Modern Wisdom - #764 - Cal Newport - The Delicate Art Of Mastering Work-Life Balance

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University, a productivity expert and an author. If you’ve ever felt that you’re not as productive as you could be, you’re not alone. But what if the goal isn't to be more productive, but to let go of the goals that aren't serving you? What if the power of saying no to more things is the most important skill you can develop? Expect to learn what our current problem with being productive is, why pseudo-productivity is a catastrophe, the advantages to what Cal calls Slow Productivity, how to better organise your communication, the best strategies for implementing a productivity schedule, how to stop saying yes all the time and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 60% off an annual plan of Incogni at https://incogni.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Cal Newport. He's a computer science professor at Georgetown University. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Cal Newport. He's a computer science professor at Georgetown University, a productivity expert and an author. If you've ever felt that you're not as productive as you could be, you are not alone. But what if the goal isn't to be more productive, but to let go of the goals that aren't serving you? What if the power of saying no to more things is the most important skill you can develop?

Expect to learn what our current problem with productivity is, why pseudo productivity is a catastrophe, the advantages to what Cal calls slow productivity, how to better organise your communication, the best strategies for implementing a productivity schedule, how to stop saying yes all the time, and much more. Honestly, the difference in the quality of your life when you have a world-class backpack is pretty hard to describe.

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That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Cal Newport. I was saying, I'm really impressed with what you've done with your podcast. Oh yeah, thank you. Really cool. You know, for a one-stop shop for understanding productivity and where it's at and history. I was hearing you try and use some example of the Cretaceous period for how email got

introduced or something. I was geeking out on that one. Yeah. Yeah. The KT boundary and email. Yes. Dinosaurs and email. Dinosaurs and email. I was having some fun with that one.

As it always does. Talk to me about what the problem is with our current definition of productivity. Well, it's a bad one. Right. I mean, I think that's what's going on is that in knowledge work, what happened is, I went back and dug up this history, right, to try to understand. You get the knowledge work as a major sector

begins to emerge roughly mid 20th century. When it emerges, there's this question of, okay, how are we going to measure the productivity of people? I mean, in other words, how are we gonna actually manage people? This is a harder question you would think, right? Because before the knowledge sector arose as a major thing,

what did you have as the major thing in the economy of the industrial think, right? Because before the knowledge sector arose as a major thing, what did you have as the major thing in the economy? It's the industrial sector, right? And product, uh, it can be productivity in the industrial sector. It's quantitative. It's model T's produced per labor hour input, right? You had a number you could measure. You could change the way you did it.

Right? Let's move from the craft method to the assembly line and see that number go up and say, this is better. You go to knowledge work. None of that works anymore. Right. Because I'm working on seven different things. It's different than what you're working on how I'm doing the work.

It's kind of up to me. I have my own private sort of organizational system. So there's no clear thing that we can improve or mess around with. So we don't have a good old fashioned definition of productivity. So what do we do in that space? We said, well, we'll just use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. It's like, if I see you doing stuff, that's better than you not doing stuff. And if we need to do better, let's do more stuff.

Like get there earlier. Let's work later. I call that pseudo productivity. That's implicitly been what has been driving knowledge work activity for at least 70 years. You asked your readers or listeners, I think, to try and define productivity. This is a community of people that have come together to watch a show specifically on productivity, and they failed to come up with a good synthesis for what they meant by the thing they're interested in.

No, they couldn't do it. Here's what most people did when I asked them. They basically just summarized what their job was. So like, what is productivity? And they're like, well, it's, you know, doing my DevOps responsibilities well. You know, they would just pair it back what their job was and say, I guess that's productivity. So that's the issue with pseudo productivity

is it's unnamed. So we don't actually recognize or admit this is what we're doing, which is just activities better than non-activity. So we can't fix it because we don't know there was something to fix. But my big argument is that pseudo productivity went off the rails once we had computers and networks

and emails and laptop and work could follow you anywhere and you could demonstrate activity anywhere you were at any time. You see this in the productivity literature. We talk about productivity completely different in the nineties. Than we do in the early 2000s. Didn't you track productivity advice from the fifties through until the modern day or so, like an archeologist of, of productivity advice. So take me through what, what, what were we being told about how to be more productive in the fifties up to today?

Yeah. I wrote this for the New Yorker recently, and this was all from my own shelf because I geek out on this stuff. So I have a historical collection of sort of vintage productivity. Yeah. So you see, we're gonna see a big change when we get to the 2000s, but starting the 50, the 1950s, the very first book. It's really the very first book on what we would think

of as modern time management. And it's called the management of time, right? It came on 1950s. Good title. Yeah, it was a good title, right? But it's not at all what you would expect. It's almost entirely psychological, right? So knowledge work was new, these large organizations in which you were sitting at desks, a lot of this was new. So most of the management of time is actually just grappling psychologically with this new reality. What's the mindset to even have to deal with a world in which you're no longer turning a wrench on an assembly line, but there's all this stuff coming at you. All right, 1960s definitive book, The

Effective Executive, right? Peter Drucker. Still read today. Fantastic book, right? Peter Drucker, by the way, coined the term knowledge work. So he was really a key figure in understanding knowledge work, why it's different. That book is all space age optimism, right? It's all like, okay, we can optimize the hell out of this. It's, you know, okay, executives, you need to keep a log of like what you're doing every minute of the day. And then we're going to go back and we're going to study this log. And we're going to find the inefficiencies and we're going to remove those. And you're going to figure out like the optimal set of acts.

It was very space age. You know, we're just going to throw a lot of engineering at work and we're going to make it optimal. The seventies, everything gets depressed, right? Cause the American economy in the seventies is it's stagflation. It's, it's Jimmy Carter and the great malaise, right? Because the American economy in the 70s is stagflation, it's Jimmy Carter and the great malaise, right? So everyone is in a bad mood. And so the 70s book I have is just A, B, C through Z. So it's alphabetical. And for every letter, it just has some things relevant to the office that start with that letter. And then they give

you a couple of paragraphs like B briefcases. Now is what you should look for in your briefcases. A alcohol because they grow anti. Well, it's clear from that entry that they were drinking a lot at work. When you see the advice, it was like, you know, I don't know, maybe not have that third martini at lunch. That was the advice. That's something like that.

Wow. W this is not making this up waste basket tree, waste basket tree, waste basket tree, right? Like the art of building waste baskets and where they should be positioned. To have like what the yeah. So anyways, there was no, there was no ambition in the seventies. So it was just like, well, it's just, all right. How do you, how do you keep procedural?

Procedural. Yeah. Uh, then you get to the eighties and nineties. Now it's Stephen Covey, right? So eighties and nineties, right now we're thinking wall street, right? We're thinking the American consumer boom, the economy starts booming.

Right. And so now you get, uh, seven habits of highly effective people. That's in the eighties. First things first in the nineties. These are all about work as self-actualization, right? And so Covey is like, here's what we're going to do. It's incredibly optimistic. You're going to figure out what matters to you in life and all your different roles. We're going to write those down and we're

going to optimize everything you do in the day, all aimed towards like actualizing your biggest goals in life, right? When we're going to figure out these complicated systems for selecting and tracking your time, all aimed at like accomplishing your deepest ambitions and not just in work, but like at home and in, and in like your religious communities, Covey was a religious Mormon, et cetera. Then we get to the two thousands and this is where the shift happens. So the, the big book of the early 2000s is David Allen, Getting Things Done. CB. Being on the show, he's a modern wisdom alumni. He's a legend. RG. Exactly. Now, if you go back and you read Getting Things Done,

this is not an ambitious optimistic book. His goal in this book is like, how can we basically find some moments of Zen peace among this untamable onslaught. Right. The whole thing is like, we can't, it's very nihilistic almost, right? There's this huge incoming onslaught and what we're going to do is keep this onslaught from colonizing our mind and making us stress. So everything's going to get reduced to next actions. And then with mind like water.

So I profiled Alan for the New Yorker. So like, he comes from a background in Zen and karate. So he really likes mind like water. So I profiled Alan for the New Yorker. So like, he comes from a background in Zen and karate. So he really likes mind like water. You're just going to execute these actions, uh, without even having to, you're not going to be almost mindless about it. Let's just execute, execute what context I'm going to execute. So it was about just trying to find peace among an onslaught. That's really different.

He's very peaceful man. A peaceful guy lives in Ohio. It's nice. It seems like it works for him. Okay a peaceful guy. Yeah. Lives in Ohio. It's nice. Seems like it works for him. Okay. 2010s. Yeah. But, but so now this is a big change though, right?

Because what happened between the nineties and two thousands is going to be the front office, IT revolution, computers. It's going to be email later. It's going to be smartphones. It's going to be Slack. So we get this huge uptick in the amount of work people felt like they had to be doing all the time. And that's when we get this change in tone.

Now, when we get to the 2010s, all of the books are on this other side of it, right? Where we are being essentially overwhelmed by this work. How do we survive? And so the big sellers are like essentialism, my book, deep work, you have a Keller's one thing, like these are all books about trying to combat overload. So you get this big shift from nineties into the 2000 and 2010s, everything becomes about work is overwhelming us. Uh, it's too much.

We're burning out. Alan is like, how do we just basically disconnect from the stress of this all and just execute like we're cranking widgets, me and, uh, uh, essentialism and, you know, Keller's book, we're trying to like, okay, how do we fight back about this focus still matters? Don't, don't get overwhelmed. There's almost like a rear guard action, you know, trying to protect the rear as, uh, the advancing army is routing you.

Like all this is going on. So it's a huge shift. And I think that's because pseudo productivity was fine. Like you could talk about alcohol and waste baskets and self-actualization until you get computers and emails and laptops and smartphones. And then it began to overwhelm us. So it's like a night and day shift in tone. Once you get to about 2000. Why is pseudo productivity so sticky? What's caused that to be so prevalent? Simple. It was a simple, right? It was like, I don't know, what are we going to do here? I'm simulating like a manager in the 1950s. What are we going to do here? I don't know.

If I see you working, at least I know you're not not working. And so it was simple, right? So anything else is more difficult. So we just went with what was simple. So it's less of that sticky, it's simple. But the other thing that happened is that same Peter Drucker, who wrote the effect of executive, he really hammered writing in the sixties all the way up until the late nineties, he was really hammering, uh, trying to explain his management theory, trying to explain knowledge work. He was really hammering autonomy. He said, productivity is not something for us to discuss.

Like managers shouldn't be discussing it. It's not our business. It's now personal. is not something for us to discuss. Like managers shouldn't be discussing it. It's not our business. It's now personal. Individuals will figure out on their own how they wanna manage their business. Knowledge work is not something where like in a factory, we care about how the work is done.

This is up to the individual. So productivity is not a topic of discussion. So Peter Drucker really pushed this idea. In knowledge work, we don't talk about productivity. So in lack of discussion, the simplest thing is going to stick. And the simplest thing was if I see you working, that's good. Why aren't you answering emails? You must, maybe you're it's a defensive approach to it.

Like if I don't hear from you or see you, how do I know you're not slacking off? So that's, uh, I guess organizationally how productivity has become I guess, organizationally, how productivity has become detected by the people that are typically above you and also by your peers as well and your colleagues that you work with. But this is emergent. Like we are our own taskmasters with regards to this. So we're building out our own pseudo productivity desire

and whipping ourselves with this. What's the reason? Is it just that this was the only measure of busyness? Therefore we took that and turned it into our own internal state, or is there something else going on when the individual is working for themselves? Well, yeah. So, so what happens within the non working for yourself context, if pseudo productivity reigns, right? So people are going to measure your activity is how you prove that you're valuable, then all of your own work on being organized or productive is all going to be aimed at how am I more visibly active? How do I do more? How do I be seen more? This just bakes into the culture eventually. So yeah, now I start my own company. I'm a freelancer. I have my own thing going on.

It's the only definition of productivity I know, right? Is like this activity and everything that we've been seeing since the early 2000s, it's all in a world in which this is what really matters. Seeing work is what matters, activities, what matters. Slack is a way you can always show that you're involved. And so we just internalized it, right? So even though there's a lot of flexibility, if you run your own business, they actually are probably the worst tend to be the worst offenders of

pseudo productivity mindsets because they feel more pressure. Like I have to be productive. Like it's all on me. And if all that we know is pseudo productivity, then that's what you're going to do. Well, when you are both the person who decides which tasks to work on and also the person who works on the tasks. Yeah. You end up with this very bizarre, like, Harry Carrey, immolating sort of situation where you work never finishes. It's sort of a productivity purgatory scenario where it just permeates

everything that you do. And yeah, how would you, how do you frame or what do you think about most people's relationship with productivity? Like how do you think that they conceive of that? Well, it's shifting a lot, right? Because what seems to be happening is pseudo-productivity has been around, it begins to become increasingly unbearable in the 2000s.

