SOLVED with Mark Manson - Productivity Expert Explains: How to Accomplish Far More While Working Less (ft. Cal Newport)

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

What if there was a way accomplish meaningful work—without the associated relationship breakdowns or stress? What if “making an impact” didn’t require massive amounts of energy or sacrifice? What if you could get more done by doing less? In this episode, I talk to Cal Newport about how knowledge work has got it all wrong. We discuss the subtle dangers of remote/digital work and the key to avoiding burnout, all while still being able to grind on the things you love. If you’re a stressed out, overworked remote worker, this one is for you. Get a one-month Shopify trial for $1: ⁠shopify.com/idgaf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. In a recent survey of 12,000 people across 15 countries, a shocking 75% of office workers said that they had experienced burnout in the past year. Burnout is defined as chronic workplace stress or constant feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion.

Not only has this become more common in the past decade, but post-pandemic, it has reached, well, epidemic proportions. Yet, this is despite the fact that more people than ever have flexibility both between and within jobs. We are more able to choose our hours, work where we want, and for who we want, on what we want, than any other time in history. On paper, things should be great for workers, yet they're suffering more than ever. So what the fuck is going on here?

Are people just whining and weak? Or is there something deeper and more psychological going on? Today's episode is all about productivity burnout and why when given more freedom and flexibility in our jobs, our minds appear to burn out faster. It's a complicated and nuanced subject and a must here for anyone who struggles with feeling stressed at work. Now joining me today is Cal Newport.

Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, But Cal is best known for his New York Times best-selling books about the intersection of technology, productivity, and work culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated in the 40 languages. His newest one is called Slow Productivity, Accomplishment Without Burnout. But perhaps most impressively, Cal has made it this far in life without ever starting a social media account. Yes, you heard that correctly. If that blows your mind, well, once you listen to the conversation,

you'll understand how he does it. 20 million books sold. Zero fucks given. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Cal, so good to have you here. Mark's good to be here. I'm excited to do this for a couple reasons.

One is just I've been reading your books for 12 years now. I've been a fan of your work for a long time. Also excited because I feel like philosophically we're very aligned. Like every time I read your stuff, I'm like, that totally dovetails with what makes sense to me. But there's so many situations where my intuition seem diametrically opposed to yours. So I actually feel like this is a new podcast. So you might have the honor of being the first podcast guest that we get to disagree about things.

I like it. And have a conversation about it. So I'm very excited about it. The new book is Slow Productivity. It's fantastic. It's clear. It's to the point. It's classic Cal Newport.

why don't we start by just laying some groundwork, defining some terms, and start out by just telling us what is slow productivity and what was the inspiration for the concept? Well, I mean, it's the answer to a question, which is how can we produce work we care about that's impactful and successful, right? Supports us, supports our family without burning out and without having work annex more and more of the territory of your life, right? That was the motivating question. I was hearing that from my readers, and then I was feeling it myself as well. And, you know, for me, the personal motivation was my three boys all became elementary school age, which I discovered as a dad is a real switch. Suddenly when you have three boys that are elementary school age, they want essentially

every single minute you can give them, which is different than when they're younger and it's more like survival mode. Let's keep these things fed, right? So it's really different. So I was feeling that at the same time that in my career, I was hitting on all cylinders, you know, as an academic, as a writer, you know, 10-year to Georgetown, writing for the New Yorker, books were coming well. So I had endless opportunities. And so I was feeling that personally. Then the pandemic hits and all my readers write and said, I'm tired of the word productivity and I'm tired

of work. And this whole thing is nonsense. I just spent eight hours in Zoom and I'm going to quit and move to the countryside. We'll figure out later how I'm going to survive myself. All this was going on at the same time. And so I said, okay, we have to solve this problem. Like, how can we work and do interesting work and meaningful work and not burn out or just want to leave it all behind moves to the country. So slow productivity, that's the answer. It's what I came up with as an answer to that question. And how would you define slow productivity? Well, so we have to define it in contrast to what we do instead. So, I mean, I went deep in sort of Calumport fashion. I went deep on the history of productivity and knowledge work. And I think the story is important

to understand what slow productivity means is that you go all the way back to mid-20th century. knowledge work emerges as a major sector, right? The term is coined in 1959. There's a problem. This is a new type of work. We're using our brain. We're not building things with our hands. It's growing really big.

We see this in the U.S. economy. The problem is we didn't know how to define productivity. Because we were coming out of the industrial age in which we had very clear understanding of productivity. It was a ratio. We produced this many Model T's for this many input labor hours. That's a number. We changed the way we build the model T's.

That number goes up. this is better. And so you had a very straightforward notion of productivity. That actually came from agriculture. We got this many bushels of wheat from this many acres of land. We switched the way we rotate our crops. That number went up. This is more productive. None of that worked to knowledge work, right? Because I'm going to do five or six different things. That's going to be different than what you're doing. That's going to shift unpredictably. The method by which I actually complete my work is entirely obfuscated. No one has any idea how I'm doing it. There's no central system to even evaluate. So we were left with a quandary.

How do we define productivity? We need something, right? We have to manage these people. And what the industry came up with was we'll use activity as like a crude proxy for useful effort. Sure. Yeah. Activity is better than less activity.

More is better than less. I call it pseudo productivity. And it was an activity-based notion. This kind of worked because we had offices we went to. And you would go there and you would do the show and, you know, you'd put the magazine down when the boss walked by and whatever. And then we get to the 20. a century and we get the front office IT revolution. Now we have computers, we have networks,

we have emails, we have smartphones, we have laptops. Suddenly the opportunities to demonstrate activity are endless because I can send an email anywhere at any time. The threshold on what active means really went up because I can constantly be on Slack, like I can constantly be leaving a digital trail. And the amount of work that was possible to do also became basically limitless. That's when the wheels really spun off the car. Yeah. And that's when pseudo productivity became increasingly unbearable until we get to the pandemic and that's it. I love this term pseudo productivity because occasionally I will interface with very large corporations and it's funny because I'll go into a meeting and in my head there's like five minutes of things to talk about. But for people

who are working at a large company, you know, a 90 minute meeting with Mark Manson sounds productive. It sounds like they're doing something really important, right? And so you end up in this meeting and it's like eight or nine people, half of which probably don't need to be there in the first place, going one by one, giving like a 10 or 12 minute spiel about something that's completely inconsequential, but sounds important and sounds useful. And it finally takes 80 minutes to actually get to the five-minute thing that is of any productive value whatsoever. And it kills me inside. As a self-employed person and entrepreneur, it just drives me absolutely insane.

but I love that you point at the ambiguity of measurement within knowledge work, right? Like, it's easy. If you're a plumber, you can measure your productivity by how many sinks you fix per day. But if you are a writer, for instance, do you measure by how many words you write per day? Do you measure by how many hours you put in per day? Do you measure by how many chapter outlines? Like, I ran into this myself with my books where it's like I would set word counts, goals. And quickly, what you discover is that you'll just write bullshit the first.

fill up your word count call and then call yourself call it a good day you know pat yourself on the back and then I was like okay that's not working maybe I'll switch to just put in three good hours a day and then I would just sit at my desk for three hours and not write any words yeah and then call pat myself on the back and call it a good day and so there's this ambiguity that pervades so many jobs and I think so much of this problem is just accurately defining what is the metric that we're optimizing for Well, I mean, I think your example about writing is perfect for getting to the core of the issue. So this idea that what's my daily metric, that's industrial thinking. Yeah.

Right? So you're thinking, okay, so what am I supposed, I have to measure something? Like how do, what am I doing today? Is it word count? Is it pages? Is it, yeah, time? Where I think the right metric for a writer is measured and this is going to be quite different on the scale of a decade.

Okay. What books did I publish in the last 10 years? How proud am I of those books? I mean, it's why I opened slow productivity with a writer. I opened it with John McPhee. John McPhee is laying on his back on a picnic table in his backyard in Princeton, New Jersey for five days. Like the book opens with five days of John McPhee, laying on his back doing nothing except trying to figure out how am I going to make this massive two-part New Yorker piece I'm supposed to write about the pine barons. How am I going to write an article about this? And he sat there for five days. And my point is, if we zoomed into one of those five days with the to productivity industrial mindset. It's like, this person's lazy. Like, he's doing nothing. What can he point to?

