weren't really doing much in the way of podcasting. So it came and it went. No bestseller list. That first six-month royalty statement was small,

especially compared to the advance. So we sort of moved on to the next thing. Well, look, the other day I went and checked my most recent royalty statement for that book because I needed that number for a book proposal I'm writing now. In North America, if we look at the main formats, you know, physical e-book and audio, So good they can ignore you It sold something like 300,000 copies

That all just came from the book spreading People liked it And give it to someone else And they told someone else and they told someone else And you know, I keep talking about it I started doing podcasts as I mentioned in about 2014 Not like I was doing a ton But I was doing them pretty steadily

2014, 2015, 2016 And to lead up the deep work These invitations would just come over the transom And I would just say yes I think it was out there in the early years of podcast just talking about the book. And conversation, my conversation, I guess I was seeding at the new potential super spreader events. If I can use a sort of inappropriate analogy for the times right now and just over time it's sold. So I don't know.

I think the best you can do is write a book that's going to be so good they can't be ignored. Do not fall into the trap of writing for the sake of writing. I think it's the biggest trap, especially that pragmatic nonfiction writers have, which is I want an idea that. that makes sense as a book. Right? It makes sense. It's tight.

There's a clear idea. And then I can sell it and then I have a book to write. Instead, you want to think about, I want an idea that someone's going to read and it's going to change something about their life in such a way

that they're going to keep thinking about it and tell other people about it. It's a higher bar. But if you write that book and then just keep talking about it through whatever venues you have available, the book will spread. And I think the main thing you're moderating whether or not you have a really big platform

to talk about it or like me in 2000. You're just bouncing around the early days of podcast talking about it. The only thing you're really controlling there is how long it will take for that book to take off if it's going to take off. But if a book is going to take off and you're talking about it, it will eventually sell. And if a book is not the right book to do that, it's not going to overtime take off and sell a lot of copies, no matter how much you talk about it. So I don't know. Don't get too caught up. I would say don't get too cut up in that connie. Focus on writing the best possible book and then doing a reasonable job spreading the word.

All right. one more writing career question here. This one comes from Dave. Dave asks, could you walk through your early years of blogging and what rhythms and habits you had around it? He then provides a much longer elaboration. In his elaboration, he talks about he has a friend who is uniquely positioned to write, quote, the book, unquote, on a subject.

And he's been encouraging her to start writing articles on a weekly basis on a blog just to see if she could keep up with the rhythm and help work through the ideas. idea. All right, well, Dave, there's two points here. I think there's your original question. What were my early blogging habits? And then there's the specific question here about what your friend should do. If she has to write expertise to write potentially a really big book. So let's start with that second piece first. If you're thinking about writing a book and you're following my advice for nonfiction, pragmatic nonfiction writers, which says you need to be the right person to write the book is one of the key things. It needs to be an idea that has an audience

then you have to be the right person to write it. So it fits with your expertise or personal experience. If you're in that situation, I don't know that starting a blog right now is the right way to move that goal forward. I would actually jump right ahead to articles. Articles and publications online or print doesn't really matter. But you want to start establishing, okay,

can I actually establish writing for an editor for an existing audience, writing on this topic in a way this interesting or compelling. A, that's going to push your skills much quicker than a blog because with a blog, as I've talked about before, there's no feedback. You don't have an editor saying, no, I'm not going to buy this article. Or I bought this article, but it's not good. That pushback, that back pressure plays the informal role of coaching in deliberate practice in general. It's what's going to help you get your skills better. You need that back pressure. So I would suggest going towards straight to articles, maybe public-facing articles,

commentary sections and more specialized academic venues right away. That's what you can tell if you have to write idea for the book. That's how you're going to polish the idea. So you're going to get the best feedback. And it's how you're going to best have a chance of getting a book deal. You can say, look, I wrote this article for a scientific American blog, and it really took off. And then I wrote a bigger article for, you know, nature commentary or something like this. And it was popular.

So I think there's something here. Let's write a book about it. And those examples, I'm assuming that your expertise is scientific, but you can extrapolate this to whatever field. What about my own habits? Well, when I started blogging, I was in grad school, 2007, so I was a few years into my grad school career. I was doing three day a week blogging.