What we then get starting maybe five or six years ago is an emergent anti-productivity movement, right? Because again, this is coming out of a place to make sense. People are increasingly burnt out. It's also coming on the tail ends of the first decade of the 2000s. There was a whole techno productivity revolution. This was the whole, what they would call the productivity prong revolution. This is some lead speak, but basically it was this, there's this moment in the early two thousands where

people were really optimistic about this idea that productivity implemented by smart software was quantified self. It was going to, yeah, it was going to revolutionize work that it was like, if we get the right system, I remember David Allen, I kind of introduced this idea of being more systematic and engineering in your systems that plus the right software. Was going to bring us to this utopia where work was like effortless, like do this now, do that now, you're just going to be cranking widgets and the software was going to do it. I interviewed some of the people who worked on these, these electronic GTD systems back in the day.

So there's this big optimism that kind of faded by the end of the 2000s. Now we're even more burnt out than before. We begin to get anti-productivity, right? So this begins to emerge. It's picking up some steam, 2018, 2019, right? These are when some of the first big books on this emerge. And then the pandemic really accelerates that.

So by the time I'm actually, you know, writing the new book, there's a really big anti-productivity movement. So, we now have an emerging antagonistic relationship with the concept of productivity, which what it really is, is an antagonistic relationship with pseudo productivity because the demands of that are deranging, right? I mean, especially when now you're at home, you're working remotely, the work never ends. At every moment you have to be internally arguing with yourself, should I work or do this other thing?

I could be working. Now you're in this constant internal battle. There's no boundaries anymore between work and non-work. So like that was the defining relationship with productivity of the last five years. I would say is this anti-productivity movement. And where are we now? Are we still in the throes of that?

Or is there something new coming up? Well, I'm trying to put something new in. So slow productivity in my mind is a, uh, it starts from the same place as the anti-productivity movement, it goes somewhere different because the problem with the anti-productivity movement is they're, they're starting from the right place, which is we're burnt out from this. But their response is typically anti-work. So then the answer they often come to is work itself is tainted. And typically they'll bring more of like left-wing labor politics. So maybe like more of a Marxist

frame. This is an inevitability of the exploitative nature of late stage capitalism. It's very cooperatives and they won't even go that far. They'll just be like, don't try so hard, right? Right. Do nothing, the art of doing how to do nothing. These are titles of, of really good selling books. Quiet quitting was sort of a, you could think of it as like an anti-productivity move.

So it, it recast, it sort of recast what's going on away from our definition of productivity doesn't work well to like, let's put this back into more of like an early 20th century labor politics context of no, it's exploitative managers trying to exploit labor from you. And now we're in a zero sum fight. And the way we're going to fight back and do less work, there's more than life than work. So that was largely the answer that didn't really catch on in part because a lot of people that were preaching work less were like working really hard to, you know, that's luxury beliefs. Yeah. I'm subscribed to my sub stack.

I'm writing every day about why you shouldn't work hard that I'm working hard on. And also people, they don't hate work, right? Like a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, like, no that I'm working hard on. Right. Um, and also people, uh, they don't hate work, right? Like a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, like, no, I'm going to do this well. Like I want to be killed by it. I don't want to be killed by it. Yeah. So then that became the central question for my book was, okay, so here's the question, how do we produce stuff?

That's good. Like that we're proud of. We can support a family, um, without burning out and without having work take over more and more of your life. Like that's the real question, right? The question is not how do we deconstruct capitalism? Like that's not the right response to the burnout crisis, right? As they capitalistically sell their books on this. The right question is this, how do we produce stuff and be proud and ambitious about what we're doing,

but also not burn out? I did an annual review and I've used the same process every year for a while now. And I redid it this year and I tried to ask myself more kind of introspective artsy questions, stuff like what would eight year old me look back on and wish that I did more and less of? What do I think is productive but isn't

and what isn't productive, but I think is. Interesting. Uh, that's a really great question to ask. So, uh, things that are productive, but I don't realize that they are, uh, were going for coffees with people who are just coming through town for a short amount of time. Right. Dinner with friends, uh, playing pickleball and, uh, going for walks. Uh, those were some, uh, stuff that I think is productive, but isn't.

Being on calls, answering emails, spending time in Slack, sitting at my desk when I'm not working, that's a big one. I'm just like, Oh, if I'm here and I'm at the seat and the computer's there, something else, something will happen. Even if you're on Twitter. Something will matter. Yeah. I'm just dicking about.

I'm like, that's not productive. And the final question that I asked myself, like just notes, and it was the most interesting part of the review process, was just notes at the bottom. And it was stuff that came up that didn't fit into any of the questions or categories that I created for myself is fleeting thoughts. And this one was, and this is the main question

for this year, and it's so funny, this is the topic of your new book. Is it possible to be world-class and have fun? That's the main question that I'm asking myself this year. Many of the most world-class creative minds in history had a lot of fun. So the answer is yes. Yes, and this is why, it's something some people complain about,

but I think it's actually a feature of my approach in approaching this topic is I said, I'm going to go back and find world-class creators, I call them traditional knowledge workers, scientists, philosophers, artists, et cetera, throughout history. And I want to see how they worked. And then the complaint is, well, wait a second, I can't work the same way as Galileo. That's like a completely different time and place. And I was like, no, the goal is not to try to replicate the work day of Galileo. But what we can look at is Galileo had a lot of flexibility in how he worked.

So with all that flexibility, what did he drift towards? So they have a lot of space. Mary Curie had a lot of space. Georgia O'Keeffe had a lot of space to figure out how they wanted to work. So they were running these natural experiments to see what is the absolute best way to create value with your mind.

Then once we isolate those principles, okay, we can adapt them to modern jobs, but like it's the principles that matter. So if you study these great traditional knowledge records throughout history, none of them were busy. The idea of busyness being somehow connected with great production is not inevitable. Especially if we're not talking about running a complicated business, but just creating

high value things with your brain, you don't find a lot of busyness until you get much more towards the modern era. What was the typical day of some of these favorite famous people from history like? That question wouldn't makes sense to them. Right. So it's a very modern notion that we have uniform work days. And so we need to have like a tip. Here's how, here's what I do during work days. And I work five days a week and I work this many weeks, uh, this many weeks a year.

They were way more variable about when and how they were working. Right. So it'd be like, okay, uh, this two months, I'm working really hard on something. And then I went away and traveled for four months and did nothing. Right. There is no typical work day. They had a lot more variation, right? So Georgia O'Keefe, for the painter, right? What kickstarted her productivity as a, an artist is, you know, she began dating Stieglitz and he had land in

the Adirondacks. He's like, okay, you got to come up. We're going to go up there in the summers. And she figured out this rhythm of they go up there in the late summer into the fall. She has this shack by the lake and that's where she has inspiration. She's doing her nature paintings. And then she brings them, she's there for months. And then she brings them back to Manhattan and then she finishes them and exhibits them and does the stuff. And then they go back up to the Adirondacks and she gets her creative input. So there's like no typical day for Georgia O'Keeffe,

but there's a typical year and it has different seasons she's doing things. I opened the book on John McPhee and I'm like, okay, for five days, it opens on five days of John McPhee's life in the late sixties, lying on his back on a picnic table. Because he was trying to find his way into a New Yorker piece and it was,

he couldn't figure it out, right? Like, I have all this research, how am I gonna start this piece? And as someone who's written my share of New Yorker pieces, I can tell you this is like an impossible problem. Like, how do I get into this article? Five days he's laying on his back just to try to figure out how am I gonna make sense of this stuff?

Like, what's a typical day for John McPhee? Like that? You could look, if you zoomed in on that day, you would say he did nothing. He's lazy, you know? And on another day he would be, you know, up in his office next to a Swedish massage parlor in Princeton, where he has this really kind of a centric way that he would cut up all of his notes and Xerox them and put them on these boards and he might be in there for hours and another day he might just be doing nothing or doing research, right? So they didn't have typical days, you know, so this idea that there's a work day, how do you structure your work day? We invented that, you know, for knowledge work in the 1950s and it was an idea we

borrowed from factories because that's how factories ran. You had shifts. And so it's not even the right question for creative work. Every time that I read, whether it's digital minimalism or deep work or any of your books, and some of Ryan's stuff as well, it's this, it almost feels like a nervous system re-regulation. It's like a reminder of a slower time. It's a reminder of a different time.

And so much of the stuff that we take for granted about the rhythm of modern life, about the ferocity and velocity that we go through these things with, we realize is just a creation, maybe not even a creation, maybe a malignant bug or a byproduct or a side effect, some weird externality of a thing that no one really designed.

It's the second, third, fourth order effect of some shit that happened 50 years ago. And then reading stuff like that or reading about how much Isaac Newton or Einstein loved to walk. I feel like that was in one of your books at some point, like the power of walking and how important that is. And you think, God, I came up with this idea,

the productivity purgatory is one of those where all of the things that you do, even the things that you're supposed to do for leisure, you do because you once saw an Andrew Huberman documentary that said 15 minutes of walking improves your dopaminergic response by whatever, whatever. That there's nothing that isn't done in service of productivity, even the things that ostensibly are supposed to be for

leisure. Yeah. And then, yeah, to me, and maybe to a lot of people listening, it sounds like hearing Galileo or Georgia O'Keeffe, you know, wanking off for four months and then dicking about and then coming back and I'll do a little bit of work. It sounds Bohemian. It sounds new age. It sounds hippie because our framing is only within the last.

We only know the last hundred years of work. We only know that before that it was just people hoeing the ground, right? It was just agrarian shit. And changed drastically by the seasons, right? Like you talk about like the German ritual, you'll cause they had nothing to do, right? It was a pagan ritual.

They're like, we're going to have bonfires for a month because like, what are we going to do? There's no, it's the winter. There's no crops to whatever. And then in the fall, like they're really busy. So the agrarian lifestyle was up and down. I went back and looked really deeply into a forager, hunter gatherer life, which is the 270,000,

the first 270,000 years of our species. Nature dictated everything, right? I mean, it was today we're on this hunt. The other day it rained, we did nothing. We're in the middle of this hunt, but it's hot in the middle of the day. So we just stopped for a while. The only time in human history,

like the first time we really had just work hard all day long was when mills and factories were invented. And it was so unbearable, it was so terrible to try to take humans who are used to all of this variation and autonomy in their approach to work. They say, you have to work all day long as hard as you can. We had to invent labor unions, we had to invent regulatory frameworks,

we had to put all of these huge apparatuses in place just to make that type of incredibly unnatural work tolerable. But the knowledge work emerges like, all right, so how are we going to organize our workday guys? Like, let's do what the factory guys are doing. We wrap that like the least natural in terms of our human wiring choice that we had because it was simple and it was what we were used to and it was what was big right now. And we're like, well, let's just do that. Yeah. One of the principles of slow productivity is work at a natural pace. Yeah.

What is that for humans? Well, there's, there's two parts to it. So for humans is what we just talked about, uh, variations in intensity. And it's not just on one timescale, but basically all timescales. Right. So when I went back and looked at how humans work before, within a day, you're going to have some periods that are more intense than others.

In a week, some days will be more intense than others. When you're looking at a season, some seasons might be more intense than others. The fall harvest is way more intense than the winter. Even at a bigger time scale, you might have busier periods and less busier periods. I'm writing a book for two years, and then for the next year, I'm going more fallow, right?

So variations, that's much more natural. Then the other principle that came out of that, and this was just from directly studying the great traditional knowledge workers of time past, they take much more time. So we try to go too fast. And a lot of these thinkers who were very productive in the sense of they produced new scientific work that changed the way we understood the universe, they worked very slowly. Their

notion of how long should I take on this project was way slower than what we do today. So we're always trying to charge ahead right away. What's the quickest way I could get this done? They took their time, right? They're happy to take their time. Even contemporary traditional knowledge workers do this. Lin-Manuel Miranda was one of the examples I gave. His first play before Hamilton, In the Heights, was a big hit, right? Eight Tonys.

