Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 99: Should I Move to Sweden or Make Money?

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: How Can I Significantly Reduce Email? [6:30]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS: - How do I account for transition time between time blocks? [20:20] - Rant Alert: How do I creeping combat corporate complexity?[21:58] - How do I identify processes to optimize? [29:58] - How much should one rely on technology to think? [33:10]  - How important is memorization in deep work? [36:07] - Should I move to Sweden or make more money? [38:09]   - Should I take a promotion that requires lots of shallow work? [46:50]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:  - Would people use Facebook if it cost money? [52:54] - Do you (Cal) identify with philosophy of Ayn Rand? [57:56] - How do you balance discipline and enjoyment in leisure? [59:03] - What's the best way to prioritize which books to read? [1:03:18]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 99. Quick announcements. Episode 99, that's potentially a big deal because it means episode 100 is coming up. I like arbitrary milestone, so 100 episodes seems like a nice arbitrary milestone. That will sync up pretty closely with one year of this podcast, not quite. I believe the very first podcast episode was posted very late. May. So it'll be within a few days of the one year anniversary. I was sort of hoping recently that we would hit the other arbitrary milestone of 2.5 million downloads in the first year slash by

episode 100. Looks like we'll be a little short. We will be at about 2.4 something million by early next week. So we will miss that arbitrary milestone by about a week. But still, I think that's nice. It's a nice round number of episodes, a nice round number of downloads. Almost a million of those downloads have happened in the last three months, so certainly growth is happening in the right direction. So that is exciting. I've been previewing upcoming improvements to the podcast, and they're starting to happen. The video team is working on the first sample edits of video, and once we get those sample edits where I like them, the pipeline will turn on, and there will be regular video updates of deep dives and selected questions going online every week.

I have an engineer to do the mastering. This was supposed to be the first week with the newly professionally mastered audio. I didn't get my act together. Hopefully next week will be that week. But pretty soon you will have this extra level of professional quality on the audio itself. So I am excited about that too. I'm also bringing people into studio. I did a shakedown of my new multi-mic setup,

last week. It wasn't for this podcast. I was actually doing an interview as a guest on someone else's podcast, and I had them come to my studio so we could really test out, make sure all the equipment works, and it seems to. The first deep question interview in person will happen next week. It will be a repeat offender guest, so I'm excited for that. At the moment, my studio is still visually speaking quite messy, because it has just been me here. All of the gear has now arrived for the new visual upgrade. So within the next few weeks, this video,

a studio rather, will be transformed into a Charlie Rose-style black box, black drapes as far as the eye can see and guests sitting at a round table. So all of this is exciting. Other quick announcement,

my latest article for the New Yorker came out last week. It was called Thinking Outside to Home. It looks at the lives of a lot of famous writers. It notes that writers are kind of the first work-from-home knowledge workers, right? I mean, they don't have office buildings, but they're doing knowledge work. And I talk about how many different well-known writers would find sort of eccentric places to work near their home,

but they wouldn't work in their homes themselves. I talked about Maya Angelou. I talked about John Steinbeck. I talked about Peter Benchley. I talked about David McCullough. They all had weird, somewhat eccentric places they would go to work. And the article is about the unique difficulties of trying to do work in, your actual home.

I got to do a shout-out in that piece to the Deep Work H-Q. So near the end of the article, I did talk about the office space I leased here in downtown Tacoma Park, or where my studio is, where my library is. It's a modest space, but I love coming here. So that was great that now we have our little world here being brought to the attention of a larger audience via The New Yorker. Now, moving on to today's episode, we have a good one. the deep dive segment returns, and we have, as always, great collections of questions on both

deep work and the deep life. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how to submit your own questions. A quick note, people have been writing me recently to say, hey, I followed the instructions on calnewport.com slash podcast. I signed up for your mailing list where you send a survey links to gather questions, and I haven't received one of the links. Well, I used to send out these links every month or two. Now the gap between me sending out these links to the newsletter has gotten longer, mainly because as the podcast has grown, the questions have gotten better. So whereas before, I might go through 100 questions to pull out 20 I ask in an episode. Now I'll go through 30 questions to pull out 20 because they're much better. So it takes me longer to go through the questions I collect.

So I'm sending out the survey links less often. So if you have signed up for my mailing list since the last time I sent out a survey link in March. Be patient. More links will come. That is still how I gather questions. All right. So before we get started with the show, as always, I want to thank one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible.

And I am talking about my body tutor. This is an online coaching fitness coaching company run by my longtime friend, Adam Gilbert, one of the original health columnist for my blog. study hacks way back in 2007 and 2008. The idea is incredibly effective and incredibly simple. You want to improve your diet. You want to improve your exercise. With My Body Tutor, you get hooked up with an online coach. They work with you to develop your eating plan and your exercise plan. And then, and here is the secret sauce. You check in with them every day. As Adam says, in fitness knowledge isn't the problem. Everyone I talk to already knows what to do, where they

struggle is turning information into action. My Body Tudor fixes that with daily accountability and expert support. So you go to My Body Tudor. Tudor is Tudor.com to learn more. Now, if you sign up and mention deep questions, they will give you $50 off your first month. That's MyBodytutor.com and mention deep questions. All right. And with that, let's get started with the deep dive. The topic of today's deep dive is how can I significantly reduce my email. Now, the topic of email is one I have been writing about for a long time. I actually just went back and looked in the archive of my blog at calnewport.com and found one of my first major articles about email being a problem and how to reduce it from June of

2008. right. So this is a topic I've been dealing with for a long time. Of course, my thoughts culminated in my more recent book, a world without email. Now, I thought in this deep dive, I would get right to the heart of the matter. If you feel completely stressed out and overwhelmed by your email right now, what can we do to make sure that in the near future, let's say one month from now, you are significantly less stressed or overwhelmed by your email? How do we significantly reduce, concretely speaking, significantly reduce email right away? Now, we're going to tackle this issue. The first thing we have to do is shift our mindset. One of the big problems people have, when the obstacles that gets in the way of them reducing their email, is that they focus on the inbox. They ask, what are my habits for interacting with my inbox? When do I check my inbox?

How do I organize my messages? What norms or expectations can I set with people around me? They're trying to solve the problem in the inbox. You're trying to solve the problem. In other words, once all those emails have already arrived, how do I deal with them better? This is not going to be how you get to a significantly better place. What we need to do instead is stop the offending emails

from showing up in your inbox in the first place. Took me a while to figure this out. A lot of my early writing was focused on inbox habits. I've come to realize over the years working on this, that's not going to solve the problem. We have to stop the emails from getting into the inbox in the first place. Once they're there, no amount of clever productivity tactics is going to help you tame them in a way that's going to significantly reduce your stress. All right, so if we're going to figure out how we reduce the emails that arrive in your inbox in the first place, we have to differentiate between different types of emails.

