Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 97: Should I Outsource My Inbox?

Episode Date: May 17, 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 - How can I get others to accept a deeper work environment? [6:16] - How can I escape meeting overload? [10:12] - How can I ready myself for a deep work sessions? [18:00] - Should I hire an assistant to help me with my emails? [22:14] - How should indie authors use social media? [27:10] - How do I stop being so distracted at work? [35:11]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - What is my (Cal) next book going to be about? [42:26] - How do I preserve energy for home projects? [44:43] - What do you (Cal) find valuable in the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel? [50:02] - What is my (Cal) favorite Neil Postman book? [53:06] - Can I write a novel if I'm a full-time computer programmer? [56:20] - Nina how do you choose what to work deeply on? [58:56]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 97. Quick announcements, as we approached the 100th episode of the Deep Questions podcast, I thought I would check in on some of the changes that are now in progress. First, the studio itself is getting an upgrade. During the pandemic, I was the only person in this studio. So it's a mess in here, except for the one wall directly behind me that we have carefully lit, so that when I'm on camera, it looks like this blue tinted void.

When I bring other people into the studio, that's not going to work. What we're doing instead is three walls are now going to be black curtained or draped. So we're going to do sort of the Charlie Rose thing. There's going to be a round table in the center of the studio. It's a small space, but we can fit it. And then I can have a guest across from me. We can have three cameras in here and always have a nice controlled black and draped background behind every shot.

We're going from a white void to a black void and are gaining the ability to have everyone on camera. Okay. Upgrade number two. I'm going to have more people coming through the studio. Now, my idea is not to have a lot of just traditional interviews. Oh, here's a guest. Let's interview them. I'm actually more interested in perhaps having the people who come through my studio join me for deep dives.

Let's take a topic. They know something about that's interesting to the audience. and let's go deep on it together. I can learn from them. Maybe sometimes we can argue about things. I like the idea of having a regular cast of characters that comes through. And so that is, roughly speaking, underway. Friend of the show and friend of mine, Brad Stolberg,

is actually going to be the first person who's coming through town, I think in the next couple of weeks, who's going to join me on air, as it were, as we upgrade the studio space. So we'll give that a try. And then finally, you know, we've been collecting video. We'll be collecting a lot more video. I didn't like the idea of just seeding this all over to YouTube.

And being, okay, YouTube, you have all my video, that's my channel, you control it. So perhaps quixotically, I have now initiated the process of we're building out a portal. A portal for the Deep Life where the video is going to be there, the podcast are going to be there. My weekly essays are going to be there. a sort of micro-streamer channel, if you will, just for deep lifestyle content. I'm really interested in this idea of creators themselves creating their own basically micro-streamer services,

their own channel of information, as opposed to just seeding information off the very large companies that can then do with it what they will. I don't know how this is going to work out. There'll obviously be a lot more details about this as that project unfolds, but a lot of changes are afoot. Oh, and finally I should add,

We brought on an engineer to master these episodes, so get ready for some sweet compression. I don't quite know how audio works. I'm not an audio person, but I've been told I need more professional audio, so we're going to have an engineer mastering all these episodes pretty soon as well. All right, so a lot of changes are afoot as we come up to the one-year anniversary of the show. So stay tuned. We'll talk more about this as things unfold. But the thing that needs to unfold now is this week's show. We've got a good collection of questions here about deep work and the deep life.

Now, here's the thing about how I go through questions. You know, I gather questions from my newsletter followers once every couple of months. And then for each episode, I just read through questions until I have enough for that episode. Often I'll have to go through 50 to 100 questions to get the 15 or 20 that we do on the show. This week was ridiculous. I'm looking at my numbers here. We got all of the questions we needed in three, 66, three, four, yeah, I looked at 20 questions.

Basically, every question I happened to look at today was good. That doesn't always happen, but I think it's a good omen that we do have a good show. Of course, Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions and sign up for my mailing list, get my weekly essay while you're there. No deep dive today. We're going to get right to the questions. But first, before we do, as always, let's briefly thank one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. I'm talking about our friends at Blinkist.

as I always say, in our current moment ideas are power and where do you get the best ideas from books? Books are where you have experts who take a lifetime of digging and thinking and experience with a topic and condense it down into a codex or a few hundred pages. You get the benefit of all that work very quickly. So books are the source of ideas. However, books take a long time to read and it's hard to know which ones you should bother investing in. This is where Blinkist enters the picture. Blinkist is a subscription service that gives you 15-minute summaries of thousands of best-selling nonfiction books. You can read these summaries or you can listen to these summaries.

But in 15 minutes, you get the key ideas of that book. Why is this important? Well, it means that you can take a general topic that you want to learn more about. Quickly survey the main ideas of the main books in that topic. have a great foundation of knowledge on that topic and figure out which smaller subset of those books you actually want to buy and go in-depth reading. Over 12 million people are using Blinkus right now,

so they must be doing something right. Now, right now for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can try it free for seven days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkis, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, and you'll also save 25% off, but only when you

sign up at Blinkus.com slash deep. All right, with that, let us get started with some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Clint. Clint asks, how can I get others on board? I work in a very reactive environment, basically in firefighting mode all the time. How can I get coworkers and my organization to accept office hours, non-response to email, a closed door for deep work, etc. So, Clint, you're in a workplace that is deploying what I call the hyperactive hive mind workflow. This, of course, is the big villain in my new book, A World Without Email. It's an approach to collaboration in which you figure things out on the fly with low friction back and forth digital messages. That's what gives you that sense that everything is very reactive.