He spent seven to eight years working on that play. Not procrastinating. He didn't put it aside for eight years. He just was working slowly on it for eight years. Kept coming back to it. They were doing readings with real actors. Then you would go away and do some other stuff and think about it and try to get something better.

And they come back and do another reading year. It's just this like slow process, but that's like pretty typical with traditional knowledge workers. We think in the pseudo productivity culture is like not fast as possible. I want to do a play. I'm going to like go away for a weekend and grind this thing out. Like let's rock and roll. That's not the way people used to do things. What are the industries or job types for whom this changing of the

pace doesn't work quite so well? Cause there may be people listening who say, well, that's all well and good. If your goal is to create over the next, however many years, a really great play, but that's not the world that I live in, that's not the profession that I have access to. Right, so the whole goal is then how do we take these principles that the great traditional knowledge workers excavate,

and then how do we apply them to just normal knowledge jobs, right? So all the advice is for knowledge work jobs, right? Basically, if you work on a computer screen for a living, if you send a bunch of emails, you're probably a knowledge worker. All right. So what does it look like to start adapting these ideas to a regular job or you have bosses or this or that?

Well, now it becomes a little bit more subtle, but you get the same effect. So now when a boss asks you, Hey, can you put together this report? Instead of you saying, sure, I'll have it done. And then you, you plug in the most optimistic possible estimate. You know, we do like you fall in love with the idea of getting it done that fast, you instead take that estimate and you double it like, yeah, you don't say one month, you say two months. So you're giving yourself more time to work on it.

And then what about like the seasonality? Well, if you're an entrepreneur, you can just start actually wiring this into your actual work rhythms, right? Like I talk about an entrepreneur in the book, she takes two months off in the summer. She just works it out, like the way her contracts and the clients, and she's just not around in that summer,

it's about 20% less revenue. She'll happily take that hit to be able to take two months off in the summer. So she's getting variation. Then we talk about people who work in jobs or they can't do that. Now they start doing this subtly, right? Okay, so here's what I do.

I don't really schedule meetings on Mondays. I don't tell people I'm doing this. Like when they say, hey, when you available, I give them lots of times. They just don't happen to have any on Mondays. Now we have like a slower start. And I know in December, because we're gonna lose the last week anyways

for Christmas, I'm kind of careful. I don't tell anyone about this, but I'm pretty careful to have projects set up the finish before that and start after it, but nothing gets really due into it. And I am turning down that intensity dial for those three weeks. And it's not long enough for my boss to really notice.

But for me, it's a big deal, knowing that I can wind down that month, I'm wound down versus another month, right? So people can start implementing these principles, but like more surreptitiously. So we see them really flashily done in these historical stories. But then when we jumped to implement them in practice, it's like more subtle, but it's the same principles you're taking longer. You have variations in intensity on different times.

This starts to add up, starts to make a difference. Yes. and intensity on different times that starts to add up, starts to make a difference. Yes. Your first insight around do fewer things, which is essentially impossible for people to do, because you look at a calendar and there's room in it and you fill the, well, there's a gap. The gap should be filled, should be doing things. And I think a lot of people feel like do fewer things is accomplish fewer things. Yeah.

That's the conflation. Yeah. And they're wrong. Yeah. Because if I add two words, it becomes clear, do fewer things at once. Right. Because here's what I think is going on. And this is like the case I make in the book is that when you agree to something,

the big problem is when you agree to it, that is gonna bring with it administrative overhead, right? So whether I'm ready to work on this thing or not, now the team needs to, hey, how's it going? There's emails I'm gonna have to answer. There's meetings going onto the calendar, right? You're like, hey, we gotta check in on this. How's this doing?

I call it overhead tax. Everything you say yes to generates overhead tax. So the problem is when you say yes to a lot of things, you're not just trying to keep, I'm keeping my queue really full so I always have something to do. That's not just what's happening. You're generating a lot more overhead tax.

So the more things you've said yes to, the more things are generated administrative overhead, which means the more meetings go into your calendar and the more emails that are coming that you have to answer, right? So where do those meetings come from that are filling up your calendar. They're not just random, right? It's not just, Hey, let's, let's just, you guys want to do a meeting, you know, no, no, it's related to things you've agreed to do. So the more things you've agreed to do, the more of your time gets

devoted to the administrative overhead of the things you need to do, which means you have less time available to actually accomplish the things. And to make it worse, this administrative overhead does not coalesce into like one nice big batch. It jumps all over your- Fractures your day into- What's the quote from Deep Work? I must've shared it a million times. Shatters-

Shatters your day into fragments so small that you get nothing meaningful done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It shatters your, yeah, something like that. You're scheduling the fragments so small, like insufficient for concentration. Yes, whatever it is. Nothingatters your, yeah. Something like that. You're scheduling the fragments so small, like insufficient for concentration. Yes. Yeah. Nothing gets done. Yeah. Yes. I think about that all the time. Well,

but think what happens now though. This is why I think people are so burnt out because it really is deranging. Think about this. So you say yes to too many things. Now your schedule is like completely full, not doing the things, but jumping on calls and answering people's emails about the things. Right. Now you don't have time to really get them done. So what happens? You fall behind. So new things come in. So now the things you have to do get longer

and you fall even farther behind. And then eventually you get to a place where most of your time is now taken up just dealing with talking about work. Nothing gets done. You feel like you're making no progress. You have to start getting up at four or working in the evenings, you know, and now you're completely frustrated

because you said I'm on Zoom all day long and now I'm working instead of being at my kid's basketball game. Like what was the point of the day? And this is what's making knowledge workers cry uncle. So when I say do fewer things at once, it's not at all about accomplishing fewer things because if you can save most of your schedule

from all this administrative overhead, what happens? You start just executing. So now the rate at which you're finishing things and finishing them at really high quality levels, that skyrockets, right? So doing fewer things at once will make you actually accomplish many more things. That's not the only reason to do it.

The main reason to do it is because it's entirely deranging to have your whole schedule be taken up by administrative overhead. I mean, it just makes life bearable not to be overloaded, but you have this bonus. You also gonna start producing, right? So if you can just bootstrap and have a lot of ideas how to do this, but if you can just bootstrap in the doing fewer things, get over that initial fear, you're going to pretty quickly earn your ability to keep doing fewer things because

you're going to be outsh shipping everyone else in your organization. Yeah. The, uh, zoom apocalypse that everybody went through when the overhead of having meetings and this, I guess, pain from management of coordination, you know, if you can't see what someone's doing when they're in the house, cause they're no longer in the office, Oh God, I mean, that's anxiety inducing, isn't it? So why don't we start looking at Slack dashboards and activity time. And then, you know, a response to this, you know, the anti-productivity

movement was that law, was it France that brought it in where bosses can't message their workers after 5 PM? I think they tried. Yeah. I don't know if the locks, I don't know if it went through or not. Interesting. Yeah. But it was topic for the podcast.

Well, it is interesting. Well, in French, they have labor unions that represent knowledge workers in a way that we don't know if it went through or not. Interesting. Yeah. But it was a topic for the podcast. Well, it is interesting. Well, in French, they have labor unions that represent knowledge workers in a way that we don't in the U S but the problem with that, and I wrote about this some at the time is, you know, again, it's like putting a little bit of a bandaid on the wound. We got to stop the things that are creating the big wounds. Like in other words, this is the issue with almost

any response that is just focusing on let's just reduce the time you can work. Let's have a four day work week instead of a five day work week, et cetera. The problem with these ideas is if you don't also fix the overload problem, you're not getting to the core issue, right? The core issue is I have too many things on my plate at the same time. Yeah. So this is why people went insane during the pandemic and anti-productivity took off because that overhead got out of control because A, everyone got sort of like 20% new

tasks all at once and they shifted remote, right? And then B, the coordination took 25% longer because things we could have just done in the hallway, get a zoom meeting, but I can't drag a zoom meeting. Yeah, I'm on it. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. And on zoom, there is no two minute zoom meeting. Hey, did you got the thing sorted? It's going to be a half hour because I can't drag it smaller. So we had a, uh, the footprint of overhead got worse. The quantity of overhead got worse.

Zoom inflation. And we got the zoompocalypse where, and this is, you know, my readers were writing me and saying, my main problem right now, and you know, may 2020 is when do I go to the bathroom? Because I have eight hours of Zoom without any gap anywhere in it. And then at this point it's just absurdities, right? Like that's like a third play or something.

What's that idea, the red queen effect. Yeah. Yeah. Running faster and faster to stay in the same place. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, you know, the podcast,

and it's been interesting, I guess, that you've been in the arc, you've been involved on the guest side in an arc, seeing it from episode 200s, you were in one of the first ones, and then maybe like 300s, and then 600s, and now. And operationally, it's so complex behind the scenes, you know, to coordinate something of this size.

And increasingly, I find myself doing more and more of being an operator as opposed to being a creator or a visionary or a researcher or just a learner. It's all coordination all the time, so much coordination. And you don't like that. It's the thing from Michael Gerber's, the E-Myth revisited,

that lady that starts a bakery and then soon enough, she can't remember what it's like to bake a cake. All that she's doing is on Zoom meetings, organizing factories to start, where's the wheat coming from? And what's the new machine that we're gonna have to grind the flour and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm very much living a, and I can remember when the operation was simpler

because the business was simpler and because the actual production itself was simpler. When I'm observing even within my own life, this trajectory go from simplicity and purity to much more success and I'm very, very grateful. And it's amazing to do all of this stuff. But there are all of these side effects that come along with it, that build things out and there are a million opportunities.

There's a million things to say yes to. There's a million things to say no to that you would have begged to have the opportunity to say yes to only two years ago. So you're permanently readjusting the sensitivity on what constitutes a hell yeah. Like that's the one thing that with Sivers hell yeah or no rule, which is fantastic. The problem is that you lag. Yes. What you would have begged for yesterday is something you now need to learn to say no to today.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the guy who has it all figured out, we all have to just nod our heads to Ferris. So I was on his show in February and you know, he had this like headset, like NASCAR headset, whatever. I was like, what's going on with this thing, man? And he's like, uh, if I, if I, uh, do video well, if I build a studio, then

I have to stay where the studio is. And then I have to have people to run the studio and, uh, I want to travel. And I have this headset. It's like, look at this thing. And this is a pretty good microphone. I could just be anywhere anywhere in the world. And so maybe Ferris figured this whole game out. I mean, he's the guy that did it.

Uh, but there's a, there's a deeper thing in there though. Right. Which is like, that is the central tension when with slow productivity, when things start going well, like this is partially why I wrote this book is because things are going well for me, right? You know, like this is not a book that would have been relevant to me as a 23 year old at MIT, you doing a, you know, theoretical computer science. But now it's like, things are hitting well. Like I can, my, my books get read and I'm a tenured professor and there's opportunities and there's, you know, and I have, my, my books get read and I'm a tenured professor and there's opportunities

and there's, you know, and I have a podcast, these other things are going on now. And it was that same fear of, okay, so how do I keep and crystallize the principles of just slowly producing stuff that matters even with different stuff going on. And it's led actually me to be pretty careful or thoughtful thinking about the different aspects, like what I do and what I don't do. Like when I started the podcast in the pandemic, I was really worried about the footprint because the footprint can get big, which is fine for, you know,

like a tier one show like this, but this was something I was doing in addition to being a professor, in addition to writing. So I made a rule, I said half day a week. That's what you get. This podcast gets a half day a week. That's what you get. This podcast gets a half day a week. And if I want to grow or add something or whatever I want to do, I got to figure out a way to do that such that the podcast doesn't leave a half

day a week. So I got to have to hire. Yeah. And it's what happened. It so developed slowly. Eventually I hired a producer to touch the computer for me because that saves a lot of time, right? Like, okay, I don't have to touch any computers. And we have, you know, I'm the master and okay. So he talks to all of them. So now I can just show up and do the show. Now I have more time to think about, you know, what am I going to say, or what are

we going to do that we want to do video? Well, how are we going to make this fit within a half day a week? Well, it took a long time. We had to find the right person to set something up. That was super turnkey. Like we have the studio set up where like it's all just installed and my producer can just turn on these lights that, and these cameras are always in the same place. Yeah.

With these big C stands that like never moved that the cameras are locked off locked into and everything like that. So, okay, great. That doesn't, so everything has been very, uh, slowly, but it also means though, right, there's impacts. Like if I wanted to have a lot of guests, probably wasn't going to work with a half day a week rule because you know, guests can do it when they can do it and it's not going to fit.