This is another place where people often get things wrong. Not all emails are an equivalent source of stress. in particular emails that are broadcasting information or delivering files or other digital assets, these are not a source of stress. I sometimes hear people complain when thinking about their inbox, man, I've got too many newsletters in here. I get too many newsletters. I've signed up for too many newsletters.

Or I get too many promotional emails. Yeah, those are mildly annoying, but they're not a major cause of stress. Imagine this thought experiment. Imagine if the only emails that are around. arrived in your inbox were newsletters and promotional emails from companies you've signed up for and let's say announcements from your company about new policies, etc. Like this is what we're doing for vacation days in the upcoming year or something like this. If those were the only emails you got, even if you had a hundred arrive every day, it would not be a source of stress. He's okay, it's annoying.

I look through these. Maybe I should unsubscribe to some of these, but it's not a source of stress. The emails that actually make us feel overloaded are those that require a response. And in particular, it is the messages that arrive without a schedule in an ad hoc fashion, demanding information response from you. They're a part of an ad hoc back and forth conversation that you now have to figure out what's going on here, what do I need to say, and I have to get back to the person. Seeing those type of messages pile up, that's what causes distress. All right, so once we understand that those are the messages that we need to focus on, the first concrete suggestion I'm going to have for you

is to separate out to the extent possible those back and forth messages requiring responses from messages just delivering information. To the extent that you can segregate these two things, I think it's useful. There's a couple different ways to do this. In your personal life, you probably should have a what I call sign-up address.

An email address you only use when you're buying something or having any type of transaction where they need an email address for you. doing online commerce, you're signing up for mailing lists, you're in the store, and the clerk is saying, can I have your email address for whatever purpose? And have an address just for that that goes into its own inbox. If you use something like Gmail, just have your same Gmail name and add a couple random numbers to the end of it. In your work inbox, work with filters to the extent that you can automatically filter these type of information broadcast into their

own folder, that's good. If you can't automatically filter, you can just immediately drag these things into another folder, or if you're in Gmail, another label, where you can process them later. So now we're really separating out two purposes of email, broadcast information and interaction. You can deal with the broadcast information whenever you can batch that, do that, whenever you want, separate that from the back and forth emails, which are the real source of stress. All right, now, how do we cut down on those back? back and forth messages. Well, here's the thing you have to keep in mind. Every time you have one of those messages, it's going to require a response. This is really part of some sort of

project, implicitly speaking. There's some sort of project here that's collaborative, so it's requiring you to talk to other people. And the goal, there's going to be some goal to this project, like that a meeting gets set up, or that a client question gets answered, or that a marketing strategy for a new product comes together. There's some sort of implicit project that. There's some sort of implicit project that these back and forth emails are supporting. It's supporting the collaboration to get this project done. The critical question then becomes, okay, how do we accomplish this project, get to the desired goal without having to do a bunch of unscheduled back and forth additional messaging? And that is the question you're coming back to again and again and again. For these

projects that should come up, how do we collaborate without having to do just unscheduled back and forth messaging. Now, some projects are going to come up again and again, so you can have a solution that you apply again and again. Other projects will be one-off. It's never happened before. It'll never happen again. So you just have to figure out for this one instance of this particular project, what's our plan here to get this done without just the interaction happening with unscheduled back and forth messages? Those unscheduled back and forth messages, again, that is the source of stress. That is the source of ill-feeling towards your inbox, because not only does it give you this ambiguous obligation to have to respond, then it's difficult to do message after message after message

to switch your context for every message, figure out what's going on, come up with a plan, and then repeat and repeat and repeat message after message. That is incredibly stressful. We also forget the checks that accompany these messages, these back and forths are happening relatively fast. I mean, we have to answer this client's question. It has to get done in the next day or two. So I can't wait four hours to respond to your message. We have to keep this interaction going. So I have to check my inbox or check Slack or check teams many times for each time one of these messages arrive so that I catch it pretty quickly and get it back. So it's very stressful to deal with a large number of these response requiring messages and it requires also

many more additional inbox checks, which makes any other work outside of your emailing almost impossible because of all these context shifts induced by the check. So we really got to get our handle on it. So how do we accomplish these projects without unscheduled back and forth messages? That is the critical question for significantly reducing your inbox. What do these answers look like? It depends on the type of project. Now, sometimes you can have a ready answer. It could be some sort of system or rule or tool that for some of these projects, you can just directly defer it right to that tool. So this will be the deferral strategy. So for example, if the project is we got to set up a meeting, pushing that conversation to a scheduling tool, a calendarly or schedule once,

is giving you a way of implementing this project into the goal without a lot of back and forth messages. Similarly, you might have office hours to deal with short questions. Yeah, every day, there's one hour where I'm always available in my office on the phone and in Slack and Zoom. And then maybe I have an hour after that with 15 minute increments that you can sign up for for one-on-one conversations, however you want to do it. Set times. It's in the signature of your email. Every time there's a project that comes up that can be dealt with with a relatively rapid five or ten minutes just back and forth conversation, you can just defer. That's great. Grab me up my next office hours whenever it's convenient. We'll chat. You're getting projects towards conclusion.

in this instance, while minimizing the amount of unscheduled back and forth. Other types of projects, you can tame the back and forth email exchanges with automation. If it's going to be this step, followed by this step, followed by this step, you know how the project is going to unfold. You can put in other places or other methods

for collecting the information, getting the information to who it needs to get to, and simiphoring that it's ready for them to actually take control of. It doesn't require unscheduled. messages. In a world without email my book, I talk, for example, about how my friend Brian Johnson's company Optimize automated their daily video production process. How they get from step to step to step without having used emails or Slack, the information moves through Dropbox folders. There's a shared spreadsheet they use to change the status, so different team members know when it's

their turn to take the video. If it's an automatable process that's just happening one time, you can just embed the process you want to use into one of your early email responses. Someone sends you a note that says we've got to get this report ready. And you can just say, great, here's how I think we should do it and lay out a plan and then just execute it. I'll read a draft. I'll put it in the Dropbox by close a business on Monday. Then you have it all day Tuesday. If you have any questions, grab me in my office hours.

