Deep Questions with Cal Newport - IN-DEPTH: Architecting a Deep Life (w/ David Dewane)

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

In this episode of IN-DEPTH, Cal is joined by David Dewane, the architect responsible for the “eudaimonia machine” featured in DEEP WORK. In this wide-ranging conversation, Cal and David talk about the challenges of finding depth in a distracted world, and the results of David’s personal experimentation in creating a deep life of his own. Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaINTERVIEW: Architecting a Deep Life (w/ David Dewane) [04:06]Links:https://www.calnewport.com/slowhttps://donedaily.com/ Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the theme music, and Mark Miles for mastering. 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 In-Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. I'm excited about today's guest. It's my longtime friend, David Duane. Now, if you've read Deep Work, you might recognize this name. David, who is an architect, is featured in that book for his idea of what he called the Utimodia Machine, a design. for a theoretical office that maximizes deep work over distraction. So after my book came out, this idea, this design of the eutamonia machine became a bit of a sensation. As David talks about in our interview, he got a lot of press about it.

Eventually, someone even built a version of his eutamonia machine, so it had a life of its own. Since then, David has gone on to make these type of buildings a reality. He works with a cutting-edge firm that tries to design the offices of the future for knowledge work, So keep it in mind, not just the physical spaces, but how they interact with how people think and distractions. Probably one of the most creative thinkers out there about the interaction of space and the ability to do things with your mind. So we talk about this in my interview. We get into it, this sort of interaction between offices and spaces from a massive office to how you design your home office to be more conducive to deep work. But the other reason why I have David on the show is that among the people I know, you spend as much time as he does.

systematically thinking about what he wants in his life and how to make his life deeper. He is very good at life engineering and engineering his life towards depth. So we get into that journey as well in this interview. We talk about his current life right now, which is really cool the way he has it set up and how he got there, including key turning points and the specific tools he used and is invented to help make his life better. Keep a particular eye out for our discussion of the Collins score. which is something I learned from him and he uses to great effect in his life. So anyways, if you're interested in either more focus in your current spaces or more depth in

your life going forward, I think you're going to love this wide-ranging conversation that I had with David DeWain. But before we get into it, I want to mention our presenting sponsor who is making it possible for us to present this interview with no commercial interruptions. And that is our friends at Dunn Daily. done daily helps you break free from the noise of shallow tasks and focus on the deep, meaningful work that really matters. Now, I know the people who created Dun Daily. They were behind another company called My Body Tutor, which has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast. They're experts at online coaching. So having real people

coach you but using the internet to try to keep things affordable. And that's what they're bringing to the world of productivity. With Dun Daily, you're assigned a coach to work with. But this coach is going to work with a proven productivity system. So they will help you build a quarterly plan, lay out your weekly plan, and then organize a daily plan to stay on top of what matters most. You check in on your plan daily with them for accountability and then debrief on your plan every week to see how things are going. I don't work for this company, but they know my ideas. And a lot of the type of ideas I talk about on the show like multi-scale planning are integrated into their system. And I was happy for them to do that because I've known them for a long time.

And I think it's really cool to bring the idea of online coaching to the types of productivity ideas we talk about here. I think that's probably the future, especially for very high performers, is to have a coach on board. And online coaching is much more affordable than trying to have like an executive coach actually show up at your office. So anyways, I thought this was a cool company. I've known these guys. I said, look, I want to tell people about it. So done daily, just go to donedaily.com, do you in e.daily.com to find out more. All right, with that, let's get into our interview with David Dwayne.

All right, I'm here with David Dwayne. David, I think you're best known to my audience, as I mentioned in the introduction, for your idea of the eudamonia machine, which was in my book, Deep Work. Now, my memory is, correct me if I'm wrong, that began as an architect's sketch. You literally sketch this, no cliche, on a napkin. At a bar. At a bar. Deep, pot circle.

What's the backstory there? So the backstory is that you know, I found out about your stuff between so good they can't ignore you and deep work and if I remember right

you're blogging chapters out to deep work right? Or like you were talking about the concept in some way, shape or form. I used to use the term hard focus and then at some point I evolved that over to the word deep work.

Yeah. So a mutual friend of ours Brian Chappelle was deep working to accelerate his dissertation. And he turned me onto the concept of deep work because I was teaching architecture at the time and I was trying to accelerate my paper output. And so Brian and I were just having lunch one day. And he's like, well, you're architect. Like, well, it would be the ultimate space for deep working. Because we were each doing all these workarounds. Like, I don't know if I described

this to you before, but I actually had to get an office in a different school on campus so that I could focus. Like, I got an office in the Religious Studies Department. even though it had nothing to do with me, and nobody knew who I was. Just to get away from distraction. Exactly. And Brian was writing his dissertation in his basement, right? And he had that like super regimented, 5 a.m.

4 a.m. or something crazy, yeah. And so we were kind of in like a little bit of a support loop. And then I just sketched it out at lunch. And he had the idea. I think he emailed you without even telling me. And then you were blind and you're like, yeah, let's get together and talk about you doing you. And I remember like really distinctly taking this seriously and being like, okay, here is,

here's like a description of how this should work, you know, and I put it on one page and sent it to you. And that was like, it was very impactful in my whole vector since then. I mean, it showed up in a lot of places. It would come up in magazines or I would see it and you reference. Like I don't know that world well, but it seems like it had to have. a bit of a half-life. It had a little cult following there. Yeah.

Yeah. Somebody built a version of it in Chelsea and New York. I didn't realize this. Okay. In Chelsea? Okay. Yeah, yeah. Full size?

It was like a store. It was like a retail store. But it was, it was organized like, it was organized along these lines. And then, yeah, it was there that, you know, a couple of people, like Seth Godin was there.

A chip cutter from the Wall Street Journal was there. And that was a consequential one because he brought up in the future of, work. The Wall Street Journal does this every year. They have their future work. Kind of section. And that's where my current CEO read about it. And he's like, boom, here's my guy. So you would say now, I think it's what's interesting, is back then it was a sketchy or teaching architecture. Now your day job in some sense is making these type of spaces of reality. Do I have that more or less right? Yes. So I'm an architect and

the chief experience officer of a company called Genient. And what we do is we try to build workplaces that help people have great experiences and do their jobs better. The whole project grew out of it. I think your critique was that the whole world of work is in a way suffering because we're so distracted all the time. I was looking at it purely from the slice of the experience

of the physical space architect and thinking like the space is damaged or the space is faulty or whatever lacking. And there are other people looking at it from like the technology standpoint. And so now like where I'm privileged to be in a position where like that's my job is to try to figure out how to enable companies to take a totally different approach. Like a totally elevated, evolved approach. And it keys together.

Like it reinforces in a ton of ways your whole gestalt, you know. A question I'm often asked is people who are doing a lot of remote work. So they're setting up their own space at home. They're wondering, okay, if I wanted to take advantage of my physical space, have something like the eudamonia machine type of advantage, but it's not an office for a lot of people. It's how I think about the physical spaces when I work when I'm at my own home. Have you thought about this?

Like if you really wanted to go, not radical, but you really wanted to get into it with someone who was working from home into changing the various spaces you work in, having multiple spaces. What's possible here? Okay, so I think about this every day. You know, I think about it a lot. I think that we've become so used to languishing.

You know, flourishing is the highest state of well-being. Depression is the opposite. Linguishing is the middle. I'm just getting by, you know? And I think that the open office kind of just generic world out there. is largely about languishing. And so when you compare that to my house, where would I rather languish in my house or here?

It's easier to languish at home. I don't think a lot of people are flourishing at home. Because I think in order to flourish, you have to be exposed to other people. You have to give resources. You have to, for a lot of knowledge workers, I think you really need to engage in some sort of reciprocal, like, energizing dialogue.

and Zoom is a poorer proxy for this. The reason I'm sitting in the HQ right now, talking to you in person, is because if this was on Zoom, I don't think the conversation quality would be as good. Yeah. So where you're going here is actually the key is to making the non-home office better.

That we'll prefer remote work if all we're doing at the office is we're in a cubicle on email. Like, I might as well be at home because I don't have to commute and I have other, I can go to do my Peloton over lunch. But if you build an office right...

If you want to make something remarkable with other people, I think you have to do it in an environment that is set up in such a way that stimulates that kind of creativity. You know, and that kind of... That triggers the Arkansas relationships. So this is the whole switch from functional

to performative. You know, like, if there's one kind of just switch I want to flip in your head, is that like... And I'm stealing this from Rem Kulos, the greatest loving architect, probably Dutch guy. is that like almost anything can function as a, let's say a school. A trailer can function as a school. Yeah.

Right? If you're a school is too crowded, you can put people outside. But like what performs as a school? You know, what gets the students in the right mindset? What like connects you to like history? This is like the Georgetown campus with its ornate buildings and the greens with the old trees. They don't need it. Georgetown could function on any, in,

in a commercial office building downtown, you could put every single student, every single professor in a tower downtown. And they could function. But like, if you want to break into that next tier, it's about performance. You know, and like what performs as a workplace? You know, what gets us in the right state of mind,

what puts us in the right kind of relationship? And that is, it's a tricky thing. Like a great experience is a tricky thing to build. It's like a spell. Like you kind of conjure it. It's like a bubble or something. And it's easy to break it. It's like concentration.