That's what gives you that sense that you're always putting out fires. Now here's the key. Once you recognize that that is the issue, it becomes clear that trying to solve the things you do not like about your work environment without first addressing the underlying workflow is quixotic. So if you focus on just, hey, don't bother me so much. Let me have time alone to do deep work. Don't send me so many emails or expect so many email responses. If you focus on the negative side effects of the hyperactive hive mine and just directly try to induce people to stop participating in that side effect behavior, you're not going to be very successful because the underlying hyperactive hive mine workflow, which is based on all this on demand, on the fly,

when I need you, I grab you. This underlying workflow demands all those side effects. It's a problem if you're gone for a long amount of time doing deep work. It's a problem if you're not responding to emails. It's a problem if you are not reacting. to issues that pop up and have no other way to be addressed. As long as the hyperactive hive mind is how you coordinate your work, all these things you want to get rid of are going to be hard to get rid of, because they're actually necessary side effects of this way of collaboration. So the key is to actually look below the inbox and all the meetings and all the distractions

and fix the underlying workflow. The conversation that have, again, is not email me less. It's how do we do process why that's creating so many emails in the first place? how do we change that process so it doesn't create those emails? So what this comes down to is figuring out, here are the things that our team or our company do again and again that I'm involved with that produce value. I call these processes.

These are our key processes. Now we're going to ask the question, how do we implement these? What are our rules? What are our guidelines? What systems do we use? If this question has not been asked already for one of these processes,

then almost certainly the default answer is, oh, we just use the hyperactive hive mine. So now you need to start looking for the low-hanging fruit, where are there processes that we can upgrade, how we implement it, that's going to reduce all of these unscheduled messages, all of this reactivity in the moment. Complicated process. The bulk of my book is about the principles for doing this right.

Some of these things you can just do on your own, just given what you can control, you update how you approach these processes to minimize the amount of back and forth messages. Some of these are going to have to work with at the team level, but that's ultimately what the solution is going to be. So you're focused now, and this is not easy, but I'm saying the battle you need to be fighting now is not a battle of how do I change this high-level behavior, this top-line behavior of my colleagues.

And instead, how do I change the underlying processes that's demanding this behavior? Again, it's not easy, but you want to be focusing your attention on the right thing. As I like to say, the real solution here is to buy everyone copies on my book. But in the near future, I think you should read it, see those principles, and it'll help you ease into it. I have a whole section in there about how to deal with the psychology of teams and get people on board in a way that that plays with motivational psychology properly and escape valves. There's all sorts of different best practices here for making these changes, but I want to make sure that the changes you're making, you're aimed at the right actual target.

All right, let's tackle a related question from Charlie, who says, now that I work remotely, we have many more meetings, and I find myself unable to apply more than 45 minutes to a project at a time without interruption. How do I express to my bosses that I need a few breaks here and there for what I believe are important meetings but are just simply too many and number? So this question sounds similar to Clint's question. There's some different dynamics going on, so I'm going to give a slightly different answer. So just to clarify, the hyperactive hive mind workflow creates this constant need to be checking communication channels because there's all of these ongoing asynchronous interactions going back and

forth, and if you're not involved in these for long periods of time, a lot of different work slows down. So the hyperactive high mind forces you to constantly be context switching, constantly checking email and slack, and the solution is to replace the underlying processes so that you don't have so many unscheduled messages. Meeting overload is related but somewhat different and therefore requires different solutions. And what I've been arguing, especially during the pandemic, is that one of the main sources of meeting overload is using meetings as a proxy for productivity. Most people are not deep questions listeners, so most people do not really have their act together when it comes to their professional productivity. Most people aren't doing daily, weekly, quarterly planning.

Most people aren't doing capture, configure control. They tend to have a bunch of stuff in their inbox. They get stressed out when new things are on their plate. It's now an open loop. And they want to try to close that loop. Well, the one system that almost everyone trust, the one productivity system that almost everyone reliably uses is their calendar. if a meeting goes on to your calendar, you know for sure you will check your calendar,

you will see that meeting, so you will not forget about it. So it is an easy way to close an open loop. A new project falls on your plate. That's a source of stress. What are you going to do with it? You don't have a nice trello board for it to go on a back burner column,

so you set up a meeting. Now it's temporarily off your plate. Your mind can say, I don't have to worry about this for now, because it won't be forgotten, because when I get to that day, I'll see the meeting. And I always do the meetings I see on my calendar.

So it's a way of getting some relief. Why do meetings increase during the pandemic? Well, a lot of the cost of deploying this meetings as a proxy for productivity strategy, a lot of those costs got greatly reduced. When we're in person, there's more of a social capital cost of making you all get up and gather in a room. I have to watch you all come in. You have your coffee.

You have the stop by the kitchen. It's really clear I'm taking time out of your day. There is an overhead to maybe reserving the conference. room and getting that set up. So I have a little bit more reluctance to do that. So we have fewer meetings. The other issue with remote work is that we lose a lot of heuristics that are possible in the office that make meetings less necessary. I can't grab people in the hallway. I can't see that your office door is open and walk in there to ask you a question. We can't have these quick powwows at the end of an unrelated meeting to solve three or four different issues. Without those heuristics,

everything just gets its own meeting. There's huge overhead to that because as long as we're scheduling a meeting is going to be at least a half hour. And so what might have taken a few quick conversations becomes two or three longer meetings. So we get meeting overload gets exaggerated during the remote work that got much more common during the pandemic. So how do we combat this? We need to add more back pressure against this urge to set up meetings just to get things out of your head.