C.O.B. Tuesday, I'll take whatever is in there and give it a final past. Hey, designer, who CC it on this message. By midday, Wednesday, grab what's in the Dropbox and do the. the final formatting and move it over here when you're done. You're laying out in an email message a automated process to accomplish this project that does not require a bunch of unscheduled back and forth messages. So again, if it's something that happens again and again and is automatable, agree. Here's how we always do it. There's a one-time project that can be automatable. Just explain the process right up front that you want to use and get going.

Now the final concrete way to try to get unscheduled messaging tamed when dealing with these implicit projects is to export the information, the collaboration out of your inbox and into alternative structure. So now if you have some projects you're working on, it's not really automatable, you're not quite sure how you're going to accomplish this project. Maybe you move all of the relevant information into something like Trello or Basecamp or Flow or, flow, or, Asana or whatever your preferred tool is, but now all the information about who's working on what its status and all the relevant information is not in our inboxes. It's in a shared system. And when we go to that shared system, we just see information for this project. It's not buried in our inbox. And how do we talk about this and collaborate and figure out who needs what and who's working on what and make decisions? Well, let's export that out of just back and forth messages. And now we can

have status meetings. Here's when it's going to happen. You might be locked in and say, I don't want more meetings. But there is a difference between a highly structured status meeting where all the information and status and assignments of work is in a shared system and you're just looking at it and very briefly saying, what happened to the thing you're working on? What are you going to work on next? What do you need? Update the board. Boom. You do that 15 minutes, highly structured meeting. That's a real win. It's not just jumping on Zoom to brainstorm for an hour. So you can export the work on a project out of your inbox and into other tools where the information goes and how you talk about it, export that out of your inbox, and now you can make progress on that project

without a bunch of, again, unscheduled back and forth. So we have those three categories of ways to reduce back and forth. We talked about deferring to another tool. They can just handle it directly. We talked about automating. Okay, here's the steps, and here's how we're going to get from step to step, so we don't have to just work this out informally. We talked about exporting. Okay, all of our information is now in Trello. We have status meetings. They're on exactly these times. They run for 20 minutes, it's twice a week, here's how it happens. There's a bunch of other ways you can do this too, but the key mindset shift here is, again, we're going away from taming what is already in your inbox and focusing on reducing what goes into your inbox in the first place.

We then clarified that the key is not informational emails who cares about those, segregate those and deal with them on your own time. They don't create a lot of stress. It's emails to require responses. Each of these emails is a part of an implicit collaborative project, so the goal is to just come up with an alternative way of executing each of these projects that does not require so many back-and-forth messages. Apply this approach again and again to all the projects that show up wherever it's possible, more and more and more, you will find that the pressure in your inbox will greatly reduce. The number of these unscheduled emails that require responses will drastically go down.

And when those go down, your relationship to your inbox is going to become much better. All right, and with that, let's move on to some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Chetwin, who says, hi, Cal. This question has to do with the transition time between different blocks when time blocking. When I time block, I'm usually setting aside the time to do one task, say one hour to work on a task like reading through research material, etc. When that hour is done, it's onto whatever block is next. but I still need a few minutes to clean up, whether it is putting away material I was using closing computer applications, etc.,

and this eats into the time allocated for my next task. Well, Chetwin, you need the cleanup time to be part of the actual block that you were scheduling, because it is putting away the papers, or like in my case, shutting down my podcast studio after a time block dedicated to time blocking, that's actually part of the block. Now, if you need more time to accomplish what you want to accomplish, and clean it up, then give yourself more time in the block, but probably the issue is it's just psychological.

You see when the block ends and you want to do the primary work task until you get there. So a little trick you can do is maybe 15 minutes away from the end of the block where it's actually drawn out on your time block planner, do a little dotted line. And then you can write above or below, rather, that dotted line with clean small script cleanup. It's a psychological hack,

but you have two hours put aside for research from 12 to 2 and you see at 145, you have this dotted line and under it it says cleanup. Now your mind just thinking, ah, when I get to 145, that's when I'm finishing up the primary activity and moving to the cleanup part of the actual task. The next question comes from all the productivity I can fit, one word. He or she asks, how would you suggest we reduce work complexity? As companies grow, they add layers of complexity that inhibit productivity, such as mandatory training, annual goal, and evaluation processes, system approvals, etc.

And on top of it, they use software products such as Workday and ServiceNow that are not at all user-friendly. How can corporations reduce or eliminate those time-sucking processes that inhibit productivity, especially for managers? Well, I think this is a really big issue. In my book A World Without Email, I talk about the so-called productivity paradox. This observation that as technology such as network computers entered the front office, making things significantly easier in isolation than they had been before, I can now type on a word processor instead of a typewriter. That's much easier.

I can book a flight using an internet portal as opposed to a travel agent and having to then send the tickets via an inner office memo to the travel office. I can go and do my time sheet with an online form instead of filling out a piece of paper and having to put it in a mailbox where it made its way to be processed by real people. So all these technologies came along built on the foundation of network computers

that made lots of different activities that are common in corporate life, put them isolation, apples to apples to how they were done before, easier. It did not make us more productive. It did not mean that we were producing more work per hour. It did not mean that we were making more money for our companies. It did not mean that the economic metric of non-industrial

productivity increased. None of that happened. It's called the productivity paradox. Now, one of the explanations for this paradox is that what we did is we made certain tasks just easy enough for the frontline value producers to do on their own. So we fired or reduced support thinking we're going to save money by slashing those salaries. But when you put all of this new work that just became easy enough on the plate of the people that are doing whatever the frontline activity is that ultimately produces value for your company, it takes away their time to work on those activities. Now they are net net producing less bottom line value for your organization per week or per day or per month or however you want to measure it. So now you end up having to

hire more people to get the same amount of value production done. Typically their salaries were more expensive than the support workers in the first place and you can end up worse off than you were before. Now, to make matters worse, you then get this pile on effect where you have individual units within organizations that are thinking about how do we optimize our operations. So you have internal facing units, let's say the unit that deals with payroll. And they're asking, okay, how can we optimize our operation? Oh, if we get a big intranet tool like workday and we can just get everyone to come in here and just a few times a month, they need to come in and they need to sign off on their timesheet and there's this salary declaration.

that they just need to approve, and then they can just go in with a few simple searches. Once they learn how to do it, they can check in on how money is moving in and out of their unit, and they can reconcile that. And it's all going into these databases, and it kind of automates it. And, man, we really can operate much more smoothly

once we have everyone coming into workday and filling out this stuff for us. And yes, that might make payroll operate much more efficiently. They need less people. It's more effective. Fewer mistakes arise. but now you've added another non-trivial, often ambiguous and complicated time demands on the people who are whatever, writing the code or doing the ad copy or whatever it is that actually makes

the value for the organization. So in this age of new productivity-saving technologies, when you have units, internal-facing units saying how can we best leverage technologies to make us as efficient as possible, now you're really starting to bleed the lifeblood out of your organization. and we end up with more complexity, we end up more overwhelmed. Everyone just trying to solve the problem of how do we make our thing I want to do better can strangle the ability of the company or the organization or the team to actually produce the stuff that is the raison d'etra

that they have in the first place. So I think there really needs to be accountability on this issue that is clear and has some authority behind it. One thing I've been arguing for is the introduction of a chief productivity officer as an actual C-suite position in the corporate hierarchy. And you can imagine something similar in non-corporate hierarchies, like at a university, for example. And their whole goal is to say, here's what matters.

