Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 98: LISTENER CALLS: Choosing the Right Job

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.  - How long to keep items on a "done" list. [2:09] - When is it worth spending money on productivity software? [4:57] - Troubleshooting time blocks. [14:33] - Scheduling short breaks (or not). [19:30] - Avoiding distractions during planning. [30:04] - Helping young people figure out their career. [33:31]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions listener calls mini episode. Now, I'm running a little short on time today, so no quick announcements. I want to jump right into the show. But first, before we do, let me just briefly mention one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible, and that is our good friends at Blinkist. As you've heard me say, ideas are currency right now, and books are the best source. for well thought through ideas. The problem is figuring out which books you need to read in depth

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seven-day trial. And you'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkist.com slash deep. And with that, let's start our show. Our first question is a quick one about a technical productivity strategy. I figured this would be a good way to get us warmed up. Hey, Cal, how you doing? This is Jesse. Just finished your book, a world without email. And I was wondering, when you have your trailer discussion, you said that you have a doing and done columns. I was wondering how long you keep items in the done column. If it's months, years, weeks, just curious. Thanks. Hey, Jesse. It's always good to hear from you. Go Nats. Let's clarify a little bit what you're referring to. So the done column you mention is, something that I talk about in a world without email when I'm talking about task boards as a way to organize the things you have to do or the things that a team has to do when working on a particular project. Now, in a taskboard, as we've talked about before, you have cards corresponding to

things that need to get done. Information about those things can be virtually attached to these cards. The cards are then arranged into named columns that captures their current status. The done column is a commonly used column when people are setting up these taskboards. It actually comes out of agile methodologies like Kanban or scrum, where typically one of the columns you do have is for completed tasks. Now, I don't personally use done columns on my task boards. When I'm done with something, I just archive it. I'm done with it.

If you do want to use a done column just to get a record of what you've completed, but also So in some circumstances, this record is more than just for your own reference. It's actually useful. So if you have, let's say, a team that has a high velocity of obligation tasks come through it, it might be very useful to keep a track of what you've completed. Also, sometimes people annotate cards as they complete them with some notes about the completion. Having it easily accessible in a done column might be useful for answering some questions about

it. And that being said, I think if you are using a done column, especially just for your own individual task organization. One week is about right. In particular, when you do your organizational sessions, where you sit down and really look at your board and move things around and figure out what you're going to move off the back burner to work on that week and who you need to follow up on, who has cards currently under the waiting to hear back from column, et cetera, when you do that organization step, which in the book I suggest doing once a week, and that's a good time to clear out the duns from the week before. So it's not that everything it goes into the done column

stays there for a week. It's instead every week you clean out the done column. That would be my recommendation, again, unless there's some other logistical need to have a longer record of things that were accomplished. All right, let's do another productivity question here. This one has to do about when it's worth paying money for fancy digital productivity tools. Hi, Cal. I had a question about paying for upgrades in Trello or utilizing automation services like Zapier or if then than that and whether the delta increase in efficiency is worth the cost. Thanks. This is a good question. It allows me to make a distinction when it comes to productivity tools that I think is useful. So I want to move these tools into two separate classes.

The first is tools that take things you already do and make those same behaviors either more efficient or more effective. The other class of tools will actually change the way you do things, enable new ways, new ways of doing things. All right, so the first category, first class here is well known, getting, let's say, a nice electronic calendar, you start using Google Calendar, you start using Trello or some other fancy tool to keep track of your tasks and their statuses. That falls into that first category.

You probably had a calendar before. You would probably keep track in your tasks somewhere before, but these tools do it better. They have more features. They make it quicker. It's quicker in Google Calendar to, like, set up a recurring event, for example, that if you're using a paper calendar and Trello has a nice feature. as I was talking about, you can drag the cards, you can attach information to them. Another example of things in this class would be a software that's more fully featured.