We need more friction, more difficulty to find time to get these meetings to go. This is going to moderate this impulse to start this otherwise, or stop, I should say, this otherwise out of control growth process from taking over all of the day, which is what happens when it's not checked and what seems to be happening here to Charlie. Now, there's a couple different ways to do this. One way is to actually just start scheduling your time to not be in meetings as a meeting on your calendar. So if your office uses some sort of shared calendar to book meetings, you are just booking your non-meeting time like a meeting, so that time is off limits. It automatically just gets protected. So we're flipping on its heads, like a productivity judo move here. We're flipping on its head, this idea that the one thing we understand and trust is our calendars is a productivity system. Use that to your advantage. Great. So I have a meeting from 9 to 11. Now that meeting might actually be you working without distraction, but whatever, we, we, are used to this idea of you were books, so we can't do it then. If you don't use a shared system,

you should just get in the habit of telling people like, hey, let's have a meeting on this. Can you do it Wednesday afternoon or this or that? Keep a list of available times. So if there's some social dynamic here where you don't want to use a scheduling tool like Callenly or Schedule once, I get that. Sometimes in offices, there's a social dynamic where you can't send a sign-up link to someone above you in the pecking order. I think this is crazy and it should change, but I understand that's an issue. So this is this. manually type out, here's 20 free times I have for a meeting. You can just keep this in a text file that you just copy and paste in the email. It's like, great, here's all the times I'm free.

And those times reflect times that you have protected for your work. So you're not making a big point of it. Nine to 11 and two to three 30 are my undistracted times. You're not telling people that. It's just those times don't show up on your list of available times. You're giving them 20 available time. So it's not like you're really unavailable. And again, it just plays into the psychology if sometimes you're in meeting, sometimes you're not. If I want to set up a new meeting, I have to find one of those times where you're not. The other approach here is to actually talk to your bosses. The right strategy here is probably to do the deep to shallow work ratio conversation. Did I talk about, I talk about it in deep work. I also talk about it in a world without email.

And that's where you basically say, look, there's two different types of work. There's the deep work where you're creating the new value, and then there's a shallow work where you're talking about work or doing administrative or logistical tasks. Both are important. You've got to keep the lights on, on the same time you have to make the money

to pay the electric bill. So both of these are important. But Mr. Boss or Mrs. Boss, what is the right ratio of deep to non-deep work hours for my position? The ratio that's going to make the most value for this company.

Because clearly the answer is not going to be, we would rather have you be in meetings all day long, right? Why are we paying you a salary for that? That's crazy. So we get them to commit to a number from a pot. But this is from a positive perspective. Again, you're not like Clint was sort of implying that he wants to talk to his coworkers

and say, stop bothering me so much. It's not like that. So how can I be most valuable? What's the ratio that makes the most sense? And then you measure and you say, look, look at these meetings. I'm not getting the one to one ratio we thought made sense. I'm getting, you know, one to five of one 45 minute block and one 30 minute block. like this is crazy. It's, it's, you're quantifying it. And you say, okay, so what can we do to hit

the number that we think is going to make the most value for this company? From there can come relatively large changes to company policy. One change I've seen come out of this is meeting free times. Okay, the mornings, there's no meetings. Meetings have to happen in the afternoons, etc. Right. This back pressure, I think, will just immediately solve the problem because, again, most of these meetings are not necessary. They're meetings as a proxy for productivity. when you have a scarcity of this time, you say, well, I'll just call someone, I'll just stop by someone's office,

I'll just tack this on to the end of another meeting. Oh, I see you have office hours. Well, I'll just come to your office hours because I can't find an afternoon slot this week to actually get you into a full meeting. You've got to have back pressure. The back pressure against this growth can easily constrain it,

so those are a bunch of different ways to get there. Our next question comes from Greg. Greg says, what are some tips to get yourself into an in-depth session? That is how do you start a session without distraction? Well, Greg, when it comes to get, getting the most out of your deep work sessions. There's two factors I always talk about. Having a scheduling philosophy and having rituals. So the scheduling philosophy is about answering the

question in advance about this is when I figure out when and where I do my deep work so that you don't have to have this battle on the fly every day. You don't have to ask yourself, should I do deep work now? Should I do deep work? Now that's a battle that you're not likely to win. You should say this is when I do deep work. What you're talking about is the second factor, which is rituals. having a ritual that you always do to start and in your deep work sessions allows you typically to get a lot more out of your brain during those sessions because it transforms you into this artificial state of abstract symbolic reasoning within your mind's eye

something that humans didn't evolve to do but we can trick our brains and the doing and it's been very valuable for us and our species it's a very artificial state so you might have to go above and beyond to induce your brain into this state. I don't need to do a ritual to get a ritual to get, energized when I'm surprised by a negative stimuli, like a lion jumping out of the savannah grass, because I've evolved to take that state seriously and we can switch into it real quick. But a state of I'm now going to concentrate on trying to solve a math theorem for the next three

hours, that's something that's not as natural, so we've got to help it along. What I'm going to suggest here at a big level is when it comes to rituals that you do before deep work sessions and after, your bias should be towards going big over the top. The more, I think, radical or disruptive to your day the ritual is, the more effective that hook is likely going to be for accomplishing its goal of shifting into a deep work mindset. So I'm a big fan if you have a over-the-top location to go to deep work, I think is great because it really helps you induce that mindset.

You know, you've changed your garden shed or your attic, an attic dormer window into a isolated deep work chamber where you got an antique lamp off of eBay to light this vintage desk that overlooks the woods beyond your house or something like this. This is not just fun with aesthetics. It's brain hacking. Ooh, I am in my deep work place. You know, I wrote an article a few months ago about John Steinbeck, who had a beautiful property at Sag Harbor where he would spend his summers, including a writer's shed or writer's house right there on the water. but he would still take a note pad on a small fishing boat and row it out into the middle of the bay there, drop anchor,

and had a little portable table that he would put the writing pad on that tried to do his writing. Why? Because it's just over the top. There's such a disruption from where he was normally living and working it. It helped him think deeper. So a radical environment change can help going on some sort of walk I think is very useful, having a circuit that you actually go through, changing the lighting or physical layout of your space, you clean your desk, you spotlight.

That's what I would do at Georgetown back when we could actually go to our offices. I would darken the room and put on basically spotlights for my desk lamps on my desk. And the rest of the room was dark, just because it was very different. And that's what I would do if I was going to work on reading a paper or trying to solve a proof. So again, you can change your surroundings. You go for a walk. Have a particular cup of coffee or, you know, Irvamate teas. that you make, that you just associate with deep work. I mean, the key here is go over the top.