I think the sense back then about blogging was kind of exciting, but blogging was almost like your own written cable channel or publication or something, and it was pretty content heavy. I think the big bloggers were pretty content heavy back then, because everything came through RSS feeds when you wanted to have a pretty active feed. People would really check and read you on a regular basis. So I would write three days a week. Long time study hacks readers will remember Monday masterclass. So every Monday was a Monday masterclass. So it was advice, usually advice about studying. And then I would have two other articles on Wednesday and on Friday. I had a ton of free time.

That's why I was able to do that because I was a grad student. If you're a grad student in theory, so you had no labs to do, you have no experiments to run. And you're at a school like MIT where they don't want you wasting your time in the classroom. You have the TA once as part of your PhD requirement. So otherwise they want you doing research. You have a lot of downtime. I was bored a lot because my wife was at work. I didn't like to be home in our apartment by myself.

So I would in my office at MIT write a lot of blog posts. Once I became a professor, I shifted that to one blog post a week. And for a long time, I had the habit of it was, post-bedtime. I would get in my big leather chair, which I believe was a housewarming gift from my in-laws, my favorite piece of furniture. I'd get in my big leather chair, sometimes I would pour a drink, and I made writing my weekly blog post, I associated it with a relaxing, interesting thing. I love thinking thoughts. I could experiment with thoughts and get things out there, and I was very rigid, had to be every week. Only under very rare circumstances, would I not? And I made it something

I enjoyed and looked forward to, and I would do it after the kids. and then kids plural once we had more kids. That's why I would do it after bed. I still do the weekly blog post. My kids are older though, so they don't go to bed as early. So we used to have this nice window. Hey, I've got a two-year-old. And they're in bed at 7.30.

So let me write my blog post and then let's go watch a TV show. Well, they go to bed much later now. So now when I write my weekly blog post, just I fit it in my schedule where I can. You know, when I'm doing my weekly plan, like Thursday afternoon. Monday morning. I mean, I fit it in where where I can. I do want to get back, I think, to rebuilding it around a relaxing ritual because that really helps get it done. So I'll have to figure out how to do that. That might be a good idea.

All right. So two different things I'm talking about there. If you have a great book in you, blogging's not the best place to start. My blogging habits, I went from doing it all the time because I was bored to making it something I enjoyed once a week. And that seems to have been working pretty well for me. Let's take a brief moment to talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, and that is Optimize. Optimize is a subscription network that gets you the wisdom you need to live a deep life. And when you sign up for Optimize, first you get access to their world famous philosopher notes, which distill the biggest ideas from 600 of the world's best books. you can get this distilled wisdom into six-page PDFs

written by Optimized founder of my longtime friend Brian Johnson. You can also get 20-minute MP3 summaries of these books or watch video discussions in most of these books. The reason why I became friends with Brian Johnson in the first place is I was so impressed by the philosopher notes he had written for some of my own books. He really got it. These really are some of the best book summaries ever written

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questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Arthur who says, do you listen to audiobooks? If yes, when, if not why? Well, Arthur, I do. I do not distinguish between audio books, digital Kindle books, or physical books when it comes to, does this count as reading a book?

Did I learn information? As I've said before, my slight preference towards physical books just has to do with my note-taking system. If I'm reading a book to use as research for an article or a book, being able to mark quotes and mark pages with a pencil or pen, makes it a little bit more efficient for me to process it.

But beyond that, I am format agnostic. At the moment, for example, I am listening to Becoming Steve Jobs. Greg McEwen recommended this to me. I think it was in the interview I did with him on this show a couple weeks ago. He said, according to Silicon Valley people, is that, not the Isaacson biography, but that is the best Steve Jobs biography.

And I have been really enjoying it. In general, I think having an audiobook that I'm working on at any one time adds another book or two I get done each month. I use them when I'm walking, heavily when I'm doing household shores. So especially on the weekends, I get a lot of reading done. If there's yard work, it has to be done or cleaning work it has to be done. I really find it as a good sort of high-quality backdrop to low, cogly demanding activities. Stephen asks,

how do you remember specific insights received during your outdoor johns? Well, Stephen, I'm known here in Tacoma Park, Maryland as the unusual walking professor because I'm always walking around thinking like I've talked about before, but one of the additional eccentric characteristics I have is that I also am always wearing this weird yellow backpack.