And so I'm not doing that right. Like it's, it's, it's made some, it had some impact. Yeah. Well you can and can't do, um, but it allows me, but it's slow and it's growing and slow productivity. So like the show is growing and it's like, actually this does pretty well. And it generates more money than like my professor salary. This is interesting. Like it's growing and slow productivity. So like the show is growing and it's like, actually this does pretty well. And it generates more money than like my professor salary. This is interesting.

Like it's starting to get interesting. It's probably going slower than maybe it could, but it's a slow productivity play. You know, this is important, but I want to take my time with this and not let it metastasize. I think James Clear put in a newsletter recently, over the short term, your results are determined

by your intensity and over the long term, your results are determined by your consistency. And it is a trade-off. You know, there is a trade-off between the two. The harder you work, the quicker you burn out. And there is a threshold above which, that's not to say that that's a linear relationship. You know, if you're doing the bare minimum,

doing double the bare minimum is probably not going to make that much difference to linear relationship. You know, if you're doing the bare minimum, doing double the bare minimum is probably not going to make that much difference to your consistency over a long period of time. But if you're running at seventh gear at 7,000 RPM, trying to shift that to a little bit faster is something that's really going to hurt. Look at a famous novelist.

Like they figured this out, right? Novelists do have very long careers. They figured out no more than if you're a genre, one book a year, and if you're literary, one book every two or three years, maybe even every four years, do very little outside of the writing. The whole industry understands this. We don't need to hear from John Grisham until he has a book coming out, but it allows them to produce large literatures over their lifetime. Right.

So like, we could all take a lessons from that. Like you don't see John Grisham being like, you know, if I really get after it, I could probably get three books done, you know, I could do the whole James Patterson thing. Like I got to have three books a year and then I could get a team to write other books and then we could merchandise this. I'm going to have John Grisham land and it's going to work with you. No, it's like, I, if I do all that, I'm going to last five years.

Have you seen Brandon Sanderson's output? Yes. Yes. I mean, so there's a, I think it's in the r slash fantasy subreddit. And if you have a look at that, the number of words that that guy writes per year is terrifying. It is, but I'm worried about him. Me too.

Because he's adding other things. He started adding, he's, he's, he's building out more of a company. The merch. Weighing in. Well, yes, exactly. Merch and, uh, fulfilling their own, their, their own printer. Now they do some of his books. They print themselves, uh, as opposed to going through like a standard publisher.

And he has a big team now. And like his whole thing, like everyone, he's famous in writing circles for exactly this. Like he just sits and writes and he generates like a lot of words. Like that's what he's- I think it's maybe 300,000 words a year. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's crazy. I mean, you saw his video, his whole surprise video thing in the pandemic where he was like, I have a surprise for you. I wrote five extra books and I'm gonna like sell them directly. He just wrote five extra books. Yes, I did see that. Yeah. Yes. The thing he did, which I do admire because it's crazy, but I love it. It's a deep work thing. So he lives in like a normal cul-de-sac in Utah, right? So it's just like a cul-de-sac of houses. Um, he bought the lot next to his

was empty, right? What he did was instead of building like a cool workspace there, he dug down and built an underground lair. So he built a whole Victorian Gothic underground lair where there's old fish tanks with weird things in it. He writes in there, there's a full screening room, movie theater in there. They podcast in there. Whole thing's decorated like a Tim Burton movie, built it underground, right? 10 foot ceilings. They dug all, I have photos of all this. Then he covered it back over and then they put like a garage on top of it and he has a secret entrance to it from his house. So he goes under, he's the suburban house. It's like secret entrance in his garage and it takes him into this like massive underground layer. I think it's awesome. It's preposterous. But hey,

if you're writing fantasy novels though, at his level, like, yeah. Well, that's one of your lessons, which is that the space you inhabit when you're trying to do your productivity can influence the way that you feel. Yeah. And that's a slow productivity idea, right? Is that like, okay, the environment matters because you're trying to produce the best possible stuff, not just trying to be as busy as possible. So yeah, so environment matters. So Sanderson built that whole underground layer

because it inspires him to write, you know, fantasy well, in much the same way that Dan Brown, who wrote the DaVinci Code, he has a similar kind of quirky house he built in New Hampshire with like secret passageways and code and you pull down the statue head. Oh, cool. Cause he writes sort of conspiratorial genre thrillers.

So like, why not put ourselves into that, that mindset. Other people did other things. So like one example, uh, Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, he brings wherever his production offices are old electronic gadgets. Cause he likes this connection to building, like I'm building something that's, you know, I'm bringing together parts. And he used to solder and do all this stuff as a kid.

So he like brings them wherever he's going, but it's not just the positive, which is have stuff in your space that's inspiring. It's also get away from the stuff that's distracting. Right. And this is the problem, for example, with just working out of your home office, that's just right there in your home next to everything else is that you're exposed to

all of these highly salient distractions that have nothing to do with what you're doing. But when you see them are going to trigger all of these neural networks are going to start to be activated. There's a laundry basket. Oh my God, the laundry. When do I need to do the laundry? And what is going on? And this is very difficult. So I also tell these stories of people, activated, there's a laundry basket, oh my God, the laundry. When do I need to do the laundry? This is very difficult. So I also tell these stories of people, these are mainly writers too, who go through like great lengths to get away from the distractions. And my favorite was Peter Benchley who wrote Jaws because he lived right down the street from where I grew up when he was writing Jaws. So I know his house, I could see it from mine, it's a beautiful house. And when he was writing Jaws. So I know his house, I could see it from mine. It's a beautiful house. And when he wrote Jaws, he didn't write it in that house, but in a back room at a furnace repair shop

that was on the other side of town. And we, the fact checkers in New Yorker talked to Wendy Benchley about this, Peter's dead, but they talked to Wendy and she was like, oh yeah, they were like hammering in there, man. It was like loud metal hammering. That's where he went to write Jaws because he was trying to get away from the distractions. Like the distraction of loud hammering, whatever, that's not something that he has a lot of associations with.

He can associate, right? That's no big deal. But the laundry basket, you know, now you're gone for the next 20 minutes thinking about it. Did you ever hear the story about Victor Hugo being locked in the room by his own servant? No. in the room by his own servant. No. So this, this is, um, a guy who wanted to write six pages per day,

his writer, and he paid his servant every single night to come in during the middle of the night and pull the bed sheets off him, just slide the bed sheets off him, and then there was a quill and an ink pot and six pieces of paper that were left on the table next to him. And then he would lock the bedroom door from the outside and he wouldn't unlock the door until Victor Hugo slid six pieces of paper, double-sided written underneath the door. I like that.

That's the level of extremity that writers have had to go through in order to be able to overcome the writing hump. My Angela would do this. She would go to typically like cheaper hotels, take all the artwork off the wall. She wanted it to be white box and she would write on the bed. So she would just like prop up on one arm with a legal pad and like that there's nothing to do. You're in a completely distraction in the box. Steinbeck had this beautiful property at Sag Harbor. He would get his rowboat and go

out into the middle of the Harbor and write on a little hand desk. David McCollough lived in Martha's Vineyard, beautiful house, West Tisbury. He wrote in basically the garden shed. So he had a great home office where he would do his correspondence or whatever. He wrote his books on a typewriter in the garden shed. It was pretty absurd. He was in the backyard in a shed. But yeah yeah, they would do anything to kind of let's get away from distractions. Let's like lock ourselves someplace where it's, you know, it's hard to leave. There's nothing here that's distracting. Let's get some work done. I don't have the keys. They don't have that. Yeah.

Mark Twain, when he had this off building that he would go and outbuilding, he would work out. And so his wife had this like horn she would blow to try to get his attention. It's time to come back for dinner because he was so far away, right? It was like hard. Wow. I have an office, you know, I have a, my house, I have a very nice library, but I also rent office space, like a three minute walk away. It's just like a different place to go to. And so my podcast studio is there, but also it's a place to go to write. What is a more accessible solution for someone who doesn't want to dig 20 feet

underneath the house in Utah? Everyone should do that. Come on. That's true. More underground layers. I'm pro underground layers. This is the revolution that we really need. Podcast layers, I think would be awesome.

That would be cool. Yeah. You go to like the small office and you go down the stairs. You could pull the statue of the tiny owl and it opens up the door. It's like a killer underground. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. You could also like kidnap and murder your guests down there. I guess the problem with it is. and you go down the stairs and you could pull the statue of the tiny owl and it opens up the killer underground. Yeah. Yeah. You could also like kidnap and murder your guests down there. I guess the problem with it. Imagine that imagine if it was a podcast run by a serial killer and each guest that was just the last day on the planet. The ratings will be,

I mean, the downloads will be off the charts. It would be briefly and then they may get caught because of the murdering. That would be the problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's looked down on. I need to redo that. Yeah. But you got to innovate. You got to innovate. Yeah. So get caught because of the murdering. That would be the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually. Yeah. It's looked down on. Need to redo that. Yeah. But you got to innovate. You got to innovate. Yeah. So, okay. What let's say you're not, you're not going to

build an underground layer, right? Um, I'm a big fan, for example, what I call work from near home, which is you don't need to build an underground layer, but also if you don't work in an office, find a space to work in that's not your house. Like that is a worthy investment. Um, and that might just mean leasing. It's might just mean leasing low cost office space nearby.

That might be worth it. And don't think of that as an expense. Think of it as your mental health's going to be much better, you're going to be able to produce much more. Or taking an outbuilding in your backyard and make it into something that you can work in. I think this idea of going out of your way to find places to work, this not just your home is the right idea. Don't think about it in terms of, my home is free and this is not free. Now think about it more as my home is this terrible place to work that I really wish I didn't have to work there. Oh, this is, I only have to pay this much to avoid that. Oh, that's great. You know, you're, you're, you're paying to

solve a problem and then be careful about your environment, but the rituals can be not just, uh, aesthetic, but can also be functional, right? So, so it might not just be here's what's in my space to inspire me. It can be here's what I do as a ritual before I work to inspire me. So it could be I walked the same route, like to this coffee shop, I get this coffee. As I walk with that coffee back, that's when I'm beginning to frame up what I'm about to work on. And then when I sit down after those sessions, it's like hard work time. And that's how I mentally separate from email time. And I do this, for example, there's a particular walk I'll do about 15 minutes transition walk.

Okay. I'm, I'm switching. I'll often switch locations, but also I want to switch my mindset into I'm writing now, not answering emails or doing something like this. It's the reason why training at home during the pandemic was so difficult that there is something ritualistic about you get in the car and you drive to the gym and you say hello to, or you're playing your music, you say hello to the receptionist and then you dump your bag down. There's something about that. Right, okay, this is gym time. And in some ways,

there's a bit of a costly signaling thing going on, which is driven all the way to the gym. I'm not going to train now. I've driven 15 minutes to get to the gym. I'm not, not going to train now. Yeah. Driven 15 minutes to get to the gym. Whereas if you go, I walked into the garage. Like, you're a little bit of a fucking thing. Yeah. So, um, what about going back to the do fewer things thing for the. Innate people pleases amongst us. How can we get better at learning to say no to things, both philosophically,

emotionally, and then tactically as well. Yeah. Transparency about your workload, right? I think this is the number one issue that when solved makes workload management better is getting transparent with other people. This is what's on my plate. Instead of keeping at this obfuscated thing, no one knows what anyone else is doing.

And we just sort of throw tasks at each other. And like sometimes they come back and sometimes they're accepted. And we just imagine why that is be more transparent. So many of the tactics in the book are all under that category for doing fewer things are all under this category of making your workload more transparent.

So like, here's a really direct way of doing that. For example, this is like sort of on the nose, but people are actually doing this. So now I, now I say like, this is not a thought experiment, but really do this. Imagine you have a shared document and at the top it says, okay, here's what I'm actively working on right now. And you should have like three things under there. Like I'm working on these three things below it, like big dividing line.