So more recently, for example, I've started using Scrivener instead of Microsoft Word for working on articles. And it has a lot of features that makes that easier to do. You can break up the article in the pieces. I can bring my research right into Scrivener. I can open up the research in a separate pane that is next to the pain where I'm writing so I can cite the research right there on the same screen. it's more or less still writing, but it's a tool has more features

that makes it easier to do. The thing about these type of tools is you are going to get what I usually say is a 10 to 20% improvement and how easy it is to get hard things done. So if you have really slick tools for keeping track of and organizing your task, if you have really slick software for writing your articles,

etc, it can make things 10 to 20% better, 10 to 20% easier, but no more than that. I think it's important to acknowledge. I think one of the promises of the productivity prong movement of the early 2000s where we got really excited about the combination of advanced software and productivity is we thought work could get massively easier. That if we had the information in the right place, organized in the right way and we had the right tools to execute it, work could become this effortless widget cranking that

David Allen talked about. We wouldn't even really have to think about it. we just look up at the end of the week and say, man, I'm really killing it. That turned out not to be true because software can't get you around the cognitive difficulty of figuring out what to work on next and what not to work on. It can't get you around for sure the cognitive difficulty of actually doing cognitively difficult things. Scribner is great.

Writing is still hard. So you need to calibrate those tools. You're going to get a 10 to 20% improvement, which could make a difference. But it's still going to be hard. It's still going to be disciplined. this I'm going to work now. What am I going to work on? I'm actually going to do this work. Let's execute. And the software can't take it off your hand. So, you know, I think it's fine to invest in that type of software. Just don't expect too much from it and don't go too overboard on it.

The other category here is I talked about productivity tools that actually changed the way you do things. I put Zapier, if then, I'll put that in that category. Because when I think about those tools, I think about what I call in a world without email automation, right, where you can actually now take what I call a process, right? So a something you do again and again and your work to create value, you come back to it again and again. If one of the processes you come back to again and again your work has the same steps that happen more or less in the same order every time, you have the possibility to automate this. And my automate this, I mean build a system that allows this work to go from stage to stage without requiring unscheduled messages.

So one of the examples I give in the book, it actually is a Brian Johnson's company, Optimize, which is one of the sponsors of this show. Well, in the book, I talk about the automated process they had for producing these daily plus one videos that they do. So it's daily video, and there's a lot of steps here. The idea has to be figured out,

the script has to be written, the video has to get filmed, the then it has to get edited, and the edited video has to get pushed to multiple platforms. There's web platforms, mobile app platforms. It has to get included in emailing list. They use different automation tools. They don't use Zapier, but you could use something like that.

To do this whole thing each week, well, each day, really, with no emails, no slack. You know, I don't exactly remember all the details offhand. I think there's a shared spreadsheet. There's entries that happen in the spreadsheet for potential episodes. There's a cell that has the current status. They heavily use shared Dropbox folders. And information, when one person, person has it and is done with it, they change the cell for that row. Okay, this is ready for

filming now, for example. All right, let me try to uncover this process a little more detail here, since this is a good example. All right, so I believe what happens is Brian puts in ideas into the spreadsheet of things he wants to do these videos on based on, you know, his reading and thoughts. And I guess they have a status at first in the spreadsheet, like preliminary potential or something like this. He then works on scripts for the ones he actually wants to record. They record these in groups.

And when he has a script done for something, it gets uploaded to somewhere and he changes the status to ready to film. Now there's a set day, at least the way they used to do it. There's a set day every week when shout out the bin, the videographer extraordinaire,

would come out to say, he always came out the same day, it was my understanding, and say, great, we're going to shoot a bunch of these plus one videos. Well, he knew what was being shot because he could just look at what had built up in the spreadsheet to say, ready to film. Then they would film these. They'd go in the studio that Brian had built at the time, his house in California. He's moved since then. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Right? Let's go through here. Let's film them. The raw video, Ben, rather, would move the raw video into a drop box folder, changed the status in the spreadsheet to all these to something like raw video ready. At this point, the editors, who lived and worked somewhere completely differently, but knew when the filming day was, would see the status had changed. They would grab these files. They would do the standard whatever you have to do to edit. You got to put the bumpers on and do the sound compression and whatever you have to do to get the video ready. When they were done, those would get uploaded to another shared folder. The status would change to something like ready for review. There's a content manager who would come in