I'm always walking around town, going to get coffee from the coffee shop, going to my office, going to my kids' sports games. I always have on this weird yellow backpack. It's sort of my thing. So why do I always have it? Well, the backpack itself is a running backpack,

this waterproof. When I first moved to Georgetown to be a professor, we lived nearby. My wife and I lived about a mile away, but it's before we had kids. And I used to run to campus. I would do a running commute. So I had a running backpack,

so it straps on with a hip belt so it doesn't bounce around. and it's kind of spelt, so it's not messing up your weight. And I'd have my clothes in that, and I would run to the gym at Georgetown, exercise shower, and then change into my clothes, which I would keep in the running backpack. And it was waterproof because, hey, look, it rains someday,

but I still have to go to work. So it's a waterproof backpack, so it's a sort of weird look and color. I still have it with me all the time today. Why? Because that is where I keep my collection vehicles. I'll have multiple notebooks in there so that when I have ideas or thoughts,

I can get them out of my head to clear up my head to think about other things, and so they're not a source of stress when I'm out walking and thinking. Now, I'll typically have a moleskin in there. Moleskins are where I keep track of ideas about living a deeper life, so sort of non-professional ideas or very broad ideas about my career in general. I'll almost always have one of my grid notebooks in there, my gridline notebooks that I do CS work on. I'll also use these to take more detailed notes.

Let's say I have an idea, like a more complicated book-related idea, an idea for a proof, an idea for something in my business, a bigger notebook for that. And then I'll often also have my time block planner with me because that has every page on the daily pages has a space to collect tasks that I'll then process at the end of the day when I do my schedule shutdown ritual. So I have this backpack I just carry with me.

Also, I'd keep my keys in there, my wallet's in there, my sunglasses are in there. I'm not known as a very fashionable person. And this is one of the reasons why is this weird backpack. but hey, collection vehicles are important. I don't like to keep things in my head. So, Stephen, that is how I remember my insights.

I write them down, and it requires me to bring multiple notebooks with me. Our next question comes from Ben. Ben says, do you think social media usage will decline as more long-term research is conducted? Well, Ben, let's break this into two questions. One, will specific research about harms of social media help drive down usage? and two, unrelated to that research, will usage of social media decline. As for the first answer, I'm not sure. And I don't mean that the current image is murky.

It's just that I don't have enough expertise on the current image. I know this because I'm in the early stages of working on an article where I'm going deep into this research literature. And it's a complicated literature. And so I don't know yet, but I will know, or at least I'll have a stronger stance on that question, hopefully in the next month or so. If I had to bet, I think yes, I think as that research literature refines, probably as it refines, it is going to put a pretty strong pressure on adolescent social media use.

I did this interview for GQ a couple years ago that became semi-viral where I said we'll look back on teenage social media use like we do today on teenage smoking. I suspect that will probably be true, but let me do my work surveying this research literature to come up with a more definitive stance there. more generally though, I think social media usage is going to decline regardless of what these particular research literatures think. I have this emerging theory that we're already past peak social media. We just don't realize it yet. I've been talking about this theory more often on podcasts. I talked about it on Lex Friedman's podcast recently. I talked about it on the realignment podcast.

I just did an interview with Ryan Holiday. I don't know if you posted it or not yet, but I talked about on that interview too. I won't go too much into the details of the theory again right here. but I really think we're actually past peak social media. The TLDR version of this idea is that social media moved away from the network effect advantage of here is a place to easily connect with other people you know. They instead said here is a place to get easy to consume distraction that will push your buttons in a pleasing way. People took their digital socializing away from social media and towards other tools like group text messages or instant messenger services. people are also moving this idea of groups, small groups of people who share an interest that they want to be connected to digitally.