Have tools you just use for your deep work. Here's a way too fancy notebook and a restored vintage 1950s fountain pin that I'm going to use to take my notes here. Again, this is not just random aesthetic fancy. It's brain hacking, brain hacking, brain hacking. The bigger the signal, the more attention catching the symbol, the more unique the signal surrounding your deep work, the easier it's going to be to fall into that state. So especially if you're working remotely right now, so you don't have to worry about your colleagues around you wondering, you know, what the hell you're up to.

I say, Greg, go big. It'll help you think big. All right, moving on, we have a question here from Ben. Ben says, Cal, I run a relatively small investment fund. I love the concept of getting rid of back and forth emails. I set up a click-up space as an alternative to Trello, but I am still spending massive amounts of time on email. Wondering what criteria you would use to consider whether I should hire an executive assistant.

I generally find more employees equals more problems, so I have avoided it. But curious how you would approach the question of when it's time to hire an executive assistant and what he or she should do for the firm and me. Now, I get asked a lot about bringing on administrative support like executive assistant, so I'm glad I have a chance to talk about it. So, Ben, the big issue here that I want to underscore is that if you're facing chaos at work, so like the hyperactive hive mind is really rock and rolling, you can't keep up with all the emails, there's so much stuff coming at you, and you're spending more and more time just wrangling and reacting

and participating in these asynchronous conversations, you think, I need some help. This is untenable. an assistant or related administrative support can't solve that problem. They can't solve that problem. Where administrative support becomes high ROI is after you have done the work of structuring the way that you work. So after you've gone through with your team and said, okay, the hyperactive hive mind's not working for us. Let's identify our processes. What are the things we come back to again and again that produce a value for our investment firm or whatever?

it is the company we're talking about. All right, how do we implement each of these processes? Right now, I think we're probably just rock and rolling with most of these back and forth on Slack or email, just trying to figure things out. But how do we actually want to do this? What we're really going to try to minimize here is unscheduled messages, because of course, unscheduled messages are a proxy for context switch. Context switch is productivity poison. So you go through and you're trying to upgrade these back and forth processes to reduce unscheduled messages. What's our rules? What systems do we use, what guidelines do we use? As you do this, if you're a small company, half the battle here is actually eliminating processes. You know, here's something we do. It's causing a lot of unscheduled

messages, trying to engineer away the unscheduled messages are going to bring a lot of overhead. And this whole process is not creating that much value in the first place. Let's get out of that. Let's get out of that business. Let's not do that anymore. Once you're going through this process, Now you can get a high ROI on an executive system or related administrative staff. Because now what you're doing is you're plugging someone in very intentionally for a very intentional process where they can really make a lot of difference. Now you're saying, okay, we hear from our clients a lot. And what we're going to do is we're going to move in this particular example.

We're going to move away from the clients having our individual email addresses, you know, bin at small investment firm.com. and said we're going to have a client address. In fact, maybe what we're going to do is set up an address for each client is their name at, you know, our domain. So it's like, here's your personalized channel that shows how accessible we are. And what we want to do is triage these messages, et cetera, et cetera. You have some process in mind. And then you're able to slot in, oh, this is a perfect place for an executive assistant.

They monitor this channel. They do it at set times. And they move the messages that comes through into different categories. some they can answer right away, and others they move into these systems, however you work this out, where we see it once a day and are able to get back to the clients very quickly. The details of this example don't matter beyond just the general idea here is that now you're slotting at administrative support to a very specific well-thought-through process. Administrative support works incredibly well in that context.

If on the other hand you're just saying, man, I am spending five hours a day in my inbox, hey, new assistant, do my inbox for me. not going to work. Not going to work. You're going to spend more time trying to manage that assistant than you are going to save time from them being in your inbox.

Assistance can't tame chaos. Assistance, on the other hand, can really help support structure. And so that's the way you should think about this, Ben, your goal here is to structure your business and how you work. Implement your processes in ways that's more intentional

and gets rid of the unscheduled messages. That is going to make it very clear to you where, if anywhere, bringing in extra administrative help could give you a really huge ROI. Now, you might go through this and say, oh, once we really re-engineer these processes, there's no real need to bring on someone else. We've actually really got this down to be pretty sveled and it fits easily into our workflow. Or you might say, okay, there's no real way to implement these key processes without having someone who's dedicated to do an X, Y, or Z. But when you come at it from structure, that's when you get the

ROI on that particular investment. All right, we got a writer-related question from Debbie. Debbie asks, how can indie authors best use social media and email to market their books? I'm interested in this because everyone seems to be starting Facebook groups and I hate Facebook and would leave it tomorrow if I didn't have actual family and friends old and new that I care about on it. I am trying out alternative ways to connect with readers, including Patreon substack and a separate mailing list. Well, Debbie, as I've talked about before on the podcast, my model for how book sales happens, is a two-phase process. Seed and spread. So the seeding step is when a book first comes out. This is how you get those initial sales, how you seed that book out there into the book

reading population. Once the book is seeded, you then enter a spreading stage where as they tell other people and they tell other people and then it gets more coverage because people are hearing about the book, the sales expand out from that initial pool of seeded readers and the sales grow according to some sort of curve, some sort of growth curve. The seed stage is controlled by the author's marketing in some sense, right? I mean, this is where things like, are you on social media, your email list? Do you have a blog? Like, that's where that comes into play. Are you a celebrity that's going to get coverage because you're a notable person? That's all what controls the seeding. The spreading stage is all about the book itself. How good is the book, its message,

it's fit for the time, it's fit for your voice, you know, is it the right moment for this book? Is this a book that is going to spread well? So if we're going to use, again, maybe inappropriately, but just because we all have this on our mind, epidemiological terms, the spread is the initial over dispersion, the initial sort of super spreader event where the one contagious person, how many people do they seed that sickness, that virus too? And then the spreading phase depends on, the R not of that virus. That is what is this contagiousness? On average, how many people

does each infected person go on to infect? So that's an attribute of the book itself. That's where the quality of the book and its fit for the time really makes a difference. All right, so a couple of things to keep in mind. With some few exceptions, the book sale potential of the spreading stage far dwarfs the book selling potential

of the seed stage. It can't seed your book. into a massive bestseller, right? That is going to require, those type of really large book sale numbers are going to require a really hardy spread stage that the book catches on and more people talk about it and it gets more coverage, right?