But then you zoom out, he's written 29 books. Yeah. You know, Pulitzer Prize, two different books that were finalists for a national book award. His writing for the New Yorker's incomparable, right? I mean, he's productive by any reasonable sort of self-evident definition of productivity. So as a writer, like, yeah, what did I do? I mean, my decade began with this. Like, this is my productivity metric.

Like, this was the first book. This was the start of me wanting to write serious idea non-finding. fiction books. This is about 12 years, right? Yeah. So like now I can evaluate this and I am. Like, okay, what comes next? So that's the scale at which I'm thinking about. That's a very slow productivity mindset. I know it's hard and there's a whole we can get into how do you approach work. Yeah. Ultimately you're going to measure some things on a scale of a decade. But that's slow productivity. This is a classic situation where my heart loves that. I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. Your brain is not so happy. And my brain is like, wait a second, time out. That can work for us as

authors. Like how that's a little bit of a luxury position, right? Yeah. And and John McPhee as well. You know, what if you are a data analyst at a bank? Yeah. You know, which is also knowledge work. Also ambiguous metrics, KPIs that you're supposed to meet. Maybe they're good. Maybe they're not. Maybe they're driving you crazy, burning you out. But they don't have that luxury to necessarily measure their productivity in a decade. So this is the kind of the key of the approach in the book is let's start by looking at what I call traditional knowledge workers. So the people well before we had cubicles and computer screens used their brain to create stuff with value. Now, the thing about traditional knowledge workers, so writers and philosophers, like scientists, artist, right? The thing about them is

they had huge flexibility, right? I mean, if you are supported by the Medici's to do statue card, right, you have a lot of flexibility in how you work. And so my thought is, well, this is an interesting natural experiment. What happens when you give a knowledge, worker, a cognitive worker, complete flexibility, how are you going to figure out, you can do anything you want through trial and error, where do you end up, what principles do you end up embodying to produce the best stuff to have the most sustainable, interesting career? And then my idea is we isolate those principles and then we adapt them to the data analyst, right? So we look at me writing books over a decade or we look at, you know, Newton taking 30 years to get the

Principia together or Lin-Manuel Miranda spending seven years to do in the heights. And we don't try to replicate their daily work habits. We don't say, great, as a data analyst, you should go, be like Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yeah. And you should kind of come back to it every few months and then be in a freestyle rap touring group for the rest of your time. We're not replicating the specifics, but let's isolate the principles they discovered and then adapt them. So like let's take this principle, which I would call take longer. Right. Take longer on your work. Take longer. Take longer. the scales in which you measure productivity, you know, make that a longer scale. You have a standard knowledge work job. What that then mean is, okay, when it comes time for me to agree to a project,

let me take whatever timeline I initially think of as reasonable. Like, all right, boss, I'll get you this report in a month and just automatically double it, right? Because you're probably really bad at estimating how much time. We see this principle of great creators is that like they take their time. If you give yourself more time, actually, it's not only going to be more realistic. It's probably going to be a better report or a better marketing strategy or whatever is you're putting together. So you can take longer. Now, it doesn't mean sit on your back on a picnic table for five days, but it might be this is going to take two months instead of one. And now you're able to produce something that really turns heads and this gets the flywheel going, the momentum going. So it's all

about adapting these examples to modern jobs. Are you familiar with the Hofstadter's Law? A project will take 50% longer than expected even when you account for Hofstadter's Law. Yeah, that's I'm a big fan of that. So this is a classic example. Philosophically, absolutely. And I have absolutely found in my own career, slowing down, doing fewer things, which is the first principle of slow productivity, do fewer things, say no to more things. It's been a huge help in my own career.

But then I try to start actually carving out where the boundary between that and just straight up procrastination. You know, where does that end and procrastination begin? If I go to my boss and I say, hey, I think you said to have in a month, I'm going to do it in two. Like, do I actually need those two months? Am I bullshitting myself? I don't know. It's very murky for me.

Is there any way to like clarify that? Yeah. Well, hey, this is the challenge of doing interesting stuff with your brain. Yeah. Right. So like let's emphasize all this is hard. But like let's talk about the procrastination issue. The story in the book that was relevant here is the Beatles, right?

So I mean, tell the story of Sergeant Pepper. Because what's interesting about that album is the Beatles had had this terrible tour right before that. Everything went wrong. And at the very final stop of that tour, they said, this is it. We're not touring again. Which is a big thing when it comes to thinking about recording an album. Because if you're going to tour, your songs have to be reproducible on stage, like in an arena where everyone's going to recognize the song. If you're not going to tour again, you can do anything you want with the music.

So now they're in this situation of we could stay in the studio as long as we want. Like we can endlessly mess with tape loops and effects and Indian instruments and all the things they did. So now you're in this interesting tension of we want to do more interesting things than our first album, which they recorded in a single day. Yeah, which is crazy. It's went in the studio. Boom, boom, boom. They had it completely practiced.

They've been playing those songs in hand. Boom, boom. They're right out the door. So we want to do better than that. But we also don't want to be stuck in here, you know, endlessly, which, by the way, a lot of bands ended up doing. Right. they kicked off the progressive rock movement. A lot of bands, especially in the 70s, just got lost in the studio.

So how did they walk to balance between it? Well, they did spend more time, but they also set milestones that made them actually ship things, right? So like they released a single. As soon as they had a single ready to release, this started the clock ticking of, okay, this album has to follow. Like you have a single out. So they felt, okay, we have some pressure to actually keep moving, but are moving a slower pace. So you should take two months instead of one.

because I know one month is not enough time. Yeah. I've never met a knowledge worker who has ever accurately estimated how long something was going to take. I mean, what people do is they create a fairy tale about wouldn't it be great if I could finish this book chapter in a month? And then your mind falls in love with how everything in your life would make sense. But it's not what's actually going to happen. So make it two months, but not three. I'm taking more time, but not endless time.

And what's my equivalent as a knowledge worker of releasing a single? Hold me to it, boss. I'm going to send you updates along the way. This is going to be good. You're going to like it. Hold me to it. There's a cost now. There's more to life than finding the perfect car.

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So, okay, that helps me conceptualize this because one thought that I had recurred throughout me reading this was this idea of like limitations and constraints can actually improve productivity. And it sounds like what you're saying is don't just kick the can down the road.

Like, still have a deadline, still put a constraint on, just allow for an extra amount of leeway than you might do naturally or normally. I mean, this is what Lin-Manal Miranda did in that example. Right. So he has this play. He writes it as a sophomore. Because, you know, it's a brilliant guy. Yeah. So he writes in the heights as a sophomore at Swarthmore.

They perform it. It's not very good. Yeah. He's also he's a sophomore. Yeah. But he's like, there's something here, right? I mean, I think there's something here. Sure. I need to mature creatively, but I think there's something here. So he didn't just sit on it and say, let me wait till I'm inspired. But he also didn't say what I'm going to do is like disappear for three months. months and like finish this thing because it would not have debuted on Broadway and won eight

Tony's if you had done that. He did the middle. So he got connected with two alums from Swarthmore who saw the play and said, I think you're on to something. Like your book is kind of trash, but the music is really interesting. So there's something here. And they said, here's what we're going to do. They had a theater company in Manhattan. They said, we're going to every couple of months stage a new reading. We're going to bring in actors and actresses. We'll pay for it. And we're going to do a reading and you're going to really get a sense about what's working and not working from actually hearing people read the script. And then you better update it before the next reading comes along, right? You need to actually act on it. Right. So he had these milestones that pulled

him forward. But he was also touring with his freestyle group. He was doing some substitute teaching. He was writing a restaurant review column. Like he wasn't just doing that. Yeah. So he was taking time to let that really mature. But at the same time, he wasn't, uh, He wasn't sitting there and saying, I'll get to this when I feel inspired. So it sounds like this principle of do fewer things isn't necessarily do less work. It's work really hard on fewer things over a longer period of time. Yeah. So do fewer things.

