Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Break Free from Burnout: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less with Cal Newport #466

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

In today's fast-paced world, the pursuit of productivity often leads to overwhelm. In fact, one report suggests that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. But what if there’s a better way to work and live? This week, I’m delighted to welcome Cal Newport back to my Feel Better Live More podcast. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. He’s a New York Times bestselling author whose books have reached millions of readers in over forty languages. His latest book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, challenges our current notions of work and offers a revolutionary approach to productivity. In our conversation, Cal and I explore the concept of "slow productivity" and how it contrasts with our culture of constant busyness. We discuss why traditional productivity methods are falling short, particularly in the realm of 'knowledge work' - a term Cal uses to describe intellectually demanding professions - and how modern digital tools have exacerbated the problem of burnout. During the conversation, he shares the three core principles of slow productivity: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and obsessing over quality. We delve into practical strategies for implementing these principles in various work environments, even for those who feel they have little autonomy in their jobs. We also touch on the importance of solitude and reflection in living an intentional life. Cal emphasises how smartphones and social media have impacted our ability to be present and socialise, particularly for younger generations, and he offers insights on setting boundaries with technology and creating healthier norms around its use, too. Our conversation also extends to the value of lifestyle-centric planning versus goal-centric planning, challenging cultural norms around constant connectivity and redefining success beyond professional achievements.  This episode is packed with actionable advice that can help you reclaim your time, reduce stress, and find a more balanced approach to work and life. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Buy tickets for my stage tour https://drchatterjee.com/tour Thanks to our sponsors: https://boncharge.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/466 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you're working a lot, but you're working on something that's tangible and meaningful, it's not going to burn you out. What's burning people out is the fact that they're busier than they've ever been before, but they feel like they're producing much less. So what's going to burn you out is four or five hours of Zoom meetings plus 125 emails sent and received. It's almost like a psychological experiment. We're going to have you spend your entire day talking about work. No actual work is going to get done. And we're

all going to pretend like this makes sense. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. In today's fast-paced world, the pursuit of productivity often leads to overwhelm. In fact, one report suggests that 88% of UK workers may have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. But might there be a better way to work and live? the past two years. But might there be a better way to work and live? Well, this week, I'm delighted to welcome Cal Newport back onto my podcast. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. He's also a New York Times bestselling author whose books have reached millions of readers in over 40 languages, and his latest book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout,

challenges our current notions of work and offers a revolutionary approach to productivity. In our conversation, we explore the concept of slow productivity and its three core principles, doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and obsessing over quality. And Cal explains how it offers us a way through our current culture of constant busyness. We also discuss how modern digital tools have exacerbated the problem of burnout, and why traditional productivity methods are falling short, particularly in the realm of knowledge work, a term Cal uses to describe professions that are demanding off our brains instead of our hands. We also talk about the importance of solitude and reflection for living an intentional life, how smartphones

and social media have impacted our ability to be present and socialize, how to set effective boundaries with technology, and the value of lifestyle-centric planning versus goal-centric planning. And of course, we highlight the crucial need to challenge cultural norms around constant connectivity and redefine success beyond professional achievements. I have been a big fan of Cal's work and books for many years. This episode is jam-packed with actionable advice that can help you reclaim your time, reduce stress, and find a more balanced approach to work and life. So Carl, there was a recent report in the UK that suggested that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. What do you think an alarming

statistic like that says about the state of society? Well, I think it says about the state of knowledge work that it's broken, right? I think the way we work in knowledge work has for a long time been a problem and the pandemic made it unmissable, right? So, what I think happened during the pandemic is we had already begun this descent in knowledge work where the introduction of digital tools like email, like Zoom, like mobile computing, like smartphones was increasing the, not just the pace of work, but increasing the amount of time we were focusing on talking about work. Work became more performative. It's the communication about work, the back and forth. The pandemic made all that worse in an acute way. And I think it pushed a lot of people over the edge.

The term knowledge work comes up a lot in the new book, Slow Productivity. What is knowledge work? Well, there's a technical definition, which has to do with adding value to information using the human brain. But I think there's an informal definition, which is essentially, if you get annoyed by how much time you spend with email, if the word Zoom generates mixed emotions, you're probably a knowledge worker. Yeah. But it's not everyone, is that? No, it's not everyone. It's not everyone. Because a lot of my writing, a lot of my ideas, at the base, I think about technology and how technology comes in the different parts of our life and disrupts things and what we do about it. So the techno story behind this new book is what happened when tools like email and laptops, network computers, when they entered the workplace, it really created a lot of problems. And so it's really the type of workplaces where those tools became prevalent. That's where we're seeing the sort of specific burnout overload problems that I'm talking about. Is one of the problems with knowledge work,

or I guess more broadly, work that is done on screens and using modern technology, it's one of the problems that you never see real world evidence for the completion of that work. So what I mean by that is if you were a bricklayer, for example, and you spent eight hours laying bricks, at the end of the day, you can see the fruits of your labor. Whereas you could literally spend eight hours just going back and forth on email, feel like you've accomplished something.

Yeah. But in many cases, you've not actually done that much. Yeah, well, okay, you're getting at what I think is the core problem with knowledge work. We can't count feet of a wall that's been built. We can't count the number of automobiles

that came out of a factory. We can't count the number of bushels of wheat that each acre of land produced. This is actually the key issue. So the notion of productivity, economically speaking, was very well defined for about 300 years, right? So for about 300 years, we knew that there was a ratio situation going on. We could count the output versus input. This began in agriculture. It really hit its stride in industrial manufacturing. Henry Ford could say, this is how many Model T's produced per paid labor hour at my factory. And they could tweak something about the production system and say that number got better. So this new way of building cars is better. Knowledge work

comes along, none of that works anymore. Because in knowledge work, I might be working on a bunch of different things. It could be different than what someone else is working on. How I'm doing this work is not well-defined. It's obfuscated. It's my own sort of personal habits, how I actually like to organize my labor. So we have nothing to really measure. So productivity becomes a much more squirrely topic in knowledge work because we can't just say, when we do this, we produce more Model Ts. And we do this, the number goes down. Without the ability to do that, we have to fall back on rougher heuristics.

And that's where ideas like, well, let's just look at activity and being busy as a proxy for useful effort. That's where that emerges. Yeah. What I love the most about the new book, Slow Productivity, is it seems to kind of challenge a lot of the prevailing and accepted norms.

The things that we've just sort of fallen into as email and screens and technology has become a bigger part of our lives. And it reminds me a little bit of your book, Digital Minimalism, in the sense that the big take home for me from that book was that what we need is an intentional approach to our technology. And that was particularly about technology in our free time and our non-working time. But it's not a dissimilar idea that you put forward in slow productivity.

Yeah, well, I mean, because the same issues happen in the world of work, right? So, we had these technologies roll into work. Why did that create a problem? Well, here's my argument, is that when knowledge work emerged, before we got these modern technologies, when it emerged as a major sector in the mid-20th century, the definition we came up with for productivity is what I call pseudo-productivity in the book, but it's the idea that a visible effort will be our proxy for for useful activity. I love that term pseudo productivity It's very evocative. Yeah, we've all been in that situation. I think or many of us have where Someone is on their screen in front of a desktop or a computer between 9 to 5

Yes, and therefore it is assessed that they have been productive or they have been working. But whether they were on Facebook, Twitter, sending the gas engineer an email or whatever it might be, is kind of not being measured. It's just the simple fact that they were sitting in front of a screen. What they were doing is a different matter altogether. That's why we call it pseudo-productivity. Pseudo-productivity. And this was the temporary answer to that real hard economic question of

how do we manage productivity and knowledge work if we can't count Model Ts? Pseudo-productivity is what we came up with. It was like a Band-Aid or a heuristic. Like, well, at the very least, if I see you're doing something, that's better than you not doing something. That's what productivity became in knowledge work. Now, where this becomes a real problem

is when we get email, when we get mobile computing, when we get smartphones, because a visible activity is how I demonstrate to you that I'm being productive. Now that we have email, the granularity at which I can demonstrate activity just got really small. It's no longer, oh, I see you're at your desk for eight hours. So like that's how I know you're doing something useful. You're here and you're not obviously writing a magazine. Now it's, well, wait a second. How long did it take you to respond to this email?

How many emails did I see you send and respond to? So the speed of activity got faster and the scale at which you had to show you were doing things got much smaller. So if visible activity is how we indicate we're being useful, and now we have a way of demonstrating useful activity minute to minute, not just in the office, but with us on our laptops, with us on our smartphones, that's where you get this feeling of the pace of work starting to pick up. It's pseudo productivity plus these digital communication tools. And so it's really not a great way to think about doing stuff with the brain. But again, the culture of activity-based productivity, pseudo productivity is deeply ingrained in knowledge work. And we don't realize it.

It's fish not knowing what water is. Yeah. But it is what we're swimming in. It's the only thing we know. And when we think about knowledge work and its problems, too often we just assume that's the only way we have to measure productivity. Then we work from that assumption, our options become really limited. Yeah, it's going more and more upstream to go, well, you know, where did this idea come from in the first place? What if we didn't subscribe to that idea? What might our working day and our working life look like? I think when people read your book,

they're suddenly going to go, of course, I get it. I get it. That's why I feel so frustrated. Going back to that opening figure of 88% of UK workers saying that they've experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. What is it about pseudo productivity that is leading to burnout. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you're working a lot, but you're working on something that's tangible and meaningful, it's not going to burn you out. What's burning people out is the fact that they're busier than they've ever been before, but they feel like they're producing much less. So what's going to burn you out is four or five hours of Zoom meetings plus 125 emails sent and received. And yet the important report, the piece of software, the product strategy you're trying to put together, nothing's happening

there, right? It's almost like a psychological experiment. We're going to have you spend your entire day talking about work. No actual work is going to get done. Maybe if you wake up earlier on the weekends, you can make a little bit of progress and we're all going to pretend like this makes sense. That's what I think is burning people out. It's the absurdity of the busyness, not just the raw workload itself. Yeah. When I think of burnouts, because of course, burnout is technically a term relating to work. I keep bringing up your previous book, Digital Minimalismism because I don't think it's just work that is leading to maybe I broaden out the term from burnout chronic overload and stress which many people are feeling let's assume that work is frustrating and that we never feel that we've

completed everything we've got to do because there's always another email to answer, always something else that we could be doing, which is why or one of the reasons that infiltrates our evenings and our weekends. Is it not also, though, that when we are trying to switch off and relax, we're overwhelming ourselves by being digital maximalists? Yes. So it's not just the work, it's that that speed of life that we have at work, we're now taking into our relaxation time

as well. So no wonder so many people feel burnt out and overloaded. Oh, I agree with that completely. Well, I mean, just to return briefly to what the mechanic is that's making the work particularly burning us out. And then I want to get to what's happening after work. The specific mechanic that's at the core of a lot of this is I think of it as administrative overhead or an overhead tax, right? So as you say yes to more and more things, right? Everything you say yes to in a work context brings with it administrative overhead, right? So I say yes on this project. We have to send emails about it.