All right. Here's the ordered queue of things that like are lined up for me to work on next. And in the order in which they're going to like sort of pop into here as I finish things, right. Now imagine someone's like, yeah, Chris, can you do whatever now? So just be like, no, or yes, you can be like, yeah, just go add it to the queue, right? This is where I keep track. I'm very careful about my work it over there. If there's any information I need to know to do it, either put that in there or put a note there that I should call you when I get closer. And now they have to confront

the reality of your workload, right? Which means either they're gonna say, all right, nevermind. Like, I kinda need to get this done. You have like 15 things waiting to happen. It would take too long. Or their expectations are reasonable. Like, oh, okay, I see you know, it would take too long or their expectations are reasonable. Like, Oh, okay. Uh, I see you're not starting to work on this

tomorrow. I'm not going to start bothering you. In fact, I can keep checking in on this document and seeing this thing marching its way up to when it's active. So I'm going to generate no overhead tax until you're working on it. Yeah, of course we're not going to have standing meetings or emails until it's one of your three things you're working on. So you either get much more realistic calibration of like when you're going to get work back or you're like, Oh, don't, don't bother about it. Now, if they're a boss, they say, no, no, I need to get this done. Now, now you can put it back to them.

Great. Tell me which one to move. And I'll let them know they, you said that like, and, and so now there's, people have to actually be involved. What about the emotion that you feel of the, there's this sort of default to yes. You know, you don't want to appear lazy. There's almost this sort of self-flagellation that I certainly have with my productivity where it's like, I should be able to take on more.

I shouldn't be as inefficient or whatever malady I think I have that's causing me to not get a million things done in a day and only to get half a million things done in a day. Yeah. What about dealing with that? You know, guilt almost like productivity guilt. Yeah. So never give a yes or no in the room.

It helps with that. Right. So once you have some sort of system, now you're kind of tracking, what am I working on now? What am I waiting to work on? However you want to do that, your answer can always be, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds really important. Like that sounds like the type of thing I could really do. Next time I get a chance, let me just go, you know, I'm very careful about, I have these like work management systems. I track my time very carefully. Let me just run it through that and

see like what I'm dealing with. And then I'll get back to you. And so you're not giving a yes or no in the room. And now the next day or like later that day, you can actually go through and look at and come back. And, and either you say this is important and figure out when you're going to work on it and give them a good estimate or be like, I know, you know what, I took a look and really, I don't have a lot of, I'm looking at my time. I track my time very carefully. It'd be like a couple of months before I had enough cycles. So this is not going to work. I'm not going to be able to fit this in now.

Yeah. That specifically the wordage of delivering this to people. Have you found any better or worse ways to actually communicate? This is a thing that I don't think I can get done. Yeah. Well, there's, there's two things here. The first is just, you have to be super clear with the no when you give it.

So when you give the no, it has to be, you know, hammered into the tablets that Moses is holding clear, right? Like I can't do this. And then you can put whatever, then you soften all the softening should be around the very clear no, when you actually give it. Do not leave any wiggle room for

like maybe I could do this. I can't do this right now. Right now. Because you know what their whole goal in life is to get this thing taken care of that's on their list. So if you give them, they're not going to, a lot of people just hope that the other person who gave them the task in the first place is going to do the no for them. I will take this off. Yeah. Yeah. You're right, Chris. I'm looking at your skit. Yeah, this, you do sound busy. No, don't bother. I'll take it on. They'll be like, great.

So when are you available two and a half weeks? Great. I'll expect in two and a half weeks. That's it's gotta be clear. I can't do this. And then you can be nice around it, but don't let the niceness make the no be ambiguous. But the thing I mentioned before,

that's the second piece here that could be useful, signaling that you're very careful about your time. This earns you a huge amount of leeway, right? Because a lot of no resistance, right? Resistance to someone saying no comes from the fact where I don't really trust that you have your act together. I just, I don't, are you this overwhelm or is this lazy? Are you laziness? Are you all, you know, just you're entitled. It gets all these mind, do your work. But if you have the reputation of, oh, like you're like a Cal Newport nerd, right? Like you have your, you have your stuff together.

So if you're signaling that, yeah, let me just, let me just run this through my system because I actually track like everything I work on and I find the time in advance I'm gonna work on. Let me just run it through the system and let you know like when we could fit this in. And then you come back and say, I can't fit it in. Now they're dealing with Chris has his act together on this. So he's probably not lying. He probably doesn't have enough time for this. And yeah, isn't it awesome that Chris like has

his act together, you know, and it's a, it's a, the technical no. So like the no based on, I have a very technical system can actually raise your esteem in the eyes of the people you're saying no to. Absolutely. Like, oh, this guy, okay, just wait a second. Maybe we, this is someone we should keep their eyes on. Like they really seem to have their act together. So having some sort of system where I'm managing my own workload, here's what I'm working on. Here's what's active. Here's what's not active. That division is critical. You cannot treat everything on your plate as all active at once. It has to be, this is active, this I'm waiting on. Like that's how you get rid of that overhead tax problem. And then you need to communicate to other people, I'm really careful about this. So to recap the no's for people,

please is be transparent about your time to help people buy in and understand what's going on. Yeah. To help people buy in and understand what's going on. Yeah. Say no when you mean no and relate it back to your time management and availability and the fact that you're careful with your usage of time. Yes. And to make this all easier, don't give the yes or no in the room. So in the moment where all of the social pressure is on you, have your set answer,

which is not a yes or a no, but is that this sounds great. Let me next time I get a chance, I'll run this through my system and see like when I might be able to get this done. Is that to give you a little bit of emotional buffer so that you're not as. Oh, yes. Yes. Because the emotional power dynamic is to like, Chris, can you do this for you? Don't you can't, you do not want to say no there.

Yes. Okay. You're sending an email four hours later. Now you got the courage, right? Very good. I think I heard a story. Is it Daniel Kahneman? Maybe I think it's either Daniel Kahneman or Warren Buffett that say something

along the lines of, I never say yes or no on the phone. Yeah. I've heard this before. I mean, cause I'm kind of stealing this. I don't know who it was, but I've heard this before, because I'm kind of stealing this. I don't know who it was, but I've heard this before. Yeah. Well, it seems just. There is a particular, uh, I don't know.

I I'm seeing people pleasing everywhere at the moment. And I'm very hesitant about like my shiny new psychological pattern toy being used to reap it. You know, like this is great tweet. I saw the other day that said, um, I've just learned about the availability bias and I have to say out of all of them, I think it's my favorite one. I love it.

Yeah. And I'm very hesitant about pattern matching this to everything, but I can't imagine the mindset of a person who doesn't feel that compulsion, doesn't feel that sort of desire to, well, I mean, I don't want to say no, he's waiting on me, he's there on the phone, or he's there in the person.

And yet, it seems to be giving yourself a little bit of psychological distance, that mindfulness gap, as Corey Allen calls it, to just go, okay, in the cold, harsh light of day, can I do this? Probably not. And I don't think, when I think about this stuff that I say yes to additional calls, many of which I said

in the Uber on the way here, yes to, I'm looking at my Monday and I'm like, that's nice and free. And someone goes, if you've got time for a call next week, I'm like, yeah, Monday looks great. Giving yourself as much psychological distance as possible just helps you to like, I probably can't do this. I don't really even need to look at my schedule because if it's something that's optional and it doesn't find me up and it's not mandatory, it's

a no. It's obviously a no. Yeah. But you're not going to say it in the moment. Chris. Well, it's obviously a no, Chris. Well, speaking of which, can we get on a call later?

He's like, Monday. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but another thing that goes along with that would also be templates and quotas. Like it's another way. So how do you deal with things where you're going to say yes to some, but you can't say yes to

everything so you could quota it. Right. Yeah. I'd love to take calls with like whatever new people or whatever, but I only do three a month. So I already hit my three this month, so I can't do it this month. Like quotas are a way to keep you doing things or you don't want to say no to it every single time.

But if you say yes every single time, you get overwhelmed. And then templates, which probably be great for you actually, I've been messing around with these too. For certain types of really common things, you have to have a whole templated process in place so that it doesn't have to just be the interaction. So if you write Adam Grant to blurb a book, he's got this great, so you want me to blurb a book document. And it walks through, like, here's how it works. I can't blurb most books, but you should send it to me. And here's how many I get. And so in the end, I blurb a few. And so if you don't hear from me, then that means it wasn't both. And he lays the whole thing out. So now, because you, I get those requests a lot as a writer.

Now when someone's like, okay, can you blur my book? And it's often like someone you kind of know. Now you can just send them the thing you've templated it. Right. So you can even have, uh, we've started using this on the website for a few things. Um, like dark links on your website, you know, secret URLs at calnewport.com slash testimonial or whatever. And you just set, well, there's the, there know, secret URLs at calnewport.com slash testimonial or whatever. And you just set, well, there's the, there's the URL. Have a little luck. I think

there's a type of legitimacy that the URL gives it as well, which is quite nice. Yeah. Like, Oh, it's a system. God, he's got, he's got a, he's got a URL for it. This, this means that it must happen an awful lot. Yeah. Like calnewport.com slash blurb request or something. And now it seems like really, yeah. Do you have this issue with like unsolicited guests? Is this like, or do people kind of understand in this world, you know, the, the host and their team, it's, it's pulling in guests, or do you get a lot? So I get an awful lot of requests to come on the show.

One of the problems, and this is, I guess a unique challenge of going from total cottage industry solo influencer to niche micro fame to whatever version of platform we're at now, like hyper niche, slightly larger fame. Um, I built up along the way. You have my email and like fucking David Allen has my email and, and Ryan Holiday has my email. And Mark Manson has my email.

And it's clearly a personal email. Correct. That you set up a long time ago. Yeah. It's it was, I've had it for 10 years, dude, my, my phone number, I probably maybe shouldn't say this, but I don't care. My phone number was on every flyer for a club night that we ran for years,

years and years. And I haven't been, uh, you don't start something off most of the time with the systems and processes of, and one day this is going to reach half a billion people a year and like there's going to be all of these weird X and L you just do the thing you just in this sort of scrappy can do. Scrap it together. Exactly.

Which is cool. And I liked the fact that we did that, but yeah, I am reaping the whirlwind of this Frankenstein's monster that we built before. Up until a year ago, we got our first like additional member of staff one year ago. One year ago it ago, it was me and video guy Dean still same thing. Uh, and then we got another guy and he was like, what's your systems for, um, like communicating and stuff.

And I went, Oh, we have a Facebook messenger chat. So what do you mean? I was like, well, there's me and Dean and a Facebook messenger chat. We just rock and roll. And we just go back and forth and we do a message. So you can reply and you know, Facebook maintains the quality of media. They said, that's insane to do that.

That's absolutely insane. I was like, yeah, but we've released 600 podcasts and a thousand clips through a Facebook messenger chat. And then he moved us over to Slack. I know you've got a problem with Slack, but it's like problem problem, but that was revolutionary for us because it's segmented things into different channels and we could find things much more easily.

And it's got a record. It's a history of everything we've ever spoken about organized by topic. But, uh, yeah, it's, it's a real interesting time. I'm really thinking an awful lot about the operations of the show, except for myself becoming increasingly distracted by being an operator, not being the creator, not spending time reading, not doing that stuff, because it's just this huge, big behemoth. Must be the stage right now is that transition to-

It is. It becomes, you become the head of a organization, not just someone who's doing a podcast that people are talking to. No, it's very quickly become, I'm now COO, uh, chief brand, the leader, host, head researcher, guest curator, all of these things. And, uh, yeah, we've got right now we've got an executive after I finished up with you, I've got a

two hour meeting with an executive consultant who I literally just needed to be like, I need a Navy seal kind of guy to come in and kick the door down and just say, right. This isn't a problem for you. This is something I'm going to take off your plate and I'm going to reorg everything. Cause if you look at the org structure of modern

wisdom, it's a 15 legged octopus with one head. Because you, you, you hired people here to do specific things. I piecemealed everything together and then didn't vertically pull anything out. And especially because it's also recent. It's also recent and so new. So you're solving problems with you. You come and solve this problem. Yes.