when planning for the week ahead, see all the ready to review videos, download them, watch them, make sure there's no issues. And then there was some other, they would get moved and there's other folder that says like ready to push, their status would get changed or something like this. And then there was the tech team that scheduled each week, the pushing of various videos to the different platforms. So the people who manage the CMS. All of this happened without any unscheduled messages, any Slack going back and forth. That's an automated process. Tools like IfThin or Zapier can help with this because I think in their particular process, which was five years old at this point, you would manually go check a shared spreadsheet and then do your next step. You could use something

like Zapier or if then such that some of the stuff would be really automated. Like when this was done, it would automatically get moved, it would, you know, whatever, right? That's a whole different thing. The potential of automation, so the potential of taking a process and changing the way you implement it,

is unbounded. Because again, the big idea in a world without email is that one of the biggest cognitive cost we have as knowledge workers is contact shifts. If I have to keep switching my attention from one target to another, It's incredibly expensive. If you can come in and change a process with tools such that I don't have to do any of that to get it done, it's a massive benefit.

So compare that to the first class of tools. Being able to put an entry on my calendar faster, to be able to access my research easier while writing an article, that all helps that makes things 10 to 20% easier. Not having to be on Slack all day to produce daily videos could make my life 80 to 90% better. So let's just separate those two things. I'm a big fan of automation, especially where you could reduce unscheduled messages. I really think that's to productivity poised in our modern world. Invest in that.

Spend money on that. Put up, more importantly, with hardship to try to get that right. You know, it could be a pain at first to get that right. For the other tools, it's motivational boost. It's nice to have things be a little bit easier. You don't want to have unnecessary hardship, but I just want to get too obsessed about it. I wouldn't spend massive amounts of money on those tools.

Like, I'm happy to pay for Scrivener, but I'm not going to spend, let's say, thousands of dollars on tools for organizing my task or helping my writing. If, on the other hand, there's some way I could invest thousands of dollars in software that was going to greatly automate parts of my podcast production and save me 20 or 30 emails a week or something, I would spend it. All right. Moving on here, let's do a time blocking question. Hi, this is so. I'm a property manager in while I like the idea of time blocking, I do have a problem finishing up whatever I need to finish within that time or I finish too early and I don't know

what to do the rest of the time. So eventually I'll end up stop using the time blocking method. So let me know how you handle when you finish your work too early or you still have work left, but your block is finished. Thank you. Hi, so I appreciate this question because it's a really common one, and it gives me a chance to talk about solutions. In fact, this is probably the number one most frequent issue people have with time blocking is getting the blocks correct.

So the first thing to keep in mind is some of this is just practice. In the sort of essay, I guess you could say, that I put in the front of every time block planner, where I get into the philosophy behind it and how to execute time blocking correctly. One of the things I note is that at first, you're going to severely underestimate the time needed for most blocks. In fact, I usually tell novice time blockers

to make a first draft of their time block schedule and then increase all the blocks by 50%. You're probably going to be a lot closer to it. So some of this is just practice, getting used to how long things actually take. Now, here's the virtuous feedback cycle that you get at a time block planning, is that by building the plans, seeing the plan break,

seeing it break at specific blocks tied to specific activities and then having to fix that block, you are getting great feedback on how long specific things actually take. There's no better way to actually learn what's going on with your time than to actually make a guess at how long you think things are going to take and then be forced to confront the reality of how long they actually take. So you get this really virtuous feedback cycle. Yeah, you're repairing your sketch.

a lot at first, and that can be frustrated, but think about that as learning. You're very quickly learning how long things actually really take, and pretty quickly you're going to converge to more accurate blocks. All right, that aside, there's two other common pieces of advice to try to help reduce schedule breaking. Number one, use rougher or larger granularity blocks. So one issue you might have is that you're trying to time block too narrow of activities, and that's just too hard to get right. I mean, if your time blocking is, you know, this 30 minutes, pick this up at Home Depot,

and then for the next 50 minutes, swing this by the post office, then go over to this property to check out the progress on, you know, the plumbing repairs, and then you have another little block for call mortgage broker about whatever. There are a lot of blocks that are pretty fine-grained, right?