We have to do meetings about it. The thing that I think is particularly deranging for people is when they say yes to too many things. All of that administrative overhead builds up. It aggregates. And at some point, you cross a threshold where all you have left is time to handle the administrative overload without actually getting to the actual projects itself. And then you fall farther and farther behind on the projects, right? So that's the mechanism, I think, that's driving the knowledge work burnout more than anything else. It's the having too many things on our plate is creating the days of this sort of shallow busyness because you have to service the overhead. So it's a kind of low

grade busyness that doesn't actually achieve the truly important things. Yeah, and what's important, and I realized this working on this book, and I hadn't realized this in some of my previous work, right, so I wrote a book before this just about email. And I was saying, okay, this is really bad to switch your attention to an inbox every three minutes is bad from a neurological perspective.

Our brain can't context switch that fast. It's going to exhaust your brain. You're not getting much work done. This is terribly unproductive. But at the end of that book, I said that the answer is to have different communication protocols that don't require being interrupted by messages. What I didn't realize back then is the reason why we're checking email so much is not just because we're choosing to do busyness instead of doing our work. It's because we said yes to so many things. And each of those things brings with it administrative overhead that cannot be avoided.

That's how each of the items of work is coordinated. And it's adding up to a point where we have no breathing room left. There's no room left to say, hey, let's come up with a really smart process for how we're going to communicate on this project because this project's one of seven and they're all generating messages and you can't keep up with it. You're drowning it. So the overload is what's generating the excessive busyness, what's generating the excessive communication. So as long as we're doing too many things at once, our work is going to become increasingly more the busyness and less the actual substantive work. So the overload, I think,

is the driving factor is that we have too many things on our plate, at which point all we can do is handle the overload and everything devolves into the communication. But I do, I want to get back

to your digital minimalism point because I think you're absolutely right that technology is squeezing us from both sides of the work-life division. So, we have what's happening in work with email and the overload. The way I think about what's happening at home is that when we have tools that are these attention economy tools like social media on our phone, for example, what they're doing is subverting very deep human drives. they're doing is subverting very deep human drives. So we have these deep human drives that, you know, if we follow them, help us be more fulfilled human beings. These tools hijack and subvert those for their own means. So like communication, we're super social. Like we're driven to want to communicate with our fellow humans. It's very important to us to be part of

communities. Social media comes in and hijacks that drive. Oh, you want to communicate with people? Do it through the screen, right? And it feels enough. It's easier than actually talking to someone. It feels enough about it that we think we're being social, but we're not. And we get more strung out, right? What about the drive I've been thinking about recently? The drive to be a leader, right? We have this sense of, I want to be respected in my tribe. I want to be a leader, right? We have this sense of, I want to be respected in my tribe. I want to be a leader of my family and my community and of my business. Social media can subvert that. No, no, no. Be a leader posting things. You have this sort of fake community that you feel and there's likes happening and people are reposting your things. And again, it subverts this drive

that otherwise would have been used to do things that would have been really fulfilling. Like I'm actually going to emerge as a sort of a person of standing in my actual physical community. So we get this again and again with these technologies that drive to be, you know, entertained with novelty, to go out and experience and be inspired by the world. Again, our phone is not a, we've got a clip for you to look at. So it hijacks these drives. Like food, right? Food, same thing, fast food.

I'm hungry. Let me just grab whatever, a candy bar. It's hijacking the drive. In the end, you don't really get what you need and you get less healthy. But in the moment, it seems better. It's hyper palatable. So I think that's what's happening in our life outside of work. And so all of these activities that are hard but fulfilling that make humans humans are being subverted into these apps. They're being subverted into our phones so they can be monetized. And so we feel definition you utilize in that book was freedom of input

from other minds, which was just beautiful. But why is solitude so important? Yeah, because people think of it as physical isolation, which it's not, right? The definition of solitude that matters is you alone with your own thoughts, taking in the world around you and thinking about things, right? This is how people make sense of their lives in the world. around you and thinking about things, right? This is how people make sense of their lives in the world. You have experiences, that's step one. Step two, you sit there and you grapple with them, right? Because we build in our heads these sort of hidden schemas, these frameworks for understanding our life and our journey. What has happened to us? Where are we going next? How do we understand what's important to us and what's not important to us? All of that takes time in your own head, just thinking things through.

What's going on? Why do I feel this way? What do I want to do different in life? So solitude is critical. Until recently, it was completely unavoidable, right? You were just going to have time during your days where you were alone with your own thoughts because there was nothing else to do. You were in line at the store.

You're just thinking. You're walking to the underground or something. You're there with your own thoughts. Smartphones, ubiquitous, high-speed wireless internet makes it possible for the first time in the history of our species to get all solitude out of your life. And I think it's a real issue

because without the ability to make sense of our lives in the world, we feel unrooted. And that makes us more anxious. So then we hide even farther in the distractions of the phone. And that's not a cycle that ends up well. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I've said on many occasions, I actually believe that a daily practice of solitude is one of the most important things that we can do for our health and our happiness. Because without it, as you say, you don't realize that sense of who you are. You don't really have the time and the space to reflect on your life, to step outside, to go, oh, that's how I'm living. I don't want to live like that.

I want to sort of live a bit differently. I want to make different decisions. And actually, although I think slow productivity is probably at least initially written for the workplace because it's about work and how do we work in a much more meaningful way in the 21st century to me it's so much more than that i think it's a revolutionary manifesto for a slower way of life but i also think there's a huge manifesto for a slower way of life. But I also think there's a huge health component, which is really interesting to me as a doctor, that if you are feeling overwhelmed every day at your job,

if at the end of the work day, you feel a sense of incompleteness, that nothing really meaningful got done, well, what do you do? Yes, you go to social media, you go to alcohol, you go to sugar, you go to junk food, you go to takeaways, right? And I've been really thinking deeply about what are the root causes of all these poor lifestyle choices that so many of us are making. I don't think knowledge is the answer. Giving people more knowledge about the harmful effects of too much sugar, everyone knows that. It's because of the state of our nervous systems, because of the way we're living and the way that we're working, we have to soothe it. So I would

argue that your book in many ways is a health book, because if you can work in that much more slower and meaningful way, I think you are naturally going to make better health choices as well. I think that's so right. I mean, if you read a lot of the examples in the book, and I make this choice in the book, by the way, like, where did I want to draw my wisdom from? And instead of doing what might've been the obvious thing, which is, well, I just want to study companies that are doing this differently, or I want to pull social psych papers and say, researchers at Michigan show that, you know, I was like, I don't want to do that with this book. To be true to the idea of slow movements

in general, slow food, slow cities, slow medicine, I wanted to look back at a traditional source of wisdom and then try to adapt it to our modern time. So I study what I call traditional knowledge workers, people in times past that use their brain to create value, but had a huge amount of flexibility and autonomy to experiment with it, try to figure out what did they land on. And then I try to adapt at the modern office jobs. But if you read those stories, there's just this moment of these moments of recognition and inspiration. It just feels somehow right. That was my experience with these stories. I mean, hearing about Jane Austen or Lin-Manuel Miranda,

or even going back to Galileo, there's these intimations in their stories of, oh, that's what work should be like. It's meaningful. It's slower. It's productivity measured on a big time scale. Like, look what I produced this year. Look what I did this decade that I'm proud of.

Not productivity on a minute-to-minute scale. Not look how busy I was in the last hour. The fact that those stories resonate, I think, tells us that what we're doing now isn't natural. Because we ache for what we hear when we hear these stories of times past about how people use their brain to create value. It just seems right somehow. Yeah. That they're on, that there's something there. Of course, we have to adapt it to a modern office job. We can't live the life of Jane Austen. No. But like we can learn lessons and then ask the question of how do we make those lessons work in our modern life? So that resonance, I think, in those stories tells us that there's

something natural going on there. One of the stories that really stood out to me in Slow Productivity was, I think, the work of HSBC, who during the pandemic, during the lockdowns, suffered a heart attack. It was very, very powerful. And particularly because we've covered on this show quite a lot recently, because I'm very passionate about it, the regrets of the dying. From Bronnie Ware to Palliative Care, and she wrote the book, The Five Regrets

of the Dying. And one of those top five regrets on people's deathbeds is, I wish I'd worked less. And I think this particular example kind of speaks to that. Yeah, because he wrote out a list, I guess it was 10 things, his resolutions or revelations having survived the heart attack early in the pandemic. Number one, spend less time on Zoom. I mean, let's just pause on that for a minute. Spend less time on Zoom. Because remember what happened.

And I think it's important what happened because it shows a deeper underlying dynamic. But remember what happened. Early pandemic for a lot of office workers, their days got completely taken over by Zoom. Which if you think about it is absurd, where you would have, people would have an eight hour day back to back to back to back. I mean, I had calls into my podcast from listeners

where their problem was, when do I go to the bathroom? Like there's not even a 20 minute break in my day. That's what I think emphasized to people, okay, something we're doing is broken. Now, how do we end up, I call it the Zoom apocalypse. A couple things happened when the pandemic erupted that I think made this sort of inevitable. One is we were working right at the limit, which is what we tend to do in a pseudo productivity culture, is we work right at the limit of what's bearable. Because in a pseudo productivity culture where activity is what matters, it's very dangerous we feel to say no.

