Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep.37: The Planning Fallacy, Inbox Zero, and the Limits of Ethical Technology | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about avoiding the planning fallacy, my thoughts on Inbox Zero, and the limits of the ethical technology movement, among many other topics.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:OPENING: The three stages of hard creative work.WORK QUESTIONS* Cutting back on meetings. [23:06]* Improving your coworkers habits (without them knowing). [26:44]* Teaching depth to kids. [39:52]* Choosing between graduate school and a job. [46:30] * Scheduling side hustles. [48:55]* Career capital theory for parents. [49:44]* Avoiding the planning fallacy. [52:21] TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* My thoughts on Inbox Zero. [54:08]* Preventing short breaks from derailing depth. [57:47]* Reading on book per week. [1:04:04]* How much a serious college student should read. [1:12:33]* Digital minimalism for college students. [1:13:32]* On the limits of ethical technology (sermon alert). [1:20:20]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Planning for family in the deep life. [1:36:02]* Fostering depth later in life. [1:41:00]* Living deeply during pandemic homeschooling. [1:44:12]Special Offer Sponsor Links: - grammarly.com/DEEP - foursigmatic.com/DEEP - indeed.com/QUESTIONSThanks to listener 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, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I want to talk briefly here about something I have been dealing with recently. Friction. Now, to step back a little bit, when we're talking about creative efforts, what I sometimes call long-form creative efforts, where you're applying skilled cognition to produce something valuable, it's easy to oversimplify this. Say, well, you're either doing hard creative work or you're not.

Your efforts are either deep or they're shallow. But there's actually a really interesting substructure to these long-form creative efforts. And it's worth trying to highlight this substructure because it helps people get through the different stages and obstacles involved in producing really original valuable things using their brain. Now, I tend to think about long-form creative work as having three stages. Friction, which is the one I really want to talk about today, flow, and finalization. Long-time readers and listeners know that I never miss a chance for superfluous alliteration. So when you're working on something hard with your mind, that first phase is friction, and to me, that's the phase in which you have an idea of what you're trying to do, but you can't yet make the piece.

is work. And so you're throwing brain cycles at it. What about this way? What about that way? What if I come out from this angle? Doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. It's a lot of cognitive dead ends, a lot of cognitive rejections that you do again and again and again until you get to stage two, which is flow. Now, I run the risk of danger here because I am overloading the term flow. I do not mean this necessarily to be exactly the psychological state that Mihaila Lachicent Mihai identified. It can be. But I mean flow here a little bit more generally. This is where the pieces are coming together. All right. Now I'm making progress. Now things are coming together. I see this thing I'm trying to create with my brain. I see how the pieces are going to fit and I start

fitting the pieces together. And then there's this final stage finalization, which is where you take these pieces that are coming together and you have to, work out the details, you have to grind through the polishing, and you have to do what's required to take this thing that you're excited about and get it to a professional level and get it ready for actual consumption. And finalization often takes much longer than people would like. Finalization is often what weeds out the amateurs from the professionals because it is hard work, and it's after that fun flow phase. So let me make this more concrete by going through the two types of long-form creative efforts that most define my own professional life,

which is writing and solving proofs. So writing in the context of me doing books and articles and essays on the intersection of technology and culture as I do, and proofs being my primary work as a theoretical computer scientist. So for writing, the friction phase is, I know the general idea I want to do here. I have a in my head, sort of a hook or an idea, but this is based off of, I don't know, a rough understanding of the relevant information. Now I actually have to get in there and confront real information.

And I have to talk to people and I have to read things and have to confront what's actually true and then see how this idea really starts, how it's really going to come together. And it can take a while to make that work. To go from, here's my idea for a chapter. Here's my idea from an article. To go from there to, okay, now I actually see how this chapter is going to come together. I'm going to cite this and build on this and bring in this idea over here and draw from this interview over here.

Or this is how this article is going to come together. It takes a lot of time. A lot of trying to fit the pieces together and it doesn't quite work. And building an outline in your head and being excited about it and then you confront that outline with something in the real world, the real world source of information, you realize, oh, that doesn't quite make sense. Right, so that's friction for writing. Flow is when I have the sources, they make sense, the outline makes sense, and now I'm actually

putting together. I'm literally writing that draft, and I feel like I have the tools I need next to me to build the thing I'm trying to build, and then finalization in writing, in this example, would be actually polishing prose and craft, which is really hard. You do your very best, and it's painstaking, and then the editor comes by and says, now this is not working and then you repeat and you get copy editing, then you get fact checking. You know, I'm talking here as someone who is just coming off the final stages of my new book. Like finally we're at production now, where you're looking at the actual production pages,

what they're going to look like in the book. This is the first step in book writing where you finally get past actually touching the content. Anyways, finalization takes a really long time. let's run through these three stages with my other type of long form creative work, which is solving proofs. Friction is, I think a result like this is feasible and important, and I want to try to show something like this, and I don't know how. And it can be really frustrating. You just, you have to come at it again and again. I honestly think about proof solving in my head, like, I don't know, you're strafing a target. in World War II or something, or let's be a little bit more blunt, you're running into a wall

and it doesn't work. You're like, no, I use a reference relevant to my kids in Halloween. You're like Harry Potter at King's Cross Station, but you forgot what platform has the magic wall, but you know you have to do it at a run to get through when you find the magic wall, so you're smashing into column after column with your luggage cart. hoping you finally find one where you go through. That's probably a little bit more blunter way to do it. Though I guess Harry Potter King's Cross references is not quite as cool as

Spitfire strafing targets during World War II, but this is where we're at. That's where we're at, folks. And that's what it can feel like. What about this angle? Doesn't work. What about this angle? Doesn't work. Well, what if I changed the problem?

Let me make it a little bit easier, and maybe I can get a foothold. Doesn't work. But what if I go this way? Oh, it's trivial here. And it's just again and again. and again, different angles, tweaking the projects, the problems, different attacks on the problems,

let me talk to my collaborators, let me try again, let me read this paper. It's very difficult. Then if you break through, you get the flow, like, ah, it's working. This technique opens up analysis, and I'm making progress now, and there's still going to be some bumps I'm going to have to smooth over.

There's going to be some obstacles are going to have to leap. But when you get into the flow stage of solving a proof, those obstacles that come up, they're really fulfilling. It's like each one takes about an afternoon of thinking and you get past it and this whole thing comes together and then you get the finalization where you have to take those rough notes and make it into a polished paper that can be submitted for peer review and that takes a really long time and it's a pain.

I think these three stages, friction flow and finalization, are common, a lot of long-form creative work. And it's useful to acknowledge them. Because psychologically, how you handle each of these phases might be different. and if you don't acknowledge their existence, this can lead to unexpected suboptimal outcomes. A lot of people, for example, will focus in on the flow stage as like this is what it means to be doing

deep creative efforts. And so when they're in the friction phase, they say, well, what's this? I don't like ramming my luggage cart into these brick barriers when all these muggles are looking at me. This is a bad project, I should move on.

Or they don't know about the finalization stage, right? They just think about the flow stage, and so they give that short shrift or sidestep it. And without that finalization stage, that grinding hard work, which can take a long time, their creative output never gets to a stage where it can have a true impact. And again, they're accidentally blunting it.

Right, because we often want to do this. Like, well, I want to put my energy into the flow stage. That's what I want to be doing. And then we don't put energy in the friction. We don't put energy in the finalization. or we get spooked by friction or we get spooked by finalization and a lot less gets produced. All right, so back to me and back to friction.

So, you know, I do these two different types of efforts, in part because I feel like they balance each other out. Something I've liked throughout my career as a computer scientist is that I usually have some writing going on at the same time and I find these things often balance each other. So if I'm in friction with a CS problem, maybe I'm in flow with a writing problem. If I'm in friction with a writing problem,

maybe I'm in flow with a CS problem, and so it averages out to me feeling okay. At the moment, this is what got me thinking about this particular discussion, I'm in friction everywhere. That's hard. It's just a coincidence in timing, but I'm in friction everywhere.

The main problem I'm working on is a theoretical computer science right now. I am ramming in the walls. The main things I'm working on in writing now as my book comes to a close, I'm out of the creative phase of working on my book, or we're leaving finalization.

There's some other things I'm working on, an article in a new book idea, and I am pure friction phase. I don't have all the pieces I need, and I know the only way to get there is I have to read more and talk to more people and I'm doing it, and I see the light coming,

but it's just a lot of hard work. It does not have the fun of the flow stage. So I just happen to be, in a coincidence of timing, the two cycles for the two different types of things I do are synchronized. and so I'm up to my neck in friction. I actually just got back from the ocean.

Me and the family went out there to the Atlantic to spend a few days. There's nothing I love better than an off-season beach town. It's quiet and it's cold and you have the beach and the ocean. It's very contemplative. There was a whole lot of friction over the past three or four days. in the time I got to stare at the waves and think there was no flow. Friction, friction, friction. That doesn't work.

That doesn't work. What about this? I don't think that's going to work. A lot of cognitive frustration. All right. Anyways, again, I just mentioned this to say that it is useful to understand the differences between these stages. Because I know flow is coming.

I'm willing to put in the friction time. And I guess there's a lesson there that I'll try to pass on to the audience is know those stages, know where you are, have different rituals or attacks or routines for each of the phases. Don't be worried when you're not in the flow phase. Know where that comes in the cycle. And I think you'll do a lot better. Now, just one other quick aside about this is friction in writing the same as writer's block. And I would say no. As you know, I don't really believe in writer's block. I feel like it's a term that amateurs. give to the process of actually writing, but this allows me to be more concrete about it. Writers block is where you feel friction and say, this is a sign I should stop writing. Writers block is where you say, I'm not in flow and that's a problem. When you understand these three phases, writer's block goes away. You say, oh, I'm just in friction now. And that is as important a part of the process as the flow process. And you can't sidestep it. You got to read. You got to talk to people. You got to think. You got to read. You go

Talk to people, you have to think. That's what's happening in writing. Just like in proof work, you have to try an angle, triangle, try an angle. If that doesn't work, change the problem, try again. Change the problem, try again. Read something else. Talk to your collaborators, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Those cognitive cycles are actually aggregating value that in flow is shaped into something valuable and in finalization is prepared to ship. You can't skip any of the phases. So no, friction is different than writer's block. Writer's block is a term, again, that people use to label friction as a way to stop doing work. Anyway, so there you go.

