The Rich Roll Podcast - Slow Productivity: Cal Newport On How To Escape Burnout, Do Your Best Work & Achieve More By Doing Less

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Cal Newport, a bestselling author and Computer Science professor at Georgetown University, advocates for a slower approach to productivity that enhances work-life balance and reduces burnout. His philosophy promotes a deliberate and measured approach to work that emphasizes simplicity, autonomy, and thoughtful task engagement. In a world constantly bombarded with communication channels, Cal challenges the idea of constant activity and pseudo-productivity, advocating for a medicinal remedy of deliberate pacing and doing less to minimize undue communication. In this conversation, we explore how to avoid suboptimal navigating of daily schedules, offering insights on improving functionality, focus, and sustaining productivity. Cal addresses challenges related to managing external pressures, prioritizing quality over quantity, intentional time management, and balancing ambition with work-life equilibrium. We discuss autonomy in creative work, common productivity mistakes, dealing with schedule intrusion, and escaping the gravitational pull of email. Cal highlights the impact of slow productivity on modern knowledge work and provides practical strategies for effective workload management, communication, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. He emphasizes the significance of meaningful work and the crucial role of setting boundaries to protect time and focus. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: InsideTracker:  25% OFF with code RICHROLL 👉insidetracker.com/RICHROLL Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL  👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs 👉 drinkAG1.com/richroll NordicTrack: Top-tier treadmills, bikes, rowers, and more  👉nordictrack.com Squarespace: Get FREE trial 👉 Squarespace.com/RICHROLL

You're doing work wrong. The pseudo-productivity approach is killing you inside. If you're a knowledge worker, this is why you're feeling the way you're feeling. Why is it that we can work all day and still feel so unproductive? My guest today is Cal Newport, a modern-day legend, who has gone on to author a series of bestselling books on work, productivity and focus, while also serving as a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. We said, let's use visible activity as a proxy for doing useful effort. So if I see you doing stuff, that's better than you not doing stuff.

And if we need to be more productive, let's work longer hours. This is what I think started to burn people out. Cal's book, Deep Work, changed my life, no exaggeration. And now with his latest offering, Slow Productivity, he has much to say about the suboptimal ways many of us navigate our daily lives and delivers valuable insights on how to enhance focus and sustain productivity over the long haul. So the solution to all this is let's have better definitions of productivity.

It's wisdom applicable to anyone, basically, who, like me, occasionally feels overburdened or worse yet, teetering on burnout. Cal is a real deal. I'm delighted to pick up where we left off nearly five years ago when we last connected. That was RRP447. So without further ado, please enjoy me and Cal Newport. Cal, great to see you. Thank you so much for coming. It's been a couple of years since we first did this. Yes. You're back with a new book, so much to get into, but I think to just kind of create some context here for people that don't know, I mean, you are a bit of a unicorn.

You have no social media presence, although now you're a YouTuber, which I didn't have on my bingo card for your life, which is very interesting. Let's be clear, someone puts my podcast episode on YouTube for me. So do you ever find yourself checking the comments or no? No, no, that would be terrible.

That would break my heart if you were doing that secretly. I'd be done for, yeah. Nonetheless, despite having zero social media presence and never, it's not like you quit these apps. Like you were never on them to begin with all the way back to the beginning. You have nonetheless become this really culturally significant person

with reach and with impact and these parentally best-selling books in a way that contravenes everything one would think you would have to do to have a certain kind of cultural presence that sort of feels mandatory. So on some level, it's like a parlor trick. a certain kind of cultural presence that sort of feels mandatory. So on some level, it's like a parlor trick, like what you have done feels impossible.

And that's what makes you a bit of a unicorn, but also an inspiration because it is possible to do great work, share it with the world, have that work, be embraced, celebrated, et cetera, without the incessant pressure to sort of be everywhere in all places all the time that I think a lot of people who create things shoulder. Yeah. I mean, it's an example of slow productivity, I suppose, right? I mean, my thing with books, for example, and it's not a complicated strategy,

was try to write a book that I felt like forever people would want to tell other people about. And that's actually how most of my books have sold. I've never had a book, for example, be a breakout success right out the gate. I've never had a book that sat for months on the New York Times bestseller list. My bestselling book, Deep Work, has never been a bestseller. It came out. Is that true? It's true.