There's another bit of the logic to it as well, which I think is clear when I add two words to it and say, do fewer things at once. Okay. That makes sense. Fewer things at once actually means that your rate of completing things is probably going to go off. Yeah. Right. So like this one gives palpitations to people with bosses because they interpret it as like, I'm going to do less stuff. And they see it typically through a standard sort of zero sum employer manager relation like you would have in the labor politics of the industrial sector. You know, I, I as the employee in the factory, what makes my life better is going to make your life as the factory owner worse. And what makes the factory owner's life better is going to make my life as the employee. So we're going to fight, right? And we're going to have to just. go back and forth. It's not that situation, actually, in this case. Doing fewer things at once is actually going to produce more things. And the reason for that, actually, it's like really insiduous and subtle. It is the administrative overhead that comes along with saying yes to something.

Yes. Right. So once you say yes to something, there's an administrative overhead in an office, that's going to be emails, that's going to be, I get shutters thinking about it, but standing meetings. I don't know. I'm also an academic, so you don't have to deal with this as much. But they're like, great, we'll meet every Wednesday to talk about this. Everything generates that, right? Which is fine. Like you have to, there's overhead with commitments. You've got to talk to people about it.

The issue is that's generated whether you're working on that at the moment or not. So if you say yes to too many things, they're each generating this overhead tax. That begins to pile up. Right. And then once that begins piling up, the time left in your data actually execute the work, get smaller and smaller and more fragmented because these meetings aren't going to all fall one after another. They're going to fall sprinkled throughout your day.

So now the pace at which you're actually completing things goes down. So how long does it take in between things you finish? That actually begins to get longer. So if you keep fewer things on your plate at once, it's not that fewer things get done. Actually, it goes faster. So I always tell people, if you start there, it's okay. Because once you bootstrap doing fewer things, your boss is going to say, why are you so productive? It's actually going to be the opposite thing.

Hey, what's going on here? Yeah. Like you're shipping at a pretty fast rate. I believe it. I've actually, I found that with my own team. I actually had to sit down with one of my employees maybe six months ago. And I told her, I'm like, you're doing too much. Like, you're good at five things.

I need you to be excellent at one. Interesting. And it was really effective. It's been really helpful. I think it's, I've definitely seen, as my team has grown, I have seen the importance of specialization. You know, because when you're small and it's just two or three people, everybody wears a lot of hats.

Yeah. And the stakes are a little bit lower. But now that we're growing quite a bit, I'm finding that I'm having to have these conversations of like you were going to be the team expert at this one thing. Yeah. And you are in charge of this domain. And it's, it's been great. Yeah. It's been really effective. You that well. I mean, this is like software developers figure this out a long time ago. Like, we want you to write this type of code that you write really well. Right. That's why software developers figured out a while ago. We're not just going to push tasks on people. We're not just going to say, here's like 20 features

we need. Yeah. Just take care of these. No, we're going to use some sort of agile system where if there's a that needs to be done, we'll write it down on a board. And it's not on your plate and it's not on my plate. It's on the team's plate. It's generating no overhead tax. Because no one is assigned to this yet. And then we're going to give you one thing at a time and just like sprint, do that thing, you know, all the 10x code this. And when you're done, we're going to give you another thing. Right. They discovered programs get built faster and better that way than just dropping everything on everyone at wants and like just, hey, figure this all out and, you know, add all these features and keep up with them. So one of the recurring subjects that happens throughout the book is remote work.

It kind of, you never, I don't think you ever completely address it directly, but it's, it continually shows up as examples, particularly over the last few years since the pandemic. And I was thinking that this concept of the overhead tax, which I love, and it's a completely accurate way of thinking about it. I think there's something about digital work that, deludes us, it makes the overhead tax less apparent. Yeah. Like if you come to me in person and you're like, hey, Mark, I'm doing this event.

It'd be really cool if you showed up. For some reason, you know, we can talk about it. I can ask like, okay, what are your expectations? How many days is it? How long is the talk? You know, all these things. And I can get a really good sense of like, okay, how much time in my schedule is that going to take up?

Whereas if I get an email from a random company or organization saying, hey, come out to Indiana and come speak to a. thousand people and we're going to pay you a shitload of money for some reason that email just looks like easy money and like just on paper I'm like oh man this is this is the best deal ever and what for some reason my brain is not processing that this is we're going to have multiple Zoom meetings I'm going to have to fly out like two days early yeah there's going to be a meeting with with the organizers there's going to be a meeting with the VIPs there's going to be a sound check there's going to be a lunch there's going to be a lunch there's going to be a

There's going to be a reception. There's going to be a book signing. My flight's going to get delayed coming back. It's actually, it's like a four-day commitment. And it's actually not worth it. And it took me a long time to start saying no to those things. Part of me wonders, like, what is it about digital work in particular that obfuscates the overhead tax? I mean, I think it matters you're not seeing someone.

Yeah. Right. I mean, the friction, little reductions in friction can make a big difference. Right. I mean, there's a study that Gloria Mark did where they went to a company and they took 12 people and they turned off their email. It's like one of these cool Gloria Mark studies of like, let's unplug this wire and see what breaks, right? Yeah. But then she told me a backstory about the study, which I think gets to this, is that one of the subjects in the study told her, like it's not in the paper, but told her that he was really annoyed at his boss in general because he had this job where he had to set up a laboratory for experiments every day. It was an R&D lab. And the boss would just keep emailing him with like, do this. Can you just do this?

Like, get me this. Not just get me. Did you get the email? Did you get the email? And he's really annoyed because it would keep distracting him from what he was doing. And it was kind of intricate what he was doing. Then they selected that guy to be one of the no email people in the subject. In the study, the boss essentially stopped bothering him.

And then what Gloria would say, the reason why this is interesting is the boss's office. It was like three doors down from the laboratory that this guy was setting up. So like the boss could just walk down the hallway and ask this guy, hey, could he do this. what about this, that extra little friction, that was the difference. Yeah. Right? It like substantially cut down. So there's something about, you know, like if I pitched you right now, come to Indiana.

Yeah. It's just like you're saying, I want you to come give a time. And I've done exactly this in Indiana. So I know. We've probably done it for the same company. Been there done that. Yeah. We've probably done for the same company.

You're in person. A, I'd be much more reluctant to ask you because I can watch. I mean, I know it sounds small, but like asking someone to do something, you have to watch their face in the consternation, and there's like a social capital costume. There's a risk of feeling the rejection. It's easy. Like, if you don't get an email back, it doesn't really bother you. But when you stand face to face with somebody and ask them something, and they're like, no, like, it sucks. It does suck. And yeah, and I think that that is true, right? So you get that with the digital. So you're like, okay, I don't care if I

send this out, you know, because what happens, they're going to say no. You also have to see the context, right? So, you know, when I see you in your office, I see you're doing things. So I'm thinking like, oh, Mark's kind of busy. Like, okay, I'm not going to bother him about this. On email, for whatever reason, or Slack, the way we imagine other people is basically like empty vessels to do our work. It's like we imagine like you're just sitting there. My entire team is nodding along right now. And especially like the killer is not necessarily the trip that in the end is going to take four days. It's the thing that's going to take like 45 minutes of the time. Because they imagine.

And like, come on, why not? What are you doing right now? Like, I do things to take 45 minutes all the time and they don't understand you're busy or the scale of how many people are asking this. Or even five minutes. Like, it's dozens of five minute things. And there's something to,

there's like a cognitive load that comes with task switching. Yep. And so when you are always available and when everything seems minor and easy and you just get inundated constantly with a five minute thing here and a five minute thing there,

it wears you out in a way that, I mean, this is a lot of what deep work is about. It wears you out in a way that, you know, working four hours on one thing does not. And this is, I think, is like the productivity poison. Yeah. It's like the fact that the human brain is not a microprocessor, right? Like a microprocessor, every op that it executes, every op code, is the same as far as it's concerned. It just here it goes.