Friction, flow, and finalization. If you recognize that's what's involved in your creative output, I think you can produce a lot more. That being said, I really look forward to getting out of the friction phase and at least something I'm working on right now because it's demanding, and I do not want to be forced to use more inappropriate Harry Potter references. Let's do a little business here.

In a recent episode, I talked about my, time block planner. It comes out on November 10th. I'm very excited about it. And I talked about some pre-order bonuses we were doing to try to reward my more long-term or serious productivity geek listeners who are going to order this planner anyways. We wanted to have something to give you to say thanks. So we talked about this pre-order promotion. You can get the details on my website at calnewport.com slash blog. I wrote a post about this. I also sent it to my email list, but basically if you pre-order it, yours an email address at Penguin Random House where you forward your proof of purchase. And you were put on an invite list for a seminar we're doing. Not seminar, right? What do we call it?

Academy. Time Block Academy. A live event. A live event where I answer questions pre-submitted and submitted live about time blocking. We can geek out about it and get into a lot of detail about how to use the planner and how time blocking works. All right. So there, and then also I believe we were going to, as soon as you send that email, as soon as it's processed by the marketing people, they also will send you a link to a video I recorded that I show off the planner and I show you the pages and as you get a sneak peek about the planner, you order.

So that was the pre-order campaign. All right, a few bits of follow-up business about that. One, the price is falling on the planner. So Amazon, I don't know, Amazon does what it does with. prices. The planner was originally listed for $25 because it's been so popularly ordered, pre-ordered. The price is down to $16. Now, if you ordered it through Amazon already, do not worry. They have what's called a pre-order price guarantee, which says when they ship you the planner on the day it comes out, they will charge you whatever the cheapest price was so far between when you ordered

it and when it ships. So if you bought the planner for $25, or at least you thought you bought the planner for $25, good news, you bought it for $16. And that price might even get cheaper. So I think that's good news. You don't have to worry about timing your purchases around that price. They'll give you the cheapest price. Two, a lot of people are asking rightly so, can we see inside pages of the planner? How can we buy a planner if we don't know what it actually looks like. This is a very good question. So here's what happened.

With most books, I mean, this is insider baseball, but with most books, there's this feed with which your publisher feeds all this information to Amazon, including inside images of the book. Amazon puts it on their site. Typically, they put inside pages up 30 days before the publication date. So my publisher fed Amazon, lots of nice images of the inside of the planner. The idea was these would come on. up around October 10th.

We waited until after that to announce the pre-order campaign, just assuming they would be there. Amazon didn't put them up yet. So we're working on it. We're working on getting Amazon to put those up. My publisher is going to try to also just publish pictures of it on the Amazon page a little bit farther down. You know, there's places where publishers can put their own images. So we could just have them there while waiting for the inside pages to come up. You can also see them right now on the Penguin Random House page for the planner.

they have the inside pages. In fact, you can read the entire introduction of the book on their website and learn exactly how it works and see sample pages and see it filled out. So anyways, my apologies, that's just a technical weirdness. We're going to get those inside pages on Amazon soon and you can find them now on the Penguin Random House page for the planner.

Other technical points, people ask, well, what if I can't, what if I pre-order but I can't attend the live event, the Time Block Academy event. Yes, we are going to record it, and yes, we will send a link to the recording to everyone who pre-ordered, so you do not have to be there live

to have access. And finally, a lot of people noticed there was some legal terminology that Penguin made me put at the bottom of the pre-order campaign that said something about U.S. citizens or U.S. residents only. You can basically ignore that.

You will get the link and can attend the event, no matter where you order it from. Just don't tell anyone I said that. All right, so those were the technical notes on the planner. Hey, by the way, thank you everyone who has been ordering it. I think this time block planning Academy event is going to be great. And I think the planner is going to be something that a lot of you are pleased with. I have been

loving using it. Let's be honest, like the whole reason behind this planner is I wanted it. I was tired of doing this hand formatting notebooks. And I figured, hey, maybe I can get a publisher to build me the planner I want. But hopefully some of you would want it as well. All right, let's also do quickly the Spotlight Review. This is where I read a real five-star review from iTunes. This one is from, well, the name is San exclamation point 631-05202020. All right, I mean, I know a lot of sand exclamation point 631105202. It's really common name.

You know, there's really a period there back in the 80s where that was the trendy thing to name your kids. all right the title of this review is excited that you're doing podcast it reads my husband and I have been fans of your blog back when we were grad students and have followed your work and drink up every book you put out deep work was a phenomenal and world-changing book there are many books and contents in the field of productivity but your work stands out because it is not just about optimization you're brutally honest about how good work is hard and is always going to be hard and there's no shortcut or hack to put it in the hours protecting your cognitive abilities you're optimization strategies are rooted in this foundation of intention. So happy that you're branching off into other media, there aren't enough Cal Newport books. We'd love to hear more about your learnings about how the brain works when learning. By the way, I like that some of these reviews now are addressed in the first person, and they'll refer to me in the first person, like they're addressing me directly. That's a sign that you're probably too hard, maybe too hard to reach when people have to actually use reviews to interact with you.

But anyway, sand exclamation point number, number, number. I appreciate that review, just as I appreciate all reviews and all ratings and all descriptions, it does help spread the word. As I always say, if you want to submit your own questions to the podcast, sign out for my mailing list at caldneyuport.com. Once every two months or so, I send out a survey, nice solicit questions, and those are the questions I use on the podcast. We have a great group of questions to get to today, and one last thing before we do is I want to thank one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

And I'm talking about grammarly. You've heard me talk about grammarly before, and you know I'm excited about it. Because here's the thing. I've talked about this. People do not realize that degree to which what makes professional writing sound professional is the editing. We work on getting our thoughts out there, and then it goes to an editor, and the editor works with us to make those thoughts clearer. What sentences we use, what words we choose, the clarity of how we try to portray our sentences,

and it goes from an editor to a copy editor who goes even farther into things like word choice and clarity. And by the time it comes out on the other side, it has that effortless feel of, wow, this is compelling, this is convincing, this feels professional. We use a lot of editing. Grammarly has this premium product called Grammarly Premium which brings professional caliber editing basically into all the writing you do. When we think about grammar checkers in the old model of, well, they fix grammar mistakes.

And obviously, Grammarly does this, and you do not want grammar mistakes. It will make you seem amateur. But what this new Grammarly Premium product also does is it'll help you with your vocabulary. There's a better word here. There's a more compelling word here. It also will help you with clarity.

It will say, hey, this sentence could be written in a better way, typically pushing for more concision, typically pushing for more active voice versus passive voice. This is all the secret sauce that makes professional writing professionally. I remember, for example, my very first manuscript I ever submitted for my book, How to Win at College. I was 21 years old when I submitted it. I remember my editor very nicely coming back and saying,

hey, I like what you're talking about here, but you're starting a lot of sentences with the word so. I looked and I was like, she's right. You know, and it made the writing better. She took it out. So anyways, you can have the benefit of professional style editing and all the writing you do and all of your main apps and all your main devices with Grammarly Premium. You will get a huge advantage in your professional life if people think of you as someone who communicates

very clearly. This will help you. So elevate your writing with 20% off Grammarly Premium. if you sign up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off Grammarly Premium at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. Use your browser to access that, not your phone. For some reason, the website has some issues with the iOS Safari browser, so do it with a desktop or laptop, not your phone.

Grammally.com slash deep. Get your writing professional. All right, let's get rolling. And we will start with, as always, some work questions. Tallis asked how to reduce the number of meetings while staying aligned with your team. So Tallis, I think a big issue with meetings is when people use them as a substitute for actually having a process or workable productivity habits. So this is pretty common where people will deal with things on their plate, objectives their team has to deal with by saying,

let's have a standing meeting for this project. And then every different project, every different objective gets a standing meeting. And the idea is, look, I am too unorganized to actually trust myself to make progress on these things. I don't really have a system. I don't do things like capture, configure, control. And so at least if I see a meeting on my calendar, that will force some progress every week or every other week or however often you schedule the meeting.

And maybe the motivation of knowing I have a meeting coming up will get me to do a little bit of work right before it. It's basically a really low fidelity, low impact productivity system that generates lots and lots of meetings. So what's the alternative? will actually have a process for dealing with the various objectives or projects on your plate. Actually, I have a place to keep track of who's working on what. How is it going?

What do they need? You have a place with that information that's being kept track of. Actually have for yourself in your personal sphere, productivity habits where you are able to see what do I need to be working on and you can actually put a side time and actually work on it, not just because there is a meeting tomorrow, not just because there's a deadline, but just because you are controlling your time. You're doing something like capture, configure control.

In this alternative setting, you do not need weekly meetings for every single thing you're working on because that just looks like a much poorer productivity system. Now, you probably still need some meetings, but these meetings become a lot more focused and a lot more efficient. They become much more like the meetings you see in agile project management methodologies, like scrum or like Canban. You might have a short meeting with the whole team

where you are moving forward all the different projects and objectives. Okay, we can see plainly on a taskboard or in a tool like flow or Asana. Who's working on what? How's it going? What's their status? Great. Would you need anything else? Let's update the board. What are you doing here? We have a new task list assigned it here. You can handle making progress and synchronizing all your projects at once and it takes 15 minutes and you do it very quick and then people get back to working. This is what I think works better. So meetings, I think, should be an adjunct to really well-defined and effective team and personal productivity systems. And when you put meetings to work on behalf of an optimized system, they can be very useful.