It probably sells just as well today as it did at the beginning, though, I would imagine. It does. And it's sold 1.5 million copies at this point or something. Never been a bestseller. So I write books that I hope people will like enough that they'll tell other people about it, and it's all slow burn. And so I have book after book like this where I don't know what it feels like to have a really exciting, oh my God, I'm number one on the bestseller list for the next three months type of book launch. I don't know what that feels like. It's more two years later, hey, you know what? People are still kind of buying this book. It's all about the slow aggregations, which I guess is the opposite of our culture right now. Right. I mean, it really begs the question of how much we value those metrics because

hitting the bestseller list for a week only to quickly disappear is something that a lot of people can do. It can actually be gamed if you have money and time and a certain kind of strategy. It's another thing altogether to be a book that sells perennially like your books have. And it feels wrong that there is like for you to say Deep Work was never a bestseller and it sold 1.5 million copies. Like that's not right. It is a bestseller, just not in the metrics that we sort of deem to be laudable. And I think it helps that I got started in this early. I wrote my first book when I was 21 years old, which is a long time ago from now, unfortunately. So a lot of this world we have

today about visibility online, this notion of being able to measure how many followers do I have? How much am I in the public conversation? None of that was really around. So when I came up doing this, all you really had to do, you could write the book, and then there was the publicity tour. So when the book comes out, you try to talk to as many people as you can, but that's a couple of weeks. That was it. So it was the only lever I had the pole was how do I make the book do something special? If it does, then it will eventually sell a lot. And if it doesn't, no matter what happens up front or how many followers you have, et cetera, it's not going to go anywhere. Sure. I get that. But as you've matured over the ages, social media did become a thing. And I wouldn't have judged you for saying, oh, wow, there's this

whole other avenue to promote my work. I'm going to jump in on this and see where I can take it. Like, even if you were doing it late in the game, like I'm noticing what Mark Manson is doing now, and I feel like he's using social media in a really smart way and has really, you know, grown his following, which I'm sure translates into book sales and helps to further the message that he's trying to put out in the world. So it wouldn't be surprising if you made a similar move. So the decision to say, I'm a writer, this is what I do. I'm not going to be lured into this,

into the wiles of this sticky wicket and I'm gonna stay over here, requires a certain, like a deep sense of what your values are and what's important to you and where you wanna place your time and your energy and a level of discipline to avoid it because it is so addictive and all of the cultural incentives

are luring you towards it, like a tractor beam into the USS Enterprise. Yeah, like a tractor beam that also makes you miserable. Yeah, I know. It pulls you in while making you unhappy at the same time. But that miserable thing, it's like, yeah, but it's that weird thing where it's like, yeah, it's making me miserable, but I can't resist it. That's why you don't get anywhere near that tractor beam.

It's the way I think about it. Well, I call it like the spinning sign syndrome. Like, yes, I could sell more books probably. If I was on some of these social media platforms, I could also sell more books. If I had a spinning sign that had, you know, the book's name on it by the interstate, right? So at some point you have to draw a line. Like, what do I want to do or not do, for example, to promote a book? Like somewhere you're going to draw the line. Like no one's going to be standing by the interstate spinning a sign that says, buy my book. So we draw the line somewhere.

So the question is just where you draw it and that's where the values come in. And so I drew it on the other side of social media because I didn't really want that in my life. You know, I see what that can do. And so I said, that's fine. I'm doing stuff that I think is good and I'm doing, you know, good faith effort to promote it.

And there's other things I could do that would help that I'm not doing because of the side effects. And podcasts are helpful for that. You can go on these podcasts, you can talk about your books and you can do these media appearances and then you can kind of retreat back home and start on the next one. That's the way. I mean, so here's the comparison I always think about in the world of writing is it's like my favorite comparison is Michael Crichton versus John Grisham. Because they're both doing the same type of books. They are both doing these mega bestselling genre books.

They dealt with their careers completely differently. So Crichton, I found this interview from him right after he left medical school, right after the Adronimus strain, his first big hit book in his own name came out. And the interview, it's all about here's all the things I can do now. I'm going to Hollywood. I want to write books. I want to write for television. I want to write movies. I want to direct movies. I want to direct television. I want to do all the things, right? That was his instinct. John Grisham has his first successful book, The Firm. He's like, this is great. I can quit my job. I don't have to be a lawyer anymore. I don't have to be in the state legislature anymore. I can move somewhere quiet.