Like as soon as your phone buzzes or somebody taps me on the shoulder, going. Okay, so here's a follow-up going on a rabbit hole here, but it's a fascinating one to me. Does this make sense to you, by the way? Absolutely does, yeah. So my follow-up is I had this idea I wrote about in the early days of virtual reality, where I'd done the first demos, one of my students had brought an early vibe to Georgetown. And I wrote this article on what I called immersive single-tasking. And my idea was because of exactly this theory you're talking about, I said space matters. I was thinking about Cambridge, think about Oxford.

Space matters, the symmetry of those greens, the fireplace and the wood paneled offices, C.S. Lewis is in there. It matters for certain creative production. Well, it's like the Seinfeld thing about space. It's cataclysmically relevant. Yeah. You remember that? So I was saying, okay, so at home, I was like maybe something virtual reality is going to bring to us is work spaces that are inspiring in that way.

I call it immersive single tasking because you'd be working on a single thing. And I think my example was, you know, you're in the Hogwarts dining hall, which is based off King's College or whatever. With a whiteboard, you can draw on with like the virtual reality. And you're working on a proof there. It's going to be a completely different mindset than at your kitchen table. And people built these things, right? I mean, I said, okay, here's the limitations.

It was resolution. I was like, you need a good enough resolution that you can actually read and see text and be able to write. And people have built these things. It really has not caught on. So is this just we're not there yet? or is there something about the physicality? So I think we're not there yet.

Okay. I was totally blown away when I did my first demo of the Vision Pro, the Apple Vision Pro. I'm like, oh my God. You know, there's a, have you done it? I haven't done the Vision Pro, though I've done other AR. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm on the records. It makes it, it makes old ARs, in my view, look like toys.

Yeah. You know. But what's you do in it? Okay, so there's a couple simulations that you walk through, which are kind of like, okay, and then there's this whole deep experience they do at the end where they're like basically play like a reel of like, it starts like it fades out of black and like Alicia Keys is standing from media away, like singing to you, you know? And it was so shocking to me that I made the guy play like three times. But this is just like a Verobs reality demo at this point.

This is what the past through completely turned off and now it's in from. reality. Well, what's weird about the vision pro too is that your peripheral vision is intact. So you can kind of look to the side and see real world stuff. But then there's like, it takes you to like a, you know, Greek ruins in Turkey. And then it takes you to like little kids playing soccer in Nairobi or something. And I've been a Greek ruins in Turkey. And I've seen little kids play soccer in Africa. And that's exactly what it feels like. You don't have the dusty bus ride to get you there. But it's like 80, 90% of the way. So like immediately after I, I had that demo.

I emailed a guy I know who runs like a software company for architects and I'm like, you got to do captures of like all the great buildings in the world and sell an architecture schools. Yeah. You know,

because like now you don't have to go out or, you know, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Like, you could get most of it, you know, just like sitting in your couch in your living room or something. Now, why hasn't it caught on yet?

And like the sports stuff is actually awesome too. Like you'd really appreciate the baseball one where you're sitting on like the first baseline. I did one recently of the S&L 50th anniversary show. They put a 360 degree camera

and you could sit next to the cameraman while they were doing one of the skits and like they were here and you could look over and the cameraman was right there and you can look behind you and the audience. Yeah. But do you buy this? My argument has been the way into this world is what I've observed a report on it is going to be screens. So

the number one productivity app in the Oculus store during the pandemic was this company called Immersed. And what they found was everyone else was trying to jump straight into a full virtual experience, typically with like group meetings, we'll all meet at the ruins of whatever. And it was friction was the problem. People like, I don't want to go through the, I don't want to put on my thing and log into a room. And like I could just do Zoom on the computer I'm already at.

So what immersed did is they said, you know, you're in a virtual world. But here's what you care about. We give you monitors. And at home, you only own one extra monitor, but in the virtual world, we can give you four. And so it's like a more useful workspace, right? You have more monitors. So I'm working from home and I can have three big monitors. Because I don't own three big monitors, but they're virtual.

But you're surrounded by you're on top of a mountain or this or that. And they found this got people into the virtual world because it was convenient. It's a better screen than they physically have at home. Yeah. But then they were in a virtual world. And then other things could happen. My personal test for these kinds of things is when you forget. And there's like a slip in your mind.

And you forget that you're in a Apple. or whatever, and you think you're in Turkey, you know? And I guess it'll be exciting when that's readily available to everybody. But man, the bar is so high for making all that content and stuff. And the adoption has got to really be agonizing for Apple and the companies that are invested in this

because, you know, you haven't even tried it. Yeah. When I think about these things instead, When I think about great experiences, you know, I am like maybe oddly satisfied with the real world, you know? And like my favorite digital experience is that Apple pay. I didn't ask for it. It's invisible. It was free.

It just showed up one day. And it makes my life easier. You know, so I don't have to think about extra stuff. I can focus more on, you know, what I care about. that day, like what I set out to do that day. Did you read Rick Rubin's creativity book? Some of it. It's not a book you really read through.

Yeah, he modeled it on the d'altay chain kind of. So you can kind of pick it up and put it down whenever you want. But there's one part in there that I thought you'd like a lot where he encourages you to plan your day with a concentration that you're like landing an airplane. And so like, yeah, the first 50 minutes of my day when I'm like time blocking and stuff and going through like my kind of core daily metrics, it like, I have it written right next to it, my planner. Like take the same seriousness as 50 minutes as though you're landing an airplane.

What does that mean? What does it mean to be serious about planning? Be really focused on like the two or three really important. Like for me in my rhythm and my daily life right now, I can probably achieve two or three really important things in a day. You know, and so I just need to. And I like carefully segment creative time out from normal time, a shallow work time. And so I really carefully budget.

Because if you don't do it, the world just sweeps in and steals your time. I'll tell you something interesting about it because I was just writing about exactly this idea this morning. So I'm working on a chapter of my new book and it's about organizing your time as a prerequisite for changing your life. Yeah. And I was writing about exactly this idea, and I was looking back historically, where did this idea of MIT's most important tasks? Like, make sure that you figured out the most important thing and get that done first, right? It seems like a timeless idea. It arose early 2000s.

Right. Okay. Like just that phrase? That phrase, but not just that phrase. That phrase came a little bit later. I think that was Gina Tepani at LifeHacker. Okay. Invented MIT's.

But it was you had Brian Tracy eat that frog, was sort of getting around that idea. If you eat the frog, eat a frog first thing in the day, everything else won't seem so bad. And his idea was do your most important thing first. Then Julie Morgan Stern in the early 2000s wrote, never check your email in the morning. And her idea was, before you do anything else, spend one hour on the most important thing because you're not going to get to it. And then the bloggers took over Leo Babuda. That's where I first came across it as his inhabits.

And then I wrote about it. This, by the way, is like one of the issues I'm having now when I'm using AI asking about the origins of different productivity ideas, my articles keep coming back. So it's become oddly circular. I wrote about this back then. But this idea emerged sort of concurrently with email culture. And I wonder if it wasn't as relevant in 1992. It was, I have time.

I have two meetings today. And my problem is like filling my day. But you get to the early 2000s, we introduced this idea of make sure that you do the thing that matters first because that might be your only chance. to get to it. Yeah. No, I could see that. I like Ferris' kind of idea of make before you manage.

I just think that... The sort of situation I've carved out for myself is that I have decent amount of control over my time, especially, like, I know the hours of the day where I'm pretty productive, and I try to really focus on taking things off my master tassel. like I don't have to go looking for stuff to do. It's all there.

Like I've captured it or configured it or whatever. And like I kind of tee it up and I go for it. But man, I look at other like because people share their calendars and stuff, you know. And you're talking about you get a lot of communicate. Like you're in it, right? Like there's emails. There's meetings all the time or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I have to, I look at other people's calendars and it's just jammed all the way. And I'm like, man, how do you? you get anything done, you know. But... How do you resist that? I try to not... I personally tried to just focus on doing fewer things but doing it well.

And I try not to... I try not to show up or like volunteer to show up to meetings where I'm not contributing. Yeah. Unless there's something like there's a series of meetings that are within my company, that I'm not participating. Other people are like presenting forecasts

and stuff like that that I love because I can feel like the pulse of the company and stuff. But I just, I don't have a lot of meetings that aren't mission critical. And most of my meetings are external to, like with, you know,

people that control workplaces for other companies that I'm trying to sell my services to. So, you don't, like, I think the biggest thing that helped me, have a under-scheduled calendar is just killing the pseudo-productivity dragon

and be like don't like don't assume that you're more valuable to the company because your calendar is full. Yeah. I just met last weekend. He just retired, but he was a president of a relatively large company. It had been for most of his professional career. And the story he told me is he said, look, my calendar was filled because of exactly what you're saying. this is what makes me useful is people want to talk to me and I can talk to them and give them guidance or help them make decisions.