It goes to the circuits. It takes exactly one cycle. Give me the next thing. So all that matters for a processor is you want to make sure that it's never idle. So if you design a processor, like all of us, computer. scientists had to do in school. You want to keep a pipeline as full as possible of instruction so that like it's never idle. Human brain can't do that. Like if I want to switch from what we're doing now to talk about or think about something unrelated, I have to do a lot of cognitive work. I mean,

and it goes down to the neuronal level. I have to inhibit certain networks that are relevant to this conversation. I have to excite different neuronal networks that are relevant to the new conversation. This can take 10 to 20 minutes. It's why when you sit down to do something hard, it's this sucks, this sucks. Ooh, I'm in flow now, right? Like 15 minutes. in. Like, why is that? Because it takes about 15 minutes for your brain to reconfigure to what you're doing. And then it goes easy. So, yeah, so what happens when you have to switch every five minutes? You always feel like in the first 10 minutes of trying to write. Like, everything is just frustrating. Your cognitive capacity is reduced. It's deranging. Like, it completely exhaust people. It's

like working in an environment with weird flashing lights and it's like too cold. Like, it's not conducive to how humans actually function. Like, I really do think, constant context switching is like the number one mental health affliction of knowledge work, right? Like it's a massive issue. And it's something that technology, to the point of digital minimalism, it's something that technology enables further. There are a couple of themes here that keep coming up on the pod with multiple people. So like when Oliver Berkman was on, we spent a lot of time talking about how removing friction

actually can in some cases make things worse. And with him, it was more in kind of a lot of. like a philosophical, existential sense. Like it's without friction, things don't feel as meaningful. They don't feel as important. When David Brooks was on, we talked about how the loss of social friction is actually makes relationships more superficial and more, you know, more tenuous. And here we're seeing it with productivity.

Like that lack of friction is actually, in some ways, kind of overloading our brains. So when I was doing research for this episode, I came across something really fascinating. I looked up job satisfaction surveys. And I was surprised, really surprised. According to the Conference Board Job Satisfaction Survey, 2023 marks the highest job satisfaction since the survey began, almost 40 years ago. It measured job satisfaction across 26 categories, and it found that the gain in job satisfaction was most marked in people who had hybrid or remote work.

Let's put a pen in that. Next thing I looked up, burnout. Burnout is also at an all-time high. 61% of workers say that they find it difficult to unplug and stop working at home. 77% of remote workers say that they feel isolated and 41% say that they do not feel supported by their bosses or coworkers. One study found that on average, remote workers spend two and a half hours more per day working, which is, that's staggering. That's like a 52-hour work week. So we have this like weird contradiction going on here of if you ask people how satisfied they are with their jobs, they, they,

They're more satisfied than ever. And the people who are working from home or have the option to work from home say that report that they are the most satisfied than ever. But they're also the most burnt out of all the remote work, of all the workers, period. So what the fuck is going on here? I know these data. Partially what's going on here is people like flexibility. Yeah. Right.

So many different surveys ask people, and this is not surprising. Would you rather have flexibility in your schedule or a schedule that you have, no flexibility. Nine out of ten, I'm thinking of recent Gallup data will say, I want flexibility. It's like asking, do you want sunshine? Totally. Right. So when you ask a newly hybrid or remote worker, are you satisfied with your job? I honestly think a lot of that answer is, I don't want you to take this flexibility back away. Yeah. So I'm going to say this, like they see the question as a quorum. You know, they're asking you, do you like having this flexibility? Like, no, it's good. It's good. Don't take it back. Yeah. Right. And that's a lot of the dynamic right now.

is people who gained hybrid or remote work schedules don't want it to go back. Actually, right now, what's ended up dominating is hybrid. I was just looking over these numbers. We had fully remote a course in remote capable jobs, like jumped and dominated in March of 2020. On site fell all the way down to 12%. On site came up a little bit. Like, it never got back above 20. It's been there ever since, right?

So like we basically got rid of on-site jobs for jobs that didn't have to be on-site in knowledge work. the real shift is remote and hybrid. Remote just fell, fell, fell, hybrid rose, rose, rose. Hybrid is now two times more prevalent than fully remote. So like we're in a hybrid world now

and no one wants to not have the option. Yeah. Yeah. But they're also really burning out. Yeah. Right. So hybrid work, remote work, whatever combination you have,

it brings with it these friction issues we're talking about. It also brings with it the issue of we get more meetings. Yes. And they're virtual meetings. Because if I can grab you in the hallway, then we don't have

to set up a Zoom. If we set up a Zoom because we're both at home or one of us is at home and one of us isn't, that's going to eat up 30 minutes on my schedule because I don't have the dexterity that drag like a smaller thing on Google Calendar than 30 minutes. So now you're taking what might have been 15 total minutes of ad hoc conversation and now it's going to be two and a half hours of Zoom meeting. And this is really deranging for people as well. Yeah.

Again, it is a concept that keeps showing up over and over is people like a lack of friction. It on some level makes them happy, but it produces worse results in terms of just overall well-being, mental well-being. It's really interesting to, not to get too philosophical, but, you know, when I was thinking about this, I've been thinking a lot about Jean-Paul Sartre, he had this idea. As one does. Yeah, of course. Like, what else do you do on a Tuesday morning?

Good existential. But Sart, you know, he described that as a good Frenchman. He said freedom was anxiety. terror. And, you know, at the time that was just very, I don't know, edgy of him to say. But the older I get and the more all of this technology develops, the more I see the wisdom of that of how giving people endless optionality is actually, in some sense, emotionally overwhelming and cognitively taxing, to use your word. Like, it is a tax. And it's a subtle tax. I don't think we recognize it when it's happening when we're scrolling on Instagram or browsing through Netflix or opening our

email and like scanning through the 200 emails that just came in like our conscious perception is wow look at all this amazing stuff that's available to me what's actually happening behind the scenes is very taxing and draining it looks like the Netflix effect right i mean you go on Netflix today and like i can't find something to watch because when the options are endless you're like there's got to be some sort of perfect movie that's like going to mess that's like going to my emotional state slash interest of the day slash I heard about this thing. It also has this actor in it. If I can't find that I'm not happy,

whereas 15 years ago, you could basically take a random thing that you select on Netflix. And if it was on TBS and you were home that night, you're like, this is great. This is kind of interesting. Look, like Vince Vaughn's in it. Okay, I don't know. Like, it's going to be funny.

We were happier. Yeah. Yeah. Or like when I was a kid and probably the same right. Remember the 90s, it was like, we're going to go to the movies every weekend. And it's like, okay. you know, there'll be something that seems like kind of okay. And it was fun. Like some things were like, fine, some weren't.

probably be a movie with like Harrison Ford. Yeah. Jumping off something. And it was like fine. And we really loved it. And we were happy. And now we're on max. Like,

oh, there's only like 20 Oscar winners here. Yeah. I don't know. This is bullshit. This is two and a half hours. I don't have enough time for that. So imagine like in the workplace,

one of the ultimate, uh, flexibility we gave people in knowledge work is we said, okay, productivity itself. Figure that out. How do you organize your work? Figure that out.

You can do anything you want. You know, it's, we'll just throw stuff at you. and you have to figure out, Like, how are you going to make sense of everything? Like, why leave that completely up to every worker? And you would say, like, well, options are better.

But I think exactly it's the start right over again, right? It completely paralyzes people. Absolutely. Like, I have to figure out how I say yes, how I say no, how I keep track of what I'm doing, how I decide what to do next, how I, you know, every time I do a video that's even remotely, you know, hey, here's a productivity related thing you could do. Those numbers fly through the roof because there's so many people out there like, oh my God, I don't know what to do.

It's Netflix all over again. It is fascinating how much this topic has blown up since the pandemic. And it's funny because at first I thought it was that everybody was at home and had nothing to do. And so they suddenly became very aware of all their bad habits and all of their worst tendencies. That might be part of it. But as it keeps going, I have to believe that this is part of it, too. that it's it's the remote work and the weird kind of paradox of increased flexibility versus feeling like you're running in place all the time feeling like nothing's actually getting done

and the burnout that comes along with that i think some of the best practical tips in the book come from this section of like even if you have a boss even if you're working in a huge company even if you've got like 20 people under you who are relying on you like here are some practical tidbits that you can do to slow things down, to take things off your plate. Can you run through a couple of those really quick? Yeah. And most of them come back to the practical tips in that section, making your workload more transparent.