X, Y, and Z is what we produce. That's our mission. That's what produces value. That's what makes the money for the company. That's what makes culture better for our nonprofit. This is the stuff that we're here to do. and my job is to protect that and maximize that, to make sure that everything we're doing at this organization,

especially internal-facing units, everything we're doing is aligned with producing as much as that as we can with the people we have, like productivity in the actual literal sense here, that if you're working here trying to produce this stuff is valuable, the ratio of time you're doing that the other time is really large. Because you have to have that back pressure because individuals in the moment are going to do what makes their life easier and what makes

their unit easier. Individual managers in the moment are going to say, we're going to save money if we fire some of the support staff. You need someone who sees the big picture and says, what is the net net impact I think is going to happen of any of these things on the ability of people to actually produce the things that is valuable? This might mean hiring more people and making life for some people handling certain things harder. Of course, work is hard. So this idea that the key in work is to make it as easy as possible

is not really conducive with the definition. Work is by definition the application of force against a resting body. It's supposed to be hard. So yeah, maybe now there's more support staff. You're an internal facing unit. You're doing more work because it puts less demands on the ad copywriter or on the computer programmer. And that's actually best for the company. If we need more people to get that done. We need more people to get that done. You know, maybe what we need is one half day a month where basically, okay, your team is assigned a half day a month and all these different people from all these different internal facing units come in and they each get a 20 minute slot and they kind of get from you the information they need. They come up with a laptop. All right,

we want to do payroll stuff. Can you sign this? What about this? Let's check it on your grants for you. We don't want you to worry about this at all until we get to your half hour slot or our half day slot or whatever it is once a month. And everyone will come to you and get from you what they need to make sure that the lights are going to stay on and the taxes are going to get paid, but now you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, of course, that's much harder for all these internal facing units, but now that ad copyright or computer programmer can really get after it. It's much better for the company. That's just an example, but that's the type of thing you might get if you actually had a chief productivity officer that was saying, forget what's easy,

forget what short term seems like at saving money. What is the long term? In the long term, what is best for actually producing the stuff? That is our mission to produce. All right. So anyways, this is a bit of a rant. It's a very complicated topic, very complicated solutions. But it's one that I think we need to deal with. The productivity paradox is real. It's making people miserable, and it's reducing significantly the effectiveness

of a lot of organizations and companies. We need to elevate the solution of this problem to become a tier one concern. If we do, there are a lot of benefits to be gained. All right, let's see if we can return to some concision here. by moving on to a more technical question. Comes from Malcolm, who asks, how do you go about identifying and then optimizing unspoken processes,

which are currently being handled by the hyperactive hive mind? Right. So this is like what I was talking about in the deep dive from today's episode, that our work is made up of these projects, implicit projects or processes, whatever term we want to use. and the default is that we try to make progress and collaborate on these projects or processes

with just unscheduled back and forth messaging. I call that the hyperactive hive mind in my book. World Without Email, the key to get away from this is to, as I talked about the deep dive, put in place alternative implementations, alternative ways to accomplish these collaborative projects that don't require a bunch of unscheduled messaging. Malcolm's asking, well, how do you figure out

what these things are that even need to be optimized? And, you know, Malcolm, I would say, let your inbox be your guide. Oh, here is an email that I have to answer. Before I do, let me step back and ask, what is the implicit collaborative project that is associated with this email? And I would literally keep a text file on my computer

and write this down. These are like ongoing processes, right? Have a text file on your desktop. Write it down, write it down, write it down. And then you can take a moment to, you know, bold it, and then put under it, like, okay, current implementation. I'm going to just hive mind it.

Let's just go back and forth. It's really quick. I'm going to defer to a scheduling software. We are going to do an automated process, like I talked about the deep dive, where we go from whatever, we use Dropbox and this scheduled time for updating drafts, etc.

Right? I would say write it down. Here's ongoing processes. Boom, bold. Here's the name of it. Under it unbolded description of how I'm implementing it. So if you want to handle it with the hive mind, you're writing that down in black and white ink.

All right. So again, the emails or Slackchats themselves are what identify the processes because you can just ask, ooh, here's something I have to answer and I'm kind of annoyed I do. What's the project here? And if it's not already on your list,

you're going to add it. You have to take a moment to come up with a plan. Below that, you can have, if those are ongoing, you can have sort of permanent or regular processes that over time, you say, okay, here's handled the same type of process. a few times the same way.

So now let me just put down that general schema down here. You know, meetings, schedule once. Quick questions about X, Y, or Z, office hours, right? See, kind of these ongoing implementations of these processes that you're working with right now, and then over time, as you finish those up and things come up again and again, you move down to this section of permanent processes get put down there. Have this as a Tier 1 document right there on your desktop.

that you're constantly updating. The inbox or the slack sparks your attention that this is something I need to think about that text file structures that thinking. That one document, having that one document and the maintenance of that document will significantly, significantly improve your working life as a knowledge worker,

in particular the amount of these unscheduled messages that are urgent that you need to deal with will significantly reduce. All right, so let's move on now to some more philosophical questions. I have two questions on roughly the same topic now about technology and thinking and depth. And the first one comes from Abdul, who asks, how much should one rely upon technology to think for them? How much should we rely on technology to do our basic thinking?

Does it allow us to become more creative by avoiding the grind, or will it become a crutch causing the basic muscles of those would-be scholars to atrophy? And based on this, do you recommend that I master basic skills? in my field in the same ways that my professors have in order to stand out from the crowds who avoid it. All right, and there is some elaboration on this question. Abdul, I believe, is an academic linguist in training. And there are certain activities involving memorization of vocabulary and verbs and structure and such that I guess there's tools now to help you do it. And he's still doing it the old-fashioned way.