This is why I'm useful. Then he hired a new CFO and a really high-level executive assistant. And they kind of put their heads together and came back and said, you have too many meetings. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to block off a non-trivial amount of time every day. And the executive assistant is like, I'm going to protect that like you're at your daughter's wedding. So this is time that I'm not going to, we're not going to let meetings go into. And he's really worried, but that's like three or four meetings.

And he said after that change, it was, you know, night and day. He felt like he was 5X more useful. Not productive, but useful. He had time to sit and think and strategize. And it turned out that there was this back pressure in meetings that would fill every minute. Anyway, there's no into it, right? So it's not like those three extra meetings was the difference between success or not. And then the story I told back, I tell this in the world without email, is that General Marshall,

Chief of Staff of the Army during World War II, the person in charge of the entire war effort, essentially, right, back here in D.C. Didn't work past five during World War II? Because he had a hard condition. And like back then, the doctor's advice was don't work past five, so you don't have a heart attack. So he ran World War II.

Fixed schedule. It was fixed schedule. He had to get congressional approval that completely changed the lines of communication within the war department. So there's too many people reporting to me. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to talk to these five people, and then these people will handle these people. And if you're going to have a meeting with me, you're going to bring all of this stuff in advance. That meeting is going to be 10 minutes.

And it turned out it was all a knob you could turn. And you could turn that knob to fill every minute of your day. You could turn the knob to work till 5. And he was just as effective. There was just an element of intentionality. I mean, you sort of just have me now on a workflow tangent. I still want to get to the main thing I want to talk to you about. All right.

So the main thing I want to talk to you about is I do think about you as someone who's very intentional about your life. Thank you. And I want to break down some of the things you've done to get there, because I think it's useful for my listeners who care about the deep life. But I want to paint a picture a little bit more. We've talked about your job. We know you're an architect. Now you have this job where you're helping to design sort of the workspace of the future.

That's like a Disney-Upcott term. But you know. Right. But you also have, tell us about the farm. Epco is pretty radical, by the way. Okay. So, yeah. one of the things that I feel happy about in this conversation

is that I do kind of feel like a representative of the audience. Like I'm not a famous person. Nobody, like, I don't have a, I'm not an author of some other book that's coming here to kind of do that. Like, I, and I'll give you your flowers just once really quickly, that I attribute a lot of the things that make me a kind of, an intentional person to the fact that I've like, I've taken a lot of your lessons really seriously

and applied them over a long period of time. Like a decade. That's why I'm having you on. We want to hear this story. Yeah, right. So where do you want to start at the farm right now? Yeah, tell us about the farm. Okay.

Like where you live normally in the farm and then I'm going to wind you back to like how we ended up there. So I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, but I live in Chicago. And my wife and I are from the same small town. and we decided during COVID that, you know, and we'd been thinking about it for like a while,

but we wanted a country spot that is a kind of a compliment to our city spot because our jobs depend on being in the city. And so... And your city spot's really a city spot. Roe House, like you know all the people. You live in a neighborhood. Yeah, I live in a great neighborhood, right close to university, Hyde Park, south side of Chicago.

It's kind of like Tacoma Park for Georgetown. But, yeah, it's great. And it's like a working class neighborhood. And, but we found a, we were looking and looking for like a country spot. And we finally found a really interesting one that is like five acres right in Lake Michigan. You know, like 10 minutes outside my hometown. And so. An orchard nonetheless.

No, it didn't have an orchard. Oh, you planted that? Yeah. All right. So it was just five acres when you got it. So we, yeah, we bought it. and it wasn't expensive. I think we paid $170,000.

Yeah, because the house was... It was an old barn. Yeah, an old barn. From the 1870s, and then it had a two-car garage attached to it. And so we converted the garage into a thing, but we had to put in a well, we had to put in gas,

we had to put it electric. And those weren't bugs. For me, those were features. Yeah. Because we got to design everything. I like building stuff. And so it was cheaper. Like, I could never have afforded

to hire a contract to do all that stuff. And so... And how far is it from your house in Chicago? Two and a half hours. So we can migrate there on the weekends and stuff. And the pragmatically, the way that we did it is that we will like, well, Airbnb it when we're not there. And that worked out perfectly.

You know, we kind of have a push-down pop-up system where if there's a big event in Chicago, we can Airbnb our place in Chicago and go to the farm. And it works out. So, like, we're not rich people, you know, very middle-income folks. and like but we really wanted this to work and we came up with like an imminently practical solution but now it's like I joke around like with you probably

but like every day I'm there is a plus two you know every day I'm working there for sure is a plus two you have the writing what do you call it now the writing shed cottage cottage yeah or I love this part of it yeah so we have three little kids and it's a lot of noise

and when I'm there sometimes you want to get away from that so I copied Mark Twain's writer's cottage and like other people have had these you know like we probably jumped around about project Douglas had one you know these other writers have them and so and I do like writing

I'm working on a book project that I will get to at some point here I think the writer's cottage like building a writer's cottage was the ultimate act procrastination on this book project. Well, the ultimate move is what Michael Pollan did, where he wrote a book about building his writer's cottage. That's the meta move right there.

Yeah, tusha. So anyway, no, it's like an octagon building about the size of this room. And it sits in the field like beyond the orchard, looks right, Lake Michigan. And it is like my favorite place in the world. You know, and I, it cost $2,000. in materials from Lowe's. You built Craigslist.

You know, it's not like these things are not, but it took a lot of time. It took a lot of hours. But again, that's a feature. You know, it was fun to build. Your schedule is like most weekends. Most weekends. You would head out there.

Yeah. And then sometimes if there was something going on in Chicago, you would bail. Airbnb and got there longer. Yeah. And we just got comfortable Airbnb in our house too. Yeah. You know, so it's like a lot of people

kind of raise their eyebrows at that. But hey, man, whatever. makes it that possible. And it's really great for the kids. It's like my life is this really beautiful kind of two alternating currents where on Friday, I can get out of the city.

I have a couple afternoon calls that I can take on the road. And then I pull up to the farm, it's like I get out and it's just quiet. And, you know, I can notice little changes in the landscape. Like I'm so attuned to that landscape now the day to day, especially in spring.

It's like I can see things changing. And that's really exciting to me. And then like Sunday evening, I pack up, go back to Chicago and I turn my 94 or whatever. And I see the skyline. And I feel like seven feet tall. Yeah. And I'm like, all right, let's get back into this.

And it's so, it's such a great way to live, at least at this stage in my life. But there's one other thing in my drawer at the writer's cottage. I don't know if I told you about this, but I hacked your time block planner. Yeah. And I have my own like version of it. But I built a life time block planner. So you mean like on a year scale?

Yes. So it goes 100 years. It goes from now until I'm 100 years old. And each spreads like a year. Yeah. And so there are projects that I have that I know I don't have the bank. to work on them now, but I don't want him rattling around in my head. So I put them in my life block planner years out, you know? And you look at it. And I look at it all the time. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, from a lifestyle-centric planning perspective, what was, so the farm is a solution to a vision that, because we talk about this a lot on the show that in lifestyle strategic planning, you don't work towards a particular, you don't start with the goal. Like, I want to buy something here. You start with the vision of the lifestyle. Like, here's what I want in my life we don't have and then you look for creative solutions that gets that there. So what was the goal that eventually the farm became the solution to? I think just like what were you thinking when envisioning your life tell this is what's missing. I think it's just a pace.

You know, like years go by like that. You know, and I think that there was something else about like returning to our like our roots. Because your hometown was nearby. Well, not just that. Yeah, like my hometown was nearby. My parents are kind of aging and they're there. I want my kids to have a relationship with them. But I was, you know, tucking my middle little kid in

when we were at the farm one day. And I was telling her, I'm like, you know, when our people immigrated here, they came right to this county. Yeah. And she's like, what? Really? Do we have a photograph?

And it's kind of like right after the Civil War, potato famine, Irish people. And I'm like, yeah, we got a picture. And she's like, I want to go put a picture on the guy. grave tomorrow. And so we gone the picture, made a copy of it, putting a little frame, it took it out to the cemetery and found the guy's grave. So your relatives, there's a cemetery nearby

that has like your relatives are there? The first guy from Ireland. Oh. It was born temporary. Now there he is. And so every successive generation has kind of come up there. And so, I mean, that's different than when you're in Chicago and it's kind of like anonymous in a way. You're absorbed into this larger thing. What? Like when you first were thinking about those, general goals. I want to slow things down.

I want some connection. You're probably thinking generally like the country. You have some part of our life that's slower back to our roots. Was there, I'm imagining there as like, okay, let's look at the obvious options. The orchard was also a really big deal. You planted the orchard. Yeah. And they're cider apples.

Their hard cider apples. Was that part of the original plan? Well, so my wife and I, she did a, we lived in Paris briefly. Well, she was doing a study abroad. and we discovered like in the French countryside, you know, like they have this like, a Normandy has this champagne like apple cider, and we're like, oh my God, we should make this.