But the coordination problem is still always on me. So, yeah, not to get into the weeds too much, I suppose, about the internal machinations of what's going on with the show. I'm also, there's a part of me that's like, hesitant about being too open about this on the internet, because in part, it feels like a humble brag, which it isn't, if you saw the mess and like the nightmare that I have to wake up with on email every day,

it's not a flex. But the other thing being that the whole point of the podcast is for me, is for me to just express my curiosity and to speak to people that I'm interested in about stuff I'm interested in. And all of this sort of complexity feels a little contrived and cynical and it's like, hang on, this is just supposed

to be you chatting with people you're interested in. Why does there need to be 15 people behind you? And it's like, well, because as the number of incoming emails and sponsors and all of this other stuff needs to happen. And the reason it has to happen is because the show gets to a size where I can't take it on anymore. Yeah. But yeah, in inbound email, a lot of that

outbound guest research, keeping on time. I mean, your last book was a world without email, which I dream of. Um, and, uh, yeah. It's like your fantasy. Yeah. It's a very interesting challenge. I'm really hoping that I'm going to look back at

sort of this period as a operationally, organizationally, psychologically, emotionally, a very formative learning experience where I had to let go of the kind of boy operator I was before and grow up to be a real kind of. Yeah. Isn't this fun that you can kind of do this for a living? Like I'm just chatting with people and it's, and at some point it changes to

like, that's a media company you're putting on a TV show, TV shows have staffs. Yes. Yeah. And they, and they need to, so obsessing over quality. We were talking about this before. It's something that I've really leaned into as much as I can with the show. Yeah. You know, this hyper fixation that we've had on the quality of the AV stuff, the way that we shoot, the way that I tried to construct the guest lineup as well

to give this really sort of lovely museum art gallery curator. Good mix of different types. You know, I had a democratic presidential candidate on a couple of weeks ago. He was the founder of Belvedere vodka and Talenti gelato. Dean Phillips. Yeah. And he's a cool dude.

He is. And I'm like, I'm interested in this guy. So I'm going to speak to a democratic presidential candidate just because it's interesting. And I think, oh, wow, that's cool. And I look back on those sorts of episodes. I think that's great. And then, oh, Dr.

Robert Glover, no more Mr. Nice guy. So this obsession of equality is important, but I think a lot of people, when, when that gets ripped out of them, their fear of, uh, doing fewer things is, well, busyness is a reliable route towards success and the obsession of equality plays into their fear of perfectionism paralysis. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think they have it backwards.

Busyness is never a route to success. Like some successful people are busier than they probably should be, but the route to success is producing stuff that's valuable. And calls don't produce things that are valuable and emails don't produce things that are valuable and jumping back and forth on Slack chat, they don't produce things that are valuable. That requires doing something really, really well. And it turns out the world's like incredibly competitive. So it's 10X harder than you imagine when you get started, right? Like you have to produce stuff that is at a very high level if you want to begin

gaining autonomy over your life and career and impact and this and that. So I think people get that backwards. So then I say, yeah, but I'm afraid. So you busyness, I think it's reliable and that you'll succeed at it. I think what's appealing with busyness is it's a goal that you will succeed at. I want to be busy. You will succeed at that. It's not a hard goal to succeed at. It's not easy because you have to be busy, but you know you can succeed at it. Just keep, take calls, do this, do whatever you need to do. Uh, people worry much more about, no, I want to produce something that is unambiguously really good. And that means it could be bad, right? Like there's, there's, there's fear there. So then people fear about perfectionism. And essentially like my short answer to that is like, yeah, that's the whole challenge. This is like the whole

challenge of doing stuff that matters. I got to make this good. I'm going to have to battle perfectionism. Like that is the dragon. I'm saying George, like that's just part of this good. I'm gonna have to battle perfectionism. Like that is the dragon on St. George. Like that's just part of this challenge. It's like saying to a relief pitcher in baseball, you're gonna be nervous. Like relief pitchers in baseball, right? They come out in these like super important moments of the game and it all rides on like this one person

throwing the ball. And I've heard them talk about this before. They say, oh, the whole part of this job is how do you do stuff when physiologically you feel incredibly anxious, right? Like it's absurd that your goal would be, I don't want to be anxious. Like, no, you're going to have to deal with anxiety, right? You know, other types of performers do have this as well. Anxiety is a big part of what you do. What you do is high stakes. You're hosting the Oscars. Okay. That's, you're going to be anxious because it's very high stakes. You got to deal with it. This is the same thing with trying to produce things that are really good. You're going to struggle with perfectionism and we have ideas

how to get past it and there's best practices here, but that's it. That's the challenge. You're trying to get better. You want to do as good as you can without waiting too long and holding on to it. You're going to walk this tight rope and you might fall to the side sometimes. Yeah, that's it. That's the whole game. Right? You're going to be nervous tight rope and you might fall to the side sometimes. Yeah, that's it. That's the whole game, right? You're going to be nervous when you pitch. That's the whole game. So I tell people, busyness is not going to make you, uh, not going to make you successful.

How do people deal with perfectionism? So, you know, there's a couple of things to do, but the example I gave in the book was the Beatles, right? Because when the Beatles decided to stop touring, it was like a big deal. They had a terrible tour. Late sixties, everything went wrong. And they just declared like on their way to the very last stop, which was a candlestick park in San Francisco.

They're like, this is it. We hate touring. We don't want to do this anymore. So they went to the studio after this for the first time, they did not have to produce an album that they could replicate on stage and that just opened up like every possible option, right? So it's kind of Pandora's box. Like when you're recording music as had been done up until that point that you were gonna then go play

on stage, you only had so many options. We're gonna have guitar and the bassist and we're only so many chords we can do and let's go. Yeah, so they didn't have that. So it was completely open-ended, right? And so there was this fear and they were like, we're gonna make this better. We're gonna spend way more time

than we've ever spent on an album before. We want it to be great, but we also want to get it out. So one of the things they did, and actually we could probably give credit to their manager and not them, but one of the things he did is as soon as they had a single that was releasable, he released it. So we put a stake in the ground. Oh, there's an, there's a single out. Oh, we're expecting an album now kind of a clock.

It can't be three years, right? So they spent much more time on this album they ever had before, but they didn't spend an incredible amount of time on it. The album was Sergeant Pepper's and it stayed longer at number one than anything they'd ever done before. So like, that's the tight rope you're working on.

So what they did there is something that other people can do. You put a stake in the ground. It's what Lin-Manuel Miranda did. Seven years working on the play in the Heights. Like, Oh, that seems like perfectionism land. But what they did was he was working with these two alumni of Swarthmore that had a theatrical company in Manhattan.

They would schedule. All right, three months from now, we're going to bring in actors to read the latest version of the script. So like you had to do something like it had to be better. The people were going to come and read this The people who are kind of investing you want to see this as better So you had to do something to make it better, but it also wasn't oh my god. I gotta do this tonight So they kept scheduling. Well, here's the next thing we're gonna do. Here's the next thing

He had time to think about it time to marinate and mature creatively But he always had a stake in the ground that was pulling them forward So it's like you want to make the thing you're doing, uh, as well as you can, as good as you can, but also put time pressure on yourself, put some constraints. And like, okay, I want this to be good. I really want this to be good, but I also got to ship it. And if it's not the best possible thing, the next one will be better. Justified to the busy addict, why they should obsess over quality.

Well, it's going to give you two things. I mean, so if you care about slow productivity? Well, it's going to give you two things. I mean, so if you care about slow productivity, it's going to make slowness suddenly be natural. People who obsess over quality grow antibodies to busyness. The complaints you were having about the administrative overhead of your show, it's because you're obsessed over the quality of what you're doing. It's in the contrast to that, that the busyness becomes frustrating. If you didn't care about the quality of what you were doing, like it's a job, it's fine.

I do these things all day, right? So it makes slowness becomes more natural once you care about quality. Then as you actually do better because you're obsessed about quality, you gain more control, more autonomy, more leverage to enforce more slowness. You can start taking stuff off your plate.

You can afford to hire people to do things or like in Ferris's case, because his show is so the OG show that's so like powerful, he can just say, I'm going to just wear a headset and record from wherever I am in the world. And you know, it's just, it's just me and my right-hand man, whatever. Right. So then you gain more leverage to keep the stuff off your plate. So it's really the glue that makes slowness possible. And if So then you gain more leverage to keep the stuff off your plate. So it's really the glue that makes slowness possible.

And if you don't care about slowness, then I think the right argument is nothing great didn't require an obsession over doing quality greatness is not accidental. No one accidentally produces Sergeant peppers or breaks a record in a sport. Right. That is an obsession with, I want to do this better. Maticulous. Maticulous. Getting the evidence is another big thing. Finding the evidence of what actually matters. So another part of growing up in terms of like professional lives is realizing at some

point, here's this thing I want to do well. I can't just write a fairy tale about what I want to matter, right. So a lot of people do this. I want to be a novelist. The fairy tale I want to be true is that if I do national novel writing month and I write every single morning for one hour at the end of it, I'll be, you know, John Grisham, right? No, you have to actually go get the evidence. How does this field where I work actually function? What matters? How are things judged? How do people get good at this? What distinguishes the top performers from the lower performers? Because you almost always find on the mountain of success in a field, there's all of these paths and almost none of them go up.

And there's like a very narrow path. And it's a hard one to traverse because it's steep. There's like one path that goes up. And if you're not having that really well-blazed for you, I know exactly what I'm doing. I know exactly how I'm training or what I need to do to try to, you know, sell this book or whatever. If you, if you don't know exactly the path you're trying to go, you just wander around the base and then you kind of just eventually burn out, enough of this and let's go do some more email. It's interesting to think about, um, the people who do find success that haven't had that quite meticulous plan in advance have basically closed their eyes and thrown a dart and then opened one and gone, Oh God, I hit the bullseye. Wow.

How amazing. But you don't want to leave your success up to a fluke. Yeah, because it's not going to happen. I mean, it might happen, but you also might as well buy some lottery tickets. Kind of playing with similar odds. I mean, this is like the YouTube influencer effect. You know, like everyone my kids age, elementary school age kids,

they all want to be YouTube influencers when they grow up. Because there is- Don't do it kids, don't do it. Look, I told my son, I was like, I want to come give a talk at your school about the economics of YouTube and what's actually involved in how this works and how difficult it is.

Winners and losers. But occasionally people just blow up. Now the problem is like with YouTube influencers, the people who sort of just accidentally blew up into like these huge audiences, the main thing they had in common was they were very early. It was, you know, I just wandered into this, but it gives this fairy tale of it's possible

that you could just, because I have a camera and this person who blew up was just talking. So, you know because I could, I have a camera and this person who blew up was just talking. So, you know, I could just talk into this camera. I could be plucked out of obscurity as well. Now this is the insidious thing about TikTok is they are actually explicitly playing with that effect because TikTok can control exactly how many people see whatever, you know, they can show your video to exactly how many people they

want to show it to, right? So they figured this out like, Oh, here's what you do. When someone is new to tech talk pretty early on, you give them a big video. 10,000 views. Yeah. You're hooked. You're hooked. You're like, Oh my God, I'm going to chase that dragon. I am so close. I think people really like me. Like I have something going on here. I'm funny. You know, I'm going to be famous, but let me just keep scrolling on here. Yeah. That's a brilliant business model. What does obsessing over quality look like practically? What are the rest of the strategies that people should rely on?

You got to improve your taste is a big part of it. So don't just assume you know what quality is. You have to actually go out there and learn about the thing you want to do. What makes it, what's good, what's bad, what makes the good stuff good and the bad stuff bad. Like that's harder than people think. Um, we often take it for granted, right? want to do, what makes it, what's good, what's bad, what makes the good stuff good and the bad stuff bad. Like that's harder than people think. We often take it for granted, right?

So like this was Ira Glass's famous YouTube interview. I don't know when he did this thing, but I cited it back in so good, they can't ignore you, which was 2012. He has this, this, uh, interview he did about taste that everyone cites and in it he says, uh, basically I'm paraphrasing, the whole thing is if you're a creator, is that at first your taste is gonna be here and your output's gonna be down here. There's this gap and it's really frustrating

because your stuff is bad. He's like, he's gotta persist. And if you persist, you eventually catch up to your taste and then that's like when things go really well. But then I found an interview from a couple of years ago, Ira Glass talking to Michael Lewis, and they go back and listen to Ira Glass's very first NPR piece, which was at the Oreo factory at like their anniversary or something. And in that retrospective, Ira Glass said, you know, like Michael, when that came out, he's like, this is

really bad. First of all, this is bad radio. But when that came out, I thought it was the best thing. I was like, I really got this thing. Correct. The standards move over time. Yeah. So he didn't have this idea that you have this gap you're trying to close. No, the main people have is not the gap between their taste and their performance is that their taste is so bad, they think they're great. So you actually like what makes Ira Glass succeed was he kept pushing his understanding of what good could be. Yes. You got to open the gap. So it's, it's a little counterintuitive because people want to jump right into, what's my deliberate practice plan, right?