So how do we then manage how much work we take on? What a lot of people do is they wait until the stress of their workload becomes sufficiently acute that they feel like they have psychological cover to say no. So their busyness has to be sufficiently painful to compensate for the pain of saying no. So their busyness has to be sufficiently painful to compensate for the pain of saying no. So because of this, we tend to work constantly at this level of having too much, right? That's how we get some sort of psychological permission to start saying no to things. So if you perturb this at all, it falls apart. And I think that's what happened in the early pandemic is everyone was already working at this peak workload where things were just barely possible. The pandemic introduced 25% new tasks all, you know, overnight, basically. That was enough for this whole thing to tumble. And then it was just endless meetings and endless email. But to me, the real lesson of that

is not just how terrible the summer of 2020 was, but how busy we were in the winter of 2020, right? How busy we were in 2019, how at the red line we already were that any sort of perturbing, any sort of inflation of our workload could lead people to have their lives completely fall apart. The book's been out for a little while now, and you've been on many high profile shows talking about the ideas in the book. Are people getting it? Are people thinking, yes, I can do this. I can make a change. Or as I've seen in my job as a doctor time and time again, it often requires people to get sick and to get a diagnosis before they start really looking at their life and going, right,

you know what, enough's enough. I ain't living this way. Or it requires someone to become burnt out and have to take six months off work to then recognize I've got to live in a different way. I've got to work in a different way. Do you think it's possible for humans to make those changes without going to that edge? I hope so. Yeah, I do too. I hope so. I mean, what I'm seeing is there's two major audiences for the book, right?

So there's entrepreneur types who are much more willing and able to make radical changes to their work. And so within the entrepreneurial circles, you have sort of a dividing line. Those who are constantly experimenting and they're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's rock and roll. I'm going to cut this back. I'm going to do this. Let's see how this works. And then there's those who are living in fear of if I'm not hustling every minute, this could all go away. The clients could disappear. The other major audience is people who work for large companies. And again, there's sort of a split there. Those who are saying, okay, this is scary

because I have to walk softly because I have bosses. I want to be careful about this, but I think this can work. I mean, most of the advice in the book is actually for that crowd and how you walk softly and make this work. And then the other half of that crowd is saying, I love the idea. I'm just too nervous. I'm too nervous. It's too different. And so it's a split kind of down the middle in both of these crowds between the like, let's rock and roll. And I hear you, but I'm afraid of what's going to happen.

Well, let's get into some of those specifics then, because that was one of my big questions is who is this exactly for? If you have autonomy over your working day, like a lot of entrepreneurs perhaps do, perhaps they may feel it's easier to make some of these changes, as you say, compared to someone who's got a boss and they're accountable for certain things. So let's go into those three core ideas in the book. Maybe explain what they are. And then let's get into actually how do people do this in real life. in real life. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now.

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He basically midwived the notion of knowledge work as a major economic sector. He was responsible in his writings for explaining to the world the business, this is what knowledge work is, here's how it's different than industrial manufacturing, here's what you need to know to succeed. And if you go back to his writings, again and again, he says autonomy, direct quote, autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. You have to give autonomy to the worker because he was making the point, which was right.

This is not an assembly line. You can't break down the work of an ad man into seven steps they always follow. You have to give them autonomy. It's creative and it's skilled work. And so autonomy is baked into knowledge work. So what we do is his suggestion, what we do today is management by objectives. Make it clear what I want you to do, but how you do it is up to you, right? So knowledge work has a ton of autonomy. That can cut both ways. So it's what allows us to get super overloaded into these absurd workloads because, again, there's no set system that we use of here's how we manage how much you're working on. Here's how we decide, you know, what's a reasonable amount to work on. We don't have any systems like that. So people can

get into a lot of trouble. You keep saying yes to things. The next thing you know, you're overloaded. But it cuts the other way as well. Because there's no set way, this is how we work and here's how many things you work on and here's exactly how you do it. You have a lot of flexibility, right?

So we have more autonomy than we think. It's just a matter of flexing that autonomy in a way that is palatable, that doesn't bring negative attention to you. And I think it's completely possible. And so like the three principles we can talk about, all three of them are very

implementable within the autonomy that most knowledge workers already have. Okay, great. Well, let's go through them. Okay. So number one, this is the one that scares people the most when they hear it, do fewer things, right? The quick summary of that is that it doesn't mean accomplish fewer things, but what it does mean is actively work on fewer things at the same time. So your concurrent work, reduce that. Focus on a small number of things at a time. Do those things faster. Do those things better than pull in something new. That way of working, small number of things at a time, you pull in something once you finish something you're working on, as opposed to everything you agree to working on it at the

same time, is much more sustainable, produces better quality work, and you actually finish things faster. So things come through this queue of projects actually much faster than if you try to work on them all at the same time, right? Then we have work at a natural pace. That's the second one, work at natural pace. Yes, right. And there's two elements to that. One is you need much more

variety and intensity. Humans aren't meant to work all out every day, all week long, all year long. We're just not wired for that. We need variation in intensity and accompanying that, we should stretch out

the timescale in which we think about productivity and say, what am I producing this season? What am I producing this year? Make those productivity timescales longer, changes the way that you think about work. It allows more of that variety in pace. And then the third principle, obsess over quality. So, for these two things to work, you have to couple it with this third idea of, I really care about how well I'm doing the thing I do best. And I want to get better at that

thing and craft matters to me. And that's ultimately going to be my ticket to autonomy is doing something really well. That's going to give you two benefits. One, it's going to naturally make busyness seem anathema. It's going to make pseudo productivity and the freneticism that defines work. That's going to suddenly seem unnatural to you. At the same time, as you get better at things that are valuable, you get more control over your career and you can more fight back against the busyness. Because as you get better at things, you're more valuable. You get more control. So that's kind of the engine that's going to drive your ability to do these other principles. Yeah. I love it. Well, let's get

into the first one, do fewer things. Now, as it happens, my own internal mantra to myself over the past, I'm going to guess two or three years has been do less, be more. Whenever I'm not sure, wherever, you know, if I'm journaling or meditating or just reflecting on my life, the thing that I often come back to is do less, be more. That's just something I've discovered from being overloaded and from falling into many of these traps. I think like many of us do, I've learned that no wrong and there's there's a few high impact things you do that you can do really well yeah focus on those things that's and get people in to help you to do the stuff that they can do sometimes better than you yeah you know and it but it takes a while to get into that

so I very much resonate with the idea of do fewer things the pushback is though as you say people are going to go yeah but my boss has given me these 10 things that I pushback is though, as you say, people are going to go, yeah, but my boss has given me these 10 things that I need to do. So what do you mean, Cal, when you say do fewer things? Yeah, yeah. So for an entrepreneur, it might be less initiatives, right?

Like these are the struggles you and I might have. It's like, okay, how do I prevent having a podcast, for example, from metastasizing over the rest of my schedule? Do I want to add this new product?

I don't know. I want to do fewer things. If you work for someone else, this becomes less about saying yes and no and more about demarcating active versus waiting. So what I mean by this is imagine you work for someone else, right? And you don't have a lot of leeway on saying yes or no. Imagine that you maintain a public list, like on a shared document, and it's split in half, right? At the front of the list is here are the things, the projects, major tasks that I'm actively working on. And there's like two or three of those. All

right, the big dividing line. Here's the ordered queue of other things I'm going to do in the order in which I'm going to do them as I finish my active work. And so as I finish an active project, I pull the next thing off the front of that list. And I finish something else that's active. I pull the next thing from that list for me to actively work on. So if you give me something to do and I say, I'm going to do it, you can see exactly what its status is. And you can watch it march down that waiting list towards actively working on. And you know, as soon as it makes it on the actively working on, I'm going to contact you. Okay. I'm working on this now. Let's talk about it. I'm here. Let me know your thoughts. We can talk about it. This thing, for example, this simple idea makes a major difference because what are you doing when you divide between these two categories? Everything in the waiting list

is no longer generating administrative overhead. You've agreed to them, but they're not generating emails and they're not generating emails, and they're not generating meetings, and they're not pulling at your cognitive cycles because they're not in your active list yet. Yeah. And you're also making the invisible visible. Yes. Which I think is one of the other big issues is that because it's all screen-based and it goes into the big ether of the World Wide Web, no one knows what anyone else is doing. No one knows. So you can start making assumptions that that person's not doing anything. Yeah.

But they have been slogging away at something or, you know, to speak to one of your early books, deep work. They're doing the deep work. Yes. That creative project may require, but you don't know that. You know, if you're assessing them just on hours, you're not really seeing that. So I think it's, I mean, I really like that tip because then you're making the invisible visible. Everyone around you knows what's going on. But I think you also gave this nice example in the book

where if your boss gives you another task to do, because it's all open, you can say, hey, no problem. This sounds really, really interesting. When do you want it? When do you want it? Which one of these current tasks would you like me to stop working on so that I can deliver on this? Which then goes back to your boss. And your boss, oh, actually, you know what? That one's actually more important. We don't need that one. So it's a very, I think it's a very clever way without, you know, you're not trying to be problematic at work. You're just trying to be open and transparent. Transparency makes such a big difference. I mean, this is one of the big drivers of overload is that workload management is obfuscated.

I have no idea what you're working on. You have no idea what I'm working on. You're just some sort of vessel that like receives work and does it for me. As soon as you make it transparent, a lot of good things happen. And what's key about these types of strategies, and I have a bunch of them, but what's key about these types of strategies is you're not putting a burden on someone else, right? So you're not saying to someone else, you now have to do something more complicated as part of my new system. That doesn't go over well, but I'm not asking you to do anything different. I'm just giving you more information if you choose to look at it, right? So you're not adding a burden. You're also

demonstrating that you're organized. And I don't want to under emphasize the importance of what you earn within a workplace when people see you as someone who has your act together. Yeah. Oh, you're really organized. You're keeping track of exactly where things is. I can watch where it is. You gain yourself a lot of respect and flexibility. Adam Grant calls these idiosyncrasy credits. You get the ability to be idiosyncratic about things

if you're delivering, if people trust you. Now, here's what I think is really going on in the workplace, because one of the big fears I hear from people is that, no, no, no, what my boss wants is me to do something right away because that makes his life easier and he won't tolerate anything less. I think that's actually not true in most cases. Here's what's really happening. The problem you're solving for your boss is that they have this thing that entered their world that needs to get done. It's a source of stress for them until it gets done, right?

Because it's in their mind taking up space, right? And so if they're going to enlist you to help them get this done, the problem you're solving for them is taking their stress away. Now, if they don't know anything about your workload, if they don't know anything about your work process, if they just, they don't know anything about this,

they would rather you just did it right away because they can't release this till you finish it because they don't know what happens once they give it to you. So like, I've sent this to you, but I don't know if you're going to do this or not. I'd rather you just do it because I'm going to still be stressed about this. If you're organized, if it's sure, I'm happy to do it. I've put it in position seven on this list, which you can look at and watch it, but I'm happy to move it somewhere else if you want to. seven on this list, which you can look at and watch it, but I'm happy to move it somewhere else if you want to. You've solved the same problem.