How long ago was this? 2010. So it had been lurking. Oh, yeah. It's been like a detail that became a part of your lifestyle. You and your wife are bumming around rural France and you're like, we should get a country spot and plant an apple orchard.

Yeah. You know? Meanwhile, you're in D.C., then you're in Chicago. Yeah, you're buzzing around. And you're getting jobs and getting promoted and all stuff. But then eventually it's like we got to get serious. And so we, as a kind of forcing mechanism, we used our 20th anniversary as like, we're going to have a reunion or like a kind of a reunion of the people that came to our wedding, you know,

and we're going to do it at this farm. And we did. We did. It was awesome. Yeah. Well, but when you first, so practically speaking, I'm assuming, when you first like, okay, we have this deadline. we know we want country connection to roots orchard

probably the first thing you did was what will fire up zillow and you're looking at vacation homes for sale and it's like super expensive and that might be a place where we were even looking when we were here you know we looked at an orchard actually and like a buy roanoke or something but like yeah you look in a non-serious way for a while and then you kind of get more serious about it

and COVID was sort of like okay And then also it's like, you know, we're running out of time. Yeah. What are we going to do? And so... But you got creative, right? Because a lot of people might have got stuck with like, okay, I'm looking up like nice houses on the lake and they're all $800,000. And I don't have $800,000.

So I guess that plan's not going to work. But you kept working... We found it the day it came on. Yeah. And we put an offer in like a week later. Yeah. And also, I mean, like, from the financial standpoint, I just traded my 401K for that, basically. I cashed my 401k early.

Yeah. Absorbed all the penalties and stuff. And it didn't really hurt my feelings too much because I want to work. I love working. Yeah. So I want to work until I die anyway. Yeah. But, like, and plus I, like, it's a good investment, too, even though I didn't even

we don't want to sell it or anything. But you're thinking about the next 20 years. I had to make a non-trivial choice about, like, should I risk this thing on that? And it was best decision I ever made in my life. Yeah. I want them, you know? I don't want anybody. You're prioritizing the next 20 years,

like making those as good as possible, as opposed to just maximizing 30 years or whatever, that period of life. Tell me about the Collins score. Yeah, I threw out this thing that like every day at my farms a plus two, you know? Yeah, that's a subtle note. I talked about it briefly on the show about a month ago,

but it's worth bring the list up to speed again. Yep. about six years ago Ferris interviewed Tim Ferriss interviewed Jim Collins the author of Good to Great and a handful of other

landmark books I consider him like the Peter Drucker of the 21st century Yeah I told you I got met him at some point after that He gave me some advice, nice guy He's a super Like I just have to imagine

I don't know how I got in touch with him He's hard to get in touch with Yeah I know I have I'm not really a star chaser Like that you know But I look I look forward someday to hopefully meeting him.

We have a lot of things in common. If you go to his website and you go to his further reading, he's like the only person I've ever met who's listened to more great courses series than I have. So we can have a fun laugh about that. But he said something on, you know, Ferris's show that really stuck with me or caught my attention and then I implemented it right away,

which is he tracks every day three things. He brings up a spreadsheet. And he does a little bullet points of like the things that happened that day. And then the second column, he records the amount of creative time, what he calls creative time. You'd probably call deep work. She'd say me how I would call flow, whatever. Like, heads down, focused work.

And then the third column is a rating, like a daily rating, like a grade. And it's highly subjective. It's just a body feeling. How do my day go? And it's on this very specific scale, which I think is probably the most genius part of it, which is negative 2, negative 1, 0 plus 1 plus 2. Yeah. So you have like...

Zero is languishing? Yeah, zero is literally languishing. And I think like, well, I'll ask you, what do you think that score is actually measuring? Subjective assessment of your subjective field of the day. Like did you... Like a zero to me... I think it's measuring Jim Collins' individual flourishing.

Yeah. But like zero would be pretty consistent for people. I would imagine zero is... I don't even really know what happened today. Yeah. It wasn't bad. Like I wasn't sad. I wasn't like stressed out. But like nothing also got me all that fired up. I, you know, I had some emails. I had some meetings. I think people's, if you're not paying attention, if you're not measuring this, I think that the default that hovers around zero. Yeah, because if you're in the negative territory too long, you're probably going to want to make some changes. Yeah. But what you people don't do is push themselves to the positive territory. That's flourishing. Yeah. And so I started tracking. How long? How long? Just a while for you. Right after I. heard about it. So six years ago. Yeah. And I started doing it with my mentor.

And like, so we would start out on our days, time blocking. And then we would like text each other our schedule for the day. And then at the end of the day, we'd text each other a rating. And you used the call and scale. And we used the Collins score. Yeah. Like that exact rating. And so a couple of things occurred to me like immediately. Like one or the first thing is that I knew what got me into negative territory. Okay.

And I deleted that. What was it? It's going to sound strange about fighting with people. Just beating people up on the street. It's stressful. I grew up in a family of Jesuit lawyers, and we would just fight for fun. They can argue. Yeah.

Everybody fights for fun, you know. And I think I used to be more aggressive like that. And then I just realized it was actually emotionally draining, you know. It's like family members? or people you worked with? Work with. Yeah, like be more confrontational about things like push on people and stuff.

And I just realized, like, man, that's not helping. And the other thing was certain people would kind of trigger, you know, if I was in like meetings too long, or if I expected a certain kind of feedback from somebody and I wasn't getting it, like it would bring me down. And so I just kind of avoid that. There's like negative score people in your life.

Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. And so, or like people that can kind of trigger negative score stuff if I ask them for the wrong thing. Anyway, so probably two or three other negatives. Actually,

like I'll tell you right now what triggers a negative, which is I have very specific goals that I'm responsible for. And if I look at where I spent my time that day, look at my goals and they don't match, that's a problem.

Professionally. Yeah, unless I had like a really good excuse, you know, like somebody came to me of the problem that was urgent and they turned to me and I addressed it in a fine way. So, like, maybe that was like apart from my responsibilities, but I handled it and good. You know, so I'll give myself a plus for that. But the other thing that was actually probably more positive than eliminating the negatives was, you know, taking the things, like setting daily realistic goals.

What could I do today to get to a plus one? what might I stretch to to get to a plus two? Did you know what, you didn't know what those were, I'm assuming, until you've been measuring? Like, in other words, did you have to discover what works pretty consistently for a plus two?

You know how you feel at the end of that, you know? But like, did you discover something you wanted to prioritize before? Totally, yes. So, like, what's something you discovered that would reliably deliver like a plus one or plus two day? Manager, just manage your expectations. And then don't waste time.

Don't just, like, don't allow time. to just bleed away. I think it's like you contain the leaks. And like you do get a sense of just a sense of accomplishment from like knocking that one thing. Like I've become very,

I try to be very particular about the things that make it onto my master task list. A master task list. Yeah. But then aggressive about getting them off. You know, things that. linger on that list.

You know. These are like at the project scale? Yeah, at the project scale. Exactly. So not wasting time for you means you made non-trivial progress. Yeah. And so, yeah, and I will, so my quarterly, or my planner,

my time block planner, I do it quarterly. And so I set quarterly goals that I review basically every day. Yeah. You know, because they don't take long to review. And then I just make sure that the part that I'm actually struggling the most with is taking the time on Monday

to really lay out the week. Yeah. I look, if I like review my old ones, those week spreads are undercooked. I keep trying to convince myself to do this end of day Friday, which makes sense on paper, right?

Yeah, it's actually the slowest part the week. And you have, and you get the benefit of the weekend of being like, I know what's going, but it's really hard. It's like you're done by Friday afternoon. But the problem is Monday morning is everyone's rock and rolling. And it's difficult to take the 90 minutes. It can take a while to really get your arms around things. So I've been struggling with that too. I think on paper, Friday end of day makes all the sense in the world. But psychologically, it's difficult. Monday makes more sense. But it's hard to give it the time Monday morning. It's an important link in the multi-scale chain, though.

You've got to get that week in there because you can't just go from quarter to day. Like, I think that you... Yeah, the week really unlocked. You can build a lot more momentum. I want to finish the Konscore thing really quick. Yeah, yeah. Is that I think actually, like,

what I'm experimenting with at work right now is trying to promote this as a broader metric, not just within my company and my work, but like within the field of architecture, you know. And... Well, I've told you, if people had to do this every day in a normal office job, You couldn't hide from the fact, like we'd have to burn down the building where they make Microsoft Outlook.

People are like, well, this is just, wait a second. What I'm doing in this job is making me miserable. There's no metrics and knowledge work. I call it the metric black hole, you know, in deep work. It's like, if people were actually measuring that, they'd be like, I'm upset. I did email and meetings all day. That's not a plus one day. So now I have access to, within my company, I have access to real researchers, anthropologists and ethnographers and people with like masters and this stuff and PhDs.

in social sciences. And, like, my personal background is in, like, high-performance buildings from an energy and resource standpoint, like zero-energy buildings. Billings you use very little water or have a low-carbon footprint. That was really easy and objective because those metrics are... You can count it. Here's how many volts. You can build a model, you know?