If you do the alternative, however, and use meetings as your productivity system, it's an incredibly ineffective way to work. It fractures schedules and it makes people miserable. So that's what I would say, Talas. Figure out how you want to run your team's meetings and projects, what process makes the most sense. Figure out how meetings should fit into that optimized process, and you will probably find that you need a lot less meetings to get things done. And in fact, you'll be getting a lot more things done without those meetings. All right. Sticking with this theme of teams, Jamie asks, how do you break down collaborators and colleagues reflexively,

use of email and chat tools and their resistance to systems. Well, I mean, Jamie, as you know, I'm a big believer that in knowledge work, we do need systems, what I often call workflows, that replace just this dependence on ad hoc unstructured email and chat communication. And that in the future, we're going to find more and more organizations and teams that are very explicit about here are the workflows we use to execute the main things we do, and we've optimized them, and we've optimized them to help us transform thought matter in people's brains into value production or value-laden output as efficiently as possible. Workflows matter. We have to be

specific about them. We have to optimize them. It's not just enough to point people to an inbox or a chat channel and say rock and roll. That is a very inefficient workflow. Now, the way I read your question, though, is what happens when you're not in a position to actually overhaul explicitly the workflows that your team or your organization uses? Like, what happens if you're not a CEO that's saying, we're going to change the way we do business? Or you're a team lead that says we're going to change the way we do business. What happens when you're just a member of a team? Or maybe you're not even a member of a team. You're collaborating with people at other organizations. You're a professor with academic collaborators where you have no authority or say over the official way that work gets done.

How do you make progress there? Well, this is a big point I lay out in detail in my book coming out in March, a world without email, that in those cases, you still need workflows. You're still going to be better off if you put in place workflows that are alternatives to just rock and rolling on email and chat. But in this situation, you don't want to draw too much attention to them. Right. So to make this point clear, let me give you a classic example. Tim Ferriss's infamous batch email autoresponder.

Right, from his 2007 book, The Four Hour Workweek. So what a lot of people don't necessarily remember about the four-hour workweek is that the thing that sparked its rise in Silicon Valley was how it dealt with email. All of the initial coverage coming out of the sort of triumphant South by Southwest appearance that Tim made in 2007 that led to that blog and article coverage that really sparked the momentum for that book was really focused on what he was saying about email overload and how to reduce email. This was right at the beginning of that era where email switched from a cool tool to a force of oppression. And one of the big ideas in that book was have an auto responder that says, and you probably remember this, in order to serve you better, I will only be checking email twice a day at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. And you could customize those times, but that's what you would say. Now, the engineer types in Silicon Valley loved it because on paper this made a lot of sense.

A, you'd have the check email less, so you could be more effective, but B, you could see them thinking, how could you argue with that auto responder? Are people going to come back and say, I don't want you to serve me better, I want you to serve me worse, or whatever, they love this sort of confrontational, rational clarity of that explanation. Lots of people use that autoresponder. Today, no one does. Why? It annoyed the hell out of people.

It annoyed the hell out of people. I mean, look, I thought it made a lot of sense, too. But like a lot of people I discovered pretty early on, that people do not like having your systems pushed in their face, especially if your system is going to introduce some inconveniences into their life. Because what you're doing there is you're giving them a hard edge to push back against. And all over Silicon Valley, people put that autoresponder in the place. They felt really good about it.

and then their boss heard it. Their boss was like, I don't know about this. What are you telling me? 10 and 3. Wait a second. What if I really need you at noon? What if it's urgent? No, I don't like this.

I don't like this at all. No, no, no, no, no. Enough of this system. This comes up time and again when you confront the people you work with with your personal systems. When you explain, even carefully explain, here's my system and here's how it works,

and here's why I think it's better. You're exposing hard edges. You are pointing out the people ways in which their life is going to be less convenient. And that is going to spark a reaction of, I don't like this, I don't like this at all. And it'll be pressure for that system to go away. So what's the alternative? Well, what did all of the autoresponder people do who stopped using the Tim Ferriss autoresponder? They realized, well, I'll just check email twice a day.

I don't have to tell everyone. I don't have to give them a sermon about why I'm doing it. I will avoid that, you know, temptation of being able to righteously explain why, you know, they're bothering me too much and why it's better to just check email twice. I was going to do it. And it turns out most people don't notice and occasionally they do. And you say, yeah, sorry, you know, I didn't see that.

I was working on something else. And they get the advantage of the system. So Jamie, we're talking about systems. you were putting in the place personally, workflows you are establishing, I would say, just do them. Don't make a big deal about them. Don't name them.

Just go for it. Now, a lot of these things might be entirely invisible to your colleagues. I have mentioned before the example that when I was the Director of Graduate Studies at Georgetown in my department, which I was until just recently, pause for the hallelujah course, me and my graduate program manager during the busy periods,

we internally, him and I, used a ticketing system. So a request would come in from a student. We got a lot of requests from students. It wasn't always obvious how to answer them right away. In that case, we would enter a properly stripped of sensitive data FERPA-appropriate version of the query into our internal ticketing system so that him and I could keep track of it. we could assign it to each other, like who's working on this now.

We could have a status that says, oh, we're waiting to hear back from like this assistant dean. Here's what's happening. We could have a back and forth conversation below the message, keeping track of, here's what's happened up to now. And it made it very easy for us internally to manage a lot of student requests, the ones that could not be answered right away. The students had no idea we were doing this. They had no reason to know we were doing this. Now, we could have said, hey, here's the ticketing system.

You have to directly interact with it. You have to enter your question into the system. You have to give it a category. You have to check back into the ticketing system to see the status of your ticket. Like that might have made our lives 15% easier. But then we would have been exposing a hard edge. We would have been pushing our system into the face of the people we're interacting with. We would have opened up opportunities for people to say, I don't know, I don't like this.

I don't like this at all. So it's just invisible. And it made our lives much easier. And we were able to be more responsive to our students, so they didn't care. So we use this system and it was invisible. I do something similar with my task boards.

If I have something I need to work on, it's going to get changed into a card. The card's going to be put into a column on a board corresponding to the appropriate role. If I'm waiting to hear back from someone, it's going to be on a column of waiting to hear back from. There might be a special day each week in which I check that column

and nudge people who I haven't heard back from. There's a complex system in which I deal with obligations on my professional plate, but the people giving me those obligations don't know about it. And I don't put it in their face. I just rock and roll with it and it makes my life easier. So Jamie, a lot of systems, you just put them in place

and no one even knows it. Other workflows or systems you might put in place might have to change a little bit about how your colleagues interact with you. That's fine, just soft sell it. In my book Deep Work, for example, I talk about process-oriented email, which is a way of doing this soft-selling.

The idea behind process-oriented emails, when you get an email from a colleague, you don't just sort of throw one back and then let the back and forth dance of ad hoc messaging commence. Instead, you say, okay, let me take a moment. What is the project represented by this email? What is a good process

for completing this project that will minimize the amount of back and forth unscheduled, unstructured messaging required? And then inappropriate informal English, you essentially summarize that process in your response. Like, okay, great, here's how I think we should handle it. We'll do this and this and this and this. And you have recruited your colleague here into a process for how you're going to execute that project into a workflow, into a system, without calling it that, without asking them to sign on the dotted line,

without asking them to commit to the idea that this is the way you'll always deal with these things. It's just very informal. They don't even realize it, but they have been co-opted into a workflow you've designed to minimize back and forth communication. So like let's say, I don't know,

you have some set process for prospective clients. There's something that you try to do in your company where you do some research and produce a brief and then schedule a follow-up call. And so like one of your calls, maybe gets a lead, like someone mentions a client and he forwards you the email and he's like, all right, we should probably follow up on this. Typical, like, terrible, ambiguous email that, like, generates stress and visions of back and forth emails for days and days ahead. So you stare at this

and say, okay, I want to handle those with a more efficient process. What is a more efficient process here? And what you might say, and I'll just give an example, you might say, okay, here's what we should do to handle this prospective client without a lot of back and forth ad hoc emailing or chatting, what if we did, my colleague writes a draft of the brief on that client, and they put it into a shared Google Drive into a new folder, and they do so by Thursday morning. I'll pick it up on Thursday morning. The edit, he puts at the top of that document with the brief, what times are good for him the next two weeks for meetings.

I pick that up Thursday morning, and I do Tuesday. things. One, I review and edit the brief. I get it ready for the client to see. Two, I take those times my colleagues sent me. I look at my calendar. Find some good times at the intersection that we're both available. Set up a calendar invitation page. Follow up with that client. Send them that page. They schedule a meeting. It goes on our calendars. When I see it on the calendars, I will move the edited brief, a link to the edited brief to that invitation for my colleague to see. when we get there, we're on the same page. We have that follow-up meeting.

Like, that might be a good process. A way of dealing with this otherwise ambiguous thing with no additional emails or chats required. Now, in process-oriented email, you would basically just explain that process informally and without being a jerk about it in your email response. Like, great, this is great. Here's what I think we should do.