Well, Abdul, my thought on this is technology, no matter how advanced, cannot help you sidestep the actual cognitive difficulty of learning things. This requires an act of deliberate practice, in particular an intense focus on the skill information or idea that is relevant. You have to give it intense focus, attempt to make progress or apply the knowledge in a way that stretches you past what's easy.

It is in that stress that you actually get growth. The best technology can do here is maybe put some guide rails or structured around that actual training process. you know, you still have to swing the golf club a lot to learn how to be a good golfer. Technology can give you some hints on what's going on with your swing and what you might want to correct, but you still have to do the hard work. Same thing with any type of academic memorization or skill building like you're talking about.

I don't really care if you use technology or not. I think the key thing here is learning the information, and that's going to be a very old-fashioned process of your brain concentrating hard. and whether what it's concentrating hard on is displayed on a computer screen where a phase repetition algorithm selected it or it's on an index card that you handwrote, I think is a small epsilon of difference.

So if the tools help reduce the motivation barrier to get started for some people, then great. If for you, the analog tools that you saw your professors use are more motivating, gives you a closer, makes you more likely to do the work,

then, okay, use those tools, but at the end, the tool doesn't really matter. It's all going to come down to a human brain trying to actually build new neuronal connections. That is the same messy, electrochemical, biological, neuronal process that it has always been. All right. Now here is a related question from Kevin. Kevin asks, how important is memorization in knowledge, deep work attainment? Kevin is a hospital pharmacist of over a decade.

and he says lots of information can be looked up in an online drug reference for clinical queries, but it slows me down so much in my research, and I often wonder if it would enhance my deep thought or work to memorize more facts. But is that a waste of my time in this age of why bother memorizing? We can always just look it up. So, Kevin, I don't think posing this as an abstract question with the universal answer is going to be that useful. looking up information using digital tools, it's a relatively neutral thing.

I think it's been obviously a real net improvement or benefit that you have a tool like Google in the world where certain information, facts, addresses, what day is, you know, Labor Day this year, these type of questions, you get the answer right away. That's reducing friction that wasn't really doing much good, but you have a very specific case here. I'm doing research work.

Having certain information in my head, maybe we'll make that research work better. Well, if that's the case, then put the information in your head. What you're doing here is optimizing a particular process. And so experiment. Spend the time to memorize some category of key information and see if it gives you an advantage. And if not, then say, great, I'll just look this up. And if it does, then good, there is an advantage there.

For this general area, that specificity is probably really important. You know, what tools you use, what you memorize, what you look up, how you keep track of information. You got to tailor that to what it is you're trying to. to do professionally, whether that makes it easier, whether it makes it harder, whether it's a no-op. And so this is a case where I think you are optimizing something specific, so there's no universal answer here. You got to try it. If it makes you better as a researcher, great. If it doesn't really make a difference, don't waste your time with unnecessary complicated systems here. All right, I want to move on now to a couple of questions about career, career planning,

career satisfaction. I've been getting some feedback that people like when I tackle these topics, which I wrote a whole book about years ago. So good they can't ignore you. So I'm going to do two questions on career satisfaction. The first, and I apologize, I've lost the name here. So we'll say this is from Anonymous, says I'm a MD PhD student in Sweden with my wife currently working in the US. We are considering our options for the future. This decision has many aspects such as careers, raising children, friends and family, etc. The options are quite different. For example, a doctor in Sweden

makes about a third of the money made by an American doctor, but they work about 50% fewer hours. Child care from one year is also a universal benefit in Sweden. I would greatly appreciate your input into big decisions like this. So the first thing I'm going to do

in answering this question is actually move the issue of money temporarily over to the side. Forget that for now. Let's focus first on the question of lifestyle. When you picture yourself and your wife and your future kids 10 years from now, what is it that you imagine that gives you a sense of satisfaction or it's really appealing or it's something that gets you exciting? Let's lock in the lifestyle, what your day-to-day looks like, what your week looks like.

a really good exercise to try to uncover the aspects of life that really resonate and what don't. You know, some people here, there might be a huge push for time affluence. There might be a huge push for being in nature. There might be a big push here for being surrounded by family and friends and community. And you're taking your kid to the Little League game and having, you know, your siblings live nearby and you're having barbecues. Actually, wait, let me correct myself. It's a native Texan. Barbecue refers to the very long slow.

preparation of meat. What people do in their backyard is almost always grilling. So let me get that terminology right. So you're grilling with, you know, friends and family. Different things. Resonate to different people. Maybe you have a doctor house style image where you are curing cases. You're a, you're an academic doctor presenting ground rounds. You're really making an impact on patient's lives or in research that you're doing. I mean, there's different visions here. You got to figure out what matters, what doesn't. Nailed on this lifestyle as concretely as you can. Now we get to the interesting part. Given, again, the foundation I have is a training to be a doctor, I'm an MD, PhD program, building on what I have

and all the different paths forward, what's the most, let's say, consistent or highest probability of success path I can think of to get towards this lifestyle. Now, there's a few different factors that are going to be involved in this path. There's going to be location. Location almost always plays a big part in lifestyles that you imagine. Is it a location near nature? Is it a location that's near a lot of family and friends? It's a location that's near a bustling city. Like depending on that lifestyle picture,

location's going to play a big role. Very few lifestyle visions are location agnostic. Money is going to play a big role. You know, we often get caught in this really non-productive dichotomy when it comes to money where we make it seem like your only two options are trying to maximize every dollar you can possibly make and become as rich as possible, regardless of the consequences, or say, you know, I read that Alan Krueger paper about the financial happiness set point and money doesn't matter once you're past a really small point.

And so I don't care at all. It's more complicated than that. So when you have a concrete lifestyle, now you can ask the question of not is money good or bad, but how much would I need? How much would I need for this particular lifestyle? And that's really good again, make a difference in terms of what you do professionally. This type of medicine versus that, you know, it's going to make a big difference. Now, you're in a very fortunate situation.

When it comes to a research medical career, you have a dial you can turn that has different earning potential amounts all the way around. And you can turn that to exactly where you want it pretty much because you have a huge amount of possibilities here. From, you know, part-time shift work to more general practice or research type. work to procedure-based work where you get really high reimbursements and the money is much higher. So the money question is not as money good or bad. It's how much do I need for this lifestyle? And then finally it's going to come the autonomy question. How much professional autonomy do I need in terms of control over when and how much I work? That almost always plays a big role in a lot of these visions because some of these lifestyle visions actually require quite a bit of autonomy. I only work this much.