But if you ask somebody, build me a high-performance workplace that makes my people happy you're more productive. You can't look at a mechanical engineer and they're going to be totally worthless, you know, but you can ask a social scientist, you know, and they can give you some metrics. But like, I think that this conscore thing, like, if you had, so this is what I'm, I want to experiment with within my own office is get a series of my colleagues tracking, okay? Yeah. And we have some underutilized parts of our office, a couple, like conference rooms and old offices that aren't really used for anything. And so I want to get a group of of people tracking and then anonymize and pool the Collins score.

And they'd be clear about it, practically speaking, you're putting down the score number and then a sentence or two without overthinking it. Just in the moment, why did you put down that score? And that, he leaves vague. Yes. And it's one sentence, two sentences. So my tracker that I'm designing is a slight modification on Collins based on my own sort of

How dare you. Yeah, I know. Oh, it's funny. Usually I try to default towards Collins. And he actually, I think, folds his personal life and his work life together. That's a tough decision for me. I'm trying to just separate it and just focus on work stuff. Well, yeah.

But to him, it's all the same thing. Yeah. But in the morning, the tracker would ask you two questions. One, what time are you going to shut down? Two, which is helpful because then it reminds you to shut down. And then two, what would you have to achieve today to get a plus one? And then at that time you set, it comes back to you and says, how'd you rate your day?

In your vision, this is an app? Yeah, on your phone. And then how would you rate your day? Why would you rate it that way? And then how many hours of creative time or a heads down focused time as you have? And so from the research standpoint, what you would get every day is two quantitative metrics and one qualitative metrics. And that's really the magic because the qual and the quant together create the full pay. picture. A lot of times people just track quantitative stuff. And you can tell like what's going

up, but you have no idea why. The qualitative stuff tells you why. What are you going to tell a manager though? Let's say you do the research. You're doing someone's office and you find like, look, when people look at the qualitative and quantitative, when they're able to spend three hours, heads down, or something I think is important, they're plus one days and when they can't, they're negative phase. You're jumping ahead. Yeah. What's next? Okay. So like, what I want to do with my team is get everybody tracking or get, This is opt-in. I'm not going to force anybody to track stuff.

And I think everybody just keeps their own data, but pulls the number anonymously. But so it's accurate. That's important. But then what I want to do is I want to take some of these underutilized spaces and get everybody together and say, okay, hey guys, and this is an architecture group, so we know about designing space.

But I want to be really intentional and say, how could we reallocate these spaces that give us the best chance of upping our collective con score. What would we turn these into? That would make us even happier or more productive and more effective architects. Would you then measure it? Yeah, and then we just keep tracking.

And you can, through the quality of data, you should be able to point to these things. And, you know, the subjectivity piece, some people view it, I think, fairly as a vulnerability because you're like, well, but if you get a nasty text from somebody, you know, from your spouse, is that going to affect your cons score that day? But like the constant day after day after day after day,

like you build trends really fast. Yeah. You know, and so I'll tell you, I've become so effective at this that I changed my own personal scale from negative 1,0, 1.5, and 2. Because I'm so, I reserve 2s for really exquisite days. I see. But I'm so regular at one that I'm trying to push it a little further. And I've never had a negative two.

Well, so what have you changed in your life? Because of this? Yeah. I think I take on less, for sure. So when you're busy or you had a harder time getting good scores. Yeah, because you always feel inadequate. Yeah. You always feeling like you're chasing or you're on the hamster wheel or whatever.

I mean, or you're too ambitious about the amount of things you take responsibility for. Whereas if, like, I would rather get half the number of things done, but do them as, like, at a really high level. It's just an example of, like, my theory of administrative overhead aggregates. So the more things you're doing, the more the bigger fraction of your day has to be spent not doing things. That sort of ironic cycle. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true.

And, like, there's a, I think you would probably understand this and be able to, to articulate this better than me, but there's an inherent risk there that if I'm doing less, I'm going to be perceived as not as interesting or not as well-rounded or not as comprehensive or whatever, you know?

Whereas if you focus on the things that you're really interested in and curious about and you maintain like a long commitment to those, they blossom into something that's authentically interesting and exciting and people like

are attracted to that. A satisfaction engine. Yeah. They take you seriously. Like, what's an example in your life? So for me, I mean, it is, well, even this conscore thing. You know, like, I didn't come upon that by accident. I came upon that because I'm obsessed with the concept of flourishing

and how to help other people flourish. Yeah. You know, and so I'm trying. And, like, I had developed rare and valuable skills in the high performance ability from like energy resources stuff standpoint. And now I'm trying to like apply what works over here or to this other place.

You know, that is, that's right on the very edge of what's, you know, innovative in my field right now. Right. So you're saying you're playing to long game and the idea you're just explaining to us, for example. Yes. But working on that and continuing to work on that might be a big innovation in the field. And that is a choice versus you could

be much busier with many more smaller projects, which in the moment would make it feel like you had your finger in a lot of pies and we're getting after it and et cetera, et cetera. I can take that concept. I mean, I've got a, there are a series of conferences that are influential in my field. And I want to use,

I have a vision for a slide to start the talks that are coming this fall that is like 0.012 and then arrow and like 1.15. and like that would be like my office's comp score moving from like hovering around zero to like plus ones.

This is like that's going from languishing to flourishing objectively, you know. Right. So if you could have that slide. If I'd say here's what we changed. Maybe. Like we tried this

in the physical space. Didn't change the score. Then we tried this and it made a big difference. Yeah. It's whatever it is. And it might not work. Yeah. You know, and I'm like a little bit

probably in a kind of a petty way, afraid that I'm going to try this thing and people are going to reject it or whatever. But I don't care that much. My ego has been diminished through other failures. Keeping the score helped motivate

the farm in the sense that now when you're thinking about your life in this way, you're thinking this is going to be a plus two generator. Well, I know for a fact that I was I didn't know that it would be as effective as plus two generator as possible. And like, I literally I remember, it's funny that you mentioned this.

This memory kind of flashes back. But, you know, like chest notation? Like how they give like exclamation points next to good moves. And like, if it's a really good move, it gets two exclamation points. It's kind of similar to the plus two things. I know this from you. You explained this to me once, yeah. Yeah.

And in all the chest notation I've ever seen, I saw one three exclamation point move, which was Bobby Fisher's Game of the Century. And like Ruben finds like, commentary on that game. But like the day we actually got the farm was the only plus three day I've ever had. You mean when you're walking through the property? Like we signed the contract at the bank and we went over and it's like ours. You know, that was plus three day. You know, and I was just so happy. But what I didn't anticipate was that and we got it in January in Wisconsin on Lake Michigan during this winter that was called as hell. Right. So it's not like a beautiful spring day. The birds were chirping. No, no. No. And, no. And, no. And,

So our initial wave of work to get it kind of going, I was working out there when it was like 10 degrees every day. Every single day in that first month that I was there was a plus two. You spent like a whole month out there? Yeah. Yeah. Every day. Plus two. And then like I'd never expected or experienced anything like that.

It was just, you know, and now they're not all plus two days out there. But like, it was so great, you know. And, yeah, wow. But that's not the, that's not the, I don't think that's the point. The point isn't a huge string of plus twos. The point is trying to get from, trying to just live a flourishing life. You know, and that's why I think, I think the days that are, you know, for a lot of people, zeros are the days where you just feel

what happened where today go you know and what happened is you know your device still your concentration and you spent too much time worrying about things that you can't control and reading about them in the New York Times yeah you know and letting people live

rent free in your head instead of just getting control of your own situation I mean what's interesting to me to me about it is like if we look at your life for example it's not built on some radical decision. It's not built on I was miserable.

This is the cliche. And we moved to a sailboat and whatever. And through the radicalness of it, this is why I like the call and score idea is I feel like it allowed you to explore the landscape of possibilities in your life more systematically and build out a flourishing life, which is different necessarily than a life built around some sort of central radical decision. So it's built. My life has built. on the ashes of a failed radical decision, you know? And the, but like, it was a youthful, you know, indiscretion, let's say, where, like, when I was an undergrad, I tried to do a sort of a heroic, you know, design build project in Central America, you know, the poor community.

And I didn't have a sustainable skill set. So even though it was, like, really deeply aligned with my mission and my values and even, like, the skills I was building, I didn't have. the ability to execute. But this was a thing back then. Right? I remember this. There was like the late 90s, early 2000s.

This idea of, it's like Project Water. It was like, this follow your passion. Do be useful though, right? And it was like the ideas you would go somewhere and build a school is a big thing, right? Project Pencil. Pencils and Promise. Yeah. Project Water.

Like this was. So I was right in the mix with all those things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And even design for architecture for humanity. So a lot of, this is actually what like the Dalai Lama calls sloppy sympathy. You go to a place where you see a problem, you want to help, you throw a little energy at it.