You do this, put it in here by this point. I'll rock and roll. We'll do this. Let's go. You are recruiting your colleague into an office. optimize workflow, but you're not saying, hey, here's the workflow. Here's how I think we should handle these sign off. You're just sort of saying, like, let's just do this to handle with this email message. So you're using workflows. You're using systems, but you're giving it a soft sell. So anyways, Jamie, this is a big point, I think, that we don't discuss enough that if you're in charge of a team,

if you're in charge of a company, there's things to do in terms of getting a buy-in on workflows to make more sense than ad hoc emailing, ad hoc chatting. But if you're an individual without that authority, you should still use those systems, and don't sell it, and don't explain it, and don't brag about it, and don't complain about people who don't, just use them. Just use them without asking for permission, and you think you will find that your life is a lot better. Kira asks, any advice for deep work while homeschooling elementary and middle school kids? I've been working to apply deep work in my own life, but I'm now confronted with trying

to encourage this with upper elementary middle school age kids while they are new to homeschooling. Any advice? Well, Kira, in general, I think the role of concentration and pedagogy is very important and it's underserved. We don't think enough about how do we explicitly train children, be it in a homeschool environment or a non-homeschool environment, to use their brain productively to produce value. Now the good news is school is basically the place where most people get exposed to this idea. It's something I've long talked about is that one of the big benefits of education in our current modern economy is that at least it used to be this is where people get exposure to concentration, what it's like to stick with hard thoughts.

I mean, college used to be about going into the library, going into the stacks and having to be there bored with a book, extracting information from it. it's where we learn in general to do the activity that's somewhat unnatural for our species, which is to maintain for a long period of time abstract cogitation. So schooling, this is a benefit of it. This is not just about the content you learn. It's about the activity of thinking productively on an abstract issue. You get a lot of practice doing that. Now, what can you do in an educational environment to make this practice more effective?

well I think there's a combination of exposure and explicit training. Now by exposure, you know, your school, the kids in your school should just on a regular basis be sitting with a cognitive challenge that they have to do for a non-trivial amount of time. Not on a computer, not with a gadget. It's just I'm filling out the worksheet. I'm trying to solve this math problem. I have to write this chapter. This is actually an advantage of testing. I think it is obviously fashionable to push back against testing, to push back against grades,

to think that what the kids should just be sort of exploring what's interesting to them and being exposed to interesting ideas and that you will squash the love of learning out of them, etc. This is a complicated issue, one that I tend to have some contrarian thoughts on. But one thing you can say for testing, especially when there's some stakes involved, hey, I'm going to get a grade, and I want the grade to be good, is that it is the cognitive equivalent of running sprints for an athlete. You really have to concentrate.

I want to nail this fraction quiz because I want to get an A. For all the pros and cons, you can say of that situation, one of the pros is, for the next 30 minutes, when you're doing that fraction quiz, you're going to be concentrating really hard. That's good training. That's good training. So there's just a lot of exposure work, which I think comes naturally. You work on things.

You have to focus to do them. You have to stick with something even past the point where you're bored. Now, the piece I think is missing and where there's a lot of work to do is in the explicit concentration training. Some countries do this better than others. Some curricula do this better than others. There's ways of teaching math, for example, that really push people, push the students on the cognitive process going on behind their solving where you go up to the board and it's a somewhat complex problem and someone tries to solve it and you kind of walk through where they're stuck and other people kind of come in and say

well don't do that let's think about this let's apply this skill here and you do a sort of collaborative out loud cogitation that's useful something else i think is useful we don't see a lot of is actually just training individual students about the subjective experience of concentration training students about that piece of mental resistance that's going to arise when you're trying to do something hard and how to how to compartmentalize that, how to move past that, how to stop that from being an obstacle. I've talked about on this podcast, for example, I've been teaching my working with my middle kid on reading. And like one of the things we'll do, use our hands for this, is we'll do a blend, right? We're working on a complicated word. And we'll do a blend.

And I'll say, okay, we've got to hold that. And I'll use my hand, like gripping like a fist. And I'll have him do the same thing. All right, hold that here. You're holding up here. Don't forget it. Come back to it. What is it again?

All right, now let's go to the other sounds around the blend. Go back to the blend. What's going on there? And I have him hold his hand in the air like a claw. And what I'm trying to teach him there is to get comfortable with the subjective experience of trying to hold a piece of information in one part of your mind while you move forward with other thoughts. Now this is from a neurological point of view.

It has to do with working memory and working memory size and facility with which you work with your working memory. All of that's crucial for reading, but we're trying to make it explicit in the training. Well, it's explicitly trained like holding something here while thinking about this and you have to go back and refresh this thought.

You're laying down pathways in your brain. You're teaching your brain how to do certain parts of concentration. So that's something there probably should be more of. So, Kira, you might think about that in your own homeschooling discipline, actually having age-appropriate cognitive challenges in which you talk through

the subjective experience. Okay, you're feeling resistance here, but don't let your mind wander. Bring it back, bring it back. Now do this over here. Now bring back what you had over there. We're actually helping walk people through what it feels like to concentrate hard.

You know, I have this suspicion that if we worked really hard on how we teach people to think hard, we could probably have massive gains. We could have kids really jumping ahead on what they were able to do. I just don't think it's an element. them in a pedagogy we've thought a lot about.

But anyways, Kira, I wouldn't worry too much. Just the one-on-one style environment of homeschool just means they're going to get plenty of exposure to activities to require concentration. And I would say just throw in some of these activities, if possible and appropriate. Or you actually make explicit the various steps and subjective feelings of concentration.

This is what we're trying to make you better with. Just like an athlete, you're like, yeah, I know your muscle burns there. But you have to keep spring. you have to keep lifting the weight. That's part of our training. All right, so thanks for that question, Kura. Ido asks, how do you choose wisely between doing a master's in artificial intelligence

or going on to be a software engineer? Well, Ido, in the field of computer science, when it comes to salary, the general understanding is those two options are a wash. if you have a master's in computer science, your starting pay will be higher than if you only have a bachelor's degree. However, in the time it takes you get the master's degree,

you probably are going to get a raise as a software engineer that gets you to what you would be making with the master's degree. So you don't actually end up ahead if you just look at salary. So then how do you make the choice between doing a master's and software engineering? Well, the only thing I would throw in here in addition to just salary is other career capital investment options. Is there a employer that having that particular master's in AI is going to open up that you would not have access to if you began just as a bachelor's degree holder? Is there a particular type of company or maybe a particular location in the world or a particular culture that you think the masters of AI is going to open up that the bachelor's degree.

doesn't. In that case, you want to throw that into the mix as well. But if not, if it's just, yeah, I want to work at Google, and I guess the salary would be higher if I had a master's, but if I start now with a bachelor's, I'd probably get to that point anyways, and just rock and roll. I say, why delay it? But if there's something unique that master's going to open up, then you can throw that into the consideration mix. So I'm going to put the onus on the master's degree to justify itself? I would say make the default to just go into the industry, go into your software engineering job, get real-world skills, start working your way up in a real company as quickly as possible. Make that the default, unless this master's degree can come back and make a strong argument for

why it's better. And as I mentioned, that has to be something like, well, it is going to open up an opportunity not available to me now or within the next couple of years. And it's something that's really worth it to me. All right? So avoid the master's. degree unless the master's degree can make itself unavoidable to you. We are falling behind here on time, so let's see if I can speed things up. Linda asks, how do you time block when you have a day job and a side hustle? Well, Linda, I think you need to, if you're going to time block, you have to time block all work. Now, if your side hustle means you have a lot more work and it goes beyond the normal work day,

then you'll be time blocking more than a normal work day. but anytime you're doing work, intentional allocation of energy is going to be better than unintentional. Also, if you're time blocking your day job and your side hustle, you are making it 100% unavoidable how much work you're actually doing, and you have to confront that and say that you're okay with it. There's no way to hide it under the rug or to slip that work in. So I would just say if you're going to time block, you're going to time block.

And if you're working 12 hours, you're time blocking 12 hours. All right, moving on quickly. Robert says, in so good they can. ignore you. I notice that all of the people you highlight are single with no kids. What part of that book changed when applied to parents with a lot of constraints? Well, two quick things. Robert, A, I don't think it's true that all the people I highlighted were single or with no kids. I think I just didn't necessarily talk about the marital status or kid status of all the people that I highlighted in that book. Plenty of them were married. Plenty of them had kids. But more importantly, how do

the basic ideas of that book, career capital theory, adjust for people with constraints? Well, they don't adjust at all. The underlying theory is the underlying theory. The underlying theory says that job satisfaction comes less from a match between your job and intrinsic traits that you possess as an individual, and they have more to do with building up career capital through very invaluable skills and then invest in that capital and the things that resonate. I mean, whether or not you're married or whether or not you have kids doesn't change that.

what it does change is what resonates. What it does change is when you're thinking about, okay, what do I want to do with career capital? What do I want my career to look like? I think for someone with kids, things like autonomy, time affluence, flexibility, living in a place that has good attributes. It's a small town. It's a place where people will know my kids, a place where the schools are good. you know, the things that resonate are different than if you're 24 and single and you're thinking, okay, what matters is I want a really nice car, I want to be powerful, I want to be like Gordon Gecko

and Wall Street, you know. So, you know, how you apply your career capital changes as you mature and as you move through life. But the underlying theory that it's investing career capital to get back things to resonate, that's how satisfaction comes. Now, maybe what you're trying to point out is that it's hard to build career capital. And if you have kids in a family, it's even hard. because you have less free time, and yes, that's just true. I mean, everything's harder if you have kids in a family. Everything that requires time, everything that requires deliberate practice over time, it's harder with kids in a family.

And that's why those of us with kids in a family have to take our productivity more seriously, and we do capture, configure, control, and we're time blocking and all this type of thing. But the underlying theory of how career satisfaction works laid out in that book is somewhat orthogonal or agnostic to what your life looks like. What your life looks like, again, is going to change what resists. but not how you get things that resonate into your professional life. All right. We're really speeding up now.