It's almost like psychology hacking in some sense. Like one of the issues that keeps too much work coming on your plate and you're saying yes too much is other people don't know what you're doing. Again, so they see you as a vessel to do their work and they're offended. Why would you say no? Like an idea in there that was actually meant as a thought experiment, but people that I've talked to about this on the podcast are actually doing it. So it's fascinating. Like it's maybe not a thought experiment is have a shared document. Right. And at the top of it is here's like

the three things I'm working on right now in like a divider line. All right, here's the queue of things I'm going to work on next like that I've that I've agreed to. Now when someone comes along and it's like, hey, can you do this? And it's not like an obvious no. It's from your boss or whatever. Like yeah, of course. Just add it. Throw it on the queue. And like, you know, if there is information I need to know to execute it, you can put it there, or you can just put a reminder to say, like, you know, to call you when it gets closer or whatever. Throw it on the queue. Oh, and by the way, you can check in any time you want to see where that thing is as it works

this way up. Oh, and you want it to be done fast. That's great. Like, you're the boss. You know, just tell me which of the things. So what are we moving? Yeah, you know better than not. Like, which one are we moving down?

I'll let them know, you know. And it forces a confrontation with the reality of workload. And you would think something like this would be kind of preposterous or, you know, a boss, like what are you talking about. But if you do this nicely, it's actually really effective. Like, oh, okay, I see what you're doing. You're working on these things. You know what?

Don't worry about this, right? Because it's going to take you too long to get to this anyways. I'll give it to someone else or we just won't do it. Or now that I see what you're doing, can we take these three things back off your plate? I don't want you doing those. It's like your employee. I don't want you doing those three things. Like these type of things are more important.

Oh, I see what's getting in the way of you doing this, which you're really good at. So you know what? Tell these people you're not doing that. I want you just to be working on this. Transparency unlocks a lot of good things, and obfuscation unlocks a lot of frustration. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan.

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whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Haboniero, more like Habinier, yes. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Hearing you say that, it makes me wonder how much of this issue is that if you're in person, or let's say you're in a blue collar job, you're on a construction site or something, you can physically see what everybody's doing. You can talk to someone.

You can see if they seem like flustered or overloaded. There's an emotional, intangible communication that happens in person. Yeah. where as a group you can kind of prioritize and sort tasks by what's most valuable in each given moment. And there's not an argument about it. There's no ambiguity about it. Whereas when you go digital, you don't have that extra nonverbal communication. You don't actually see that John's like working his ass off or busy with eight other things.

So it makes sense that building systems with that explicit purpose would solve a lot of these issues. I was a big fan of the push versus pull processes. That's actually, that's the section that I hit. I was like, oh, my God, I'm totally going to use this. That's the way all works to be done, by the way. Pull not push. Yes. Yeah, pull not push is like how all knowledge works to be assigned.

It almost none is. Can you describe each one of those and what it looks like? Yeah, and this comes out of manufacturing, right? So, you know, in manufacturing, a push system would be, as soon as I'm done with this step of the manufacturing process, like push it on to the next person, right? This doesn't work out very well because I can't control the speed at which things are being pushed on me and then you can get pile-ups. So what works better is a pull-based system. When I'm ready to do the next thing, I'll pull it from you.

No one gets piled up. So basically the slowest step of the chain in this particular setup dictates the speed. But then what really happens in these systems is then you can pretty clearly identify, oh, great, this is the slowest one. We can put more resources there and the whole system speeds up. No pile-ups, though. This is how knowledge work should be assigned, but it's not. We push. Something comes into my world.

It's now a source of stress for me. Like a client called me. I was like, we got to, you know, whatever. We got to get this feature, whatever added to the software.

I want to get this off my plate as soon as possible because, you know, productivity is personal and I'm not very organized and it's just in my head and it stresses me out. So I'm just going to push it on to someone else's plate. So I can just be like, Mark, take care of the feature, exclamation point,

emoji, sin, boom, it's off my plate, right? It took me like seven seconds. And it's just on, now I've pushed it onto your plate. Now you have to deal with it.

So now you're pushing other things on the other people's plates. So all the work that comes into the system gets pushed on someone's plate. It's all unevenly distributed. And we get the whole overtead tax issue. Yeah. A poll-based system and knowledge work would be, okay, things that need to be done exist by default, not on an individual person's plate. Like, we have a place to keep track of as a team. These are things that need to be done.

So the client calls me, hey, we've got to have this feature, whatever. I put it to our list of these are things we need to do. It's not on my place, it's not on your plate. Then what individuals do is as they finish something, they pull something more from that list. And you can do this intelligently. Like let's have a quick meeting or whatever to figure out. We have a stand-up meeting. So they do it in software development.

Okay, you're done with this. What's the best thing for you to do next? Well, now that we're really looking at this, like we should really give this priority, okay, well, you take that on next. And it gives you an opportunity to say, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to need this from you and this from you and this from you. And you can kind of figure it out right then. Yeah. Okay, not a lot of emails.

Okay, make sure I get that by Tuesday. let's write this down. You're doing that. All right, this draft will be ready for you to check by Wednesday. I'll put it in this drop box. And you do that and I'll come back to it on the, and you figure out the whole plan. And then you go and do that thing and it gets executed.

Like, that is the right way to leverage cognitive resources, not just, oh, my God. Like, let's just email this thing with them off. You know, it's just obligation hot potato. I got to get this stuff off my plate right now because I'm stressed. Totally. And I temporarily feel better. And I just made 20 people feel worse.

They're going to retaliate. They're going to retaliate. It's like, You get this. And you know, you get this sometimes where people will send you an email. And you know that there's not enough information that for you to do it. You know it's not, you know, it's going to get bounced back. They know it's going to get bounce back.

But in the moment, they were just trying to get that off. They're trying to get it out of their inbox. Yeah. Because they feel like, oh, if I can just clear my inbox, I'm done for the day. I'm done for the day. Yeah. Yeah. So you send nonsense.

I love this because a pain point in my business right now is, you know, we've completely pivoted the video and everything relies on the video production. Are you filming this? Oh man. Cut to me in a suit. Yeah, right? It should have been an elaborate wig on. But yeah, everything in the business now relies on the video content being produced.

So the social content that we put out, the way we promote things, the promotions that go into the newsletters. And so if a video production is very hard. and complex and very labor intensive. So when things get stuck in the video pipeline, everything gets backed up in the rest of the business. And I've been talking to my lead people, like, how do we solve this?

How do we get over? And so as soon as I saw the push-pole thing, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. All right, so let's get to where I think we might disagree. Principle number two is work at a natural pace. What the fuck is a natural pace? Not like you're in the first. the Ford factory.

Okay. Not, okay. Full intensity, nine to five, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. No variation in intensity. Work is turn it on. You should be working really hard until it's over. That was not how humans work through all of our history

until we invented mills and factories. And then when we tried to put people into that type of work, it was so unnatural and so terrible that we had to invent labor unions and giant regulatory frameworks just to try to make this type of artificial work somewhat tolerable. And then knowledge work comes along and what do we do? Like, how do we organize this? We're like, oh, let's do what the factory does. Yeah. Yeah, show up nine to five. Let's go. So a natural pace is inherently variable. Variable. Okay. So there's like sprints. Yes. Periodic bursts. At different timescales too. Yes. Within the day, within the week, within the month, within the year. Like, the summer is

slower than the fall. This day is more intense than that day. The morning's more intense early in the afternoon. Or within a career, I assume. Yeah, you could go that wide as well. Because as I was reading through, as I was reading this section, I kept thinking of counter examples. Like, you mentioned the Beatles earlier. They did 12 albums in nine years. Yeah. Which is an insane amount of output. They never stopped working.