They're not stressed about it. Great. You have this. You're taking care of it. You've taken my stress away. That's what I needed from you. Not that you did it right away, but that you took my stress away right away. So if you're organized, your system can really work in your favor and people will be okay

with it as long as it solves their problem. As long as they trust when they give you something, it's going to get done. They can see it's going to get done. They don't need it tomorrow, but they need their stress to go away right now. Yeah. I think that's such a good point about sending out this signal that you're on top of things, that you are organized, that you've got stuff you're working on. I think it's really, really important. I think it's also important in how you say no to things, isn't it? I think you use that example in the book that, again, if you can very clearly and be transparent why you cannot say yes to something, it probably makes it go away faster. Is that fair

to say? Yeah. So if you're at a level where you can actually just turn things down, so now you don't have to entirely just rely on something like this transparent cue where everything goes. Clarity is everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as they say, apologize is fine, but don't give wiggle room on whether you can do it or not.

Just be clear. Like what people need is clarity. I want you to do this thing for me. It would be great if you could. Don't leave me dangling. You know, either come back and say, this looks great. Thanks. I can't do it right now. Really sorry about that. Nice thing. Nice thing. Nice thing. Don't come back and say, for example, well, I'm really busy and, you know, I have this other thing going on and hope that the other person will then let you off the hook because the other person won't.

They really want you to do whatever they're asking you. They're not going to say no to themselves. So if you just describe your busyness, they'll be like, oh, we could fit it in. Don't worry about it. Or if you say, well, I'm really busy right now doing X. They'll be like, great. I'll get right back to you as soon as X is over.

Yeah. Oh my God. I've been there like many of us, so many times. So what are your tips then for someone who says, we both acknowledge that not everyone are in jobs where they can say no to certain things. Sometimes, depending on your position or your role in the company, whatever it might be, you can't do that. But if you have, You can't do that. Yeah.

But if you have, as you say, you have a degree of autonomy. Yeah. Or you have a degree of decision-making ability where you can say no to things. Yeah. What are your top tips for saying no? Yeah, I got two big ideas. All right, so one, and this is pretty straightforward, is quotas. So if there are certain tasks that come up regularly, and you need to do some of, right?

But you get way more requests for these type of tasks you can handle. Just have a quota. Like, okay, this month or this quarter, I do five of these. You know, I go to one conference per season. I do three peer reviews per month or whatever it is, right? And then when you exceed that quota, you say, you know, I appreciate that. I do a quota of this many per month, this many per season. I've already hit that quota, you say, you know, I appreciate that. I do a quota of this many per month, this many per season. I've already hit that quota, so I can't do this. This puts you in a good position because it's not an arbitrary no. You're not saying no to all of these things. You're

giving out a lot of yeses. And the only real pushback to this can be your quota is wrong. You said you do five of these. It should be six, right? Which is something that people don't actually want to push back about because it sounds like you're being very reasonable about trying to figure out how much. All right, here's my other idea. Actually go and find time for something before you do the work, right? So what this allows you to do is that when someone comes up to you and says, hey, can you do this? Instead of giving a hard yes or no in the room, you say, oh, that sounds really good, or that sounds really important. I'm really careful about my time. So I'll tell you what, as soon as I'm done here,

I'll go to my calendar and I'll look what's going on with the time and where I might have time for this. And you know what? I'll get right back to you about it. So it's like you're giving them a positive thing, but what you're really doing is setting yourself up to see what's really going on and then actually go and look for the time. How long will this take? When am I going to do it? going on and then actually go and look for the time. How long will this take? When am I going to do it? Let me schedule that time on my calendar. And if you can't find it, now you have this much more systematic way of coming back and saying, no, you know what? I went and checked. I keep track of everything very carefully. It really is going to be like three or four weeks till I have like enough contiguous time to get this done. That's too late for what you need. So I don't think it's going to work out.

So by not saying yes or no in the room, but instead establishing I'm organized, I'm going to go check my systems. And then you come back four hours later, that's a much more effective no. Yeah, I love that. I mean, this literally happened to be last week. So saying no is something I feel I've got much better over the past few years out of necessity, frankly.

But I was very proud of myself like a week ago because my assistant got a request for me to come to London to do a talk. And, you know, she knows that I just don't like going to London to give talks much anymore. And part of that reason, well, this is, I guess, one of my, one thing that's really helped me, not just in my ability to say no, but just in many other aspects of my life, is to measure the unmeasurables or to try and measure the unmeasurables. And for me personally, having children is a brilliant way of doing that. So my kids are now 13 and 11.

They're an amazing age. I love hanging out with them and doing things with them. And so, you know, weekend events for me are pretty much always out because kids are at school. They're not at the weekend. I don't want to go off at a weekend when I can spend time with them. So it's trying to quantify because we don't really have metrics. Well, you're a computer scientist, maybe you can tell me if we do, but we have metrics to measure our salary, our follower count, how many people downloaded this episode of the podcast, right?

But we don't have the same kind of metrics to measure quality time with my children at the weekend or my wife. So that's something I've become very, very aware of. And also the other thing is your rule was never say yes in the room. My internal rule has been never say yes on the phone. So I got asked, it's a very prestigious event. And the only reason I was even considering it is because it was a good friend of mine's wife was asking me. So I got on the phone with her and she made a really powerful case for it. And I'm such a people person that I nearly said yes.

And I actually, I just thought about it. I had this nagging feeling. I just don't want to do it. I just don't want to do it. I just don't want to do it. I have to get a super early train. I'll be back late. It will exhaust me the next day.

There's other stuff going on. My daughter's musical is that week. I don't want to be tied for it. And then I communicated that in a way that I usually don't, which is a very clear, hey, it's a great offer. I genuinely cannot fit that into my schedule that week with everything else I've got going on. Good luck with finding someone else. And it was because I was so clear and transparent. Yes. The reply I got was also fantastic. I just, I felt really good afterwards.

I thought, Rangan, you're growing up. You're learning how to do this stuff. They moved on. And within five minutes, it's like, okay, who's the next person I'm going to ask? Yeah. They're not sitting there the next day with, you know, their whiskey in their hand,

like Rangan, I cannot believe he said no, throw it into the fireplace. They've moved on. But even if they were, that's also their issue and not my issue. I think that's right. Well, I'll tell you, my kids played a big role in this book as well. So I have three kids, all boys, 11, nine, and six. So they all recently are now of, like in the States, we say elementary school age? So they're all sort of in school. When they got to that age, one of the things that changed is that they all needed basically like every minute of dad time possible, which was a real change, right? Because when kids are younger, it's much more of a sort of survival thing and making sure that like no one in the partnership has too much of a load. But suddenly it was we need to spend time with our dad.

in the partnership has too much of a load, but suddenly it was, we need to spend time with our dad. And that was one of the big inspirations for, I really got to figure out the details of the slow productivity thing, because I'm also, you know, I'm reaching the peak of my professional capabilities, right? The options are endless. And so I had to answer this question, how do I keep producing stuff I'm proud of, leave a legacy, support my family, but also not let work take over because this is the time when they need me. And so one of the mindset shifts I've made, it reminds me what you're talking about here, is shifting away from the value of what the opportunity brings and more towards what's lost. And this was key for me. Do I already have a good variety or amount

of that value in my life? Like a notion of enough. I think you were on Ryan Holiday's podcast recently. You guys were talking about this. Yeah. I think he got a request one summer when he was, well, actually this is interesting. I was listening to that podcast this morning and you and Ryan were talking about speaking gigs. And he was talking about, I think one summer when he was having four weeks off and he was just not going to do any, any work apart from his own writing at home. And then he got, you know, offered a big payday to go and talk somewhere for a big company. Now I want to acknowledge not everyone is in that position. Okay. Of course. Yeah. So I want to be really sensitive to that.

Some people are struggling to make ends meet. That is not necessarily relevant for them. But Ryan said something really interesting to you because you were talking about how you guys make decisions. And he ended up saying in that podcast that ended up being one of the most expensive four weeks off I've taken. And I thought that's an interesting way of phrasing it, isn't it? It's not the way I would think about it. Yeah. And I thought that's an interesting way of phrasing it, isn't it? It's not the way I would think about it.

Yeah. And again, I found it fascinating because I thought it depends what is your mentality? How do you look at life? Do you look at it as if something you didn't say yes to and didn't earn,

so it was never yours in the first place, do you see that as a loss? Yep. You know, it's again, it's looking at what you can measure. I'm not, hey, I love Ryan Holiday. I think what he's doing is great. So this is nothing anti-Ryan at all.

It was interesting turn of phrase for me. Yeah. And I've had this conversation with a really good friend of mine from university who to me works way too hard. And he also has that sort of phrasing. Yeah, but if I take a weekend off and I'm not doing a clinic at the weekend, I'm losing money. I'm like, maybe you're not losing money because

if you don't say yes, you've never made it in the first place. Yeah. And also what are you doing with the money? It's like the old parable of the fishermen. You heard the story, like the fishermen in Mexico, right? It's the billionaire who's on the vacation and meets the small fisherman and says like, yeah, you should build out like a company and get a boat. And eventually you could hire other people. And eventually you'll be able to buy a whole cannery operation for your own fish. And you could build a huge company out of this. And the fisherman said, okay, so then why would I do that?