Again, if we go back to disease terms, no matter how big your super spreader event, you're never going to get as many people sick from one super spreader event as you are after that disease actually starts passing from person to person. So you don't want to over obsess on that seed stage because, again, unless you're really talking here, a difference between 10,000 sales and 2,000 sales is going to make a big difference. It's a small book. And if you can hit 10,000 sales, you get to keep writing.

And if it's 2,000 sales, you don't, then yeah, maybe your seed stage can make all the difference. But if you want a book to be a six-figure seller or not, your seed stage is not what's going to get it there. It has to be the right book. So you should be putting a huge amount of attention to the book. Is it the right book for the right time for my voice? makes use of my voice and my experience in the right way. That's where 90% of your efforts should go. On the other hand, doing no seeding could be a problem.

So even if a book has the potential to have a really aggressive spread stage, if almost no one gets that book when it first comes out, it dies out. It doesn't have a chance to take advantage of it. So you have to seed the book enough that whatever its inherent latent potential for spread is can be expressed. Now, once you're past that threshold, the main thing that you have effect by seeding it farther and farther is just how quickly that growth curve gets going. We're going to use math nerd terms. If we think of it as like an exponential, obviously the higher up the curve you're able to start, the quicker you're going to get those growth effects, right?

So you look at a book like my book, so good they can't ignore you, relatively small seeding. Now it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It took a longer time for that growth curve to get going. Now, I think the hundreds of thousands of copies was just latent in the book. just the message and the time and the voice was right. But if I had written that same book, I think, last year, we probably would have gotten there much quicker. Because I look at digital minimalism, got the similar sales numbers in a year or two.

I was able to cede to a bigger audience at that point. So I could speed up that growth curve, but they're not that much different from where they ended up. So I'm probably being way more technical than I need to, but I think the dynamic between these two things is one that often confuses authors. So you're really playing this back. balancing act of I want my seeding capability to be robust. So I want to make sure the latent value

of the book gets expressed. And I want to speed up if there is good value late in that book, if it is going to have a high growth curve, I want to jump up that curve. That'll help. But there's diminishing returns here. If it's going to take me now 20 more hours a week and make me completely distracted and miserable to double my seating potential, probably not worth it. Because again, it's not going to in the end going to double your sales numbers. It's just about once you're past that threshold, if you've ceded to enough, it's just about how fast that growth is going to happen. So if we're just playing an optimization problem perspective here, you really want to be creating a lifestyle where you can put a bulk of your energy into improving

that spreading growth curve by writing the best book possible, thinking about the ideas, being in touch with the zeitgeist, writing the right book for the right time that takes the best advantage of your voice and your experience. That's where you want 90% of your energy. So you've got to start with, I have a lifestyle that supports that. I can think, reflect, and craft. And then with the time left, say, okay, with this smaller footprint for building up a platform and seeding, I want to do the best I can with this smaller footprint and not be too worried about am I doing as much as possible. Could I have an even larger audience? Because again, from an optimization standpoint, not so critical. So that's a long way to come back to an answer, Debbie, that says,

you know, make sure that you have a platform that is robust enough to get the book out there, give it some attention, but keep that attention constrained. Within that constrained attention, do what you can do. But do never, never make the tradeoff of I'm going to make communicating with my audience now such a large part of my life that the quality of the book goes down. Because that is not going to be a fair tradeoff. So if you don't like Facebook groups, don't use Facebook groups, use something else. You mentioned later in your elaboration that you're actually a long time video logger, a Vlogger. Am I saying that right? Or is it video blogger?

You know, someone who does YouTube videos, I guess. Great. Do that. That's probably, if you have a successful Vlog or V blogger, I don't know this terminology. Whatever that is that you're doing, if that is working pretty well, put your energy into that. Let me make that good. Let me make that better.

I increase the aesthetics and maybe make that the foundation for how I seed my books. If you already have a podcast, you're like, okay, I have a pretty good podcast. I'm going to put my energy into that. that'll be my seeding vector. Maybe I have a substack or something. Okay, maybe I'll put my energy into that to make that my seeding vector. Maybe I have an Instagram account.

The type of work I do is visual, and I get a pretty good response off Instagram. So great, I'll put my energy into making that a pretty robust seeding vector. But again, what this comes down to is the game is not how do I maximize the most possible people I can reach as an author. It is instead making sure that you have

as robust as possible of a seating potential given a relatively small amount of your time that you're willing to invest in that part of your writing career. All right. So I made this way more technical than it needed to be, but authors often like geeking out on these type of things. So Debbie, I hope you found that useful. All right, let's do one more work question. This one's from Tommy. Tommy says, how can I avoid being distracted at the office? I have the problem in my office that when I'm sitting in front of the computer, I'm quickly distracted. As if my mind knows the desk is a space for leisure and not work, how can I train my mind to stop this from happening to me? Well, Tommy, I think you need to

time block plan. Right now, you're probably using a list reactive method where you have things on your calendar, you have an inbox full of things to respond to and a long to-do list that you want to try to make some progress on. And you kind of go through your day saying, in between the things on my calendar, let me try to keep up with this inbox and hopefully make some progress on this list. The problem with the list reactive method is that you have no intention about how you want to spend your time. You're not trying to confront or maximize the reality of what time you have available. And also, you have to constantly battle the question of should I do something distracting now? When you used a list reactive method, you say, look, I'm obviously going to take some breaks.