Yeah. They never stopped working. Like, never. Which is completely atypical. And, you know, there are other musicians that, like, you talk about Jewel in the book, you know, to slow down, canceled opportunities, took her time with albums, you know, like really honed her craft and also was massively successful. Turned down a million dollars.

Didn't it just slow down? Yeah. Without homeless at the time. Yes. Turn down the million dollars so that she could take more time and make $200 million a couple years down the line. Yeah. Jewel, if you're out there, come on the pod. So the variability of it makes more sense to me.

I couldn't help but feel, and I guess this goes without saying, but a certain amount of this is probably personality-driven as well. I imagine some people's natural setting is a little bit higher or lower than other people's. And I say that just because maybe I'm a workaholic in denial. And this is like, is this therapy now? This is like triggering to me. You'll be okay, Mark. You'll be okay. But no, I really thought about this.

And because I came across some examples. And I'm curious what your response would be. So we've got the Beatles. Mark Twain did 94 books in 55 years. Picasso, if you average out Picasso's output, but he averaged almost a painting a day in his adult life. These guys had huge variation in their day-to-day intensity. Yes.

Mark Twain was not writing nine to five every week. I mean, he would go on these trips. Like, I'm going to go to California to, like, write an article about California. That's like five days on the train, you know? And then, like, he's there for three weeks. And then he comes back. This is like John McPhee. He wrote 29 books.

Yeah. But also he spent five days laying on his back, like just thinking about when you compress a career, you imagine, this is what happens is you think about like kind of working on all those things at the same time. Picasso had huge diversions, you know, where he was like, let me try this or that. This movies happens all the time too. Like directors, right? Like, wow, they have this great filmography. There's often like some exceptions, just like years. We're like, man, nothing was really getting made. I was going back to the creative well. I'm glad you bring this up and I kind of interrupted, but I just, no, no, no, I want to hear you. Because I was thinking about this

during the book. Yeah, because like, and variations in intensity is completely compatible with, like, killing it. Yeah. I'm just, like, producing great stuff, right? Like, I write a lot of books, but I'm not writing every day. I'm not writing every month. Years will go by, you know, a year will go by, right? I don't touch a book at all. And then you kind of recharge and come back. It just kind of gets to a third principle out of assessing over quality. But like slow productivity, a lot of the exemplars of this, these traditional knowledge workers are really productive. Yeah. Right? Like, you look at what they, you look at what they, done and are like, okay, I'm just going to give you a round of applause.

Yes. But they're not trying to do full intensity every day because that's impossible. You can do that with pseudo work. Totally. Right. I can do email and Zoom eight hours a day, you know, five days a week, 50, because it's busyness, right, but it's not, I'm actually not being taxed that much. Yeah.

I can't write at that intensity. I can't do a movie. I can't do painting at that intensity. So they're all over the place. I may be placated here. I'm trying. No, but that makes sense to me. that at a macro level, somebody can be intensely productive.

There's peaks and troughs and variation. And again, as a self-confessed workaholic, that maps pretty well to myself. It's funny, I go to my wife, my team. I'm like, you know, this year, this year is a sprint. Like, I'm going to go hard this year. It's going to be six-day weeks, you know, whatever. There are other years where I'm like, I'm going to take three months off. Yeah.

I'm feeling exhausted. I need time away. So you're a slow productivity efficient out. Yeah. That's working at a natural pace. So this kind of gets back to the point where it's like philosophically, like, I think we're on the same page. It's maybe it's interpretation of the philosophical precepts. So can I propose maybe, tell me if this rings true.

Like maybe part of the instinctual friction, because I get this a lot. So I think this is worth talking about is the notion of slowness in our culture is so connected to sort of anti-productivity, self-care. Laisiness. Yeah. Or, well, positive spin it, but it's like, yeah, you're doing, be less productive. Because there's more to life than productivity. Right. It's not what I think about with slow productivity.

Actually, I think about I want to really produce awesome stuff. Like, I'm fiercely ambitious. You know, like, I want to produce really good stuff and keep getting better. This is what allows you to keep doing it. It's what allows you, like Picasso to do it. 100%. But I think this is the, there's another dominant discourse right now that came out of the same place, which is pseudo productivity is terrible and people are exhausted.

and we're done with being on Zoom 8 hours a day. The other dominant discourse that came out of this is the anti-productivity movement. And that's much more coming at it from a perspective of work as a pejorative. And it's more of an antagonistic relationship between you and work, and you are zero-sum are claiming more for life outside of work.

There's more of the life than work. These type of arguments have never been as compelling to me because I think that people who need them ignore them. Let's just be less hustly. I mean, like, yes. But also, like, that's a hard sell for a lot of people. So when it's framed that way, it resonates a little bit more, you know, the anti-hustle culture thing. Like, it's, I agree with you that it's, there's often, especially when you're in one of these sprint periods, you get outsized gains from taking your foot off gas for a little while.

Like, go take that four-day weekend and relax by a lake or something. and you'll come back and you're actually twice as productive as you would have been otherwise, and you make up for the lost, quote unquote, lost time. Totally get that. With this, I run into the fear, too, of like, maybe it's part of this. I just don't trust myself enough. But like, how do we recognize what the natural pace for us is? Because I know for myself, and a lot of people I know as well, if I try to allow myself to take breaks,

I will sometimes wonder if I'm being lazy, if I, if I'm just avoiding responsibilities, if I'm actually nervous to try to do something, and this is my way of trying to avoid it. And then on the convers side, like on the flip side, I'm also, sometimes when I push myself super hard, I'm like, this is unhealthy, I'm probably avoiding something. Like, I'm very skeptical of my own ability to accurately gauge what is natural for myself. And so, yeah, maybe this is my therapy session. Well, I mean, look, I would rather have you have more variation in your intensity for the wrong reasons.

Yeah. Than have you work all out for the wrong reasons, right? Because working all out is just not sustainable. It's just not sustainable. Like, it just doesn't work, right? So there isn't really an argument for I could do this, like work all out and have no variation in my pacing. And there's some things I'm losing and some things I'm gaining. No, net you're going to just lose.

Sure. Right. It's just going to, it is going to burn you out in the end because it's unnatural, right? I mean, same thing if you had, you know, a relationship with, you know, food or drugs or something. They were like, this is just not sustainable for like a human body. Like, okay, I'm going to drink heavily. Yeah.

And that has its advantages and it's like, no, net net is going to end up being just all disadvantages. Like right now, yeah, you're getting advantages out of it, like sociality. But give that 20 years, like this is not going to go someplace. Good. that's what I feel about the all out working. One thing that I've talked about before on this podcast is, is that there's a very fine and blurry line between hashtag self-care and hashtag self-care and hashtag

self-indulgence, you know, where is that line where taking the time off, backing off, just turns into, you know, quiet quitting or whatever. Yeah. So this is why the third principle, obsess over quality, I call that the glue for everything else. This is what makes all that work, right? So when you begin to also reorient your work around doing things really well, like this is the thing I want to do really well, and I'm going to keep getting better at it. Like I'm going to prioritize craft and get better about something. This makes all of the the other things I talked about, not become degenerate and go into a weird direction. So if you don't have the obsess over quality and all you're working on is I want to do fewer things and I want more

variation, these are all real issues. Yes. Right? I mean, it's like, I don't know where this is going. And you can become sort of pathological about that. Yes. I do nothing. Yeah, I work two days a week. I win the do fewer things and natural pace or whatever. The obsess over quality is the moderator. So, I mean, I say in the book, without that, you're just going to be engendering a sort of weird antagonistic relationship with your work and it's going to go weird places. If you're obsessing over quality, a lot of these issues go away, right? Because now what's driving you is, I want to produce the next thing I do. I want to be great. So I am going to keep working on this.

And like, why am I having variations? Because it feels as natural to me as anything else that my quality is slumping here. Like, this book is not going to be great. I can't just white knuckle this. Like, I need to, like, this isn't working, you know? Like I need to go take a week and just think about it and like walk to beach. Let me come back to it again. Because if I don't, this thing's not going to be good.