Let's do one more work question here. UniA asks, have you ever been the victim of the planning fallacy and how do you avoid it? So for those who don't know, the planning fallacy is when you are overly optimistic about how long work will actually take. Well, Unia, you know my answer here is going to be time block. planning. This is one of the fundamental advantages of time block planning is that you have to confront the reality in black and white on paper of how long things actually take. And every time you are wrong, there is a penalty expressed in the form of having to fix your schedule. So it's Pavlovian. I don't want to get this wrong because I don't like having to fix my schedule. It's a pain. And so you learn and you get

better and you get more realistic. It's one of the most important side effects of time block planning is that you lose the planning fallacy. And once you know how long things actually take, two consequences arise that are both beneficial. A, you put less things on your plate. Because you realize, like, I don't actually have time to do all these things. And B, you start things with enough time. So things get done without the deadline rush. Things get the time they need, so your quality goes up. So, you and I appreciate you serving me up that softball, especially with my time block planner available for pre-order now.

So planning fallacy, you got a time block plan, and that will be a problem you avoid. All right, let's do some technology questions. Mike asked, what do you do instead of inbox zero? Now, for listeners who don't know the term, inbox zero was coined by Merlin Mann, and it describes the general discipline of regularly processing your email inboxes down to zero messages.

Now, Mike's question implies that I don't do that because he asks, what do I do instead, but Mike, I do. Following inbox zero discipline, I process my email inboxes down to zero. Now here's the thing. If you practice Capture Configure Control Style Productivity,

you should be doing the same thing. An email inbox is not a filing system. An email inbox is not a good place to track and organize and otherwise configure the task on your plate. It's just an incoming channel of information that needs to go into your systems. So if you find yourself just letting things build up in your inbox

and just using that as a place where you keep your work, which, by the way, is what 98% of knowledge workers do, you do not have a fully featured productivity system in place. You do not have a place in which you not only capture, but then are able to configure your task. And that's a problem. Now, people say, well, I have a lot of things coming to my inbox, so it would take a long time

to move them into another system and make sense of them. all right well that's the reality of your job you have a lot of stuff coming in probably too much that probably is a problem but it's not going to be better to ignore the reality of your work it's not going to be better to wing it it's not going to be better to just see what's in your inbox and just kind of rock and roll and what feels urgent you're still going to get more done

if you take the time necessary to extract from every email what's being asked to me here and let me put it into my system what role does this obligation relate to let me go over to my Trello or Flow or Asana, whatever taskboard for that role. They put on a card. We put under the column that best represents its status. And you do that for everything in your inbox. Now you have the things on your plate organized.

Now you can configure. Now you can move things between statuses. You can attach information. You can make a plan. You can see everything on your plate. And if it's really scary, then it's really scary. But that's the reality. You faced a productivity dragon.

serious productivity requires that you move around with the obligations that you have that you've committed to that you can move them around like chess pieces on a chessboard and strategize the best thing to do with your time if you're keeping these things in your inbox

you're not playing the full game and so yes I process my inbox down to zero the bigger question Mike is how come you don't if you want to be serious about productivity your email inbox cannot be a major component of how you manage to work facing you. And if it takes a lot of time, again,

I keep coming back to this. If it takes a lot of time to get things out of your inbox into another system, it should take a lot of time. That represents the magnitude of the issues of all the stuff you face. You will end up getting more done. Yes, it takes 20 minutes to do this extra now, but you're going to get two to three hours more stuff done

because you're actually doing a proper configure step. So that's what I say, Mike. I do process my inbox down to zero. I think if you follow a serious productivity system, especially in my framework or capture, configure control, you should as well. Gillen ask, what's the best thing to do during short, forced breaks in a deep work session?

For example, waiting for code to run. Well, Gillen, those short breaks, you're smart to ask about them because they can be dangerous. We know from our more advanced thinking about doing cognitive work, that context switching can kill you, at least from an output perspective. Five minutes is more than enough time to initiate a context switch into a different semantic context. That context switch is going to then reduce your cognitive capacity when you try to wrench your attention back to the challenge at hand.

So the key to those five-minute breaks, while you're waiting for code to compile or a debugger to do what the debugger is going to do, as you mentioned, your elaboration. The key to those five-minute breaks is to avoid destructive context switching. Well, the most destructive context switch are things that are either going to be arousing from an emotional perspective or overlapping in a content perspective. So let's start with the second. Overlapping, that means, for example, you begin to swap in a related but not quite

the same work target of attention. Right? Because now you have some of the same networks in play, but some are different and you get a lot of overlapping collision. So if you are working on a particular program, you have that really swapped in, and you're writing really tough code, and you're waiting for like a smoke test to run

or something like that, if you start thinking about another programming problem, then that's going to be really a big issue, because you're in the exact same context, but now you're changing up what you're referencing. And when you try to wrench your attention back to the original programming problem, you have a lot of overlapping collision

that really muddles things cognitively. You would have less collision in that context if you switched over to a completely unrelated work task, like, I don't know, a marketing slogan, or you have to organize a party. I mean, it's still not great to switch context, but if it's a completely separate context, you have less overlap.

The impact on your cognitive capacity when you come back to work on that problem, the original problem is going to be less. Emotional arousal is another bad one. So if something that gets you fired up, those are very powerful networks. So this is why, for example, social media is very dangerous

to look at during those breaks. You're going to see some algorithmically optimized content that's really been picked to hit your brain stem and generate a reaction. those arousing reactions really can swap and swamp out other things going on in your brain

and make it very hard to go back to the original task. So be very worried about looking at things that are close, but not the same. That's what you're taking a break from. Be very worried about things that are emotionally arousing. And then finally, I would say, be very worried about exposing yourselves to obligations

that you cannot close the loop on during to break. So, like, if you go and you see you need to do something and then you do something and you finish it, you can shut down that network. Like, okay, I need to go drop this letter off in the mailbox. You go to the mailbox, you mail it, and you're done and you come back. That's much better than exposing yourself to, oh, I have to get back to this person about this issue. I don't have time to completely do it during the break. And so it remains open as an open loop. It's a well-known effect from psychology, that open-loop nature is going to demand more attention than something you can complete. The big offender there is email. Email is an open-loop generation machine.

If you glance at your email inbox while you're waiting for your code to compile or the smoke test to run or the debugger to get fired up, you are going to almost certainly encounter request and questions and obligations that you cannot complete during that brief inbox change. And no matter how much your prefrontal cortex says, that's fine, I will get to that later. There is a deeper part of your mind. It says they were unmet obligations. People need things from us, and we haven't given it to them. Our Paleolithic tribe member is standing there on the other side of the proverbial fire, asking for our attention and we're ignoring them. This is bad. We're going to starve. They're going to get mad. Very distracting. All right. So if we take those three things, what have we taken off the plate?

don't switch over to other related work problems. Don't look at social media or the internet. Don't open your email. So what can you do? Well, a small task that you can completely complete during the five minute break, that is fine. Or exposure to sort of non-relevant, non-orousing, non-open loop generation information. That is also probably fine. if, for example, you're a Dodgers fan

to go read an article about the Dodgers making the World Series, which, by the way, I'm happy for them as the Nationals fan. You know, I have a lot of sympathy for what we did to them last year, so I'm glad they get a turn to come back from the Nationals' comeback,

the thumping of them last year. You know, if you're a Dodgers fan, go read an article. You can read the article to completion. It's not particularly emotionally arousing. You're just happy that they're in the World Series. It opens up no new obligations that you can't close. And it's not related to your work. So do that type of thing, Gillen, and you will be fine.

So avoid those pitfalls, stick with things that you can complete and have nothing to do with your work and don't get you fired up. Or just sit there and think a little bit. Maybe use it as a little excuse for some solitude, just to be free of stimuli. but you are smart to think about those breaks. I mean, it's easy. Breaks do not have to be bad, but they can become real traps

if you're not careful. Saif asked, what is your opinion on the popular challenge to complete one book per week? So I didn't really know what category to put this question. I sometimes think about reading

and books as technology, so I put under technology. And I think Saif is talking about like a popular self-improvement meme online, which is read a book a week. I think there's a lot of people that try to hit 52 books in a year. It's like a challenge, which I appreciate the sentiment of, which is to push your brain, to consume more long-form content, to move away from distraction. I like the sentiment there.

I like the challenge. The only thing I would say is that when it comes to reading metrics, I care more about chapters than I do books. Because books can mean a lot of different things. I mean, some books you can easily consume in a week, like some types of simplistic business or self-help books, books that are designed to be read on a cross-country flight. You can read those one per week, no problem.

But what happens when you're sitting down with like a 500-page complicated book? That probably might take a month to get through, right? something where every chapter is challenging, the ideas are complicated, and there's just a ton of pages to get through. That's why I like chapters. I talked about this in last week's habit tune-up mini-episode. I think two chapters a day, that's a good metric. Two chapters a day is a really good reading habit, and it's a habit in which you're getting that repetitions of concentration. It is a habit that is going to give you a lot more information to deal with in your life. It's a habit that's going to sharpen both your thinking and your writing. It's a habit that is not trivial, right? Like,

you actually have to schedule time for it. You actually have to have some rituals. But on the same time, it is tractable. Even the busiest among us can figure out how to get two chapters a day. Now, sometimes depending on the book, those chapters take really short amounts of time to read. Sometimes the chapters might be really long. I often recommend for the two-chapter challenge that if one of the books you're reading has really complicated chapters, simultaneously read a book this much easier. You can have one chapter from the hard book and one chapter from the easy book, and if it's a really overwhelming day,

take both chapters from the easy book, so you hit your metrics. You still hit your metrics. Anyway, so if that's what I would say, two chapters a day is a much better starting point than a book a week. Now, depending on what you read, it might get you the more or less the same place. but I think it's just more tractable. I want to take a moment to talk about a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast,

and that is Four-Sigmatic Coffee. Now, I am particularly excited about this sponsor because I already use it. So what is Four-Sigmatic Coffee? Well, it is Fair Trade Single Origin Arabic Coffee that has mushrooms added. In particular, Lyon's main mushroom for productivity and Shaga mushroom for immune support.