You might just replace that whole thing, with, okay, errands on the road. Here is a block where I'm going to be not in my office having to do things on the road. And you have, you know, as I suggest in the time block planner essay, you put a number in there and then replicate that number in the upper right and you can elaborate what's supposed to happen in that block and you can say, here's the things I'm going to do. So now you're having some give in there. You're not trying to be exact about everything.

Second, when you have those rougher granularity blocks that might have more things in them, you could think about them as I'm going to try to get through as many of these as possible, but I might not get through them all, right? So you can have a sort of more aggressive list and say, okay, somewhere towards the end of that list, I'm going to run out of time, and that's fine. I put the urgent stuff first. Again, this is much better than having a definitive block for each of those things that you're going to have to change. And then you should do buffer or conditional blocks.

So you put time in your day that says basically, if the thing before needs it, use this block for it. If the thing before it gets done, use this block then for this backup less urgent activity. So you have these sort of buffer blocks throughout the day. Break blocks make good fire firewalls as well. Here's 30 minutes of just downtime. I usually hash these out. So diagonal lines hashing them out visually on my time block schedule. 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there.

Just a little extra fire block time, right? If I'm going long, I have this time to eat. if I'm not, then go relax, you know, whatever. You got some time off. Read, rest, whatever you want to do, right? It doesn't really matter. And that gives you a little bit of leeway,

so you're not going to have to actually break your schedule. So throw all those tips at it will really help. But the thing that you're really going to find to be useful is that after a month or so of doing this, you're just going to be more accurate in the first place about how long things actually take and what are the right granulary to actually make these blocks. All right.

So I mentioned breaks. in the answer to that question, so this is probably a good time to do a question just on the topic of breaks. Hello, Cal. My name is Jaya, I'm a psychology student at university who practices fixed schedule productivity

by working from 6.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. on weekdays, 6.30 a.m. to 12 p.m. midday on Sundays, and no hours on Saturdays. I wanted to ask you how often you believe that other users of a fixed schedule should take breaks during the day. How long those breaks should last and what we should ideally be doing during said breaks. Well, first of all, I'm happy to hear fixed schedule productivity referenced.

For listeners who don't know the term, this is old school study hacks terminology here. Fixed schedule productivity is something I used to write about. This would have been 2007, 2008 on my blog in the early days. And it's a great idea. It's a top-down approach to productivity. that stands in contrast to a bottom-up approach. So what I mean by this is that fixed schedule productivity just says from the top down,

here are the hours I'm going to work. And then you work backwards from that goal and say, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make this actually fit. Like you commit to that goal and then do whatever you can to actually achieve the goal. This then leads to lots of tactical productivity innovations because to actually make your work fit, now suddenly you're going to be more careful about scheduling,

you're going to be more careful about what you say yes to, You're going to be more careful about breaks. You're going to be more careful about organizing your information and spreading things out. But all of those nitty-gritty on-the-ground tactical productivity innovations follow from the original commitment. This is when I'm working. I contrast that to a bottom-up approach to productivity where you just start with assorted random tactical productivity hacks and hope that it reduces your workday or makes your workday more manageable. Let me buy the software.