If you don't obsess over quality and it's just a pseudo productivity world, you're like, I don't know, more. I can always do more and more is always abstractly better. So when you obsess over quality, slowness becomes natural. Like, of course I need to slow down because this junk is getting in the way of this. Like you're not even convincing yourself. And then you get the other advantage was as you get better, you get more leverage to actually do more of that.

You have this sort of virtuous cycle. So yeah, the quality piece is the linchpin. People who obsess over quality don't hashtag self-care. Yeah, yeah, totally. They hashtag, here's my tonies. You know what I mean? Like, this is what they're thinking about. But by the way, they're probably doing more self-care than a lot of just pseudo-productivity-drenched knowledge workers because, you know, I got to do what works.

Like, Lynn Mel Miranda needed this play to be great. And he couldn't white-knuckle that yet. So he knew this was going to take time. And there's an awareness of like, it's not just about taking care of myself. It's also you're taking care of your own. own work because, yeah, if you white-knuckle it for too long, you start doing bad work. So that totally makes sense. So far, you were Neo in the Matrix with my objections.

I've got two more. Here we go. I should have put more curse words in that title. I thought about it. How much of this is kind of a privileged position, like obsessing over quality in particular? Like if you are somebody who's growing up in poverty, just trying to claw your way out of it, Do whatever it takes, you know, fuck how well the product turns out, like, I'm going to work three jobs until I can get the fuck out of here. Like, where is the boundary on that dimension?

And I use the word privileged, like, not in a pejorative way, but like just in an honest, like, socioeconomic way of like, is this a middle class white collar knowledge worker thing, college educated thing? Or is this more broadly applicable? This book is looking specifically at this particular economic sector because this is the economic sector that has these odd dynamics. of complete autonomy and lack of specificity about how work unfolds, complete dependence on digital tools that allows work to follow you anywhere you're going. These are the things that came together to create the pseudo-productivity burnout crisis. So this is very focused on knowledge work. But one of the things I say about that is knowledge work up to this point hasn't really had this discussion, right? So other sectors of the economy that do other types of work, we're often much more

comfortable maybe not solving the problem, but have a vocabulary for talking about the problem. Like, okay, well, this is the problem with like the service sector, for example. Right. There's a lot of issues with the service sector, right? And service sector jobs can be way worse than anything we're talking about here, right? Like having three service sector jobs where they're doing algorithmically optimized scheduling, meaning that the Starbucks manager just calls you. And it's like, never mind, you're working like one hour this day and like three hours here.

This is way worse than I have too many emails. but also in the service sector, at least the people who are talking about this, like, this is definitely a problem. Everyone's like, yeah, this is a problem. And what is this guy? What are you doing with this? And we're going to unionize now. And at least there's a fight going on. Knowledge work, we don't even have the fight.

Right. It's like, no, you should just feel like this is white color work. Like this is, you know, it's creative and you should, you're passionate about this job. Yeah. How could you complain? You got a great salary and benefits and you're working from home. What are you complaining? Yeah, exactly.

Right. So you don't want to compare the magnitude of the problems between sectors because, I mean, this sector's got to work in air conditioner. Let's be honest about this, right? So, you know, these are not strategies for the service sector. It's not strategies for the agriculture sector, for the industrial sector. But one thing this sector could learn from all those other sectors is, like, be willing to have people to step back and say, there is a problem here. Let's think about what it is. And like, let's talk about solutions and let's fight about the solutions.

And, you know, I'm going to propose this and this person. And we just don't have that discussion at all in knowledge work. To clarify maybe, what about like at the bottom of the totem pole of the knowledge worker sector? Like, you know, a secretary who's taking an extra job, you know, doing data entry or something. Yeah, in the knowledge sector, but at the lower sectors of it. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully the idea is not only your job be more sustainable, you're going to move up faster.

Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. What's going on here? This job's entry level. Like, he's always my advice to someone entry level knowledge work. Like, find a two or three things or the one.

or two things that you can start learning how to do really well, that then you're indispensable on that. And then they stop giving you the other things. And that's how you begin to move up. I mean, this is the, it's like the fallacy of being an assistant in Hollywood, right? You want to be like super competent and ambitious, but not too good at the small things, right? If you make yourself indispensable at I can figure out that you're dry cleaning, you could pick it up on the way here and I got the driver going over here. They're never going to let you move up. Because the agents, if they move you up to be a junior agent, don't need to be good at that. They need to have like some other attribute.

And there's this whole thinking of like, okay, so I want to get really good. There's that whole game theory there. Yeah. It's like whatever it is they care about, some shark attitude. But you got to show it, right? So I think obsessing over quality more. Like right away, what can I do better? Thinking about, okay, I need some variation.

In the book, I talk about how to put variation without telling anybody without it being notable. Like, right, I have all that advice about stealth, quiet quitting for just three weeks at a time. giving yourself secretly variations, so you're not burning out. And then working with transparency of workload and the subtler advice for doing fewer things, the hope is that will move you up quicker than if you're just like, let's just rock and roll. I'm just going to be on email all day. You're going to burn yourself out. Right.

So hopefully, if you're into knowledge sector, this is implementable and make things better. Yeah, my other question was around young people, particularly because they have the most energy generally. And often they aren't totally aware of what they want to specialize in or what they want to get really good at. And so there is an element of like test a bunch of different things, maybe even test a few different jobs before you go all in on something. Like how does that fit into this? Yeah.

I mean, if only there was a book that thought more about that. Young people spend too much time. Yes. Yeah. And I'm not saying you should just throw a dart. But also the only, leverage or capital you have in your career and knowledge work is your skills. Yes.

Like the things you can do well that are rare and valuable, that's your leverage. And you can alter those over time. You can pick up new ones. But you should be obsessing almost from day one. Where is there some place here in this entry level job and I'm Xeroxing things for whatever? Where is there a place here where there's something valuable that like most people at this level aren't doing well that I can with laser focus get really good at, right? It doesn't mean like what might that be if you're at an entry level knowledge or position Xeroxie?

That thing is not going to be your career 25 years from now. That's going to be what starts moving you towards options. It starts exposing more of the world to you. You know, it's like when you're new in your career, you have these huge blinders on. You could survey the world as much as you want, but all you're going to see is like the reality of the entry-level jobs. You don't know enough to know what comes up next or what it really feels like. So you actually have to start climbing the ladder. And at each level, it's like donkey con.

Now I can run over this platform and go up another ladder, but I don't know what's up there. So you have to, how do I get up those ladders quicker, rare and valuable skills? If anything, just practice it. Like, in your first job, make it a game. I'm going to choose this thing. And within six months, I'm going to be awesome at it. Just to do. Just to practice.

Like, what does it feel like to get really good at something? Yeah. What is just the sense memory or the cognitive sensation of doing that? So I'm a big fan that rare and valuable skills, that's the only currency. In the end, knowledge work is the only currency that really matters. And so you want to have a lot of that so you can kind of make investments of what you want your career to be like. Yeah, you want me over. I have no room to talk because I never had a real job.

So I mean, have I really? I'm a professor and a writer. Speaking of being a professor, I'm curious, you know, it's fashionable to trash Ginzy right now, particularly around things like this, around quiet quitting, self-care, how they're always on social media. Have you noticed any trends, any of those? differences? Like, do you think it's overblown? Are you bullish, bearish on Gen Z? What do you thoughts? I'm bullish. I mean, look, the students at Georgetown that I teach, they're all brilliant. They're all smarter than I was at that age. So you don't really see that carryover. I think social media trends are easy to extrapolate to a generation, but often,

no, it's why, what makes a social media trend to trend? Is it plays well with the algorithm? And then more and more people figure that out. And it's this weird cybernetic content content production loop. Now everyone's doing quiet quitting videos. And then the algorithm kind of disfavored that and no one talks about quiet quitting anymore. I care less about that. The thing I do worry a little bit about talking to like my Gen Z students, the attention

span thing is real, right? I mean, I have students telling me, I can't believe that anyone watches YouTube anymore. Like those videos could be like 15 minutes long. Like, are you kidding me? Like in an age of TikTok, who is watching YouTube? It's like a sincere concern that like a lot of my students have. And so I'm always telling them. this could be really good news for you, right?