I take months off. If I'm in Sweden, I want to go to my cabin in the summers and not really work in the summers. You have these visions you have. The autonomy usually plays a big role. And that's something you have to very carefully plan for to achieve.

As I talk about it's so good they can't ignore you. Autonomy is very valuable, so you have to have something rare and valuable to offer in return. So here's the three factors you have to figure out that. Location, money, and autonomy required. to accomplish your lifestyle vision. Okay.

Now you can say, great, given my training and the different options that makes sense for me, given what I've done, let me lay out a professional path here that gets me those three things. And now you can start

to make some concrete decisions. All right, I need to be in this location. Is that going to be in Sweden? Is that going to be the U.S.? Like, it might depend, right? As you go through this, for example, you might say, well, there's a way to do this vision in Sweden

in a way to do this vision in the U.S. from a location standpoint. Then you move on the money. Now, here is why you might get tripped up. Or the things you're imagining this lifestyle, you say, you know, that's never going to happen on the sort of Swedish doctor salary. So, oh, that takes Sweden out of the picture. Or you're looking at the things you want. You're like, that's very comfortable in the upper middle class Swedish doctor salary.

So good, Sweden's still on the table. And then you get to the autonomy. And maybe in the U.S., this is where you get tripped up because you say, ah, the money I need is going to go with this type of job. but that job's not going to give me the autonomy I want for my vision. So that's not going to work. And you begin to make some concrete plans. And of course, these things are going to push back and forth on each other.

You might not be able to satisfy all three, and you'll realize, okay, I need to lower my money requirement to get the autonomy requirement up because the type of job that's going to give me the autonomy I want for my vision is not going to make as much money. So let me work on my reformulation of my lifestyle vision here that can have a less money demand. And you go back and forth and you retune these and you get concrete and you come away with with a particular plan. I'm going to move here, do this type of job, and I'm going to try to evolve the job to this type of autonomy, and you're aiming towards a lifestyle image that resonates.

This is lifestyle-centric career planning. It's a great way to make these decisions. It doesn't matter. You don't have to have distress of what if I get it wrong. When you have a lifestyle that resonates, what's happening here is that you're just clarifying some internal intimations of what matters to you. You're not making them exact and it's not precise, but it's pushing you in the right direction. And you know what? If it's not what you think or you have trouble actually implementing that lifestyle, you can always update this vision. But working backwards from a lifestyle that resonates and asking what's location money and autonomy needed to execute this is a very, I think, structured and rigorous way of planning a career. And it's much better than the simplistic alternatives

were often given, such as just follow your passion or get as rich as possible versus eschew money all together. Or just take a while. A lot of people do. I see this a lot. They fixate on one thing because they feel paralyzed by all of the ambiguity

of the decision. So they fixate on one thing. You know, I want a lakehouse. And like all their other decision goes on that. Or I want to get the biggest promotion. I'm not going to think about any other aspects of lifestyle

or my family's life or anything else. So let's just do that. We shouldn't really think about anything else. It's not fair. You can't fix it on one thing. You've got to have the whole lifestyle because the whole lifestyle is what you're going to be living. So even your life is something you like or you don't.

That's a holistic picture. So lifestyle-centric career planning is going to really clarify a lot of these decisions. It's rigorous, it's structured. So good luck with that decision. All right. And let's build on that last question with another one in the same general topic area.

This comes from Diane. She says, is it ever okay to take a promotion that's more shallow work? I work in a large organization. I enjoy the work I do, but there is pressure to get promoted and build my resume and climbed a ladder. I recently applied to a job that has a fancy title, but it's like a chief of staff job that's mainly emails, emails, emails, emails, scheduling stuff. I don't know. I think I would enjoy it, the actual work, but it would be valuable networking experience could open up new opportunities for me and would look really good on my resume. All right, so Diane, you're coming at this to haphazardly. Again, this is like I talked about in the answer to the last question, we can't just fix it on a random thing. Like, I don't know, it might be a good opportunity in my network and just go with that. This has to fit into a lifestyle centric career planning framework. What is the lifestyle you envision? What is the location, money, and autonomy levels that are going to get you there? And then how does this fit into it?

So, for example, going to a job with a ton of email and scheduling is probably going to be a significant reduction in autonomy, but it is going to probably enhance the money piece. You have to see how you've balanced those two things. And again, you're looking at a long-term plan. So maybe you have this lifestyle vision that has more autonomy than that chief of staff job will give you, but it's pretty clear that if you do that chief of staff job for two years, it's going to enable job X. Job X is going to give you the autonomy you need.

So maybe it's a stepping stone where you're temporarily passing back autonomy to get to something that's going to get you where you want. or maybe you don't care about autonomy, but the money is key because you really want to be able to move your family out of the small apartment into this bigger house in the better school district, right? Like, whatever the vision is of your lifestyle, you're going to have these tradeoffs. Apply that rigorous thinking here. You're not necessarily optimizing for the short term.

It's to get closer to this lifestyle in the next five to ten years. What's the right moves? And now you're going to have a clearer way of answering the question about this particular promotion. And it's going to be much better than I think the default that you're probably leaning towards right now, which again is random fixation. This would be bad or this might be good. Why not?

This lifestyle-centric career planning framework, I think, is going to get you a lot closer to a decision. That's going to make a lot of sense for you long-term. Let's take a quick break here to talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible. I'm talking about Optimize. Optimize is a subscription service that delivers to you some of the very best wisdom modern and ancient for living a deeper life. When you sign up for Optimize, you get access to their collection of over 600 philosopher notes. These are fantastic six-page summaries of some of the best nonfiction books ever written.

They're all put together by Brian Johnson, my longtime friend, the CEO of Optimized. There's some of the best book summaries I have ever read. In addition, you get a plus one video delivered to your inbox every day. It's a quick hit a wisdom from these books by Brian himself. You can click a link and immediately get to the philosopher note of that book right away. If you liked it, if you'd like the note, then boom, you buy the book. There's also masterclasses available for subscribers. These are one hour long masterclasses taught by world experts on the topics covered in the Optimize Network.