Now, it's a great tasting coffee. The mushroom additive does not taste like mushrooms, if you're asking. It actually makes the coffee a lot smoother, sort of like you would get from a creamer, but without all the other things that come with creamers, there's a bit of a nuttiness flavor that comes with it. I add a little bit of cinnamon.

I always have a cup of my 4-Sigmatic every morning. Why do I do this? Well, obviously I'm a big coffee guy. I am a believer in Airdosh's famous comment that a mathematician is a machine for transforming coffee into theorems. When I was a grad student in MIT, I was the guy who would refresh. We had these giant carafts of coffee. You know, a coffee pot could not handle the theory group at MIT. So we had giant carafts of coffee, two or three at a time.

And I was the guy who would fill them because I would empty them. And so I was known as the guy who was going to brew the new coffee because, look, coffee is what we transform into theorems. But what is it about coffee that helps with this type of work? Well, you know, caffeine is useful, but there's the ritual. It comes to ritual. You associate the taste, you associate the flavors. It's a hook into which deep work follows.

And coffee is very distinctive. And so that hook becomes more distinctive. Well, what I liked about four-sigmatic is, that hook gets even more distinctive. Because of the mushroom additive, well, it tastes differently, so it's more distinctive than other occasions when you'll drink coffee,

but because of the lion's mane, it feels a little bit different in your brain. Now, let's put aside exactly what it does to your brain or what it doesn't do to the brain, because what matters to me is the fact that it feels distinctive, and so it is an incredible hook for shifting into deep work mode.

I drink that coffee. My brain now learns that very distinctive physiological fingerprint is associated with let's get the thinking. And so anyways, I'm a big four-sigmatic fan. I'm a big fan in general of adulterating coffee, and I think they do a really good job of it. And so if you were looking to have a stronger hook to get your deep work ritual going,

consider four-sigmatic coffee. As you might imagine, we have worked out an exclusive offer with four-sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee just for listeners of the Deep Questions podcast. you will get up to 40% off and free shipping on their mushroom coffee bundles. And the claim of this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for my listeners and is not available on the regular website. You have to go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep.

So again, you'll save up to 40% and get free shifting. So go, free shipping, I should say. So go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com slash deep. and get the deep hooks set for doing some serious deep work. We have one other new sponsors for the Deep Questions podcast. I'm very excited about as well. And this is Indeed. So if you are like me and you responded to the uncertainty of the pandemic by hustling,

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This is the best offer you are going to find anywhere. So go right now to Indeed.com slash questions. Terms and conditions apply, offer valid through December 31st. Our next technology question comes from Waddo, who asked how many hours of reading should a serious university student aspire to accomplish per day to maximize learning? Well, Wado, if you're a liberal arts student, so you're studying a standard liberal arts discipline, as opposed, let's say, to an engineering or mathematical discipline, I think you should be aiming for two to two and a half hours a day of good uninterrupted deep work style reading. I don't have data to back that up. I'm just saying this is my instinct to someone who has spent the majority.

of my life at this point in academia. I would say that's what you should be thinking for, thinking about two to two and a half hours almost every day. That's going to get you through a lot of material. It's also going to get your brain into really good shape. Pragne asks, how do you suggest college undergraduates bring a digital minimalism into their lives?

Now, in her elaboration, she mentions, for example, she feels like she has to be on social media because her college is remote and that is what will keep her connected to community. So, I think the way that undergrads can be more like digital minimalist is by becoming digital minimalist, by putting the philosophy of digital minimalism in the practice.

There is nothing about the undergraduate experience that makes it more difficult to be a digital minimalism, or less desirable. Many of the examples in my eponymous book of this topic are, in fact, undergraduates. Now, I think what's really going on here, and this is worth elaborating briefly, is that Pragene has a different definition in her mind about what digital minimalism means. I think this is really common. I think a lot of people hear the term digital minimalism, and they fill in their own definition, a definition that is more appropriate for the related term of digital minimization. So a lot of people say digital minimalism equals digital minimization, which means

use a lot less technology, basically use almost no technology. They push back and say, well, wait a second, there's technologies that are useful. I need to use the social media channel to connect with my fellow classmates because our college is remote. But here's the thing, Pragde. Digital minimalism is not the same as digital minimization. It is not a philosophy that says technology should be minimized, the more the better. It is instead a philosophy of intention. There's a philosophy that says technology put to use.

The support things you really care about is good. Technology used casually has a way of access. incidentally, taking you away from those things you care about. So digital minimalism says you start by figuring out what you're all about. What are the activities you actually want to spend time doing? What matters to you? Then for each of those, you lorke backwards and say, what is the best way to use technology to support this thing I care about?

Then you look at each of those uses and you optimize it. If you know why you're using a given technology, you can optimize that use to boost the pros and to minimize the cons. and then you let those optimized answers be the totality of the technology you use in your personal life. So if community and connection to people you know at your university is important to you, which makes sense to me that it would be. You would work backwards and say,

what is the best way to use technology to support this value? And so that might lead you to say, well, where am I actually most meaningfully interacting with these students, with my fellow students. And maybe there's a particular social media channel in which this is happening? Great. Maybe you'll realize, well,

it's not really social media. It's group text messages. All right, good. Now you know. Maybe when you're looking backwards on what's the best way to use technology to help this thing I care about, you realize,

oh, what I'm doing is probably not the best way. This group text message is okay, but I need to be having phone calls with these people, with my three best friends, or Zoom calls so I can see them, and that's what I'm really missing. So now that I'm actually thinking about it,

I realize I could be doing better. So you go through this exercise and you figure out, okay, what's the best way to use technology for this thing I care about? And then you optimize. So if you go through this exercise and say there's a Facebook group

that, you know, the fellow editors of the school news, newspaper that I write with. They all use this group. It's an important community. That's how they stay in touch. So I want to use Facebook groups. That's great. But now you can optimize and say, well, this is why I'm using Facebook so that I can use this group. And I want to use this group so I can stay in touch with my fellow editors. Then you realize, well, why do I have Facebook on my phone? Why am I scrolling my news feed and getting upset about what my weird cousin is posting? What does that have to do with connecting with my fellow editors from my school newspaper?

Let me get it off my phone. Let me put on my computer. Let me use newsfeed eradicator. I have nothing about connecting with my fellow editors requires me to look at the news feed at all. So I will put the newsfeed eradicator plug it in place. And looking at the rate at which people post on this group, checking in twice a week, is more than enough to not only keep up, but if I give myself time, I can be very thoughtful in my responses and be a real part of the conversation. So, you know, Sunday night and Wednesday morning, I log onto my computer, the facebook.com,

I see no newsfeed because of the plugin. I go right to the group. I give it a good 30 minutes of thoughtful interaction. Right? Because once you know why you're using a technology, you can optimize it. And when you optimize it, you maintain your benefits. Well, really minimizing the cost that technology might otherwise incur. So that's the philosophy, pragmat.

You go through all the things you care about. You apply that philosophy of intentionality. Your answers to those questions will look different than mine. My answers will look different than your weird cousin who you're trying to avoid in your news feed. Right? So it's highly personal. That's digital minimalism.

It has nothing to do with minimization and everything to do with intention. It is just as relevant to an undergraduate as it is to a parent, as it is to a young professional, as it is to a retiree. Based on your question, I think it would be very powerful idea for you to put into practice. So check that out. And again, my book, Digital Minimalism, really gets into all these details. It'll even walk you through a 30-day process. It ripped a Band-Aid off and get this actually working to get this process rolling.

But I think there's never been a time in which digital minimalism has been more important because we find ourselves in an era where technology is absolutely crucial to thriving. and yet we find ourselves in a time where using technology casually can make our lives miserable. That is a hard, tight rope to walk. Minimalism gives you a good chance of successfully doing so. All right, let's do one more technology question, and this one is a meaty one. Agatha asked, how do we educate children to question technology, not to first. fight it, but create better solutions that unite rather than divide people.

So, Agatha, I'm going to take this as a question about ethical engineering, which is a currently very hot topic, I would say, about whether we can inject ethics into how we build things, particularly how we build digital technologies, to try to avoid some of the issues. to try to avoid some of the issues that technologies can create. So certainly, like, what you're talking about, how technologies might divide people or cause disunion. It's the type of thing you might tackle with ethical engineering. Highly addictive use of technologies.

That's bad for other aspects of your life is something that you might tackle with ethical engineering. Algorithmic bias is a big topic right now. So ways that if you're not careful about it, your machine learning algorithms, etc. might encode certain biases that you don't want. So it's an interesting topic. Ethical engineering.

Can we design technology in a way that is informed by an ethical framework? Now, this is something I've thought about. I've done some peer-reviewed work on, at least in the broadest sense. So earlier this year, for example, I had an article for the communications of the ACM, roughly for computer scientists. The communication of the ACM is like what nature is for biologists. It's like one of our big, more influential trade journals. I wrote this article called When Technology Goes Arry,

and the territory I tried to stake out in this article is that engineers need to reembrace what is known in the study of the philosophy of technology as technological determinism. You know, technological determinism in its highest level form is this notion that technologies can have unexpected, unintended consequences on the people who use them. You introduce the technology, and it has a real change

on some sort of social techno-dynamical system that was unexpected or unintended. In my book coming out in March, I wrote without email, I do a whole analysis of the arrival of email through a technological determinist lens. And I basically make the case that just the mere presence of email changed the way we worked. The presence of that tool had a big effect that no one planned for or no one intended. That's technological determinism. it's a very popular philosophy throughout the 20th century. Not to get a little bit too academic here, but at the moment,

technological determinism is not a popular philosophy within the academic study, the academic study of the philosophy of technology. The academic study of the philosophy of technology right now is more dominated by what is known as technological instrumentalism. Now, this tends to see technology only through the light of how it's actually applied. It sees technology is quite neutral

and only really interesting in the context of how people deploy technologies towards particular ends. Within technological instrumentalism, there's a particular framework that's quite popular right now called the Social Construction of Technology or Scott S-C-O-T for short.