Let me start doing the three MIT's, three most important things approach. Let me use a time block plan. You just start throwing things out the problem and hope that your day gets better. I like the top-down approach because it leads to a lot of innovation. In fact, a lot of my productivity innovations came out of my fierce commitment to fixed schedule productivity, which I maintained starting as a grad student and have maintained ever since. So when it comes to breaks, the roll of breaks in fixed schedule productivity, typically people who deploy fixed-schedule productivity take.

fewer breaks than people who just work. And that's because if you have a lot of breaks in your day or long breaks in your day, you're probably better off just making your fixed schedule shorter and just ending your day earlier and having an unbroken break when it's done. Right. So this is a typical thing with fixed schedule productivity. It's better to work less hours than it is to punctuate those more hours with lots of breaks. Now, there are some exceptions here. For example, when I shifted from being a graduate student to a postdoc, I had suddenly more free time, right? Because of my last couple of years as a graduate student, I was writing my dissertation, I was writing unrelated research papers, and I was writing a book because, you know, I'm always writing books.

And it was relatively nice and full time, and it filled my time well. And then you move on to a postdoc and suddenly you have less to do, especially that first year, it's kind of complicated, but one of the things you're doing during the first year as a postdoc is applying for your professorship jobs. but that means especially in the fall, like the very beginning of your postdoc, there's not much going on. I mean, you might be working on applications, but you're not yet traveling and doing the interviews,

which happens later. So what I did is instead of the normal fixed schedule productivity move, which would be to say, okay, I have less time demands, let me move my fixed schedule back to be even tighter. I'm not going to work to five. I'm going to work till two. Instead of doing that,

I actually did put a, large midday break into my schedule. But for very pragmatic reasons, I had a dog and the winters, it's very easy to get sort of down in Boston winters. It's dark and it's cold. And so I thought it would actually be better to have a long break in the middle of the day when the sun was at its highest, especially in January, where it's only high for a very short amount of time. And I would bring my dog to the office in the morning, walk them there. And then midday, we would change at all this warm weather cold weather running gear to keep you warm and me and my dog Bailey would go for

a run leaving MIT, we'd go for a run and my route would be on the Charles I would go down the Charles, I would cross at the Mass Avenue Bridge and then I would run down the Charles on the Boston side. I lived in Beacon Hill at this time

so this is all ordered by Beacon Hill. They had floating docks out there. Bailey and I would go out to one of those floating docks and do calisthenics. That's when I would do my exercise. And then we would run up the hills, a Beacon Hill to go home. Then I would shower and have lunch and usually like watch an episode of a show. Then I would leave Bailey and either walk or take the Metro one or the T one stop back to MIT to work, you know, the afternoon.

I could have just ended my day at two, but there was a very specific reason why I instead put a long break. So that was a fixed schedule productivity that included a long break. But that's because there is this very pragmatic explanation. is I wanted sun and exercise and they get my dog run in the middle of the day. And that actually turned out to be a fantastic way to deal with the Boston winners. And New Balance, the shoe company New Balance,

they would, I don't know if they still do this, but I guess they're based around Boston. They would plow all those trails on the Charles throughout the winter. So you could run on them, even though the snow would be packed high on either side. But yeah, roughly speaking, do less breaks, just injure work sooner.

It doesn't mean don't do no breaks. I think a typical fixed block schedule like you're talking about 630 to 3.30 you want to do a non-trivial lunch break that involves leaving wherever you work all seasons, getting outside, getting fresh air. I definitely used to do that as a grad student. I would walk through the infinite corridor

if I was going to go. There was some food trucks that would be out there on Mass Ave. I would go to sometimes. And I had various courtyards I would eat in on the MIT campus. And you probably want to have, if you're starting work at 630, you're probably going to want to have a walk, like a 930 walk or something like that, 20 minute break. And then a lunch that's like a half hour or so.

And then just time block, time block to hell out of the rest of the time. Lock in, get it done, get after it. When you're done, you're done. That's what I would suggest. Again, unless you have one of those unusual circumstances like I'm talking about where you might put a really non-trivial size break, but that really requires a specific reason to do that with a fixed schedule. Let's take a quick break to talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, and that is Grammarly. As I often emphasize, the ability to express yourself clearly in writing is like a superpower

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slash deep and fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. All right, returning to our show, I see we're about 30 minutes in here. Let's try to squeeze in two more quick questions. The next one has to do about getting distracted while you make your plan for your day.