Like, it's the parable of the bear. If you know, you're with your friend and a bear charges, you don't have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than your friend, right? Yeah. Well, it's the same thing with attention right now. I was like, if you opt out, like 50% of this, like if you don't use TikTok, just let's just do that.

Like, if you read as a college student, just compared to the fragmentation of the attention of the people around you, you're going to be like Einstein. People are like, I cannot believe that you wrote this whole thing, this whole memo in like three hours. How did you get so much stuff done? How do you also have these hobbies that are fulfilling you?

And so that's the thing I do care about is the deep work effect, right? Yeah. Is I do think digital media, especially in non-professional media where Ginzi has this very particular frenetic relationship, that could have some ramifications.

Yeah. But it's a very smart generation. I agree. I interact, you know, a significant percentage of my audience is Ginzi and I play a lot of video games. So I inevitably end up watching, you know, these 20-year-olds on Twitch who are just incredible at games. Yeah.

It's a hungry generation. It is. I'm actually consistently impressed by how thoughtful and aware they are of everything going on. And I agree. Like, I have seen 20-year-olds on Twitch and Discord say and think about things that I was nowhere near that level of maturity when I was their age. I mean, I think this is the plus size. of like YouTube influencer culture. Right.

If you think back to Gen X, for example, like before us, you know, the sort of slacker culture, in part because there was no like obvious place to let out what might be a natural ambition. Now like every kid is like I'm going to be like a very successful YouTuber. All right. They're not going to be. Yeah. But at least they're thinking in terms of like an ambition. Like, okay, I could do this.

I could focus on this. I'd have to buy a camera. And then if I got really good, we could grow the audience. Like a lot of people don't think that way. Totally. When they're 15, 16 years old. Absolutely. Now the key is how do you take that ambition and then translate it away from, I'm going to be a Twitch streamer.

Like, you know what? Like that same mindset you could push over here to like the sport you're training for or like you're getting into theater as like a high school student. Like you could put that same ambition over here and realizing, oh, this is this is something I can do for like whatever I'm interested. Yeah. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is that our generation, Gen X and before. Starting with the boomers, really, self-destructiveness kind of became cool, became a status symbol. I think it started in the 60s with the free love and rock and roll and everything, and it continued up through the 90s. And I feel like Gen Z is the first generation since maybe the 40s and 50s that status is awarded towards constructive behavior.

Sure. Which it's actually kind of blowing my mind. Like it's one of those when you're, it's like a fish doesn't recognize the water that it's been swimming in its whole life. I've become a lot more aware of a lot of the destructive tendencies that existed when I was a teenager and in my 20s and a lot of the dumb destructive shit I did because I thought it was cool and it got like won me cool points with my friends. It's something that's just really been sitting on my mind quite a bit lately and I don't totally know how to explain it or what to make of it. I mean, it's a good question. Like what to what degree, for example, this whole phenomenon of interaction is more digital for the, for the, for Gen Z, right?

There's some real harms about that. It also is reducing self-destructive behavior. Because now you, I have other ways that I can at least simulate sociality. When I'm just with my buddies, yeah,

when we were in our teens, right, you like do stupid stuff. Like, I don't know, this is the group I'm stuck with. Yes. Like, how are we going to, what's going to impress them? Like, okay,

I think I can, you know, you take the car to the parking lot. We're going to do the donuts. Do donuts. We literally would do this. Steal your mom's beer. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We're now kids are like, let's, you know, let's, play of this like new video game. So but then there's also cost. So it's interesting. It's, it's evolution. Our generation also had, I wrote this New Yorker piece about this last year, my take on our generation, like at least from our relationship to work, is that we were the first generation raised on follow your passion. Yes. Right. So that is an idea that rose in the 1990s,

right? We can just look at it entomologically. That got big in the 90s. So Gen X didn't have that as much. Then we're also a generation that got 9-11 in the financial crisis. So like we learned, we're like, wait a second, this doesn't work. This idea. And so like, follow your passion was the baby boomers trying to rationalize these two sides of their experience, the 60s and 70s in which it was like, you need to like be true to yourself. And then the 80s and early 90s were like, oh, you need money to pay mortgages. And there's a lot of, you know, so how do we, and they're like, what if we just put these two things together? We'll, like, take all the good and get rid of all the bad from our life and like make money. Yeah.

But be passionate about working at the law firm or whatever. And then we figured that doesn't work. It's not how job satisfaction doesn't come from matching the content of your job to a preexisting passion. So our generation invented job engineering. Like we, you know, we get like the minimalism movement.

We get lifestyle design. We get all these Instagram influencers. They're showing alternative. Like that's what our generation came away with is like, okay, you've got to shape your life. Like that really influences us. It's a lot in my book.

How do you craft your life to be what you want? And it's very pragmatic. We get like the fire movement. Like this is all. Gen Y millennial Like if all your passion didn't work So we got to just sort of re-engineer work To be what we need out of it

So now Gen Z is doing its own thing So this is the last question I want to ask you The three principles of slow productivity It occurred to me that this is actually Kind of an umbrella framework For all of your books So if you look at do fewer things Is digital minimalism

Work at your own pace, deep work And then obsessive equality is so good They can't ignore you Did you think of it in those terms Or did that just kind of naturally emerge? It's somewhat purposeful. Okay. Yeah.

Right, right. So it's trying to draw all these ideas I've been exploring, deconstruct them, understand them, and then rebuild like a coherent philosophy for work. Yeah. So it is, I think it's why people who like my prior books who have read this or like, oh, yeah, no, I really like this. Yeah. If they liked the prior books, they're going to really like it.

I'm actually writing an article right now. Maybe it'll be out when this podcast there's a New Yorker piece. It's a personal essay, right? So I've been writing a lot about this book, but they're like, why don't we write something different? Let's do something different. Let's do something personal. And so I excavated my past, right? And in this essay, I go back to my time in the theory group at MIT. And it was like this preposterous place. Like this is because I had put a lot of this down, but I came back. I redredged this up, like what it was like showing up at the theory group at MIT, which is the number one theory group in the world. Right. And it was preposterous. I come to orientation and one of the first people I meet, 16. starting the doctoral program, graduated college two years earlier. So he graduated college at 14, had spent two years, all right, show up. The professor across from me, like in their office, is my age. And he wanted MacArthur the year before.

I was hired as a professor when he was 20. He got 10-year-letting into my first year. And he was the least accomplished person on that wall of offices. Three offices had Turin Award winners. And he was the, there was a fourth and fifth. So I went back and like redredged this like preposterous experience. And basically the point of this essay is like, oh, my God, everything I've chased in all these books that culminate in slow productivity, all of it goes back to my time at the theory group. They were obsessed over focus.

They had a real sort of humanistic, because they were theoreticians, computer science theoreticians in a world of engineers. The human mind is what matters. Be very wary of technology and like how it affects the mind. There was no rushing. Theoreticians can't rush. So they were very productive. But like they didn't, you couldn't be busy. Because you can't force proofs.

So I realize all these things, like work at a natural pace on not too many things, care a lot about focus, be obsessed about quality. Everything I've done, I realized it's like this five-year experience of this like preposterous place, the new business being there. I've just been chasing it ever since. So that's my new self-therapy is like that experience is something I've been trying to like grapple with in my writing for 20 years later. One of my favorite quotes, and I remember who said it, we spend our entire lives trying to

either prove or disprove who we were at 18. Yeah. It was so overwhelming this experience that I've never, I was like, okay, I just have to grapple with this for the rest of my life. Like, I think there's something happening here in a weird extreme purified form. Yeah. That is somehow right. Yeah.

And it's being lost in this like really weird preposterous place that no one sees. But I think they've like accidentally like purified and made radical like these ideas. Like why have they stuck with? I think they were on to something. And then I just keep rediscovering them again and again. Nice. All right, that's all for the show. Be sure to follow the show.

If you haven't, leave a review. Make sure you're subscribed. And tell me how handsome I am. And we'll be back next week with an all new episode of the subtle art of not getting a fuck podcast. See you all then.