I taught one of these, a digital minimalism 101. It's one of the mini masterclasses available. So you subscribe to Optimize, you get access to that. I have known Brian for a long time. I've been involved with Optimize in the sense if they've done a lot of my books, I've recorded classes for them because I really like what they're doing. I think it's one of the best examples of the internet

actually promoting a deep life instead of getting in the way of such a deep life. So if you want to find out more, go to optimize. dot me slash deep and use the promo code deep at checkout. You will not only get 14 days free to try it out, but that promo code will give you 10% off. That's optimized.me slash deep, and the promo code is deep to get that free trial and 10% off. Let's also talk about Magic Spoon, long time sponsor of the show. Magic Spoon is great. tasting cereal like that treat cereal you used to have as a kid that was terrible for you,

but tasted so good, they figured out how to make that not bad for you. Magic Spoon cereal has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, and only four net grams of carbs in each serving, also only 140 calories per serving. It's keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carb, and GMO-free. Now, if you go to the Magic Spoon website, you can actually create your own custom bundle. So pick the flavors you like and put them into a bundle package. Here's the flavors available. Coco, fruity, frosted peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon.

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no questions asked. So remember, get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code Cal at checkout. to save $5. And with that, let's move on to some questions about the deep life. Our first question here comes from Alex. Alex asks, in your opinion, if Facebook or any other big technology company charge the price for people to use their service, would people,

would most people still use it? Or will the monetary value that has now been placed on it cause people to rethink their usage. Well, Alex, it's a good question. There's some research on this, though it's a little bit difficult to pin down exactly what the research says. I think there are some economists who did an artificial study of this type where they sort of ask people, theoretically speaking, you know, how much would we have to pay you or how much would you have to pay?

Like, how much, I think it was how much would we have to pay you to stop using Facebook. But there's also been a lot of surveys who are just trying to ask this question. question, you know, would you use Facebook if it costs more money or something like this? But again, it's hazy data. I went down a whole rabbit hole trying to understand this while researching my book, Digital Minimalism. And I never really came to a satisfactory quantitative solution in the existing literature. So I'm just going to sidestep that and give you a gut reaction just based on being immersed in this world. And I think, yeah, you'd have drastically, drastically fewer people using a service like Facebook if it costs money.

What would happen is, I think this would clarify for a lot of people. Wait, what exactly am I getting out of the service? Now, some people would have specific things they're getting out of it. Like maybe there's a Facebook group they use to organize something that's important to them. Maybe they are still in 2013 mode using Facebook to share pictures of their kids with their parents. I don't think anyone does this anymore. But, you know, there might be some people who are in that boat. But I think most people use Facebook as one of many default sources of the version.

I'm bored, click this app, it makes me less bored. That is pretty good at it because it does two things. One, it gives me intermittently reinforced social approval indicators. That people like this thing I posted, that people dislike this thing I'm posted, that people ignore it. Can't find out until I click that button. That's kind of interesting. And also, its news feed is algorithmically optimized to show you stuff that's going to press

some buttons. Yeah, that's kind of nice. But when you have to see it starkly as a source of diverge, that now you're going to have to pay money for. You're going to say, I don't think that's the type of diversion I'm going to pay for. I think I'd rather pay for Netflix because that seems a little bit more high quality than what I'm getting here. I might pay for a newspaper, you know, if I'm going to pay for information, I'd rather get it from a newspaper than my uncle's Facebook feed being chopped up and distributed across my news feed. Right, once it makes it stark, what's the value I'm getting from this?

and you see it's just diversion, there's so many other sources of diversion out there that it's not going to rise to the point of, oh, I will pay to maintain this particular one. And as I've said on the show many times, and I've said in other interviews as well, this is why I think social media, at least the large social media platforms are dead.

They just don't know it yet. It's because they got rid of their network effect model of we're about connecting you to other people that you know and they went to this diversion model. And once you're in a diversion model, yeah, you can build up a lot of users and get a lot of minutes, usage minutes,

if it's free and just anyone can kind of get on there and it's nice, but you're competing against every other source of diversion. And so when the cost goes up, people could leave very easily. You don't have them locked in. Alex, I think the key is there's other costs that could rise here beyond just it's now 99 cents a month or $2 a month to use Facebook. There could be a social cost. Oh, we don't like Facebook's involvement in some sort of particular political issue.

Well, that's a cost. And again, there's a, there's a, There's other sources of diversion. I don't like how Facebook dealt with X. So I'm not willing to pay that cost anymore. There's also just a cultural zeitgeist cost. The zeitgeist changes. A service like Facebook is no longer considered as exuberant or hip anymore.

It seems a little bit old-fashioned. And now we have a cost. And using this makes me kind of aligns me with being out of the mainstream of the zeitgeist. And so I'm not willing to pay that cost to get this mild diversion because I have a million other sources of cost. So I think that's what's happening now. as cost raise, people are quick to jump ship. So maybe at first they jump from Facebook over to Instagram and Twitter.

And then from Instagram to Twitter, they get a more purified pressing of those buttons with TikTok. So the TikTok kind of blows up. And that'll probably go the way of Snapchat at some point pretty soon too. And then a lot more people are just diverting from social media, probably just the other things. I'll use iMessage to send photos. I'll listen to podcast. Maybe I'm on long-term, or long-tailed rather, social media networks where it's a hundred of us, all interested in the same thing. We all pay $10 a month and we get together in person and it's a huge part of my life and it's much more fulfilling than just sending random tweets at people, right?

So again, once these things get down to just diversion, even a minor cost is going to push people away. That is why social media, the large social media platforms are at a lot more trouble than I think most people recognize. Xenon asks, do you identify it all with the philosophy of Anne Rand? Well, Zinan, I don't know much about that philosophy, other than just the standard cultural touchstones, the fountainhead, John Galt. I know that's all related to Rand and her philosophy. I just don't know much about it. I am, however, I guess, going to learn a lot more soon. This July, I'm speaking at Toscon.

I think Toss is an abbreviation for the objective. standard, and I believe the objective standard is a journal dedicated to objectivism, and if I am not mistaken, objectivism is Rand's philosophy. So I guess speaking this July at Toscon in Boston will expose me. I'll learn a lot more. I'm sure they'll be happy to educate me, and I'll have an opinion to share. I'm mainly excited I've got to say. It's my first in-person talk, non-trivial size in-person talk that I've booked since pre-pandemic. So that is going to be, that's something I'm definitely really looking forward to just to be in front of people again. So, you know, I'll report back seeing on about what I learned.