Hi, Cal. My name is Sylvia, and I work from home as a TV animator. Now, my ADHD makes everything a tad more challenging. For example, my coach suggested I amp the 90-minute deep work into two hours because it just takes a little longer to get the gears working. My question is, given this framework, how do I tame my monkey mind during the planning stages of my time blocking? Well, I appreciate this question.

First of all, I do want to note I have heard from other. people with ADHD who have also mentioned that time blocking as a scheduling strategy is quite effective. Because this is really clear. This is what you're doing right now is you're working just on this. Oh, now this is what you're doing at this point. You're basically taking that decision making moment to moment decision making out of the equation and that tends to work better as long as that time block plan is reasonable. If you build a super ambitious time block plan that is too long, too hard, too much stuff, anyone's brain's going to give up and abort it. But a reasonable time block plan is actually, at least I've been hearing, a pretty good tool

to use as a very large toolbox of tools, which I know people with ADHD have to be very careful about deploying. Now, when it comes to your specific issue, not getting distracted while building your time block plan, two things that might work, two different suggestions. One, plan your next day at the end of the previous. So when you start your day, so nothing is yet planned today, and now I'm going to start building my plan and figure out what I'm going to have to do, it is very easy to get stuck down a rabbit hole.

We all have this issue. So if instead the final block of your day is building that plan for the next day, shutting everything down, so you're doing your shutdown complete ritual, I'm going over all my task and my calendar. It's a very natural time to say, now let me look at tomorrow and build my plan. and then you can roll into work the next day right into that first block. And that first block should probably be something that is more focused. Your first block probably should not be a bunch of tasks that you're trying to batch together

so that your brain can get locked in and into work mode into I'm following a time block plan mode. So if you do scheduling last, that's going to help. The other thing you can try to do is have a time block planning ritual where you go somewhere completely different. And it's, you bring your planner and you go to a location with a cup of coffee. There's a small amount of time. You're like, I'm not going to stay out here. It's not a place, you know, I'm on, I'm on the deck. I'm at the picnic table in the park across the street. It's not a place I'm going to stay and work for hours. But I come here with my cup of coffee, look through everything, build out my plan. Maybe I do a virtual commute. I've talked about this before

during the pandemic where people lost their physical commutes. You go for a five-minute walk, clear my head, boom, I'm back into work. And in fact, you might want to do that on either end. I walk five minutes to a park, plan my day, walk five minutes back, boom, I'm into work. Physical separation, psychological separation, aesthetic separation between planning and work. That can help well. So those are two different things you might think about that help make that planning less distracting. And thanks for the reminder that time blocking can be a pretty effective tool,

even for those with an ADHD type setup. All right, let's try to fit in one more question here. one about a book that I don't talk about as much during these many episodes. Hi, Carl. My name is Fabio and I am an Italian trainer who worked with a teenager in high school. I read your book so good I can't ignore you and I found it enlightening. Only one question remain open for me. How to help young people understand which career to pursue. Many teenagers have no idea which career direction to take in their life.

Thank you very much in advance for your reply. Well, I guess the glib answer here is just have them all read so good they can't ignore you. I'll get a really thorough treatment of that question, but let's try to be a little bit more concise, I guess, in our advice here. Two things I would emphasize, especially if I'm talking to teenagers. One, and this is just a foundational mindset, you're not wired for a particular job. We have to abandon that idea that you are hardwired for a particular type of work. And if you do that work, therefore, if you match, in other words, your intrinsic inclination, you will be happy. And if you miss that and do another type of work, you'll be unhappy.