But if you really want to be helpful, you have to move there. And you have to like transform your whole life and be extremely humble. Yeah. You know, and accept a lot of failure before you probably get successful. And I did not take that approach. Some people do take that approach and they do really impressive work. But like I felt the sting of taking the leap before I was ready. And what happens is you get alien, the failure alienates you from the thing that you really love.

You know, so I think. The goal got confused with the thing, the goal was the vision. Here's something that's important to me. Yeah. We often confuse it with the radical goal. Well, if I do this radical, goal, which was inspired by this feeling of whatever it is, I want to be helpful or whatever it is, but then the radical goal becomes a thing. And so when that fails, you lose a connection.

We talk about lifestyles and implying the difference between the properties you're looking for in your life and the particular things that might generate those things in your life. Yeah, I'm with you. I'll give you another example that's contemporary for me. But what happened? Finish the story, though. So what happened? So what happened? is that the project was a failure. I felt humiliated, but I kind of nursed that wound for a long time. But then I, you know,

that's when I came across so good they can't ignore you. And I started like connecting dots. Oh, rare and valuable skills. Okay, so there are rare and valuable skills. You would need to be successful in that environment rather than just an architect working in Tacoma Park. Oh, career capital. You know, maybe I shouldn't have like skipped steps here.

maybe I should have become an effective human being first and then gone on to those types of things. So that was really meaningful in terms of creating a structure where I had like greater patience, a different set of expectations about what was possible. And so like a big project that I'm gearing up to take on right now is writing a book. on spaces of hyper-creativity. Which I think is a good idea. The architecture of hyper-creativity. But the reason that you think it's a good idea,

probably, is because it checks, I've taken the time to check the other boxes about, like, is writing something I can even do? Or like writing for editing something I can do. Is this an interesting idea? But I can see a lot of people that are listening to this that might be nursing book projects of their own,

being like, okay, I'm going to throw a ton of energy at this. and then if it fails, they're going to feel shitty about it, you know? And that's unfortunate. And it doesn't have to kind of be that way. You can take a more measured methodical approach into like Brad Stahlberg's kind of thing. It's like the consistency and like owning up to the fact that like the consistency is more important than the intensity. And I would say with that early project of mine that was a failure, it was intensity over consistency for sure. You know?

And then acknowledging up front that every, single day you sit down to write, it's going to probably be painful. Yeah. You know, and just being, or sometimes it's not. And if it's not, enjoy that and ride that wave as long as you can. But if it's not going well, that's okay. Just keep grinding. It's like building something.

Yeah, some days it's a pain. Exactly. Yeah. And the joints don't fit that day. Your cuts aren't great. It's tedious that day. And, man, it helps if you enjoy building stuff, you know. Like if people look at this farm project and, you know, they're like,

was that fun? And I'm like, yeah, for me, it was really fun, you know? So if you can figure out a way to, like, and my wife's different, she doesn't like to do construction stuff. So it's not plus two days for her if she's swinging a hammer or saw and stuff.

Yeah. For me, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you came out of, I always, when I talk to you, I internalize a lot. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? I do. Well, about your approach, I like the intention of it, but I like that you act on it.

You know, you make choices, you make changes. It's easy to get stuck in the zeros or to get stuck in this isn't quite working. There's a lot of negative ones happening. But it seems difficult to change. And I think you're better at, you're not scared of change. Would you say this is fair? Like the difference between you back then and now is you're not afraid of change. It's just your change is more evidence-based now than it was before.

It's not on a vibe. You have data, personal data, insight data. You're like, okay, this is going to be better, so why wouldn't I do it? I feel like the core skills are so strong that even if whatever I'm currently focused on was a failure, I can reapply the same skill set to the next challenge. And I'm like, I feel like a very effective person. You know, I think I think that the, the positive thing about a lot of the systems that you have invented or aggregated or whatever clarified for people is that they get things out of your head so that you're not spending time circular thinking about something.

And you're able to then be more present in the moment so that when you're working on something, you're applying your whole. consciousness towards it so that it like and then like life is just easier man i mean how do you i think what's interesting also about your stories you have a job that like a traditional knowledge work yeah like high-skilled job but you still have this life that's very like intentional and so how do you bring that thinking to a job where you have an email address you have a calendar because often people think look if i really want to change my life in a way that's going to be like plus one plus two's all the time I have to be like a novelist. I got to leave my job.

I can't also have a calendar and Zoom and email. Your job could be overwhelming and distracting and languishing. So I can just look side to side and see my peers. Yeah. So how do you keep it different? What's the key that David DeWain's approach to knowledge work? I think it's about managing, becoming really good in managing expectations

and becoming really, really good about managing time. I consider, like, when I show somebody, like my time block planner, I describe it as the most essential mental health tool I've ever had. Yeah. You know? And, like, I think that,

I think, like, I'm an ambitious person. You know, like, I want to, achieve something, you know, that's meaningful in my field. But I don't... So I take it seriously, but at the same time, if... Like, I view the effort more important than the rewards, you know? And this is like just classic philosophy stuff, you know, try to disassociate the fruits of the laborers and the labor itself, you know?

But it doesn't let you slow down, too. It's slow productivity principle is you, like the project you're working on this vision you have or using these numerical scores to change architecture. Yeah. It's not really going to matter in the long term until we have this right. It's like my Apple pay for architecture. Yeah. And if that happens six months from now or a year, it doesn't matter to you.

It doesn't have to be done as fast as possible. What matters is you're working on and it gets done. And like the hypercreativity book, which would be great because then it would be, it would put into people's path principles that are like they could apply. Yeah. You know, and I think I just have this personal kind of feeling that as we go into the AI kind of era, that creativity is going to become a coin of the realm. Yeah. Human creativity is going to be really, really important when it, because a lot of the grinding work is going to be relieved.

And the, what should we do? Why should we do it? you know, is going to be, is going to surface. So, like, when you study the environments around creative people, and the process of creativity itself and get that out there into the public domain, like, man, that's, that's, if I could just do that, I would be pretty happy. But to be more concrete, like, how do you avoid, for example, in your position you have a team, not, let's say, check an email every five minutes.

I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, check email probably too much. Yeah. Yeah. It's not something I feel great about. but, you know, the tools are powerful and the grip that they have on your consciousness is really powerful. What about meetings?

Again, I think a lot of people, I think the thing that's kind of freed me up a little bit is not being paranoid that, like, my calendar looks empty to other people that are sharing my calendar with me. Yeah. Partially because I have a, physical planner, so I don't write a lot of this. I don't take the step of putting everything I do

into Google Calendar. But also, I don't equate it with value. My value comes from a totally different realm, and I am, like, laser-focused on trying to create value in the way, and like, the people that I report to understand what I'm trying to do, and they've given me the time And to a degree, maybe I've earned the permission to get control of how I do that. But that means practically say no to more meetings, periods of an accessibility, shutdowns. There are people that I look at all around me that are probably in too many meetings. And if you really just buckle down and say, like, hey, you know, I can't go to everything. Can I skip this one and just go ahead and I don't know.

But people trust you have your act together on your time. Yeah. Just out of curiosity. Did you look at the Plains of Marathon thing? Which one? The Plains of Marathon. The email I sent you the other day about, because I was captivated by your Elon Musk conversation

with Brad Stalberg and Clay. Was the guy's name? Yeah. Play Skipper, yeah. And it was about like, and I think this is another thing where people, I would imagine people in your audience, and even me, like you look at somebody like Elon Musk

and you're so enamored, at least pre-exambered, at least pre-Twitter with like the stuff that this person was able to accomplish. And that's like, you kind of hold that up as this is what success looks like, right? Yeah. And me, though, it's just me out. But yeah. I did this exercise as a kind of like, and again, like this is, I did a kind of a private writing project that was a buildup to my real attempt at like commercial writing. And but just to get in the habit of day after day after day writing.

And so this project was very personal. It was a letter to my daughter. And it was about painting a picture for her about the really beautiful moments in my life. And what I felt like to be me at these different times. And I collected a handful of maybe 20 vignettes. And after that conversation where you're talking about Elon and like our society or our culture's sense of status,

and sense of accomplishment and sense of success, I look back at that list, and they're very mundane moments. There's nothing in there that's about, like, a huge professional accomplishment. There's nothing in there that's about, like, rushing up against a celebrity, you know? It's all just like, it's like a moment on the farm,

like working in the orchard, you know, or, like, working on a building project. It's about an early morning writing session, and my daughter sneaks up on me, you know, and I have this, like, nice moment with her, you know, when she's little. And I'm, you know, or like a child's birth or something. Like when you really think about, like, deep life for me, it's like those moments.

Like, enjoy what you have. Yeah. Don't peg so much of your sense of self-worth on, like a grandiose accomplishment like on revolutionizing the electric car industry in America. Yeah. You know?

And like I think if you connect or if you were able to peer into the lives of people that have done those things, I bet you would find that they made a lot of personal sacrifices that would be pretty grim. Yeah, lonely.

Yeah. Yeah. So like when I think about deep life, I mean, I think about like I've lost one day. You know? Yeah, I mean, it's engineering your life. That's one way to look at it.