And he's like, because you could sell it and move near the water and go fishing every day, right? It's like money is instrumental. So once you're past a place like your friend probably is, where they're past the place where they're stressed about their finances, which is a terrible place. Exactly. And we have to be very sensitive and aware of that. Yeah. But I think these examples have a more general point. So it's useful, right? Is what happens is when you don't know what you're building towards and it's more the fear of what you might be losing, in general, there's issues, right? So, like, for example, I'm a big fan of what I call lifestyle-centric planning. Build your positive vision of what you want your life to be like. Not just professional – time with family, where you live, what your typical day is like, what you're involved in,

what role work plays in your life. This is your target, right? And your goal is like, okay, I want to get closer and closer to implementing this ideal lifestyle. That changes the way you think about things, like in this example, doing extra clinics or speaking gigs. Because now you're saying, okay, I'm pretty close to this lifestyle. And maybe if I do a small number of these speaking gigs, it enables me to do something else, like take the summers off or whatever. But to do a bunch of these gigs, well, that's going to get in the way of the vision I have in my life because I'm going to be too busy on these sort of days. And so then you begin to just think about some of these things more instrumentally. How do they help or hurt what I want my day-to-day life to

look like? If you don't have these sort of clear lifestyle visions, you usually have an achievement or maximization-based strategy. More is better than less. More money is better than less money. More accolades is better than less accolades. Whatever it is. And that never seems to work for people. So when you're trying to build the good life, however you define that, it makes you see these opportunities much differently. I think solitude again comes up here for me, because

without a regular practice of solitude, you're not asking yourself these questions. You're not asking yourself, what is your perfect life? How much is enough? What are my values? What do I actually require in life to be happy and content? So you end up on this constantly moving train, which you feel you have to be on. You end up in this rat race, which of course contributes to burnout. And at some point you have to ask yourself, well, what are you working for?

What's the point of this? And there's a wider point there for me, Cal, which is, I've been thinking deeply about your book yesterday and today, and this idea of busyness. And I wonder, have you ever thought about whether there's an East v. West kind of demarcation here? I mean, you can't really say specifically East v. West, but very generically speaking, I kind of feel in a lot of Western cultures now, UK and US, where we become quite

isolated. We move away from families. We're trying to do everything by ourselves. A lot of the time, we don't feel that we're of value to people. We're not of value to our community. So I wonder sometimes, is our over-busyness an attempt to feel important, to feel that we are actually of value? Whereas in some Eastern cultures, let's say, very, very broadly speaking, with tighter family units where you feel day-to-day that you are contributing, that what you do actually matters, I wonder if there's less of a drive to fill yourself up with busyness at work when you have that value in other places. Well, I mean, this is an idea I've been thinking about recently. So I'm sort of beta testing this here. You can tell me if this makes sense. I think in the West, there's been a major shift

over the past 150 years or so. When it comes to, how do we think about the question of, I sometimes call it the deep life, but building a life that's very intentional, right? Let's say that's the goal. I think this really is a lot of people's goal. I heard a lot about this

during the pandemic from people is, I want to feel like my life is lived on purpose. It's like sort of quietly remarkable in its own ways. It's like it reflects, like I constructed it and it's cool. It's interesting. It's, you know, I'm proud of my life. That's what people want. They don't want aimlessness. So I call this the deep life. It used to be, throughout basically all of human history, we saw this as, okay, a lifestyle, I'm going to call it lifestyle-centric approach. What's important? What parts of your life are important?

Make sure that you're servicing those parts of life. And throughout most of history, this would have been through philosophical or theological ritual and beliefs. You would structure your life, the role of family, the role of spirit, the role of community. It was pretty structured. But it was like, I want to focus on parts of my life that are important to me and live those rights. How I live is what matters. And then we get this sort of shift, 19th century going into the 20th, especially in the West, where that stripped away because we sort of had the shift to more of a post-enlightenment

secular culture. And we shifted over to goal-centric planning, which was, okay, how do I make my life good? We said, well, what I'm going to do is take a big swing at something. Like if something really good happens, if my business becomes huge, if I become the number one person doing this, in the wake of that big goal being successful, my life's going to get better, right? Just as a side effect of doing this one thing, following my passion, getting to the top of the food chain, whatever it is. If I do this one big thing, the rest of my life will fall into place. And this, of course, just doesn't work this way. Like, why would pursuing one big thing to the point of obsession make all these other parts of life that are important suddenly work out well? We know this doesn't work out well for people. And so, I think

it's like we have to rediscover or transport some of this lifestyle-centric planning that this was the way we thought about building the good life until a proverbial minute ago. Transport some of that to our current age. And we can do it in a more modern, secular way if we want to. But just thinking about, no, no, I need to think about all the parts of my life. What do I want those to be? And building my life around sort of satisfying those needs, constructing an ideal life from the ground up, as opposed to hoping that a single goal, if sufficiently bold and brave,

will somehow fix everything. Yeah, I love it. It makes complete sense. Again, something I've been thinking about recently is this idea of our life have, that there are several buckets. You know, there's friends,, you know, there's friends, there's family, there's work, there's personal passions and projects, there's health. And,

you know, it may be hard to keep all of the buckets full at the same time, but you've got to at least try and at least be aware when you're neglecting one of those buckets so that neglect doesn't go on for too long. Yes. And I think that's the key, isn't it? You know, there are times in our life where actually, you know, we do get a little overwhelmed and we do have deadlines and we do have a little bit too much going on. I think we can handle that for short periods of time.

It's not acute stress. We are wired for acute stress, but not for the chronic stress. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the way. And also when you're looking at all those buckets at the same time, you begin to find much more creative solutions for the problems of your life. Right. So when you're not just trying to maximize one thing and hope everything else follows in its footsteps, you begin to see really interesting

configurations where you're like, well, in my work, if I start building up this skill, this skill is pretty valuable, but also has a big freelancer potential to it, right? And if I could get to the point where I could freelance this, well, then we could live over here in the countryside, like in the Lake District, because we want to be quiet. We want to be in the fell. We have this other vision of our family life. And well, this would make that possible because this would be remote and it's pretty well paid and it's cheaper to live here. And so we could actually do this. I could do this 10 months out of the year and have two months completely off. And then our kids could then learn. And you begin to find these multifaceted solutions where you're like, oh, if I do this,

it enables these three things, which then supports these things. That's where the really interesting lives come out of. Those lives that when you encounter them, you're like, oh, that's really cool. Like what you're doing is really interesting. You're like writing poetry, but also on like your sheep farm, but a database admin that is like homeschooling your kids as you build up. You get these really interesting, incredibly intentional configurations that are remarkable when you see them, but you can only get there by looking at all the buckets and trying to think, how do I do this? There was a lovely case study in the book, which really spoke to this idea where you have to almost challenge the prevailing cultural norm. I think that's a big theme throughout slow productivity is that

just because this is the way we're doing things, well, it doesn't mean that's the way we have to continue doing things. And was it this computer designer that's the way we have to continue doing things. And was it this computer designer? I don't know if his name's a hand, where you did this thought experiment if he was charging $50 an hour and being, do you remember the case? Yes.

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limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal,

and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in

control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Yeah, so this is from a company of one, Paul Jarvis. That was it. I thought that was great because it reminds me of the parable of the fisherman and the American businessman a little bit, whereby conventionally in our UK and US Western cultures, it's always about how can you achieve more? How can you earn more? How can you scale up? Right. But this guy's doing the opposite.

Yeah. Because when you scale up, you get more ongoing projects, which means more administrative overhead, which means more busyness. Yeah. I love Paul Jarvis' story. So that book, I love that book, Company of One. I blurbed it when it came out years ago, right? I love that book. But Paul's story is basically he was in Canada and Vancouver, sort of expensive apartment in Vancouver, was a web programmer, some sort of technology guy, right? And he was getting better at what he was doing and there was a demand for his services. And he made this important decision. He said the typical thing to do is to build a business. I'm in demand. If I hired four people, we do is to build a business. I'm in demand.

If I hired four people, we could take on much more work. We could grow this. If it got big enough, maybe I could sell this for a few million dollars or something like this. Instead, he said, no, no, no. If I'm getting better, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to charge more per hour and work less. He went the other way. He's like, why not go that way with getting better? It's like, if I'm comfortable living on this salary now, why not, if I get twice as good, just have my hours? Same amount of money is coming in.

Now I have half my time free. And he's like, actually, to me, that's much more valuable than 15 years from now getting a $5 million payday. Like, what if right now I could be working half the week or whatever? So that's what they did. Him and his wife, they moved to Vancouver Island, which is a sort of really sort of rural nature-y place off of Vancouver. And there's a surf break there and she's a surfer.

So they lived in this house in the woods, this sort of modest house in the woods where you had extensive gardens. And he just charged more per hour. They lived cheaply. a sort of modest house in the woods where he had extensive gardens. And he just charged more per hour. They live cheaply. And he had the life right away that you would imagine, well, this is where I could end up in 25 years if all of this busyness goes well. So I love that mindset is that as he got good at something,

he obsessed over quality, right? Principle three of the book. He used the leverage that gave him to take control of his life. He said, great, I'm going to work less. I think, Cal, if you got someone in a calm state, so they're not stressed out from work, they feel the nervous system relax, and you presented to them those two options, right? In 15 years time, you could sell your business for X million, but the cost of that is going to be 15 years of hard work, stress, late nights, potentially a denigration of your relationship with your friends and your wife and your partner.

But you're going to get that 50 million or I don't know, half a million dollar payday, what would you rather have? I actually do believe that most people, if they had the space to think about it, would say, you know what, if I was going to earn enough to go on holiday and feed my family and engage in my passions. And I'd have a really good relationship with my wife and my children. I'll take that. But I think the problem is, and again, I keep bringing up solitude because I do agree with you that it's a very, very important foundational activity for every single human. Without that, you don't have the intentionality to even think about your life. So you end up doing what everyone else is doing.

And if you look at that statistic from the start of the show, well, 88% of people are burning out. So do you want to be doing what everyone else is doing in the first place? Yeah, I mean, I love you emphasizing solitude. And I would add to it, you need more time doing this than you think probably. I spend hours, hours on a regular basis alone with my own thoughts. Here's a concrete example. I fly into London, get in. I don't have events that day, get in the afternoon. So I go for a three-hour walk. I'm staying over by Parliament and Trafalgar Square.

So it's like, okay, I haven't been to London in a long time. And I'm walking for hours, just walking past all the sites, just thinking, right? And so then I'm walking through St. James's park, which is beautiful. And I come across the, have you seen this? The duck keepers cottage? No. Oh, it's like a medieval tutor, sort of small, beautiful cottage tucked in on the, uh, the pond and St. James park. And because there's these exotic birds in that pond that I'm sure this was some Royal position where like generations lived in this cottage or whatever. And it really resonated with me. It was aesthetically beautiful. It was in a natural environment. You could imagine the simplicity, but meaning of the work of like, this is what I do and I do it really well.