I'm not just going to work like a robot the entire day, so why not take the break right now? your mind says, I don't know, we should probably make some more progress on this. So then five minutes later, okay, but what about right now? Why not take the break right now? And you constantly have this argument. It's exhausting. Also, when you use the list reactive method, you're constantly moving back and forth in context switching, jumping to your inbox, jumping to this task, jumping to the internet,

jumping back to your inbox. And that's cognitively exhausting. And then you lose even more energy to do work, and then you fall back into more distraction, more easily. Timeblock planning solves this all. If you go to timeblockplanner.com, I have a nice video there that explains how time blocking works. But again, the very high-level idea here, Tommy, and my listeners know this well, is that you give every minute of your workday a job. And the only thing you commit to is following your time block plan.

You don't have to have to have a debate with yourself about should I take a break now? What should I do next? It's just should I be a time block planner or should I abort being a time block planner? And that's a question that's high enough stakes that you'll probably answer that correctly. You can schedule times for breaks. so you can schedule times for distraction. And until you get there, you're trying to execute your blocks. Because if you don't, you're going to have to redraw your plan and that's a pain.

So you try to stick with your plan the best you can. Now the advantage of time block planning, now that you have control over your time, well, you can also work less. You can say, well, if I'm time block planning, I can now with confidence maybe in my workday at 3 today and go do something really entertaining. Great, I'm motivated. Let's hit, hit it, hit it, so we can be done. So Tommy, I think you are going to get a lot of benefits out of saying,

I am done with just figuring out my day on the fly. That is not working for me. I lose the debate with my mind almost all the time about whether we should work or do distractions. Let's start to give our time a job. Let's start to get intentional. I think you are going to be astounded by how much less fatigue you feel,

how much more focused you feel, and how much you actually start getting done. Before we move on the questions about the deep life, I want to briefly talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, and that's our good friends at Grammarly. As I often say, the ability to express yourself clearly is like a superpower in our current world.

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Our first question comes from Abe. Abe says, Is your next book going to be about the deep life. Curious minds are interested. Well, Abe, I'm not sure. I have not actually sold my next book or books yet, though I'm circling in on that. There are some ideas I've been working on now for months and months. It takes me a long time to really get an idea to a place where I think I'm ready to actually write about it. One of the ideas I am circling is much more solidly on the deep life, half of the proverbial podcast. show here than it is on the deep work aspect.

I'm still not quite sure if that's what I want to do next or not, but I am thinking about it. It's a little nerve-wracking because I've spent the last five years publishing my tech and culture trilogy, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and a World Without Email. These are three books that all deal in the same space, the unexpected impacts of tech on culture, be it professional or personal, trying to unpack some of these dynamics that arose as these new technologies spread throughout our lives and offices over the last 20 years and try to paint some principles on how to react to that and move forward. So I'm known for that type of writing.

I'm a technologist, so it makes sense that I'm writing about tech and culture. Most of my public-facing writing for the New Yorker or the New York Times is in that space. So it's a little bit nerve-wracking to consider writing a book that is maybe directly outside of tech and culture and goes back to the deep life. It wouldn't be the first time I've done it. before that trilogy, my book was so good they can't ignore you, which was not a tech culture book, and I'm known for it, and that's a successful book. But that's what I'm thinking about now. I think there's a national mood, obviously, post-pandemic, where people are thinking a lot more about some of these questions of the deep life. There have been disrupted, and in the wake of disruption, they're willing to consider more radical changes to how they conceive of their life and how they're trying to structure their life.

And obviously this topic became really big on the podcast here during the pandemic in a way that I hadn't talked that much about it before. So I'm thinking about it. I'm obviously interested in your feedback as listener. So interesting at calnewport.com if you have a nudge for me one way or the other. All right. Our next question comes from Van. Van asks, How do you recommend preserving energy for home projects?

I regularly time block and do a growing number of deep work blocks. during my workday, which I found takes up a large amount of energy. Then in the evenings and weekends, my energy is low for demanding home projects, such as doing the taxes. Do you have suggestions on how to maintain a reserve of energy beyond work hours? Well, Van, I don't know that energy is really the issue. Most stuff you're doing at home doesn't literally consume a lot of energy. It's not like you don't have the actual physical energy required to,

mow your yard or to look up your tax information. I think it's time and motivation that are really relevant here. Now, let's separate out two classes of after work activities. Let's separate out leisure, high-quality leisure activities from household admin. Something I've come to learn is if you have a job that uses a lot of time, like it uses a full workday consistently, even if you're very organized, and if you add in, let's say, kids, like I have, you probably don't have a lot of time left over for high quality leisure activities. I've had to come to grips with this. I love the idea of having really big projects that I work on

in my life outside of work. I simply don't have the time. And I've come to grips with this. I'm willing to spend money, for example, to hire people to do things that I just don't have time to do, or when I do have time, I'd rather be with my kids or be doing something more higher quality. I have big ambitions for household projects that I just can't get to because of the nature of my work and the fact that I have a lot of time demands involving my family. Other people, you can go a different direction, maybe engineer your working life so it's less demanding, gives you more time flexibility, and now you can integrate larger projects into your life. And people get a lot of satisfaction of that type of high quality leisure as well. But again, that's something I've just had to come to grips with. you might too, Van, that if you have a demanding job and maybe family demands, you're not also

going to be a great woodworker, at least not during this particular period of your life. Now, when it comes to household admin, it's really a motivation issue. I think it's, you go through a hard day of time block planning. You're constantly having to turn and focus your energy intentionally. Now I'm going to do this. Now I'm going to do that. Now I'm going to do this. And you run out of that steam. You get home and you say, I just don't, I can't muster more of that attention focusing energy now to focus on let's go into tax writing mode. I've been doing that all day. I guess you don't write your taxes, but tax preparing mode or what have you. Here, I think there's some hacks that can help.