Those are moving off the major platforms and towards more niche platforms or long-tail social media platforms. So social media has become an entertainment platform. I just think there's a lot of competition there. You got podcast, you got the rise of streaming services. There is just a lot of competition when you just want to be something that people can look at to distract themselves. and given all of the overhead and difficulties of trying to be a mammoth company like Facebook, right, in this space and trying to hold it all together and keep all these different constituencies happy

and all the different pressures are coming at you from all different angles, I just think this moment in which we have a very small number of massive monopoly-style platforms through which most online interaction and information consumption is happening, I think that we're going to fragment again. Probably not back to the fully democratized field, of the early internet, when it was all hand-coded HTML pages and GeoCities and Angelfire, etc. It won't be like that, but it'll be somewhere in between. There will be many more sources of information, apps and services, sources of entertainment that are pulling people's

attention. Some of these will be highly polished with a lot of investment behind them. Some of them will be sort of like me, one-man shops, but people who have built up some sort of audience over time through other means. I think the sort of average individual will move away from the sense of I'm a content creator where I put content into this massive algorithmic machine where it gets mashed up and sold to other people. And their interaction online will be more, again, going back towards using digital tools to socialize, consuming high quality entertainment, or being a part of these long-tailed

social media experiments where you're part of small groups online to share interest. And it's more about interaction and personal development and discovery. So we're going to move, I think, away from the... we all just spend time on three different apps. We're not going to go all the way back to I'm hacking my own, you know, html web page, but it'll be somewhere in between. I think it'll be a better place. All right, Prabub asks, can you give me some tips or advice on keeping digitally minimalistic

in a digitally maximalistic family surroundings? My standard advice for this context is don't preach. Don't tell your family members what they're doing wrong. don't tell them why you are better. Just focus on yourself. How do you build a deeper life through the embrace of the principles of digital minimalism? Be the change you want to see in the world, but don't preach it. That tends to be most compatible with real world social dynamics.

Now, there will still be some things in which it'll generate some friction. In particular, if you're not constantly on text or WhatsApp threads, that will generate some friction, but just have some set times that you check, do your best, apologize, just say, look, I often don't have my phone with me. They will adjust. So, oh, probably who's the guy who, you know, is bad about being on text messages. Okay, we don't expect a quick answer there. That small amount of social friction is worth having cognitive freedom. So keep your head down, get deep, get minimalist, reap those benefits.

Other people will notice in your family, and you may get some converts, but you're going to have to to do it leading by example. And it won't be as bad as you think. All right. Our next question here comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, can you share more about the drawbacks and benefits of a more seasonal approach to work? I am a professor who will be coming up for tenure in a couple of years.

I also have two young children. And thinking ahead to what my life might be like post-tenure, I find myself fantasizing about embracing seasonality more fully as a way. way of embracing the autonomy my job gives me. Well, Sarah, this is a question I can tackle from experience. I was in your same situation not that long ago. I started at Georgetown in, I think 2012, I had two kids in 2012 and 2014, went up for 10-year early in 2016. So in that lead-up to going up for 10-year, I had two young kids. I was very locked in. I was publishing a lot of papers, getting a lot of citations.

My writing took a little bit of a backseat. That entire period, I was non-tenured at Georgetown. I wrote one book. Now, it was a big one. It was deep work, but I took my time with that book. And I, too, would fantasize about post-tenure. Maybe I want to pull back a little bit. Be a little bit less intense about my research.

Have my year itself be more seasonal? So just like you were talking about in your elaboration to this question, making my summers be very quiet to kind of offset the frenzy of the other parts of the year maybe spending some more time on my public facing riding the type of thinking

and public intellectual stuff I was doing on tech and culture, maybe giving that some more energy as well. Daydreamed about all this post-tenure. Also, we knew we were going to have a third kid which we did later on so we knew there's going to be young kids at home, a lot of kids at home post-ten year

and maybe it'd be a good time to have a little bit more flexibility just to be around my kids when they were still young. And for the most part, I did all of that. So I got tenure, and I did begin a process of seasonality adjustments, we'll say. For example, I now take my summers completely off. All throughout pre-tenure, my summers, I was on summer salary from grants, typically NSF grants, because you needed grants to help continue to show that you were good in your field and your work mattered. And so I would be on NSF grants and working pretty hard throughout the summer. I now take no summer salary from externally funded programs.