And from that random encounter, I got hit by this wave of like, oh, there's something there. And I began to think about writers I know have like a quiet house somewhere where they go and write. That is like a reflection you get from solitude. And then I'm churning on that. And like, what does that mean? Why is that resonating with me? What does that, I'm not going to become a duck keeper, but what does that tell me about simplicity and aesthetics and a slowness and a purpose? All of those type of insights, which I'm now processing, it comes from I'm going to spend time walking, thinking, just taking in the world around me. I have a little field notebook with me, field notes notebook with me. You have to do that a lot to really start to make sense.

And so I do that a lot to really start to make sense. And so I do it a lot. I also recommend if we're going to talk solitude, that on your birthday each year, you take like a full day, go hike, like be away from your normal things and really work through your vision for where is my life? What do I want? What do I don't like? What do I do? Like, what am I going to do in the year ahead to push me closer to what I do? Like, I do that every year on my birthday.

I have a birthday coming up. I'm excited for it. And in the weeks building up to my birthday, I'm thinking and taking notes. So I'm a huge believer in exactly what you're saying is you have to have time to get your act together. And the thing that's keeping you away from doing that more than anything else

is probably your phone. Yeah. I've never heard that before, to do that on your birthday. I love that. What a lovely idea. What a lovely way of ritualizing your birthday to actually help you reflect on what that extra year means and the accumulation of another year and where you're going, where are you going to end

up if you keep living like this? I think it's a lovely practice that I may might try and adopt this August when it's my birthday. Yeah. Yeah. And also you feel it, especially as we're mid-age now, you feel the time. Like that whole year passed. That was a weird year. I didn't really, I felt sort of stuck in that year. It really does help. Like I'm going through some transformations in my life. They're complicated, right? Especially like in my academic role as I move more from pure computer science and over towards digital ethics and thinking about technology and technology's impact. And that transition is complicated. What's happening in my writing career is complicated, right? And I've really been working on this now for years where it's just hundreds of hours of thought, making sense of what's happened, revising my plans for

the future. I mean, a lot of effort goes into intentionally shaping parts of your life. And I have diagrams and pictures that evolve over time. And, you know, it's a lot of time, like I'm spending right now at this phase of my life trying to figure out, okay, I knew what my thirties were about. I knew what my twenties were about. I'm figuring out now what my forties are about. And it's a complicated question and I'm giving it a lot of time. This is a practical piece of advice that creating time for solitude is important. Yeah. And I think a lot of the time people are so busy, they think I don't have time for solitude without realizing that solitude actually will give you so much more of your time back.

Yeah. Just don't use your phone for a week. You'll find time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I ran this experiment for digital minimalism where I had all these people stop using their phone more or less for a month. Well, they had a lot of time. In fact, the problem they had was how much time that generated and they didn't know what to do with it. That was the biggest problem. And so this experiment I did for that book was 1600 people. That was the biggest problem. And so this experiment I did for that book was 1,600 people.

And for a month, we called it optional digital activities. So like you're not on social media, you're not browsing the news, you're not watching video on the news. The biggest issue was what to do with all the time that opened up. So, yeah, we have time. Also, solitude is easy. It's not, you don't have to go to a meditation room. You don't have to like put aside time. You don't have to go to a gym. It's you're already to like put aside time. You don't have to go to a gym. It's, you're already going to work in the morning.

Just don't put something in your ears. You know, you're already walking the dog. Just like do a dog walk without, you know, reading something on your phone at the same time. I mean, solitude is just about activities you're already doing. Just be doing that activity and let your mind go where it's going to go.

You know, one thing that really, if I can say it worries me about the state of society at the moment, and it's highly relevant for me because of the age my children are, is technology smartphones with children. I was literally speaking to Jonathan Haidt about this last week, and he's obviously done a huge deep dive into the issues here. But when I drop my son at the bus stop, for example, most mornings to go to school, I

can remember when I was his age, standing at the bus stop, you'd have to talk to people, right? Even if you didn't know them. And over a period of five, six, seven years of being at secondary school, you kind of figure out how to do it, right? Even if you were nervous at first, you'd figure out like how that actually works. What's going on now? No one's chatting. They're standing there at the bus stop. Everyone's staring at their phones. And I'm not blaming the kids, right? I get how addicted these technologies are, but it does make me think about, well, what happens in 20 years or 30 years when these children who were growing up without solitude become adults? Like, what are the consequences of this? Yeah. Yeah. It makes me nervous. I mean, I'll tell you what

gives me some hope though, because I'm really worried about that, right? Because it's difficult to learn how to be a sort of adult socialized human. Like socialization is hard. Our teenage years is when we practiced, you know? I mean, I don't know what your teenage years were like, but also remember parties? You had to walk into this room. You were trying to navigate, like, am I cool enough to be here? You have nothing you can look at. You have to figure out what's happening. You get really good at socializing. So, I am worried what's going to happen if you lose that training. The one thing that makes me a little bit more optimistic is that the university students I teach, and maybe this is just a reflection of the school, it's a pretty elite school, they're pretty good communicators. Like, they're very polished. Okay. So, I'm like, okay, there's some hope there. Like maybe they're still picking this up. But I think John's take on technology and kids is right.

That he's been very influential. I've known John for a little while. So I've seen, I've been following along his research over the years, right? And I've given talks at my kid's school about it where I basically just simulated John on stage. Like I'm going to show you his charts or whatever. I think he's right that we're shifting and we'll be there within the next few years to a cultural mindset that it's roughly 16 or older is the earliest for unrestricted internet access. It's post-puberty is when people should get unrestricted internet access.

That's coming really quick now. And I think we're going to look back and say, man, you had a real misfortune. If you happen to be born in a time that got you to your adolescent years when we were still in the experimental phase of a new technology, which is, by the way, what we do with all new technologies. When it first comes around, we spend a decade or so, let's just try everything. And then there's the next couple of decades where we figure out, okay, maybe we should have traffic signals on the roads. We figure out once the technology comes along, we're just entering the traffic signal phrase of kids and smartphones.

So, man, if you were a teenager in 2015 or something like this, you just got bad luck, right? I mean, you were like the poor country farmer who got ran over by the first automobile in 1903 because we didn't really know what to do with the technology and people just were driving everywhere. I know Jonathan says as well, in your view, why after puberty? Why should we wait until after puberty?

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things happen. One, your brain has developed more. Two, you have a much more stable sense of identity. So, it's really dangerous when you're trying to identify, build your identity and where you fit into sort of like the world of social structures to be bombarded by these sources that can manipulate and play on your identities in early adolescence. So by the time you're post-puberty, you're much more stable in your sense of self. Also, your social groups are already more set. So you have a better understanding of

here's who I am, here's who my friends are, here's our connections we have to each other. And now you're in your interest. All of this is more baked. And then these things come in, it's not playing with wet clay as much, right? So it can't do as much. A 13-year-old, man, you just get buffeted around

because so much is happening at that age. Well, that's particularly social media, isn't it? Because as I spoke about with Jonathan, reluctantly, I did with my wife, get my son a smartphone when he joined secondary school, but there's no social media. And he's really, really good with his use actually. And again, we take it seriously to model good behavior at home. So we're also not on our phones around them at home and that sort of stuff. So I think that's another piece of it, which we have to take seriously.

But yeah, I appreciate your thoughts on that. You still don't have any social media, do you, Cal? I don't, no. The people say, I don't think this counts. Our podcast is put out on YouTube. Yeah. But it's not my social media. It's not, you know, I don't know.

I don't understand the world of social media well. The one exception is I do reporting on social media, especially my writing for The New Yorker. It's one of the beats I cover. So I will enter into various social media circles like an anthropologist going to like the distant island. Yes. So like I'll go on the Twitter for a while

to observe certain things to write about or I'll see what's happening on TikTok so I can write about it. So my understanding of social media comes as a third-party observer. I'm the only third-party observer, I think, left in the world at this point. Well, yeah, it's incredible

because most people will say you cannot do what you are doing as a very successful author and not have a social media account. Yet you have proven that's simply not the case. It may be harder for some people, for sure. I get all that, but you've definitely proven that it is possible. I think in digital minimalism, you also made the case that, well, I don't know if it was what you do or you recommended people do, but try not to have any apps on your phone that make money from your attention. Did you say that or do you still stand by it?

I said that. Yeah. Don't put anything on your phone where someone makes more money the more you look at it. Because you're going to lose that battle, right? I mean, look at the capitalization of something like Meta. Its market capitalization is somewhere between $500 to $800 billion, look at the capitalization of something like Meta. Its market capitalization is somewhere between $500 to $800 billion, depending on the day. I mean, this is significantly larger than ExxonMobil. That amount of resources, if that's being aimed at getting you to look at

your phone more, you're not going to win that battle by just having like some good intentions of I want to look on these things less often. You got to take it off your phone. So yeah, what I recommend is like, okay, if you have some professional reason you need social media, use it like a professional. Have it on your computer in the browser where it's not at all interesting. Have a schedule where you go on there and I go on there on Fridays and it's sort of tedious.

I post these clips that I've filmed on this other day and I update these things and then I shut it back down again, right? Because a lot of what happens is someone will have a very narrow, legitimate, but very narrow use for a social media tool. Like I need to post, like let's use Ryan Holiday as an example. Like he's like, I'm going to post a stoic quote every day. Right. So you'll have some, this is fine. It's a brand building exercise, but then they'll use that as an excuse. Ryan doesn't do this, but someone who had a reason like that might use it as an excuse to, great, so I have to be on social media all the time.

Yeah. It's like, no, this is like a very narrow thing you're doing. So don't put it on your phone. That's where all the attention engineering goes, is the mobile apps. The website versions of these things is boring for me. I go onto the computer, the post my quote every morning. Like Ryan, I think, has a big Google doc

full of these things. And there's someone on his team. It's like the most mechanical thing. Every morning, copy, paste, you know, send, and that's that. There's no reason to be, and there's reasons, but it's trouble.

There be dragons. If it's, I want this on my phone and I want to interact with people. Or I want to see how well this thing is doing. Or, I mean, it's just mind this on my phone and I want to interact with people or I want to see how well this thing is doing or I mean it's just yeah you also recently said which I found absolutely fascinating that you do use a smartphone but because you don't have any of those apps on it it's actually not that exciting yeah which is I think is a it's really eye-opening for a lot of people we will say that the phone is addictive.

Perhaps it's not the phone. Perhaps it's what we're putting on the phone. Yeah. I wrote this New York Times op-ed about this. Did you? Where I said we should use our iPhone, our smartphones, the way Steve Jobs intended. Right? And so what I did is I went back and I watched the original keynote address where Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone.