And this is really where a lot of the academic action is in studying the philosophy of technology. Scott basically argues that the way technologies evolve or are deployed are all serving sort of social dynamical ends. So that you study technology mainly like you would study iron filings to learn more about the underlying magnetic fields of a magnet that you study the way technology evolves, what's popular, what's not, how it changes, because it tells you something about the underlying social dynamics, that these technologies evolve and are deployed in certain ways

as a response to these underlying back-and-for social dynamics. And so what's interesting is doing this close study of the underlying, those underlying dynamics. There was basically a real famous paper that helped establish social construction of technology that looked at the evolution of the penny-farthing bicycle, and it looked at it through, among other things, the changing role of women in society.

This paper is very influential, and it led to a lot of PhD dissertations that were trying to do something similar. So let's look at the evolution of a technology to understand various social groups and what they're advocating for and how they interacted and tried to influence society or gain power.

So if you hear someone talking about the penny farthing bicycle, this is someone who has been exposed to this very popular theory, the social construction of technology. Now, my point in my CACM article is like, that's all fine, but also if you really look at this literature, it's gotten pretty scholastic, as a lot of these sort of post-modern influence construction of reality style analyses get, where it gets more about just trying to apply the analysis

in an increasingly sophisticated and complicated manner, trying to demonstrate that you understand a complex theory, but after a while, just like with the classic scholastic medieval scholars, you tend to get farther and farther away from actually understanding or explaining reality in an interesting way. And I think that's a problem that Scott has right now. And so my call for a return to technological determinism is not a rejection of Scott,

but saying this other factor is at play and it's making a difference right now. that technologies can have influences that's not part of this complex scholastic semi-postmodern analysis of how social groups and dynamics are vying for Foucault-style power hierarchies and sometimes it just has an impact because it messes with our brain or our social systems are dynamical

and you change a little something and can go out of control. Sometimes email gets us communicating a lot more not because that was good for the office. It's just when you reduced that friction, it made this social dynamical system go awry. The like button was introduced to Facebook for a very simple reason. It was trying to get rid of redundant comments.

Engineers thought it was inefficient to say, cool, or great, or congrats, 40 times on the bottom of the same post. So they said, well, we'll have a like button for that, but it had this unexpected impact of bringing intermittent social approval indicators into the world of social media, people began using social media much more. That wasn't the intention.

This wasn't a social group vying for power over another social group. It's a determinist, unexpected side effect. And so the point of that article is, hey, as engineers, one of the things we have to keep our eye on when developing and deploying technology is these technological deterministic, unexpected side effects because if they're unintended and they're unplanned, you know, they might not be good for anybody. They could be problematic.

And not in a Scott style of this group is trying to establish some sort of discourse-constructed hierarchy over another group, but just in the way that like, hey, we send too many emails now or we spend too much time on Facebook. And so I argued in that article that engineers should keep that in mind and just like you might look for a security flaw in something you built,

or you might look for an inefficiency, or say, hey, this is taking up too many computing resources. You might say very pragmatically, huh, we introduced this technology for X, but it caused side effect Y, and side effect Y is not very desirable. Maybe we should change some aspects of the technology. That was the call I was putting out in that article,

and I should say, actually, just as an aside, I'm on a research leave starting in December, where I was given a research leave essentially to study these type of issues to study it from a peer review perspective interesting modern or novel takes on philosophy of technology so hey if you're an academic who works in this space and maybe are a little bit tired of the scholastic dominance of Scott

drop me a line at interesting at calnewport.com because I'm looking to do some interesting academic work on this in the near future. But anyways, I'm very pragmatic, and that was a very pragmatic argument about ethical engineering, that engineers need to keep an eye on unexpected consequences and maybe adjust technology to account for those consequences. Now, the problem is, sometimes the effect is asymmetric. And what I mean by that is sometimes the unexpected consequence of a technology is good, let's say, for the company,

but bad for the users. Like maybe Twitter is very divisive in a way that is maybe an unintended side effect of the technology, which I think to be the case, by the way. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I think there are design choices about Twitter made for some other reason that had the unexpected consequence

of making it a division generation machine. However, division generation machines are good for Twitter. because people use it all the time. And so it's good for the bottom line. So ethical engineering in this context can only get you so far because at some point you might be on the wrong side

of an asymmetric tradeoff and you might be an engineer that says, huh, these choices we made for Twitter about, let's say, the text being real short because originally this was designed for SMS is having this unexpected consequence of really corroding people's concept of rhetoric and simplifying the world into a world

in which there is obvious rights and obvious wrongs and argument happens through the dunk where they obviously right, dunk on the obviously wrong, and if they don't get it, it must be because they are very, very stupid or very, very bad, or very, very tricked by secret disinformation.

But if you're an engineer for Twitter and that's making a lot of money for Twitter, you're not able to fix it. So what do we do in that situation? If the engineers are unable to inject more ethics into their constructions, what do we do? And it's here where we get another large divide between my response and what is

popular right now. So my response is to focus on the user. And you teach the user how to deploy technology with intention and on behalf of things that are valuable to them and their community. You embrace a digital minimalism style philosophy. And now you are not dependent on particular technologies doing the right thing for you to get the right type of value. out of technology because you're not just blindly using Twitter. You're not just on TikTok and Facebook and allowing these tools to manipulate and push you around. You're deploying them in highly optimized ways for things you really believe in and really understand and really think are valuable. You fix the user, you reduce the problem. And I think this is a way we can get a lot

of solution. We get a lot of problem reduction because a lot of users are fed up with the role of a lot of these technologies in their lives. And so I take this very user-centric perspective, not because I think exclusively it's the only way to solve this problem. I think it's just a way that could have a lot of progress right now. Now, I say this represents a division from what's popular because I think the popular approach right now is what we have to do is go into these technology companies

and if they won't re-engineer their technology to be better, more ethical, we'll go in and do it for them. Now, the problem with this, of course, is, well, who defines what better or more ethical actually means? That gets pretty squirrely when you're actually in there. And you're saying, well, here's what it is. It means like you can't have that feature, but you can't have that feature. And that information is bad information, but that information is good information.

And you have to keep in mind that some of these are five to $600 billion companies. I'm talking about Facebook here. It's going to be a battle to try to get in there and change the way they do business or change the way their algorithms work, and change them in a way that they can't just completely circumvent that with another more complicated algorithm. So I'm not super optimistic, A, that by force, we can change technology companies to be better,

and I'm putting better in quotes, and B, I'm a little bit worried about the effort to do so, because no matter how good your intentions are, I get worried about coming in by force and saying, we're going to change the way you do business so that it is good and not bad. And be very careful about doing it. And there's some very obvious things that are good and some various obvious things that are bad.

But almost everything else falls in the middle. And historically speaking, when you try to do these type of changes, you start by cheering. Like, I love that change. I love that change. I like, what? Wait, what? Uh-oh. No, no, no.

Ah. And then, you know, I don't know. You sent you the gulag or something. Obviously, I'm overstating it. But that's messy and complicated. And it makes for good theory. And it makes for good opeds. and it is academically very on corin,

but you focus on the users, and you can have impact right away. And you do not need Jack Dorsey to accede to these changes, and you don't need Mark Zuckerberg to accede to these changes, and you don't have to pass legislation in which you have senators who barely know how to use an iPhone trying to write pros about complex algorithms that require a graduate level education to even know what's going on,

you sidestep all of that. And you say, like Jaron Lanier did, when he kicked off this new era of techno-criticism, you are not a gadget. Do not be dehumanized by these companies. Don't be reduced down the vectors of numbers that allow you to be manipulated and pushed around and simplified. Live your full human life.

Figure out what you care about. Figure out what you're all about. Use tech intentionally and carefully as needed. So to go back to Agatha's original question, more important perhaps than teaching your children how to design better technology would be teaching them how to use technology better. It's not very exciting,

but I think it is an approach that is actually yielding a lot of dividends right now. All right, all right, sermon over. It's getting a little late here, so let's move on to a few questions about the deep life. Lyman asks, how do you include your family in your work and life planning? So as you may have heard in prior episodes, when I do my quarterly and above planning at that 30,000 feet level, I have two big documents, a strategic plan for work, and a strategic plan for life outside of work. Now, family has an obvious home in the strategic plan for life outside of work.

Most of the things being discussed in that document involve my family and my kids and various things we're working on and things we want to do. It has other things too, like health and fitness type obligations and some intellectual philosophical type goals. But, I mean, obviously, your strategic plan, if you plan in this way, your strategic plan for life outside of, of work is where you directly capture, I want to do X or Y with respect to my family. But there's a deeper point here I think is worth talking about, which is the intersection between my professional strategic plan and my family, because it highlights an often overlooked point in how people try to construct a deeper life. Now, the way my wife and I have always thought about professional pursuits is that they are at the service of a family vision.

We have an evolving vision for what we want our family life to be like, including how much people are working, where we live, the type of things we do. Like really looking ahead, like what do we want our life to be like optimally in the near future five years from now when our kids are older, when they're heading off to college, and then we work backwards from this vision. a family life to say, how does work fit into that? That leads to very different decisions than what a lot of people do, which is even as they start a family, they keep the professional segregated. They say, well, I have this professional world in which what I'm trying to do is whatever, be as successful as

possible. I want to, it's just about, it's going to make my ego feel better if I get more promotions. there's that world and there's my family world and I'm going to get kind of resentful if the family stuff intrudes too much on the professional stuff. Like that's me and that's what I'm trying to do and I'm self-actualizing. Then I have the family stuff. I'll provide for the family,

but they're two separate magisteria. I think that leads to a lot of problems. I think those things have to be highly integrated. Like once you are part of a family, whether or not you have kids, that is your main unit. And so what do you want to do with that family? And that's really going to affect your work.