Engineering a life so that you have more plus ones. And it's not too hard to avoid the negatives. Yeah, it's the trend. Yeah. It's the big trend, you know. Yeah. And being, like, being super intentional about it. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is what bugs me. We can jointly crack on these people. But there are a lot of people that look at scan set, self-help, you know, and this whole, like, advice and, like, productivity. Yeah. And, like, this whole subculture, you know? Yeah.

You mean, like, the reviewers at the New York Times Book Review? Perhaps. They don't seem to appreciate it. I've learned. Yeah, but I think if you, like, if you really, I feel like I've been on both sides of this. I've been on the I've been on the

sort of hapless Don Quixote style passion driven mindset all your passions guy and ridden that wave but I've also been on the like very regimented, very disciplined

very patient, very slow very focused side of this and it's just better you know it's not fancy it hasn't made me rich like in terms of money but it's made me extremely rich

just in terms of like my overall life satisfaction yeah you know yeah I mean I have this argument often with the anti-productivity crowd many members of whom I really like and respect because I think

they're on to something but they often I think the setup which I don't buy is look if there's structure in your life then you're somehow internalizing capitalist narratives or Protestant work ethic

or it's some sort of exploitative relationship from a cultural superstructure to your life that's benefiting other people and that the true... I can see that, but like it doesn't it doesn't take a lot of thinking to just realize that you don't deep work to do more for the man,

deep work to work less and to make your work better. If I could go back in time, I mean, I went to punishing graduate program like... Architecture. Yeah.

Yeah. it was so, the culture was so intense that I think there were 24 people in my graduating class. 17 of them were medicated for anxiety and depression. Yeah. Because we were in our like studios constantly. You know?

And the people that weren't there were sort of like marginalized a little bit. Not serious. Yeah. Like why are you, why did you even take up somebody else? Somebody else could have gotten that spot and been here with us. you know, man, if I could go back in time and I think I could have done better work,

been such a, like a much healthier person, and worked less time, just simply by having, like, better time management, better, like, the ability to concentrate, you know, and also not, like, and readjusted my expectations and not try to like do everything. Yeah. You know? So, yeah. I mean, people don't, what they don't often get, like people who will look at deep work,

for example, and be like, well, this is all about maximization, right? So I often get the critique of like, man, this is all about just like squeezing everything out of the day and what about people who can't squeeze as much out of the day? And what's often missed is like, that book was the follow up that so good they can't ignore you. Yeah. It was the answer to the question, so good they can't ignore you, said, if you have a very valuable skills you can create your own life. And clearly you could see the bias in that book,

that the visions I had of life was like yours right now. I was, you know, you have autonomy, you have control over your time. I was very stressed and I remained very stress sensitive. So it was a big motivating factor of that book is, why do I want control? Because I don't want a life that looks like Elon Musk, right? I don't want, I'm running three companies

and a master of the universe and have meetings all day. I want control and you can get control by being good at things that are rare and valuable. And deep work was like, well, how do you do that? And like, well, okay, focus. Focusing on stuff, deliberate practice, get better, do the stuff that really matters. You don't have to be busy, right? So it's kind of ironic that for some people, Deep Work is seen as some sort of like hustle culture bro manifesto of, of like crushing it and getting after it.

Where to me, that was the skeleton key for unlocking being able to go to the farm on the weekend. When I think about Deep Work, I just think about Eudaimonia. It's another, it's a synonym. Yeah. You know, and, you know, for those of your audience that don't know what eudaimonia is, look up the Wikipedia entry, but it's, it's an old term that the Greeks had, like many Greek terms. I'd always say flourishing would be my translation. Yeah, deep human flourishing, but like, what's also cool about eudaimonia is that it, like, the weak translation is happiness, but like in contemporary culture, happiness comes and goes. Like, you could be unhappy in this meeting and happy in the next meeting and then unhappy again.

Eudaimonia was not that. Eidymonia was like it was the trend. Are you on the trend? Yeah. The right trend. And so like, yeah, I think about but it's also like the feeling.

It's like the flow feeling or like a highly, you know, concentrated feeling. And like if you're applying that to, you know, like the, what's cool about Eudyamonia in the way that Aristotle describes it in the ethics is that even an inanimate object could express eudaimonia.

So like for a knife, I think is the example he uses, it's to be sharp and cutting something. Yeah, it's very too illogical. Yeah, so it's like, the easiest way to think about that is like for you, what is the best version of yourself and how are you engaged? You know, and so I think like, you know, something like deep work, it's not about,

yeah, it's not about piling up more capital, it's about being sharp and engaged. Yeah. Yeah. And that was my program was different than yours. Like my grad program experience, the theory group over there at MIT, working too much would be bad. Like they had their own pathologies. But if you are working too hard, that might mean you're not smart.

And like for them, the ultimate was coming up with a brilliant idea, like a math insight, solving a theorem, being smart, being a monster mind. And so it was a high stress place in the sense that huge imposter syndrome. But if you could get over that, it was completely reasonable. You're like, yeah, I'm not here. I want to come in and stare at the whiteboard and like solar proof and then go play bongos or whatever. Like that would be like, that's really impressive. It had its own pathologies, but I think that also laid an interesting idea in my mind.

It was like, yeah, focusing could be very valuable. It's very human. I mean, Aristotle thought that was ultimately the theology of all people was deep thinking because only humans can do that. That must be human's purpose. But they really didn't value busyness. And that really stuck. And I think that stuck with me as I was writing my books and thinking about things. It's like I came up in a place where busyness, like what values there in busyness?

Like what does that have to do? In their lingo, what does that have to do with solving proofs? Like that could only get in the way. And so there was something nice to see that purity. It's also brutal because you're always being judged if you're smart or not. But it was simple. Yeah. Yeah, I think

And you know, like for whatever reason, this is where my mind's going when you're talking about this, is that, like, I think a good life is where you're, I mean,

I talked earlier about the alternating, like my, my sort of, my charmed life of being alternating between, like, city life where I feel really engaging in charge,

or charged up, and then country life where I feel very slow. I think in, like, in a more day-to-day zone, it's like the ability to and the ability to concentrate on something and go kind of internal and grind

and then come out of that and share it with somebody and get feedback and like it's the kind of rhythm between highly social, highly focused. Yeah. You know, and my long-standing critique on open office spaces is that instead of those things being intentional

and putting like a logical barrier like visual audio proximity barrier between those things, you're all supposed to do all that stuff at the cubicle. And at any second, somebody could tap you on the shoulder, at any second somebody could send you an email that you have to respond to instantly. And it is just, it is no way to live effectively. I've always thought open offices to the physical correlate to an email inbox.

The email inbox was like, can't we just have everything come through here? It always feels like a blender. Yeah. It takes your brain, puts in like a Vitamix or whatever, and just like, you know. But this is the cybernetic vision of like the Silicon Valley inspired office, right? It's like this is what email and later Slack is. Like, can't we just be in this hive mind? And we're just all talking to each other all the time.

Things are moving back and forth. I'm answering your question. You're answering me this. You're sending me this file. What about this? And our minds will be melded together. And out of that will come sort of distributed intelligence, which, of course, misses the way this wetware actually works in our head.

Because we can't actually, we're not bees. We can't be plugged into. constant unrelated conversations at all time, and also flourish or produce good thoughts or not be completely stressed out. I pay a social cost at work for resisting Slack. And I do. Like, I tell people, like, I only check Slack every once a day or something, you know?

And it annoys people. Well, it's convenient if everyone's on it. Like, I would have to take a different approach if I was, like, more in the trenches on, like, a project day to day, and that's like how the team was communicating, and then I would change my behavior. But for me right now, it's like,

how many more tools do I need to do the exact same thing? Yeah. You know? Like, uh, let's say it's email versus no email solves some problems. Fax machines were slow. Curriers were even slower.

Voice mail was annoying. It's like email, kind of solve those problems. Yeah. Okay, we're good. Yeah. And we don't need the user as constant conversation. And we don't need,

I mean, I've always argued Slack is just the, they built the right tool for the wrong way to work. like if this is what you're going to do is use email, which was supposed to be a voicemail fax machine replacement as like an ongoing back and forth

conversation machine. Well, that's not a great tool for doing that. Slack does that better. If what you want to do is let's just have everyone be in touch

at all time so that there's no friction and we can keep things moving, email has some shortcomings. So Slack will solve those shortcomings. So a great tool for implementing that way of collaboration,

terrible way of collaborating outside of like a small team working together on something. So it was, it's a love-hate relationship, I've always said. Because if that's the way you're collaborating, like, I love this. It's better than email. But also you hate that way of collaborating. So it's like, I don't know what to do.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If we're going to use Slack, then let's just get rid of our emails.

Yeah. You know, I've heard of the architecture office one of my colleagues works in where they don't have individual email accounts. They just have project email accounts. I've been advocating for this. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cool idea.