So the stakes are incredibly high. Your happiness depends on you figuring out now as a 17-year-old what it is you're meant to do. We have to get rid of the idea that that is at all a sensible question to ask. Of course, we're not wired for a particular job. of course there's many, many different ways we can build a fulfilling and impactful and interesting life, professionally speaking. So let's lower the stakes. The foundational idea and so good they can't ignore you is that passion for one's career nine times out of 10 is something that is cultivated over time. It's not something that you start with. You don't love your job because you chose something

that you love to do. You grow to love your job because you do it in the right way. All right. So that's a mindset shift that I think is useful because it lowers the stakes. Now if we want to get a little bit more concrete, okay, well, how do I make a choice? We've lowered the stakes. You're not looking for the one true job. But it's not a dart throw, right? On the other hand, right?

It's not just, it doesn't matter what you do. You can convert any job into a passion. That's going too far. So how do you actually make some choices here? Well, there's an idea I wrote about on my blog years ago. But I really like it, so I want to try to re-popularize it. and I called it lifestyle-centric career planning. And I wrote this article.

I believe I was at one of my sister's highest college graduations, this probably was. So there was commencement stuff in the air, and I wrote this blog post. The idea is, I forget work, think lifestyle. Ten years from now, let's say you're in your upper 20s, what do you want your life to be like? What type of place do you live? What's your time demands? Like, who are you around? your days look like. Are you drawn to a notion of, you know, I'm in the nice suit and I'm making

moves and, you know, we're in the conference room and we're overlooking from the skyscraper, what's going on and I'm elite of what I do and skilled? Like, does that really resonate with you? Do you like to read CEO memoirs and get excited? Okay, so now you're thinking something high powered and interesting and impactful that's a frenetic business. Maybe on the other hand, you're like, no, what really resonates with me is thinking about, I mean, nature. it's slow, I have time on my hands, I'm working to land, or maybe you have visions of like a bohemian, something creative and artistic and I'm around interesting people and we're created. So you get these general inclinations about when you envision a life that seems like it would be

something you enjoy, what comes up, what resonates. Now, be really clear here, this is very different than saying what job do you feel like you should do. lifestyle, I think that is something that we can actually usefully plumb ourselves for intimations of attraction. The idea of X types of lifestyle stresses me out, the idea of Y really attracts me, right? I think at that gross level, that level of rough granularity, there are some general attractions and repulsions that is useful.

Now, again, there could be many lifestyles that you could imagine making you happy. So great, just choose one. Again, there's not a perfect science here. Then you can work backwards. Okay, if I wanted to be there, I wanted to be, you know, living near nature and spending a lot of time outside each day, let me do some work and figure out a particular career path that would get me there and what I'd have to do to get there pretty quick. Oh, I want to be into Armani, you know, making calls and slamming down the phone and say, no,

you're out of order, whatever. Okay, fine. That seems like a vaguely businessy type thing. Where's my best entry into the business world, given my skills and connection? And once in, let me try to figure out how I would move up pretty quick, what matters, what skill matters, what doesn't, right? So you're working backwards from a lifestyle that you want 10 years from now and thinking, what would get me there. So not just what type of career, but what type of work I'd have to do, what type of performance, how do I get there? Now you're hatching a plan to achieve a lifestyle. Because lifestyles are so broad, there's many different ways to them. So now you can fit a path that fits what's available to you, what matches both your pre-existing skills,

but also just your opportunities and where you live and that whole context. Now you have a believable plan that gets you to a thing that almost certainly is going to be something you enjoy as a way of living. Anyways, it's just a starting point. Obviously, people's visions of what they want in their life and what matters and what they're good at. All this will refine as you go along, but that's a great way to start. Envision your life without any super specifics about your job.

I didn't say now there's dozens of ways I could get there. Let me choose one that seems to be most feasible. And now I have a very clear goal. How do I succeed on that particular path to get to this lifestyle? And with that, I should head down the path of wrapping up this episode. Thank you, everyone who submitted their voice questions. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to figure out how you can submit your own voice questions. I will be back on Monday, as always with the next full-length episode of deep questions.

Tell then, as always, stay deep.