Our next question comes from Pedro. He asks, how do you balance discipline and enjoyment in leisure? I have a hard time taking part in leisure in the truest sense of the word that is doing something simply for the sake of it without any intent of a productive outcome. To give an example, I've always wanted to develop small computer games. while I managed to create a few ones, I've never enjoyed the process. I could force myself through sheer will, but it never lasted long. To make things worse, this actively discouraged me about the whole endeavor. Well, Pedro, first of all, I'm going to push back

on an idea here that the truest sense of leisure is doing something without any intent of a productive outcome. That's actually not quite right. I think you might be referencing my own reference of Aristotle in digital minimalism where I was talking about high quality leisure. But no, there the idea was what makes true leisure is that you're executing something without an instrumental intention. So you're not doing this activity because it's going to then get you ahead in your job. You're not doing this activity because it's going to look good for your political campaign you're running.

You're not doing this activity because you're trying to impress, you know, you're trying to impress people because you're trying to, you know, find a mate or something like this. You're just doing the activity because you think it is valuable in itself and you enjoy it. An actual productive outcome to what you're doing, that's a big part of what makes a leisure activity meaningful. I mean, I talk about when it comes to handcraft, right, where you're actually building things in the real world. If you look at Matt Crawford's writings on this topic,

what he really emphasizes is that the human brain gets great satisfaction out of seeing their intention made manifest concretely in the world. You have an idea and you manipulate hard things, you push up against the material and its limitations and gravity and all these other things. You come away with it in the end having built or fixed a thing you want to build or fixed. That's a productive outcome. And it's what makes that so satisfying.

So I want to separate productive outcome from instrumental intention. Okay. It's nothing bad. In fact, it's not really high-quality leisure if there's not something you're trying to do that you can actually do and look on with some pride, right? I finish this book and understand it. I fixed the motorcycle. I got the knitting project to the end. So don't be afraid of productive outcome.

Now, you might be influenced here and you're concerned by the tenor of some of the recent anti-productivity riding that's out there right now. A lot of it borrows from sort of a blast from the past. It really borrows from more mid-century or early 20th century economic materialism arguments that came out of Marx's work in the late 19th century, where it will look at any pursuit of a productive outcome in your leisure life as you just being a naive bourgeois sheep who has internalized these narratives of production that is making you a cog in this machine of capitalist exploitation. It's the type of stuff that, you know, you're going to get 100 papers on in your sophomore cultural anthropology class. The problem here, though, is that when it comes especially to leisure, it's just going against what we know about basic human nature, which far precedes the industrial revolutions that kicked off this type of critique. In the first place, human beings are wired in such a way that we do want to see our manifestations, we want to see our intentions made manifest concretely in the world. that is uniquely satisfying to us. It gives us a sense of autonomy and mastery of ourselves in the world.

That is crucial. That is crucial to a flourishing and resilient life. So productive outcome is okay. You're getting a little bit hyper productive about this? I mean, I don't know. It sounds like you're really pushing yourself. So I have a couple things to suggest here. A, balance the sort of productive high quality leisure pursuits with appreciation, gratitude

Pursuit. So appreciation gratitude pursuits is where you you build up an appreciation of something, such as like food or fine wine or landscape, scenic landscapes, or something you just really in music that you just really enjoy and you can appreciate being exposed to a high quality example of that and just give yourself those experiences and just enjoy it and be gracious for it. I like movies and I watch a great movie and I just enjoy the movie and I enjoyed it. I like food. I prepared or had a good meal at a restaurant. I just really enjoy it. I like scenic landscapes, I went for a hike, and I'm just fully immersed in it. I think that's great. And you want to balance the productive pursuits with that. It can't just be the ladder, though, right? It can't just

be, I'm going to stand in the Rose Garden. You also have to have the intentions being made manifest. Then when it comes to the intentions being made manifest, I think you need to go farther from your comfort zone. Maybe that's going to be the key where, like, I know nothing about this. It's not high stakes. I'm just going to learn how to whatever, do better photography or something that's so far from what you're known for and identify from that you don't, you don't have self-recrimination for not doing it well. You don't have this drive of, I want to be great at this, because if I'm not, then that's somehow going to be embarrassing because I'm known as a tech guy. So I'm going to do computer games. You better be big computer games. If that's the case, let's try something

completely different that you have no stake in, like or anthology in this example. And now you can, you can produce something as productive outcomes, but it's not really tied into your, your image and your identity or your professional identity. And you can just get those enjoyments of seeing your intentions made manifest without all that extra baggage that goes along with it. All right. So that's what I suggest. Chill out.

Take on more exotic projects where it's like, this is just cool. I'm doing it. I have no, you know, I'll see how it goes. And any progress I makeably proud of, and make sure in your leisure,

you're balancing these activities that do have a productive outcome with these appreciation, gratitude type activities. and I think you will get a lot out of your leisure life. Definitely a lot more than if you instead just numb or avoid pursuing quality leisure in the first place. All right, let's do one more question. Let's end on a quick one here. It comes from Michael.

What's the best way to prioritize and sequence a book reading list? Well, Michael, my general advice here is don't be too obsessive about what you read, thinking that there's the right books to read and the wrong books to read. And do not certainly try to create create a long-term sequence of books, something that's going to last a whole year or six months. It's going to be this book, then this book, then this book, and this book. It's going to create

too much friction over time. Other things are going to capture your attention, and you might lose the reading habit altogether. My recommendation is to take reading one month at a time. Say, what do I want to read this month? And be flexible. If something new comes up, you might adjust that list. One month, I think, is about right. So you have a plan, so you're going to push more reading than if it's just, what do I want to read today. But it also accounts for the fact that what you're interested in can shift over time. If I plan out a reading list for six months in the future, four months from now, I may have come across a new book that looks really interesting to me, that might open up a

whole other path of reading, but I can't read that because it's not on the list I made four months ago. So at the one month scale, you can say, yeah, I just heard about this cool book three weeks ago. I can read it next month. Or I want to go down a rabbit hole on a particular historical topic because I watched the documentary on it or I heard an interview with an author. They're great. I can read three of those books next month.

I can build next month around that. So you can have the serendipity preserved, but just enough structure. One month is just enough structure that you can lay out some plans that's going to push yourself a little bit more than just trying to make these reading decisions moment to moment.

For sure, keep track of the books, have a rough goal. I often talk about having a chapter goal each day. Keep track also which books you read each month. So you can sort of see how your taste and interest have changed over time and seeing the actual books themselves pile up is it self-motivating. And of course, above all else, I recommend that you read most

of my books each month. They're not as good if you read them twice in the same copy, so you probably need to buy new copies of my books every month and reread them. I think we all agree that's at the foundation of any satisfying and illuminating reading habit. All right, so that's all the time I have for this episode. Thank you, everyone who submitted your questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how to submit your own questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode, episode 100, so that'll be exciting. And until then, as always, stay deep.