I've cut back my grant activity actually somewhat extensively because my books do well. My writing income pays my summer and the salary. So I can really take the summer. I can really take it pretty aggressively off. I mean, I'm not being paid to do any university-related work during the summer. I have not been aggressive recently about bringing on new grad students. I'm sort of slowing that down a little bit. I brought my writing up.

So one book in my entire time as an assistant professor. And I've written two books already. I've written and published two books since 10-year already. I began writing for The New Yorker and other publications more often. I started this podcast. So I was doing more of the public-facing work on some of these tech and culture issues, which, by the way, I think are appropriate issues for a 10-year public intellectual in the world of computer science to be talking about.

It's not orthogonal, but it's not something you would spend time on doing pre-tenure. And I experimented with peak seasonality unintentionally during the pandemic. I didn't mean to do this, but there was a lot of factors that happened because of the timing of the pandemic that basically for one year really reduce my ability to do research. It stopped my grant cycle. It stopped my student cycle. It was basically like taking a year, almost like a year pause on the research aspect of my university job with a lot more energy having to go into other aspects of my university. university job. And I'd never done anything like that before. So that was like a, the last year has been a sort of example in forced extreme seasonality. So here's my report. It's good. Seasonality is good. I think it much better fits the human spirit to go from intense periods to less intense periods

and also just to go through periods of shifting focus, heavy focus on X during this period, then shifting to Y during this other period. I don't however want to sugarcoat it, Sarah, it is also difficult from a psychological perspective because if you're a professor, you are in a well-established competitive structure. People around you aren't necessarily being so seasonal. And that's actually harder than I thought it was going to be. I think particularly this last year where my plan with seasonality

had been much more graduated than what ended up happening, cutting back some on research production, but not aggressively, still publishing good papers, but maybe bringing down the number of papers a little bit and being a little bit slower on my grant and student cycles, right? Because these generate a lot of overhead to get the grants, to get the students. And especially as I'm doing some of this more public-facing stuff, maybe keeping my group very svel, right?

The pandemic forced me into what about zero publications for a year, which I'd never done before. It can be pretty distressing because people around you aren't in that situation. They aren't going seasonal. You know, they didn't have kids during the pandemic, make, and they increased their publication count while years went down. You have to contend with things, for example, like seeing people get promoted who are on your same schedule, now promoted years before you do because they didn't go seasonal.

They said, I'm going to keep, you know, let's keep the foot on the accelerator till full professorship before pulling back or even after, right? So there is a psychological cost of seasonality if you were within a well-defined competitive structure. So all of that I'm dealing with now. I mean, in theory, for example, I, could be going up for full professor now. I could be submitting my package, but I didn't even think to do that.

Because I slowed things down a little bit, teeny. I'm like, I'm in no hurry to get the full professorship. You know, I can take my time. Again, that's good on paper. But in reality, you're going to see people around you getting that promotion when you haven't even put in for it. So you've got to be ready for that, Sarah. So there are some cost to seasonality psychologically.

But it's worth it. And if you're more graduated about it, it's not necessarily going to be as pronounced. You kind of pull back strategically, but not in an end. too extreme of a way, you can moderate some of these ups and downs. If you're in a different industry that has a lot of autonomy, because I think professorships are very, it's unique in the sense that you have a ton of autonomy, but you're still in a well-defined competitive structure. Most people with the same amount of autonomy as a professor tend to be entrepreneurs. You're running your own small company or you're a freelancer, you're a writer or something like this. And there,

you're really in a good situation because you have... have the autonomy to embrace seasonality, and you can do so without a lot of the psychological drawbacks because you're not in a department with a bunch of peers who are doing something different. If you run your own business and you go into hustle mode and take on a bunch of contracts, and then you take the next six months in relax mode where you're just doing one contract, there's no back pressure against that other than your own bank account, but there's no back pressure from your peers about, ha, I'm getting ahead of you. Now, if you're a writer and you publish a bunch of books and you kind of take some time off, take an extra beat before publishing your next book,

might have some pressure from like your agent, but it doesn't matter. You can do whatever schedule you want to do, right? So, you know, I think a lot of people who have the autonomy for seasonality are any much better place to do it, Sarah, than you and I, because again, they have a lot more freedom. They're sort of alone in their work and they're not being compared all the time to other people. But for people like you and I, we have to be prepared to take the negatives of seasonality along with the clear benefits. I think the benefits win. A lot of aspects of my life in the last couple years that have been fantastic, especially in the family portion of my life and some of the creative production and the impact and notoriety I've been