First of all, integrate more of this household admin during the working hours where you're already in that mindset. Recently, for example, I've been starting every day with 30 minutes of household admin. just I have to find 30 minutes worth of things to fill that time. It really helps. Like a lot of little things get done. I'm at my peak energy. I also will schedule blocks for admin work like taxes. It's a very relevant example.

Like when I'm doing my estimated taxes for my business, I have to do this every quarter. It gets a time block in the middle of my workday when I'm in that mindset, right? Because I don't want to have to be doing too much of focusing my attention onto blocks of admin-type work. after I've already done a shutdown complete for my workday. Because again, you just run out of the motivation to keep focusing from block to block. I mean, I already tell you, don't time block to evenings. Well, that's because you're going to run out of the energy to keep following blocks.

So it's not surprising that you have a hard time with the household admin. Automate as much of that stuff as you can. Set times when I always do this work, hire people when you can and when you can afford it. I think it's a completely reasonable use of money to get out of or reduce this sort of motivational energy sapping or time sapping admin work. If you can afford to hire someone that takes something off your plate, I think it's a great investment on money. I think you get a big ROI on that as well.

And then when you still have work left to do, again, be really clear about when and how you're going to do that work. Don't just leave it up to yourself to decide, should I try to get to do some taxes now after dinner? When in doubt, consolidate this work earlier in the evening so you can be more relaxed later in your evening. And finally, and we don't hear about this enough, open loop philosophy applies to household admin as well. If there's household admin tasks, like my gutters need to be clean twice a year.

I need a landscaper to come do my mulching in the fall. Or like there's stuff that you know is going to happen, needs to happen for your house. And you're just keeping track of this in your head. And you just hope that you remember when the time is right. Those are open loops that are just as damaging as having a work obligation that's not in a trusted system. So make sure all the stuff that needs to happen for household admin. You have reminders to come up on your calendars, systems that you come back to to review what needs to be done. Make sure that stuff is not in your head.

That's going to lower the psychological footprint of this type of work as well. Our next question comes from Jacob. Jacob asks, what do you find valuable in the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel? I guess I've mentioned Heschel before in some of his writings and some of my interview appearances and in some past podcast episodes. So a good question. Now, I should say, first of all, I'm not a Heschel expert, nor am I an expert at Jewish theology. So I'm not speaking here from a perspective of deep engagement and understanding, but I am a Heschel fan and have been for a while, which is why I was pleased to find out earlier this year that my grandfather had actually

spent time with Heschel when he was doing a sabbatical. My grandfather that is was doing sabbatical in Manhattan. And of course, Heschel was at the Jewish theological seminary at the time. They would go for walks, I discovered, and talk theology. So that's cool to see that I'm not the only one in my family who had that interest. All right, so here's what I like about what I know about Heschel, is that, first of all, he was really big on thinking about religion as an answer to a fundamental human impulse. He was relatively polytheistic in this thinking. He was the Jewish representative to the Second Vatican Council, and he had this idea that different religions were in some sense responses to this shared fundamental human impulse. He also building on these ideas.

He really studied more of a prophetic theology as opposed to a legalistic theology. So he was less interested in getting down into the fine details of allowed or non-allowed religious activities. and actually focused a lot in his work on the great Jewish prophets and this prophetic tradition of the prophetic voice basically clarifying for people that this deep impulse they have, this underlying impulse, the theological would say is sort of the imprint of God, is not being expressed properly and help people in a more dramatic fashion come into better alignment with that underlying impulse. Now, Heschel is someone who put this into action. I think what he's most known for is his really deep involvement with the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century and also his deep involvement in the anti-Vietnam war movements as well.

And it all came out of his sort of prophetic theology, that this notion of in an almost radical way that you can realign your life to be better aligned with these deep moral intimations you have and that the prophets and the religions, that they were helping to clarify as part of this process of alignment. Anyways, I think it's a very exciting theology. I think it's a very accessible theology. The book I read of his that I enjoyed was God in Search of Man. So if you want an introduction to Heschel and prophetic theology, you can find it in that book. A lot of cool thinkers out there, but he's definitely one, I think,

is worth remembering in our current moment. Our next question comes from Aaron. Aaron says, what is your favorite Neil Postman book and why? Well, in Deep Work, I talk a fair amount about Technopoly, which I felt was an influential book for me, but probably my favorite Neil Postman book, or I'd say the book that's had the most impact on my thinking would be amusing ourselves to death. Though this is often portrayed in sort of popular accounts as a book about not watching TV or the problems with TV, what it really is is, I think, a really nice presentation of a technological determinist approach to unlawful. understanding technology. Postman was a technological determinist. He believed that the presence of a new technology can cause ecological change, as the presence of a new technology can change cultures in ways that's unplanned and unintended and unexpected. So that book focused in particular

on how different forms of media, the actual properties of the different forms of media can affect the way that we think, culturally speaking, the way that we even conceive and understand the world, and that, of course, can have all sorts of ramifications. You know, his, famous line is that medieval Europe, after the printing press, was not medieval Europe plus a printing press. It was an entirely different world. You don't get, for example, the scientific revolution until you get the notion of empiricism, which is a way of seeing the world. And you can't get that way of seeing the world until you have the printed word, which gives the idea of long-form, careful, discursive discussion of topics, an instantiation. It changes the way we even understand

how we communicate or understand the world. And so this technological, change actually changed the way that our brains perceived the world and we got the scientific revolution from it. Anyways, this is a very powerful idea. It obviously infects a lot of my work. A lot of my work is about unintentional consequences. Technology comes in for purpose

A and then you get purpose B. A world without email can be seen almost as an extension of amusing ourselves from death. Let's turn that exact same epistemic lens from media to communication technology.

and you get a world without email. I mean, it's a Neil Postman style analysis that you bring in email, low-friction digital communication. And suddenly the way we even conceive of what work means changes, no one planned for this and we end up someplace that we might not like better. So that's why I ended my last book with some extensive quotes from a Neil Postman speech on some of these ideas because it really gets to the heart of my tech and culture criticism is when we introduce technologies, they can have these unexpected impacts.