It's arbitrary. the fact that it's a name at domain dot com or whatever I mean that's just a happenstance that the original email programs the mail demon on Unix was from timeshare computers

so in timeshare computers you had to have a login so they could bill you for the time you were using in the original email what it would really do is just leave text in a text file in someone else's account and then you could read it

when he came into your account and so that's where it was your username for timeshare computers became your de facto email addresses But there's a counterfactual I've talked about where, yeah, you have emails for projects. And that, like, completely changes, by the way, how the tool is used. Because as soon as I think about an email being your name, I imagine interpersonal interaction that you're someone, there's someone on the other end of this, and I want something from that person. And if you're not answering me, there's a person who is sliding me.

And I imagine you're there and you saw it and you're ignoring me. You get all the interpersonal dynamics. If it's a project, all that goes away. like yeah I'm sending a request over to this project and you know they'll get back to me people are looking at this yeah yeah and they they have a standard they'll get back to you by the end of the day if it comes before whatever and you don't think twice about it like all the interpersonal dynamics are gone yeah yeah well I'm excited man I'm excited about deep deep life yeah I'm curious how is that how is actually working on that project

changed your your outlook or change your habits anyway we'll see Yeah, we'll see. I'm in the first part still, which is like how to become, how to get your act together before you try to change your life. I sense you being more, like, discerning about bigger things in your life, you know? Yeah. And I think working on the second part, which is much more about like what we're talking about today. Yeah, there's changes coming probably. I'm thinking about changes. I think it'll probably lead to some changes. I mean, it's just a stage of life from going through, you know, how your 40s are. Yeah. Yeah, it's a different stage of life.

And it like, but it like, it feels like on the vector, like a logical conclusion to the vector you've been on for several books now. I think so. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can imagine, yeah, slow productivity is getting at, well, what does it really mean to be productive at work? And this, let me articulate my approach, which is it's slower. It's like you talked about.

I want results over time, but my busyness in the moment is not that important. And if anything, that's going to be counterproductive. It's going to make me feel worse. And so that book is trying to articulate that. A world without email was my attempt to be like, for God's sakes, we have to be communicating all the time. Completely failed, by the way. Did not. World Without email.

I mean, it failed to change the world. Do you think it was a victim of timing? It's a little bit of victim of timing. The pandemic was not when people wanted to think about that. But also, it's just a victim of difficulty. Right? I mean, it's... I always thought about World Without Email is just deep work for companies.

Yeah. Deep work for teams. And maybe that's just a smaller market. If it's something you can't put in the place. But I talk to a lot of CSA. It's just hard. It's hard to move away. Deep work, yeah, all these books are kind of on these trajectory.

I see, I mean, I'm rethinking, you know, I'm in a different phase of life now. You've always been good at that too. You always write about the phase that you're in. That's the only way I know how to do it. Because if I don't care, it doesn't come through. But, I mean, I'm in a different phase. I've talked about this. It's, you know, after college, what are my two goals, writing academia?

And let me just focus, go deep on those, not be busy. You want to do those well. And I've done those well, right? I've been in academia. I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions left to give. Published papers won the awards. You know, I did well there writing.

I've done well there. I think my, you know, I've sold a lot of books. It's, that number is large. You've been in this one genre. Yeah. There are other genres. Yeah. Yeah.

You're talking about my romance novel, I assume. That's what, that's what people are waiting for. 50 shades of gal. 50 shades of cow. No, like, do you ever think about what Michael Crichton would be writing about right now? I wrote a piece. Like, yeah. Oh, did you?

I wrote a piece for the New Yorker a couple months ago. About AI or something. Yeah, yeah. It was like what, and he would be going crazy. Well, he would be going crazy, yeah. And I wrote, it was interesting piece. I was like, okay, what are the real lessons from Crichton? And I'll just, my takeaway was actually unexpected.

But my takeaway was because I know Crichton well, his work well. And I know a lot about it more than I probably should. It's like, you know, really my takeaway is what Cretton really understood was the issue was not so much to people when it came to technology. And I told the story in the front of that article where, you know, when he was trying to write the Adronomus Strain, it wasn't working. And his editor, Robert Gottlieb was like, here's the problem. You're trying to write like an actual novel and get into the psychology of the characters and what's going on inside their head or this or that. And he said, stop that. Write it like a New Yorker piece.

Like what matters is the technology. and the unexpected outcomes from the technology, write it like you're, like Richard Preston in the hot zone 30 years later. Like you're reporting on something that happened. And then the book took off. And that became his MO is that the, really what mattered in these books was the technology and the unexpected ways they unfold, not the characters, right? And I was saying this is actually kind of relevant for today because it's right now,

we like to snag our technological storylines onto people. and actors and villains, and it's this person, this person, this is the villain in the play, and this is the hero, whatever. And just anxiety generally. Yeah, without getting at the actual issue, right? So we want to demonize Elon Musk, but we don't get to introducing global conversation platforms might have been a wrong idea. Right.

Because, like, Hammond was like a nice guy in Jurassic Park. He had good intentions. And he got his liver eaten out by copies at the end of that book. It wasn't because he was flawed. I talked about Frankenstein. I went back to the original Mary Shelley. And I was like, let me read. I replicated the passage in Frankenstein where animated the monster.

The technology is completely unspecified. It was the vitality flowed from the machine to the monster and the monster came alive. The whole thing was about the people. It was about the characters and the flaws and Dr. Frankenstein's ambition and how his fatal flaw broke him. And you go over to Jurassic Park, Richard Hammond's a cardboard cutout. what matters is the specific type of gene sequencer they were using too. So anyways, I thought there was a lesson there about

the technologies themselves are often creating the impacts and we want to blame or care about the people. But then that obscures the fact that cloning the dinosaurs is the problem. Even if a better person was running Jurassic Park, it might have still been a problem. Yeah. Do you know where the word sabotage comes from?

Do we ever talk about this? No. So, French or something? The word for like the French peasant wooden shoe is called a sabbat. And so when the initial machines during the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural machines showed up, like it freaked the peasant sound or whatever.

And they took their wooden shoes and like jammed it into the gears and it would like break the machine. And they could go back to work. Like a Ned Ludd type of mythology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like it was literally the act of like destroying the menacing technology. You know, that was coming after your job or whatever.

Yeah. So it seems like there's, you know, history rhymes. right? Yep. All right. Well, we have run over, but it's hard not to because I always like talking with you. Yeah. I really appreciate this conversation.

Yeah, this is great. So I think we covered a lot of interesting ground here. And I would summarize it all as, you know, it's like architecting the deep life. There's a lot that goes into it. And it's not as simple as the one grand plan. But it's, there's a lot in here that I think it's interesting. Also, we got a nerd out about some work issues like we always do. Yeah, there's a Buckminster Fuller quote that's useful.

or that I've returned to sometimes where he just states, we're called to be the architects of the future, not its victims. Yeah. You know? I like it. And I kind of think you're called to be the architect of your life. Yeah. Not the victim of circumstance.

Yeah. And like what you have put out there in a series of tools and books and so forth is like here are like a suite of tools. Apply them. Yeah. You know, and life just gets easier. Yeah. And they're content agnostic.

Right. I'm not going to tell you, and this is how I'm writing my book right now, it's not, here's the five things you need for a deep life. This mix of friendship with this mix of adventure, this or that, like, okay, you can figure that out. But how do you have the tools to act on it once you figure it out? Yeah, so like architects. And just don't expect immediate results. Yeah.

So architecture, you have to learn how to design and build a building. And then, like, the great architects use those tools to build falling water or whatever. But you've got to learn the tools first. Yeah, I like what I was going. Yeah. Like, yeah, and for architecture, I mean, last word, I guess, is that, you know, it's kind of a cliche in architecture that, unlike rock and roll, you don't become successful when you're like 20. You become successful when you're like 50. And you just, like it's, again, it's an expectations management game.

Yeah, it takes a long time. Anyway, all right, man. All right, hey, David, thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you. All right, so that was my conversation with David Dwayne, brought to us by. done daily.com. I really enjoyed that. Here's the context.

I talk to David a lot, right? We've known each other for a long time. I knew him back before I even wrote deep work. He's featured in that book. He lived in D.C. for a long time, so he used to see each other more often, but he often comes through D.C. He used to live in Tacoma Park. And we always have these sort of interesting conversations when he's coming through town and

we have these wide-ranging conversations. So to be able to capture one of those conversations on air to record it to share it with other people. That was kind of fun. Because I'm used to all these cool ideas about depth and focus and concentration and the deep life. And it's good to be able to share them with other people. I also like, I'm going to try to do this more when I have these conversations.

I think I do this a little bit with Michael Easter as well. I like people who are doing cool things with their life and just to hear more about it, as opposed to just having on experts to talk about their ideas. Now, David had both of these things. He's an expert on space. designed for concentration. But he's also an expert on his own life being really cool and having that farm and the orchard with the writing gazebo that he built out there.

I think all that's so cool and romantic. So I like this idea of like specific people living really specifically deep lives and just hearing how they did it. How better to learn than the talk to real people. Anyways, I'll probably end up putting some of this ideas on my book on the deep life because he has too many good ideas about this topic. So this was fun. Thanks for listening.

Be back on Monday with a normal. episode and until then stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com.

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