able to build for myself in the world. But, you know, it's not all, it's not all going to be easy. So be ready for that. All right, let's do one more question here. This one's from Jay. Jay says, how do I maintain the will to do deep work every day? Often I find myself trapped in social media after I do a span of deep work. How do I avoid this immediately after deep work when my mind craves distractions. Also, how do I make a constant will to do deep work again and again? How do I maintain that day after day? Well, Jay, there's both a small picture and big picture solution here.

A small picture solution is the time block plan. The thing you have to commit to is just that either I follow my time block plan or I don't. And if I do, it spells out when the deep work is. It spells out what happens after the deep work. It spells out when the breaks are. It has a clear end point. When I'm done, I'm done. And what you might want to do when you first shift to a time block plan is, you know, have intense days, but in the days pretty early.

So you're like, yeah, I'm sticking with my blocks, but then I'm going to do my shutdown complete at 330 and have even extra time. There's a reward for sticking to the plan. It allows me to finish my work earlier and not be guilty about it, right? But your time block plan, you never have to have the debate for yourself, is now a good time to take a social media break. Because that question has already been answered. This is the time when I get to take a social media break, and I'm not there yet. right. So time block plans your small picture solution. Your big picture solution though is to recognize that

discipline, and that's what we're talking about here, like the discipline to do the work you need to do, even if you might not feel like it. Discipline cannot exist in a vacuum. To be consistently applied, it has to be tied to something deeper that you believe in. So Jay, for you, this needs to be your vision. of what the deep life means to you. A commitment to I want to leave a deep life because a deep life is more resilient

and more satisfying and more interesting than a shallow life. And deep work, so actually focusing intensely on certain craft efforts, well, that's just a piece of this broader deep life that I am aiming for. And it is in this commitment towards structuring your activity to make your life deeper rather than shallower,

that discipline now has hooks on which it can attach it. itself. And the discipline to do this work instead of going on social media, the discipline to eat this good food instead of this bad food, the discipline to call and talk to that friend instead of just sending them a text, all of these disciplines become so much easier to stick with because they exist on a structure that you care about. So Jay, you need to increase your depth of field here, away from just your work and towards your life. Do the things I talk about on this all the time, figure out the main buckets that you care about in your life. For each of these buckets, start with a keystone habit, something that you return to every day that you measure and

write down whether you did it or not, something that's not trivial, but also something that's not impossible, something that signals to yourself that in each of the areas you care about, you are willing to do non-trivial activity to support it. That will completely change your mindset right there. Now you're laying the main frame that you need to build this structure on which further discipline can be built. Then you want to take each of these buckets one by one, give it one the two months to overhaul that aspect of your life.

I would say don't even start with the craft or work related bucket when you do this. Start with another one. Get your momentum going. Then when you get to the work one, now you have your keystone habit, you're trying to overhaul the work part of your life, getting rid of nonsense work, focusing on bigger goals, time block planning, daily, weekly, quarterly planning. We'll probably start to happen here.

maybe you bring a coach into your life. I mean, now you're coming out your life from a completely different angle. You're motivated. You want a deep life because you know in your bones is better than a shallow one. And how you approach your work and breaks and all of this just becomes a small piece

and a larger initiative that you really believe in. It's night and day. So we can't just arbitrarily throw, will the discipline at various aspects of our life on a whim. Discipline, again, needs a structure to support it. And trying to build out a deep life

is that structure. So, Jay, that's my bigger thing. Time block planning, yes, will help you with this. Fully embracing a deep life, though, is going to be the solution. The solution for work, solution for constitution, for community, for contemplation, all of the aspects of a deep life. This is going to be the ultimate solution for being more disciplined, more intentional, more minimalist, more focused on what matters,

more willing to ignore what doesn't. All that's going to come. from that deeper commitment. And speaking of deep work and commitments, I have a paper deadline later today I need to get back to you. So let's wrap up this show for today. Thank you, everyone who submitted their questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions for the show.

We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls in any episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.