So we have to be wary. We have to know what we're all about, what we're trying to do in our lives and our businesses, et cetera, and continually be reevaluating how are we using these tools, where are they advancing what we care about, where are they getting the way, and how can we help tamp down the ladder? It is an active, constant vigilance required to keep innovating technologies while keeping the cost-benefit ratios in our advantage. That is a neopostman-style way of seeing technology in the world. So I would say that book of his is probably the most influential for me. Our next question comes from Tim. Tim says, how do you balance an intellectually demanding job with intellectually demanding hobby?

I work as a softer developer and in my free time I like writing novels. But one side effect is that so much deep work can be mentally draining. To break down my work a little more granularly, I spend about two hours per day at work on what I'd call deliberate practice, math courses, or reading research papers. Another four hours or so is spent writing code. This tends to be more of a flow state activity for me. Then I tried to sit down and write fiction after work, and I'm pretty fatigued. Well, this sort of reminds me of Vans question from earlier, so maybe I should have combined these two questions. But as I mentioned a van, there's only so much motivation you can summon in a given day for,

okay, let me do this intense thing. Okay, now let me commit to doing this intense thing. Especially when you've finished your time block day and you've done your shutdown and your mind is like, okay, I'm done with that. They say, actually, wait, let's power back up and lock in on another intellectually demanding task. I get that that can be hard.

So, Tim, it's not surprising that you're finding some struggle there. So my suggestion is you already have these two demanding things you muster motivation for every day, which is the self-teaching your job. doing, the self-pedagogy, the math courses and research paper reading, and you have your computer programming, which is a big part of your job. Two is probably enough. It's probably hard to add a third thing every day. That's too many switches, too much motivation. So what I would suggest doing is maybe finding a way to interleave the novel writing with the learning things.

So maybe twice a week you're doing some learning. I'm taking, working on a math course or doing some research papers, and then three days a week that morning block is novel writing. And maybe you start that pretty early in the day. I get my writing done, shut it down, switch over to the other part of my job. In other words, something has to give if you want to add this other really intellectually demanding thing. And I think the thing that has the most flexibility in your schedule is teaching yourself. So if you cut back on learning for six months, keeping up a baseline of learning new things, but cut that back, you get a draft of a novel during that same time. So that's what I would suggest interleave those two, so you're never doing more than two major intellectual general

categories of intellectual endeavor in a given day, probably do the novel writing and learning first before you get to the rest of your day, schedule shutdown complete at the end of your day, and don't try to muster more energy for intellectually demanding tasks after that if you can avoid it. Our final question comes from Nina. Nina asks, how do you choose what to work deeply on? I am looking at some big choices like where to work, whether to go back to graduate school,

and how to spend my free time. I struggle sometimes to prioritize what to work deeply on. In the macro sense, I feel like the work we choose to do bounds our choices on what we can be paid to think deeply about. In the more personal sense, there's so many things that are so interesting to spend time on, and there's so many things I feel I should spend time on, it can feel overwhelming to choose.

So, Nina, to answer this question, Let's go back first and quickly review my philosophy for cultivating a deep life. As you know, talk about first identifying the buckets that correspond to the things that matter to you in your life. We're talking craft, we're talking community, we're talking constitution, we're talking contemplation, etc. And then for each of these buckets at a big picture level, you want to make sure that you are focusing your time. on some high return activities and minimizing the time you are wasting on low return activities.

So there's a 80-20 rule going on here that a lot of your time is being invested in the high ROI activities and each of these buckets is covered. You're not neglecting, for example, your constitution to focus just on craft. You're not neglecting your community because you become obsessive about your fitness, etc.

Essentially then what your question is saying, yes, but how do I figure out which high ROI activities to focus on in each of these buckets? Or if I choose one, what about the other ones I'm not doing? Or what if I choose the wrong one? And here's the reality, it doesn't matter. This is not a game of matching a key to a lock. And if you have the exact right activities in these different parts of your life, you unlock a good life. And if you don't, that lock stays closed.

That's not how it works. The thing that gives you that. that satisfaction, the thing that gives you that resiliency, the saying that gives you that depth is the fact that you are aligning your activities with the things you care about. For each of the things that matter in my life, I'm taking some big swings, investing some energy to signal to myself, I care about that part of my life, I'm investing energy into each of those parts of my life to make sure that they're reflected and a big part of what I do. That's where the value comes from.

Now, exactly which activities you choose, it doesn't matter so much. Yeah, there's more options. could ever really do. It's not useful to try to intrinsically rank them. You know, you're respecting constitution, your body, your health. You're doing that however you're doing that. The fact that you're doing that's what's important, not that you're choosing this type of fitness routine versus that. In craft, that you've figured out a skill you can develop that's high impact and gains you autonomy and you've built a really nice professional lifestyle around it and you're proud of what you do. That's great. That's where you're getting the value from, not that it's the exact right

craft that you're focusing on versus another particular option. So I'm coming back to that framework, Needs, I think that'll give you a structure to thinking about this. Here's my buckets. I want to be proud of something I'm doing in each of these buckets. There's a big swing in there where I'm really investing in high ROI activity. I'm also pretty careful about not wasting my time with low ROI activities. Great.

You have established a deep life, go live it. And don't get too worried about what the exact specifics are of how you actually instantiated this depth. And with that, I'm going to instantiate an end to this episode. Thank you for submitting questions. To find out how you can submit your own questions, go to Calnewport.com slash podcast. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.