I also went and talked to one of the original engineers of the iPhone. They had no notion of the idea that this device was going to be your constant companion. The goal of the iPhone when it was invented was not people will look at this all the time. That if you go to a bus stop or a train, people will be on all the time.

If you watch that original keynote, Steve Jobs' intention is super clear. He's like, I don't want you go to a bus stop or a train, people will be on all the time. If you watch that original keynote, Steve Jobs' intention is super clear. He's like, I don't want you to carry a separate iPod and cell phone. Those should be in the same device. And he thought the interface for smartphones was insulting. He's like, no, it should be a visual voicemail. It should be really easy. That's what he was doing.

You have to get over 20 minutes into his keynote address before he even mentions other non-music or other non-phone uses. So he was, what Jobs was doing was taking things we already loved, music and communicating, and said, I'm just going to build you a better device for doing it. So that's what the iPhone was. There was not even an app store when it came out. Wow. app store when it came out. Then later they introduced an app store and then Facebook really led the charge by realizing like, oh, wait a second, we can get super high engagement on mobile because people have this with them all the time. So if we engineer this thing to be really appealing, we can get exponentially more attention minutes than we've ever gotten before. That's when it

became a constant companion. It's not fundamental to the phone. And perhaps that's why my son, phone. And perhaps that's why my son, at least up until now, has good habits because there are no apps on his phone which make money off his time. Yeah. The original Steve Jobs iPhone is fantastic. Like, what do I do on my iPhone? I listen to audio, right? It's podcast, audio books, music. It's fantastic for that. I don't make a lot of phone calls, but I do a lot of text messaging with my family. And I use the map. And like, I'm very happy to have this thing in my life. I can look up where I'm going. I can listen to things. But the idea that I would just be looking at it all the time, it's just not the way, it's not my relationship with it. Yeah. I blame social media made the phone into a constant companion. Steve Jobs would have thought that was inelegant.

He loved music and it's like I don't want to be looking at this little screen all day I want people to spend $600 to buy one of these things because it's beautiful and awesome but then once they have it

I don't need them looking at it all the time Apple doesn't make more money if you use your phone more often it's the apps yeah let's get back to slow productivity yes okay

in a nice little brief detour into digital minimalism which is a bloody fantastic book, honestly. I really, really enjoyed it when I read it in, what, 2019? 2019, yep. 2019. You mentioned the three principles, one, do fewer things, which we've sort of covered, two, work at a natural pace. Yeah. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. Well, one of the things that matters is we're not wired to work all out all the time, right? I mean, that was something that was invented by factories and mills. That was really the first time in human economic history. And by economic, I mean that loosely, going all the way back to 300,000 years of foraging and hunting. We were not wired to work at steady intensity all day long, day after day, week after week, right? That's just not the way that human beings actually operated.

We had a lot more variation within the day, but also within the seasons. If in the agricultural period, the Neolithic revolution in the winter is going to feel very different than the fall. If you're a hunter and gatherer 150,000 years ago, the migration period is going to have a different feel than the non. I cite research in the book looking at extant foragers about what the daily rhythm of that looks like. Within the scope of the day, it's super varied.

It's okay, we're on a hunt, but now it's the midday sun. So we're going to rest because the animals are resting. And then we're going to, so lots of variation. But that was really interesting. That was, for me, one of the most fascinating things in the book was this idea of us asking ourselves, well, what does work mean? And if we look at our modern lives through an evolutionary lens, well, how much did we even use to work? And when you look at that, no wonder so many of us are burnt out because what we're doing today is so unnatural.

Super unnatural. So it was mills and factories came along. And now for the first time in human history, it was actually, it makes sense. It's more productive for us who own the mills and factories if you just work all the time. The more you can work, the better, right? And that's where we got the idea of steady intensity all year round. And it was a disaster. It was terrible for people. It was so unnatural to be doing this. We eventually had to invent labor unions and regulatory frameworks and have a very antagonistic relationship between the workers and the owner of the factories. Because what we were asking people to do was so unnatural and unbearable that we had to have huge protections around it to even make it sort of survivable. Remember, Blake referred to those mills dark and satanic.

Knowledge work emerges. Okay, how are we going to organize this new type of labor? And we're like, let's do the factory thing. We'll just do factory shifts, eight hours a day, all year round, no variation. Instead of now you putting steering wheels on the car or whatever, moving the shuttlecock through the loom, you're going to be in your office, like some of the emails or whatever. But we want you clocking in and doing your shift. And it should be all day long. We're very suspicious if you're not working and just do this all year round, no variation in the day, no variation in the year. We're not wired for it. And so we're getting exhausted by it because we don't even have, at least in the industrial sector,

we recognize that way of working is unnatural and unbearable. And we build huge frameworks like, okay, if you're going to make me do this, you got to give me all these protections and we're going to negotiate for pay and you have to give me breaks and all this types of stuff. Even drivers, truck drivers, lorry drivers, they're only allowed to work for a certain amount of hours because it is deemed, or one of the reasons is it's deemed unsafe. So they have to rest. But in knowledge where we get none of that. So we get all the worst parts of this very unnatural way of working with none of the protections that we do need for it. The solution here is we shouldn't work that way.

And when I go back and study knowledge workers from a previous time where they're just working on their own, what did they gravitate towards? Huge variation intensity. Busy periods, unbusy periods. Mary Curie honing in on isolating radium from pitchblende, right? This was going to be the first sort of formal identification of a radioactive

substance. This was Nobel caliber work. Honing in on this, drops everything, goes for a two-month vacation in France, right? Comes back and starts working on some more and does it, isolates it, wins her first of two Nobel prizes. It's a different mindset. It's like, yeah, over the next few years, I want to isolate this and make a big discovery, but also I need to put the brakes on a little bit. I'm getting kind of exhausted. So let's go explore grottos and, you know, the French countryside and then come back and try again. This was much more, much more natural that things had much more variation. That's how we always naturally produce value with our brain until recently. How does that apply? The second law, as it were, in the book, work at a natural pace. How can someone who doesn't have the luxury of taking off two months

in the summer to reflect on a big idea or do something else and come back and get their Nobel Prize, what can they take from that idea and apply immediately? Yeah. So I can tell you, first of all, what I think companies should do and then what individuals can do if their companies don't do these things. Okay. So there are examples. So companies are now starting to experiment with ways to have more variation, which I applaud, right? One is the idea of sabbaticals. with ways to have more variation, which I applaud, right? One is the idea of sabbaticals. More and more companies are introducing this idea of sabbaticals for employees.

You have a hard few years, you do some cool things, take two months off paid to recharge and rethink and then come back again, paid sabbaticals. That's becoming a bigger thing. I think it's a great idea. Another idea that's out there, Basecamp, the company Basecamp does this. They do cycles.

So work unfolds in cycles. You're on an on cycle, which could be four to six weeks where you're really focused on one or two things, right? Then you have an off cycle. This can be like a two week period where you purposely don't do a lot of things. It's all about trying to close up the loose ends on what you're just working about.

And more importantly, thinking about with space to reflect what is most important for me to do next. And the employee handbook for Basecamp says, resist the temptation to just push more work into the off cycles. You have to actually cycle down your workload before you cycle it back up. So I love ideas like that.

What can individuals do if they don't work for one of those companies? You can do this internally without telling anybody. Pick times of the year, these three weeks in the middle of the summer, like before the holidays and whatever. I'm going to wind down a little bit during those periods. I'm not going to make an announcement about it. I'm just going to, how I schedule things, what projects I have in and when I have new

projects start, the hours I'm actually going to be like putting in work, I'm just going to down cycle for a while, right? You sort of like quiet quit, but just for a couple of weeks at a time, right? At a smaller timescale, you can do things like pick a day of the week and say, I'm just not going to schedule any meetings on that day. And again, I'm not going to announce it. It's just when people ask me when I'm free, I'll offer lots of dates. They just won't happen to be on that day, right? So that that day can be quieter than other days or once a quarter or once a month, take an afternoon off and go see a movie. And again, don't make a big deal about it. Just have an appointment. No one cares. You know, when you shared that tip in the

book about seeing a matinee once a month and how great it would feel. I haven't done this, but midweek in the afternoon in a cinema, I don't know, how does it feel? It feels, by the way, I do this, right? It feels great because you know the context of other people are at work right now. And so it's the most relaxing movie experience.

You're like, this is great. You really appreciate it. It's like cold water after a long stint in the desert. You'll appreciate it a lot. I loved it. And actually the bit in the book, which I really, really enjoyed reading was that if you feel guilty about this, just remind yourself how many evenings you've worked, how many times you've worked at weekends, which is true. Because a lot of people do feel guilty about that kind of stuff if they're able to do it, but they forget like, hey, you have overworked loads. You've probably given your company way more in the past. Yeah, where's your overtime for working after?

Yeah, you don't get it. But also if you leave the pseudo productivity mindset, this becomes psychologically easier. So in the pseudo productivity mindset, activity is value. You think about any reduction in activity as taking value away from your employer. Yeah, this is it, isn't it? Because this is basically the fish

not knowing what water is. Yeah. That example illustrates it beautifully. The reason you feel guilty is because you have developed the belief somewhere that you are only measured in terms of your activity and your visible activity.

If you didn't have that belief in the first place, there's nothing to feel guilty about. There's nothing to feel guilty about. I mean, what if instead, the way you thought about your work is, okay, this year or this season, I have this portfolio of projects I'm working on, and I'm really proud of the work I'm doing on these, and it really uses my skill,

and I think it's going to move the needle. And this is great. I'm on track for it. Going to a movie on this Tuesday is not going to negatively affect that, right? It's a completely different way of thinking about it. But if you imagine yourself like an assembly line worker, you're like, well, wait a second. If I'm not at my spot on the assembly line, putting the steering wheels on the car, like the whole thing slows down and it's a problem

for everyone else. But when you switch from activity to outcome, you realize, well, I'm producing stuff I'm proud of. It's why writers, professional like novelists

just write novels. And I say novelists because it's the one type of writer that we leave alone. Yeah. For whatever reason, we don't get to do this as nonfiction writers.

But novelists, we were very safe to say, disappear, write your book, two week book tour, and then go write another book. Like we don't make them do things right. Study the lives of a novelist. They're doing all sorts of things, right?