If I got 10,000 hours, I got to pile up. I want to get hours one through six done, you know, today, you know, like let's get after it. But often the first thing to do is now forget your own. Creations right now, you need to understand what you're trying to do. It's, you know, you're the, the aspiring filmmaker, like maybe you need to understand what you're trying to do. It's, you know, you're the aspiring filmmaker. Like maybe you need to go to film school, not to learn how to shoot.

You could learn how to do that, but you need to be watching a lot of films and be around a lot of other people watching films. You want to be a literary novelist, maybe you need to go into MFA program. Not because you need to learn how to write sentences or how a novel works, but you need to be around a lot of other really talented young writers

who are writing experimental things and critiquing everyone's things left and right so that your taste can jump up and down and be able to do what you want. sentences or how a novel works, but you need to be around a lot of other really talented young writers who are writing experimental things and critiquing everyone's things left and right so that your taste can jump about. And now when you pursue it, you're- When you say taste, what do you mean? What's your definition of taste? Your understanding of what's good. So you want a better understanding of what's good and what's bad. and what's bad. That's very artistic to think about things like that. And one of the problems is that taste

and popularity don't always correlate. Yeah. It's possible, especially in modern content creation, to do something which is untasteful but successful. However, I've found it to be usually quite rare that if something is done in very good taste and executed well, that it doesn't end up reaching some form of success. Well, and let's see, even complicate the term, right? Because, because taste also has this, um, other connotation,

this sort of high art connotation. So taste, because of tasteful, some people think to mean also, um, quality in a certain sort of artistic sense, but we can, we can vulgarize the term. No, it just means I know what good is in this field. And if we think about it that way, for example, Mr. Beast has incredible taste. No one would say that his videos are tasteful, right? And show it to someone.

Yeah, not high art, but very effective. But he knows exactly. And he says this all the time in interviews. No one would say that his videos are tasteful, right? And show it to someone of my generation. Very effective. But he knows exactly, and he says this all the time in interviews. He's like, you know, it's frustrating to me when people struggle with it, because I could tell you exactly how to make a video, like be really successful because he has,

I think what he doesn't understand is he has this incredibly honed sense of taste for algorithmically driven YouTube videos. He knows exactly what good is and what good isn't. And you see someone else trying to do this. And from his perspective, it's just like, this is like a really bad ugly video because his taste is really honed.

You know, he had that obsessive period of just like studying these things left and right. So once his tastes got good, because it's not like he has some other skill that is the key to the success. Like he's not like a super like handsome on TV, telegenic, like I can't take my eyes off of this person type of personality. He's not a comedian.

He doesn't have like great timing. He's not, he's not a very effective communicator. Uh, doesn't have like some sort of physical skill that's amazing or whatever. He doesn't even have, you know, I've been interested in, I've been studying the sub niche of YouTube of maker YouTube. It's like Mark Rovers. Yep. Mark Rovers great.

Yeah. Yeah. And that, but like in that world, uh, there, the whole key is you have to bring, um, incredible engineering talent to the table. That's how you sort of big time each other is like, I'm going to build something actually make even crazier, you know, this is like the stuff made here channel where, you know, he's just like, I'm going to engineer something that is so crazy. Uh, but Mr. P says, I don't have any of that, but he does have this

incredible taste for virality and like, can just express that. So it can be vulgarized too. It doesn't have to be a sort of high art, Arnold Bennett type of thing here. What one thing I think that's a little bit of an enclosed loop Bennett type of thing here. What. One thing I think that's a little bit of an unclosed loop. One of the problems that people will get caught up with an awful lot is communication. This back and forth, the requirement for communication.

What are your solutions from a slow productivity way strategies for people to slow down the velocity of their communication? Yeah. Well, first of all, just doing fewer things already. You're cutting that down. It's each thing brings with it. Excellent communication. Yeah. So get rid of three things. That's a three things less generating communication,

which is actually like 10 times less communication because of all of the things. Exactly. Yeah. Then you take what's left. And what I always say, this goes back more to my former book, but I think it applies here is like what you're really trying to avoid then with communication is you're not trying to avoid delays. You're not trying to optimize efficiency. Like what you're trying to avoid is unscheduled messaging that requires a response, right?

So something coming in, in a chat or an email that I wasn't expecting this, but now it's going to require a response for me. The more stuff you have this generating unscheduled communication that I wasn't expecting this, but now it's gonna require a response from me. The more stuff you have that's generating unscheduled communication that requires responses, the more time you have to spend monitoring channels. So for the stuff that remains on your list after you do fewer things,

you need to figure out other ways to collaborate. Like specifically, here's how we collaborate that is gonna generate as few unscheduled messages requiring responses as possible. And that's where you get something like office hours. You know, like you could have this in your company. Like we have these twice a day, like this hour, that hour, almost everything that requires some back and forth, it just gets deferred to those office hours. So you can implement these on Slack, for example, a lot of people do this in the pandemic, Slack office hours. It's an office hours channel.

And it's just this channel is monitored during this half hour and this half hour, right? It's real time to go back and forth. Let's figure this thing out. You can do it on the phone. You can do it in person. So you start to get ideas like that, or you put processes in place. Okay, let's not just send unscheduled messages

to each other about the video clips until they get done. We have a process in place. They go to this file, they're in this folder by the end of day on this day, this person. What you're trying to do here is not be fast. You're not trying to be efficient. You are trying to reduce unscheduled things that arrive that require a response.

Is it, presumably there must be some people whose jobs or roles are unslow productivity antidoting that they like the guy that's the enforcer, the operations person, they will have a job who's their entire role is to basically be the on demand gatekeeper of whatever's happening. So just thinking, there may be people who've confused their roles.

There may be people who see themselves as that enforcer. It's like, you're the social media manager. Like you're not supposed to be the person that does that thing. So it might actually require a reformulating of what people's expectations are internally. And what you find in a lot of businesses is that if you start to fill a gap, people will begin to lean up against you in that gap. Yep.

You know what I mean? So I was just talking to Ryan Holiday about this because a long time ago, Ryan wrote this thing. I guess he was an assistant at some point. He was assistant to Robert Greene. Okay. And he was around some Hollywood stuff for a while too. So he wrote this thing at some point, I quote all the time.

And so we brought this up the other day where he said, the key to being an assistant, like especially in Hollywood where, you know, they start you as an assistant and your whole job is to try to move up from there. If you want to be an agent, you start as an assistant and then you move up to junior. He said the issue- Get in the mail room first.

Exactly. And he said, the issue is if you're too good at the assistant stuff, you're not going to get moved up. They're like, no, we want this, we want this person to superstar. You managed the phones like no one else. You anticipate every one of my needs. He's like, the key is to be competent. Right.

So they don't want to think you're dumb, be competent on the phones and scheduling their dry cleaning, but where you're really trying to show value is on the stuff that will be useful at the next level. Right. And then they're like, okay, this person is like fine as an assistant, but they're showing like we want to move them up to be an agent. They're thinking actually a little bit higher. They're pitching ideas. They're really good, like working with the clients, like they're on that part.

They're fine on the phones, but whatever. Great. We want to move them up. So what I was talking to Ryan about the other day is, you know, a lot of people who are not in those roles are accidentally making themselves into the indispensable assistance. They're not at the desk at a Hollywood agency.

They're an executive somewhere. They're in the middle of the hierarchy in some marketing firm or something like this. And they've just accidentally turned themselves into the indispensable assistant. Oh, we couldn't live without Cal. How could we live without Cal? Every email right away, he's always around.

He puts out the fires. He's always very in communication. You've made yourself into the assistant. When you really want to be the agent, you're not going to be able to move up. So don't make yourself into the assistant or the ops guy enforcer, if that's not actually your role. Yeah, I often think about it kind of like a map from above

and territory is being taken over by certain people. And there's more and more, there's one person who just keeps on eating up all of this territory and everyone else is like, this is sweet. This is sweet and we'll lean on Kyle a little bit and we know, and then if he starts to pull back, you feel that, oh, hang on a second, that didn't used to be the thing.

So yeah, I think setting the tone is important. Oliver Berkman, 4,000 weeks, phenomenal book. He's coming back on the show. So funny. Oliver, a man who writes an awful lot about productivity and the pains of it and being bad at it, took ages to respond to emails. I thought it was such a very costly signal of I live my philosophy and the

challenges out myself. Yeah. And, um, Oliver's great. Yeah, precisely. Uh, he's got this great idea in 4,000 weeks where he says, decide in advance what you're going to suck at. Basically, what is the price that I need to pay to go through, to achieve this particular thing, to go through the process that I'm talking about.

What are the prices that people need to pay to be a slow productivist? Right, this is like Richard Feynman saying, okay, here's my secret for being good at doing physics work is I'm really bad at being on committees. He's like, all right, I'm bad at that. But because of that, I have more time to, you know, put on the physics work.

I sort of like that idea. Yeah, you got to figure out what, so here's what I think holds people back is they underestimate their value, right? So there's a mismatch, I think, between how employers see the world and how employees see the world. They understand each other differently.

So the employees think from the employer's point of view, they have all these people who they could hire, could do the job really well. And they're really suspicious about you. And they're kind of looking for like, are you showing any cracks that would give me an excuse to get rid of you? What's the reality?

Employers are desperate for good people. They're desperate for people who are like professional, reliable, and can do something valuable really well. Like that's it. Like all they care about is how do I find these people, right? So you actually have way more lane than you think. They'd be, look, I'm not super on the ball necessarily

about like the assistant stuff or whatever, but I do this thing over here really well and reliably. And I turn these white papers I write are really good. And I'm getting better at it and I'm really on the ball and I'm competent and reliable and professional. Now I'm not great at email and don't like get involved in a lot of other things. That is an absolutely fine position to be in because you're good at something valuable

and you're professional. People will be desperate to hire you. I don't think people realize how hard it is to hire good people. And good doesn't mean there's nothing you never do anything, everything you do, you do well, there's nothing. No, it's like you do something really well and you're professional.

So people have more, they have more leverage than they think. If you get good at something, you have more leverage than you think to be bad at other things. Talk to me about from the individual's perspective, what, how can they themselves, as they go through this process, what should they expect? What are the pain points that they are going to encounter from where they are now frantic, urgent, always living in the immediate slack channel? What are the things, the common pitfalls and pains that they're going to pain

points they're going to encounter? Yeah. There's a lot of self doubt, right? Um, especially early on when you're beginning to obsess over quality, but you haven't really. Gained traction yet. Right. That's difficult.

You're like, Oh my God, I'm trying to do some things really well here. I'm going to use this as the foundation for slowness. You're gonna have a lot of self doubt until that picks up. You're going to imagine you're going to be wrong about this, but you're going to imagine that

everyone in your organization is very carefully studying how you reply to emails, how many things you're saying yes to, and that they're all are having these conferences behind your back where they're complaining about, oh my God, you see, he told me his list was too full. I didn't have time. The reality is no one cares. Everyone's very busy. They're just trying to find people to do stuff that they get off their plate.

You said you couldn't do it. They've already moved on to the next person. They haven't given that any seconds thought. So the reality is no one cares. But in your mind, it's a real big pitfall is that like everyone is carefully monitoring. There's a bulletin board in the back where it's like they're tallying my yes and noses.

Like, oh my God, the noses are up 20%. What's going on? Third pitfall is people start talking too much about what they're doing and why they're doing it. Don't talk about it. Just do it. Because people aren't going to really notice until like you're standing down. Like this is great. Don't announce to people, this is my new system. This is why I read Cal. I heard Cal on Chris's show and I'm doing, don't tell them why. Don't like point towards the books. Um, don't have, definitely don't have auto responders that

explain in great detail. Like I am following a slow productivity strategy. Please expect a response from me. And here is why blah, blah, blah. I'm like, just do it. Just actually just do the things, um, and adjust a lot. You're probably gonna have to adjust a lot. So this way you don't want to announce it because you're gonna have to change what you're doing 15 times anyways. And it's embarrassing. So just like pull the trigger, start going, be ready for the self doubt and keep reminding yourself they're not having, uh, like Chris email response rate strategy sessions in the back room. Like no one cares.

No one's paying that much attention. Be professional, do your work, do well, put these things in place gradually. Experiment, adjust. It's like the march towards slowness. No one knows you're making that hike, you know? And maybe when you get there, they're like, oh yeah, you really have a good situation. Like you really just do this now and like we don't bother you about that.