And I bring this up because, you know, I think when I talk about how I have a strategic plan for professional, a strategic plan for nonprofessional, it's easy to imagine that these are completely separate categories. And you're trying to optimize your professional over here and you're trying to optimize your life outside of work over there. But it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. Those two things are highly intertwined. So I'm glad you asked about that line in because that's something I like to tell younger people who are just getting started, who maybe are just getting married, are just starting families, and I'm trying to give them career advice.

I always say you need to work backwards from these visions of where you want to be, and these visions better involve all the people in your life. Because if they only involve you, that means they don't involve the other people, which means you're ignoring the other people, and that doesn't lead to good places. as I said before, it could lead to resentment, but it could also lead to workaholism or basically just you're not around at all. You're not around at all in your family's life. And look, and I don't want to sugarcoat this and make it seem like, oh, well, this is all

about minimizing the footprint of work and there's more to life and success. Because I think for a lot of people's shared visions actually have like really fulfilling professional successes as part of that vision, but they're just being explicit about it. And here's what that means and here's what we need in the family life and here's how this is going to work. So anyways, that's always what I suggest is I just don't, I don't see how you can separate your family life from anything else. What do you want this family life to be like? If you want to have a family, that's your priority. How does work fit into that? Be very clear about it. It can be very freeing. It can open up a lot of really interesting patterns, a lot of interesting options. It can

open up things you might have never thought about if you keep these two worlds separate. So that's how I do it. But I think there's more general point of integrating professional. and family and how you think and plan is a general point that I hope a lot of people take into account. Mono asked, do you think it's possible to foster the deep life a little later on in life? In your research, can you recall any noteworthy examples of people who began to cultivate depth at midlife, for example, or after? Well, Mono, I would flip that around. I would say almost every case you hear of people trying to transform their life or get more serious about about what matters to them or embracing more depth.

Almost every example is of someone later in life. Like that's actually the cliche, right? You're later in life, something has happened after a divorce, after you lose your job, after retirement, and you make these big shifts and get in touch with what's important to you and you burn more incense and, you know, whatever, walk around in sandals more. To me, like the cliche is later in life.

What's unusual is actually people doing this thinking early at life. You know, I push that, hey, early on in your life, early in your career. Even as a student, you need to be thinking about the deep life and how to construct a deep life because I think it is so rare among young people. Most young people say, well, I'm just going to focus on this career I've stumbled into and just try to be as successful as possible and I'll figure out the rest later. And then they have to go through these broader embraces of depth later in life, which is all

to say, you are in the right place. you're a little bit later in life. That's when most people do this. You are not trotting in terra incognito. You're going to have an easier time at this than the 22-year-olds I'm often giving this advice because you have a lot of life experience. You have a lot more evidence from which to draw what you're all about and what matters. You also have a lot more confidence, right?

When you are 22, it's very nerve-wracking. Am I going to be able to have a career? Am I going to be able to support myself? Do I have any skills? Am I capable of being a functional member, you know, of society? And if you're 42 or 52, like, okay, I've had jobs. I've made money. I have some money.

Maybe I own a house, you know. Okay, I am fine. I'm a functioning human. I do not use the verb adulting. I'm an adult. I know what's going on. So you actually have a more stable foundation from which to make these changes. and if you're young and you're like, I don't even know what's going on.

I know very little things. So I'm just trying to be really encouraging, Mono. Yes, you can absolutely embrace a deep life later in life. That's when most people do it. You have a lot of examples to follow. So you can follow my approach where you identify the buckets and then you figure out what's important to each of the buckets. You focus on those things and you try to minimize the distractions

that aren't those most important things. Or you can look at any other sources, be them philosophical or theological, any of these mini books, be them fiction or. nonfiction have been written over the years about these later in life transitions, and I think you're going to find a lot of guidance. So, yep, you have my encouragement. Just avoid buying the red Porsche. That particular embrace of midlife insecurities doesn't usually turn out the way you think. All right, let's do one more here. Philippa asks the following, I'm a home educating mother of four children aged six to 13 in England.

throw online volunteer work into the daily mix, and I have a chaotic life of dishes, housework academics, taxi driving, computer work, and children, with no obvious divide between work and home. I've worked on digital detoxing, but no, there's more areas to work on. How can I distill the benefits of deep work

into a format that works in a crazy home life filled with children. Thank you in advance. Well, Philippa, I think the key idea that might help you here is the notion of the deep life. As I've been talking about here on this podcast and on my blog, the deep life is where you identify the buckets that are important to you.

And then in those buckets, you want to make sure that you're focusing on a small number of high-value activities and trying to reduce or effectively control lower value activities and distraction. More energy into things that are really high return, less energy on the things that aren't. Now here's a key thing about the deep life. The energy investment in each of those buckets might not be uniform. Depending on what's going on in your life, depending on your situation, some buckets might be getting a lot more energy than others, and that's okay. What's important

is that in general you're trying to focus on big wins in each and not waits too much time on distractions or diversions that are non-necessary, but that steal time and attention from things that are valuable. So if you're home educating for children, the community family bucket, well, that's probably getting a ton of energy. And so within that bucket, you want to be really focused on I'm trying to deliver this home education really top-notch. It's really important to me. It's important to my kids. It's something I'm going to put a lot of energy into. And because of that, I also want to be very careful about distractions or diversions that would get in the way of that without giving me a lot of value. So you know what? I'm going to, I'm not going to look at

Instagram posts from other home educating parents that just, I don't know, they're all dressed in white and they're in a field with a loom for some reason and the girls have is that a daffodil behind their ears? And you just sit there and you're trying to you're trying to get the paste out of your eye. But the problem is is the marker on your hand gets on your face. And then when the mailman comes to the door, you don't realize that you have a magic marker Hitler mustache and you still can't see their reaction because you have the paste in the eye. And there's no kids working on a loom with affidils behind her ears in a field. And you're saying, okay, I don't need to be exposed to that. That's a diversion. That's a distraction. Social media here is making

me less happy. It's getting the way of doing what I'm trying to do, which is educate these kids and do so while minimizing the number of pediatric homicide charges I end up accruing. All right. Now, maybe you look in a bucket like craft. At this time in your life, that might not be a bucket that's going to get a huge amount of energy because so much energy is into home educating your kids and avoiding the magic market, you know, Hitler mustache and not killing them. There's not a lot left over to, let's say, hone some skill. Like, I'm going to learn how to computer program. Or this is when I'm going to write my novel. And that's okay. Now, in the craft thing, you might, you still want something in there, like every bucket that's important to you,

some sort of high value activity you do, but that high value activity could be something you do Saturday mornings when your partner takes to kids and that's when you sit and do whatever. You write a chapter or write some poetry to stay sharp and read a novel you like in a scenic park or whatever it is or you go and find a mailman to apologize for

the blind Hitler routine. Whatever you need to do, right? It might not take that much time but it's something high value and it's in there and you're not wasting your time on distraction or diversions. And you have like constitution, like your health, And that's important. I got to figure out how it's going to work.

How am I going to be careful about how I eat? And maybe there's certain types of exercises or walking. And it's important to me. We're going to figure out how to make this happen. But I'm also not going to be doing marathon training. Right. So I guess what I'm trying to say here, outside of like finding an excuse to make really inappropriate Hitler references

and children homicide references, outside of that, what I'm trying to say here is you want to know what's important in your life and you want to make sure. you're taking swings that matter in each of those areas and not getting too lost or diverted by distractions or low value or optional activities, but they do not have to be the same size swings. If you feel like in each of those buckets, you're being true to what matters to you and you're doing something that shows you care about it and you're trying to not get tripped up, you're trying not to get distracted or diverted, you're focused on what's important, you avoid what

is shallow. That is a good, satisfying, meaningful life. And what those things are and how you divide that energy, that is going to change. That's going to change at different times of your life, at different stages of your life. I don't know the details of your situation, but if you're like me and the home education is happening because of the pandemic, then you're in like a temporary emergency situation. And your life is going to look much different when that pandemic has gone. Like every pandemic in the history of the world has ever gone, it's going to pass and things are back and your kids are back in school.

And you're going to have to rebalance where that energy goes. There's not going to be enough places for you to put that kid energy. And maybe that's going to go back towards craft, or you're going to run for that train for that marathon. And then you're just going to start running. And you're just going to keep running. You're going to run until you get to the tunnel. And you jump on that train, you never look back.

You can tell. I've spent too much time with my kids recently. But you know, as you get what I'm saying. So that's what I would say, Philippa, is don't just have a random idea. Like, I should be doing more deep work or I should be doing more of this. what matters to you, what are the buckets, focus on the important, cut out the distractions,

be completely comfortable with that allocation of energy being uneven. And it is in that commitment to the important and that rejection of the unimportant that you find meaning and satisfaction. Not in any one particular activity, not in any one particular way of living. And so I don't know. I can just look at the elaboration you sent me,

it seems like you were there, you have that energy. And so maybe I'm really just giving you permission to say, you're on it, you're doing it. This is depth. Sometimes depth is chaotic. You know, it's about focus instead of distraction. It's about intention instead of diversion. You commit to those things.

It will change over time. But the one element that will stay constant is your sense of pride and how you are living in a time of great chaos in your life. All right, we have been at this for a while, so we should probably wrap up. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions.

If you want to participate in the next survey asking for podcast questions, sign up from my mailing list at calnewport.com. Thank you to our sponsors, Grammarly, Four-Sigmatic, and Indeed.com. I'll be back later this week with a Habit Tuneup mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.