Because you can only write so much and they, they have to like take down time. And because what they're thinking is, am I going to produce a really good book? Yeah. Of this next two years. That's what they're judged on. and because what they're thinking is, am I going to produce a really good book over this next two years? And that's what they're judged on. That's what they're judged on. Not how many hours they put into that book.

It's like, how good is the book? So for them to say, I'm not feeling it this afternoon, I'm going to a movie. Yeah, of course, why not? Why is that a problem? Yeah. So we can adopt more of that mindset.

We're not novelists. I wish we were. I love their lifestyle. But we could take this into other knowledge workshops. Like, this is what I do that's valuable. Here's my portfolio of projects I'm working on. I'm really doing well in these things, right? That's what matters. Am I proud of what I produced this quarter? Am I proud of my annual contribution to the company? Not how does my time card look? I think one of the other differences between, let's say, factory work and

knowledge work, you mentioned that individual who, if they're not at the factory putting on the steering wheel, then there is going to be a reduction in output for that company. One of the upsides of that, and I'm sure there's many negatives of working in that environment, is that when you clock off at 6pm or 5pm, you've clocked off. You cannot be doing that at home. So yeah, sure, maybe the job is a bit monotonous. Maybe there's things you don't like about it. Everything has got upsides and downsides. One of the upsides might be that you simply cannot work at home because that work can only be done at the factory. Whereas with knowledge work, those emails, that thing, it can be done anytime. It can be done on a Sunday morning.

It can be done at any time, which makes that switch off very difficult for many people. Yeah, I mean, imagine if you worked on an assembly line and you were like assembling magnetos for the alternator. And now imagine that the company is like, you know what? We put a bunch of magneto parts at your house and it's up to you. But like, while you're at home, you could probably build a few more of the, and then we're not saying you have to, but like, you know, we are counting the magnetos and, and if you maybe build a few while you're at home and, and, and by the way, when you go, uh, when you go to like your, your kids' sports games or this or that, we're just going to have a guy who follows behind with a cart full of magneto.

It's up to you, but you might want to build a couple. That's what email is. Yeah. And that's part of why modern technology made pseudo productivity not work anymore. I mean, this is really the way the techno story here I keep coming back to is pseudo productivity was crude. It kind of worked. It wasn't very accurate, but whatever, until we got modern technology in the office, and then it spun out of control. This is one of the reasons why it did, because if

activity is how I demonstrate my value, and now I have the opportunity to do activity at any time in any place, I now have to fight an internal battle constantly. Constantly. I have to fight the battle. And it's draining. Yeah. It's draining that battle. You know, there's research, isn't there? It says if your smartphone is there on the table, you are exerting willpower just to not pick it up and look at it. Yeah. It's not neutral. Well, it's like a torture. I mean, think about it. It's almost like a torture device in the sense that what do humans care about? They're tribes, right? We're a community-based species, right? care about, they're tribes, right? We're a community-based species, right? If someone in our tribe, historically speaking, needs something from us, we better take care of that. We do not want to ignore in the Paleolithic era, someone in our tribe is like, I tap it on your shoulder.

You don't want to ignore that person because it's going to break perhaps the relationship and they're not going to share food when there's the next famine. But what is an email inbox as far as our more primitive social circuits are concerned? What is an email inbox if not a bunch of members of your tribe need something from you? And if you're ignoring it, now you're in danger. You're in danger of not passing on your genes, right? Because we're wired, don't ignore when people need things from you. Because that part of our social circuits don't know about norms and a knowledge work office space and asynchronous communication. So like an email inbox that is slowly filling at all times is like a social psychological torture device.

It's like, I dare you not to go and check this. It's pulling on some of our deepest instincts. It's like having folders full of pornography around everywhere. It's like, don't open that. But by the way, you know, there's pornography behind every corner. You're like, oh my God, all the deep instincts. Like, I want to take a peek at that. This is pulling out another deep instinct,

the instinct to be social. And so it really is sort of perverting this thing we have, this instinct we have in a way that makes that challenge is impossible. Do you have an email app on your phone? Yes. So you managed to use that in a way that enhances your life. If we take the digital minimalism approach,

has that been quite intentional that this email app helps you? Yes. Well, first of all, I have like five or six email addresses. So I, because I use specialized email for specific purposes so that I can have sort of specific expectations around those addresses. So this is just for one of those accounts. So I had an interesting experiment back in March. The app broke and I didn't have access.

I got basically logged out of Gmail on my phone. And for various reasons, I couldn't log back in. So I went about a month, month and a half with no email access on my phone. And what I found is like, oh, there's these very specific but frequent logistical reasons why I needed the email. Like coming here on the train,

I have the tickets in my email, right? So I have this one address with an email app. So for these logistical purposes. But again, you're very intentional about that. I'm super intentional. Yeah. But also like with email, I mean, for me, the key to email is,

it's not what you do. Once you're thinking about, what do I do with all these requests coming in that I need to deal with, how do I deal with all those requests? You've already lost the battle. The real war here is how do I stop so many of those requests from showing up in the first place? Like that's, you got to go upstream. So if you're just like a standard knowledge worker, that's where having less active projects helps because now there's less things generating emails for you to actually receive. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're like URI running like a little media concern,

there's other types of things you can do to try to be very intentional about what goes where. But I really do not like unscheduled incoming messages that requires a response. That's the killer. Third principle, obsess over quality. Yeah. We don't have a huge amount of time to go through it.

The word obsess. Yeah. I've been thinking about that word because of course the danger, as you acknowledge in your book, is that this can, you know, spill over into perfectionism and never actually doing anything because you're so keen to make it the perfect thing. Yeah. How come you chose the word obsess? Yeah. Well, because you have to care a lot about it. Yeah. I mean, if I had said instead, care about quality, that's too light. Everyone's like, yeah, I care about quality. I want to do good work. It doesn't capture the magnitude of what

I'm trying to say, which is this should be central. Yeah. This has to do good work. It doesn't capture the magnitude of what I'm trying to say, which is this should be central. Yeah. This has to be central to your story. The perfectionism slash craft trade-off is central and unavoidable. And in some sense, like this is the challenge. You can't sidestep. You have to confront it head on. It is a real challenge. Anyone who's ever tried to do anything well faces this challenge. And my approach to it is recognize that. Here's some ideas about what to do with it. Yeah. But don't run from it.

Yeah. Don't run from it. Don't let your fear of like, what if I procrastinate over perfectionism stop you from trying to get better? Because it is so important to try to get good. Craft is so central to earning the ability to have a slower notion of productivity is that you can't under-emphasize it. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, those three principles, they really work beautifully in harmony with each other. Yeah.

Right? Because if you take principle three, obsess over quality without do fewer things, you've got a big problem. If you've got 10 things that you're obsessing about to be perfect, you're going to be overloaded. So they all kind of feed each other quite nicely, don't they? And you get the flip side too, which is if you're just like, say, trying to do fewer things,

but not caring about the quality of your work, then it just becomes a game where you begin to get this sort of antagonistic relationship with your work of less is better than more and how many things can I take off my plate? And that can have its own sort of nihilism to it. Like you need the counterbalance.

I want to do fewer things so that I can do the things I care about better, right? You need those. It's the glue. I call that principle, the glue that holds the whole thing together. In terms of my public facing career, the two, I guess, most important things I do

are my books and this podcast. And all of these principles really apply to this kind of endeavor. And if we just focus on Obsessed Over Quality for a minute, one of the big differences between the podcast and the book is that the books come out every year or every two years. So there's a different timing to that. Whereas the podcast is every week, apart from six weeks every summer. So we can obsess over quality, and we do, but we also have to be able to say, that's good enough to press publish. Because otherwise you could literally

spend six weeks crafting a podcast, one show to be absolutely perfect. So yeah, it's interesting. Whereas with a book I can take longer, but I still need a deadline. You still need a deadline. You still need a deadline. But that's the whole game is you need constraints and then you do the best you can within the constraints. That's exactly. Like that's the whole game with perfectionism. And yeah, so podcast is a great example. This has to come out every week. I also have time constraints on my podcast. Yeah, it's half a day a week, right?

Half a day a week, yeah. Is that prep as well? Yeah. Wow, so you've got half a day a week to prep and record it. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I have to get help to do that. And like, as I add new things, I have to figure out how to take other things

off of my plate. And now I have a producer that helps like gather the questions for the prep or this or that. But within that half day, I'm like, oh my God, I want to make this as good as possible. Yeah. I try as hard as possible. Yeah.

Kyle, honestly, I'm such a fan of your work and have been for many years. It's really such an honor to have you in my studio and talking to you. I think slow productivity is a game changer for people. I really do. I think it's going to help people really understand why their work may be overwhelming them. And it is chock-a-block full of practical tips that people can use. That even an office worker who may feel, as you said before, doesn't have much autonomy, there are still things you can do. I also want to shout out

Digital Minimalism because I thought that was an absolutely fabulous book as well. And I guess that deals more with the kind of our off time, our non-work time, but there's a huge synergy between the two of them. Just to finish off, Cal, for someone who has heard this conversation, I think, yeah, you know what? I am overloaded. I'm one of those 88%. My life feels too much. I'm sick of being overwhelmed all the time.

Where would you advise them to start? I would start with workload. Doing fewer things at once is going to give you the most immediate benefits. I mean, I think when you say, all right, I'm going to look at this big list of things I'm actively working on. I'm going to take 30% off my plate for the 70% that remains. I'm going to divide it between these are the two I'm working on for the next couple of weeks and the rest are just going to sit here and I'm not going to give them active work until I'm finished with something over here and I'll pull it in. Do the workload changes first. You're going to get breathing room.

And then once you have breathing room, everything else begins to seem possible. Because I discovered this because I wrote a book before where I was talking about email and building processes and how to have better ways of communicating that's not so interruptive. And what I learned working on this new book is that the biggest problem people were having is they had so much on their plate that they didn't have breathing room to even step back and ask these type of questions like, oh, how do I want to communicate on this project? Oh, is there a way we could collaborate on this? It's not just going to be slack all day. When you have too much to do, it's like you're drowning. And when you're drowning, you can't actually get enough air to make any changes. So if you reduce that workload first,

it's going to feel like I can finally catch my breath. Then you can get some solitude, some reflection. You can think about your pace. You can think about quality. You can think about doing what you do best, even better. Everything becomes possible once you get that extra space. So I've been telling people, if you're going to start with slow productivity, start with the number of active things on your plate. Cal, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. You're doing fantastic work. Thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thank you. I enjoyed it.

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