And you seem pretty happy. They'll notice when you get there, they're not gonna notice you marching on the way. What are the places people should begin? This sounds great. Slow productivity, I'm way too urgent and overwhelmed. And I feel like I'm on the verge of burnout or I've been burned out before and I can see myself slowly sort of tracking toward it now. slow productivity, I'm way too urgent and overwhelmed. And I feel like I'm on the verge of burnout

or I've been burned out before. And I can see myself slowly sort of tracking toward it now. What is the initiation implementation way? How do people get started unwinding where they are to get toward a life of slow productivity right now? Overload first. Yeah, like that's the emergency is that you have too many things you've said yes to.

So that's where, that's where you should start, but you should immediately start doing these ideas about like transparent workloads or quotas and templates or, you know, one we didn't mention about is pre-provisioning. So every time someone asks you to do something, you have to go find the time in advance on your calendar. Right. And so that was just promising. Yeah. And that'll either done. Yeah. And that'll either tell you, I don't have time for it, or I do have time for it, and it's going to be in two months or, hey, this is urgent. So help me choose between these two things to take off my calendar. So doing that makes a really big difference as well.

So you start doing those type of things. You could also do like a one for me, one for you meeting scheduling strategy, which I like. Every time you put a meeting on your calendar, you have to schedule the same amount of time for deep work somewhere within that same week. So like, yeah, you have flexibility when you schedule meetings, but as you get more and more meetings, the available time on your calendar begins to shrink and you can exactly control that ratio.

Do that right away because the problem is you're gasping for air. Like the water is like up to your nose. Like we got to like get a little bit closer to shore before we start thinking about seasonality and like, okay, now I'm going to this thing, I'm going to do really well. And I'm going to assess it. Yeah. Even if that's the glue, like obsess over qualities to glue that makes it all

possible, it's the third principle, not the first, because until you tame that overload, um, you can't fix the plane, you know, as it's diving towards the ground, right? You got to get the plane out of it first. So that's, that's where I think people start and then you're going to feel much better. Just you start taming some overloads, like I can get away with this. No one noticed you're going to feel much better. And then when you feel better and have some breathing room, you're like, now what do I

really want? I want a much slower work life. Now let's like get into the other details. What's your relationship like with work now? You know, you are a guy who for a decade now pretty much has been talking about in some form or another, this, uh, hark back to an agrarian society pace of life, trying to do not anti-technology, but you know, you, you made a, um, you were quite well known for not having a Facebook account when that came out and then no Instagram account. And you know, you've got the podcast and you've got books and you've got columns and that's it. And books and columns are kind of the same thing.

It's the same thing. Just right columns go into the books. Precisely. Yeah. Um, what, talk to me about your personal emotional relationship with work and the flow of things now All of us strikes me as somebody who is still very much in the trenches. Yeah How do you? Like feel on a daily basis. Are you fully zanned out like David Allen or are you still grappling very hard with new challenges?

I'm grappling still I'm grab. I mean, I'm probably more dialed in than Oliver. We talk about this I mean my my systems are dialed in, you know, like I'm grab, I mean, I'm probably more dialed in than Oliver. Like we talk about this sometimes. I mean, my, my systems are dialed in, you know, like I'm, I'm not, uh, flailing from thing to thing. My biggest thing that I'm constantly having to turn to knobs on the tight rope. I walk is what too many things means for me, right? Because I have all these opportunities and, um, and, but I'm a slow productivity practitioner. I cannot like my, I, the way I work best is, uh, it doesn't matter what you do tomorrow, but it matters a slow productivity practitioner. I cannot like my, the way I work best is

it doesn't matter what you do tomorrow, but it matters what you do this month, right? So like deliver a book at the end of this year, but I don't care how you do it. Like that's my sweet spot. That's right. That's where I thrive. And I get worried about when I feel that I'm drifting

too much towards I have too much to do. And I know exactly when that feels. Cause I already, I mean, I'm locked down. I'm locked down, fixed scale productivity. I only worked during certain hours. I have, you know, this is all, I have these clear shutdown routines. All of my work is out of my head and tracked very carefully. I plan on multiple scales. Like on my podcast, we do all the concrete nerd stuff. We get into all this, right? So I have that all locked down. It's the, the commitment, the number of commitments is just the right number or not.

And it's something I went through a big reappraisal of. Like this is part of what led to me writing this book is implicitly I knew a lot of these ideas and had roughly followed them, but I worried I was getting out of sync. I was getting out of sync with the ideals. And part of what happened is my kids, I have three boys, once they all got the elementary school age,

they just needed every minute I have to give to them. And I was like, I gotta recalibrate now. And so I really was thinking like, the problem is I'm very ambitious and I'm like, I'm finally getting good at things. Like I'm finally getting good at writing. It's like this stuff- For each unit of effort that you put in now,

the returns are greater than they ever were because you have a bigger audience and you have more leverage and you have better platforms to speak on and your writings of higher quality. Yeah, exactly. And stuff matters now. Like if I write a really good New Yorker piece, you know, I might be called in the brief senators about it.

Like it matters, right? And if a book goes well, it could be a million copies sold. Um, and, but I realized like, okay, I got to retune art. Let's recalibrate. And so writing this book helped me articulate the principles, go explore them so I could better understand them and then go back and tighten the ship. And like one of the things I realized doing that is I need even less. I need, I have to be even more careful. Now, one of the things I do is like an extreme seasonality, like I disappear in the summers, for example, and like really just shut that down.

My teaching is largely just one semester out of the year. Um, there's other things I've been changing my relationship with the university that move away from, uh, computer science type stuff. And really like this public writing about technology is like my main outset reduces things. So I'm reducing. I'm in reduction mode for sure. Because what I want to produce, I care about writing basically. I want to write. That's my obsession. I signed my first

book deal right after I turned 21. I want to write. And for me, I want it to be the craft matters to me and the impact matters to me. That's what I want to do. And I think in our current world, a lot of what I'm writing, like a lot of my columns are trying to navigate technology, which I think is like a huge issue right now. And so I want to do that as well as possible. Like I understand AI. I have a, you know, I'm a computer science professor, the doctor from MIT.

Like I understand pretty deeply, um, how like a large language model works, you know, and like why in 2017, the innovation of a transformer, what that changed and how self-attention plays a role and I'm like, this is an area where I could be having my own lane in there. Cause I understand deeply how this stuff works, but also I can think about culture impact and the writing skill, the writing skill. So like, this is what I care about is writing stuff that matters, that moves things, everything else I see suspiciously. So that's why it took me 10 years to start a podcast because like this is not writing. is writing stuff that matters, that moves things. Everything else I see suspiciously.

So that's why it took me 10 years to start a podcast because like, this is not writing, but eventually I realized like, this is the modern world. I need some way of being in touch with my listeners. And I need a way of actually reaching people beyond who have just seen my books. But you know, I had to constrain it half day a week. You know, like that's been the rule. I mean, that's very impressive. And shout out to whoever your right hand or producer is

for being able to spin everything up so that you are ready to just step onto the field of play. Well played, Jesse. I mean, when I walk in, not only all the lights are on, the cameras are on, and the script is in all the out reads, it's all in front of me. Yeah, that's beautiful.

Yeah, I think I'm coming at writing now from the other side of the fence. Lydia, who is your senior editor, is also my lady. Ah, you're working with Lydia. I am indeed. Yes. I'll set, we'll take a photo afterwards. I'll send it to her. Yeah, I've been talking with her today.

Thinking about what happens from a writer first going into podcasting. I'm a podcaster first going into writing, but I started doing this newsletter about, um, four years ago, let's say, I think I've done about 200 of them every single Monday rupture and Achilles. I'm still writing it. I'm away in Guatemala.

I'm still writing. You're training, you're training basically. Correct. Yeah. And that's 200,000 words over, you know, it's called three minute Monday. It takes about 300 words a minute ish. People read slowly.

And, uh, my writing has influenced the podcast probably more than any other pursuit that I do even more than reading because once a week I'm forced to sit down and this, you know, I give people this prescription of, uh, you should make a fake podcast, put your phone down on the table with a friend once a week for 30 minutes and just talk about something rigorously. It doesn't matter what it is, it can be sport or Taylor Swift conspiracies or what's gonna happen, whether there's aliens.

And I think that it's very good because it forces you to focus in a way that normal conversation doesn't. But once you've got that, I think that a really great next place to go to, I think everyone should have a newsletter or a sub stack of some kind, because forcing yourself to get concrete

about what you learned this week, go, okay, here's this, I've had this idea in my head about people have hidden and observable metrics in their life and they often trade hidden metrics for observable metrics, which is why they'll sacrifice their relationship or the peace of mind or the quality of the time that they get to spend with their kids

for an increase in pay packet or a more expensive car or a bigger house. It's like, oh, that's interesting. Okay, so let's flesh this out. And who do I think of? Like when I think of that, who can I think from, you know, popular culture or from history about that? And before you know it, you go, wow, that's like firm.

But that's not something for all that. I love conversations and talking about things. That's not an idea that you can play with quite so well verbally. You can come up with the genesis, and I probably did. In fact, I think I know that I did. I came up with the genesis of that idea talking, but it really took form in writing.

And for me, the synergy between the two is, and there's no reason for me to keep doing the newsletter, apart from the fact that it's the only audience that you own, as you all know. And the second one being that it makes the podcast so much better to have that once every week, I'm forced to find new things. I'm like, dude, did you ever see the job advert

that Ernest Shackleton put in 1912 in the British, in the fucking London Times or whatever? I found this thing, because I needed to, I gotta find something. It's the same as when you start journaling. If you do gratitude journaling, and the particular one that I use at the end of the day has three great things that happened today,

I have to actively look. To find them. For great things during the day. And after a while, I go, oh God, I can't do another night where I look at the page and I don't have an idea. So I better be looking for great things.

Yeah. And then you find them. Yes. Yes. But that synthesis between conversation and writing, I think is. Writing is thinking. Yeah.

Like writing, writing is thinking. Uh, it's thinking that you can't be a sophisticated thinker if you don't write because our working memory, there's a lot of reasons why, but I think the main reason is our working memories are limited, right? So when you write, it's like you're a cyborg and extending your brain. You can now have a lot of ideas, hold a bunch of different points together and then start rearranging them. And like the great thing about writing is that when you're reading something you wrote and it's not quite right,

so this doesn't click into this. Wait, why did you introduce this piece about Shackleton? This is different than this or this, this didn't pay off. Uh, you feel that this really like, this isn't quite right. And then you feel it when the writing is right. It's like what your brain is like practicing is a rationality and narrative and how to bring pieces together. I mean, I don't know if you've noticed this, but you're, I'm curious. Like, do you find, well, there's kind of two competing forces. I was going to say, do you find that writers are interesting podcast guests because they think in terms of coherent thoughts that click together. Now the countervailing forces, some writers aren't very good at just,

you know, interacting with human beings. So you have like two forces going to get depends whether or not you've got a secret underground writing dungeon. Yes, most of the time, people that are great writers, are fantastic podcast guests. There's been a number of people that I found online, one particular guy, Gwinda Bogle, I think he's been on the show seven times.

He'll be in the top five of guests of all time. And like, he's been on the show seven times. You know, like he'll be in the top five guests of all time. And like he's a nobody, but he is one of the best sub stack writers and tweet thread writers. And I saw this thread from this guy three years ago. And I was like, if he can talk a quarter as well as he can write, he'll be phenomenal. And sure enough, brought him on.

And he was a really good communicator. And he had all of these ideas. And I just run this back all the time. I'm like, this guy's fantastic. Rob Henderson's the same David Pinsoff that so many of the people that I find on for the podcast come from Substack, or, you know, blogs and stuff. Because I just think, well, I can see the proof of your ideas here. And, you know, if we can talk about, if we get through even 50%

of the insights I've learned from this 3,000 word article, all right, this is brilliant. And that's a phenomenal episode there. We can play with that. Ooh, what about this? This is an interesting counterfactual. So yeah, people that write well are often good podcasters and great podcast guests just need the communication side.

Yeah. And on the other hand, like pure YouTube people, for example, who are like fantastic at creating great YouTube videos are often like really bad podcast guests because it's a different thing. And also not particularly good writers. Yeah. Yeah. Kyle Newport, ladies and gentlemen, Kyle, I appreciate it. This has flown by. It's been two hours. It's absolutely flown. It's been really great to meet you. Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with everything that you're doing?

Kylenewport.com. Yeah, I don't use social media, but I have a website. Podcast is called Deep Questions. Book at Slow Productivity. That's all I am. Oh yeah. We did it. Cool.