I can create a bunch of ball fields for my son to play Little League on and be the Little League commissioner and write one book a year. And I promote it for three weeks and leave me alone outside of it. So there's different ways. The Grisham style of ambition

resonated a little bit more with me. Like, great, I'm gonna try to produce great books, but then also disappear if I can. Yeah, there's no value judgment on either of those choices. No, they're just different types. I think it's really about like what your ambitions are and what's important to you. Exactly.

I mean, you know, it's not to disparage Crichton, like what he created was unbelievable and his life ended too soon. And he would have been miserable. Yeah, who knows what makes each, maybe Crichton was happier doing that. Well, yeah, it would have been miserable in a small town, you know, living the John Grisham life. And Grisham would have been miserable. Yeah, who knows what makes each, maybe Crichton was happier doing that. Well, yeah, it would have been miserable in a small town, you know, living the John Grisham life.

And Grisham would have been miserable trying to like write screenplays and create television series. Yeah, so you're right. It's knowing yourself, knowing your values. My own self, my own speed is, I don't like having lack of autonomy over time. I don't like getting in the situations

where my schedule is consistently full and out of my control and it's day after day, that sort of Crichton style, let's grind it out and go after everything. That really doesn't resonate with me. I like the idea of work on something at your own pace and you can't not work on it at all, but if you don't work it on tomorrow, no one will care. That's sort of my sweet spot. I feel betwixt in between. Like on a personal level, I completely share that. There's nothing better than when there's nothing on my calendar. And I always aspire to keep my calendar

as sparse as possible, but perhaps somewhat like Crichton, like I have ambitions and I want to be fully expressed in the things that interest me. And I found myself in this situation where 11 years plus into the podcast, the podcast has become something very different than what it started out as.

The core and the essence and the spirit of it is the same, but all the trappings around it have grown. We're now sitting in a big studio. I've got tons of people that work for me. We're producing essentially a TV show twice a week. Like none of these things were part of the equation when I began. And I love that, but it means that

I now have to manage people. I now have to deal with escalating costs. I have to think about the difference between audio and video. And there's just a million permutations of that that complicate my life. And then on top of that, I still, despite the fact that I really haven't written a book

in 12 years, I now am writing a book this year. So I'm introducing a complication into an already busy schedule. And so you and your work has been very top of mind for me. Like how do I create the space to do my best work on this book, which is super important to me, while also being able to continue to steward the podcast as sort of the cornerstone or the keystone of kind of how I make a living and also something that is dear to my

heart and very important to me. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have some advantages here, right? Compare what you're doing to a circa 1990s syndicated television show. You own this and you have full autonomy, right? So you have a lot of options. So you can think about how this fits into your life. That's what I like about podcasting is the autonomy in it. Like if you said our season ends in June and then we pick up again in September, right? You could just decide that and have a summer where nothing happened. Or if it was these two days a week, we don't do anything. And those days are completely free. Like these are all options you wouldn't have in a traditional environment. But in this environment, in independent media, there's a lot of flexibility.

Yeah. Sure. And there's also external pressures. The intrinsic pressures I put on myself. Yes. Extrinsic pressures. Yes. And kind of commercial, you know, kind of aspects of this.

Yeah. You gotta keep it going. I gotta keep the lights on. I gotta pay all these people. Yeah. You know, it's like, and then suddenly you're doing all these things that had, that you had no idea you were going to do

that perhaps you're not even good at or don't necessarily wanna be doing, but are just part of the entire package. And trying to gracefully navigate all of that while remaining true to the things that got you there in the first place creates this conundrum because what you did to get to where you are

isn't exactly what you need to be doing or should be doing to get to the place that you want to go. So it's a constant tension and evolution of trying to thread that needle. I mean, this is the crisis of ambition, basically. Yeah. And I'll say I struggle with the same things, maybe on a smaller scale,

but I'm always struggling with a slow productivity mindset and the opportunities and the things that I put in place that are trying to grow. You know, I have a podcast of my own and it took me, you've been podcasting for 12 years. I would say it took me 12 years to convince myself to do a podcast, even after it was clear I should have, because I was very worried about schedule intrusion, time commitments. It really took a pandemic and a bunch of boredom to get me to pull the trigger on that. That was the catalyst. I was wondering what the impetus was to jump in on that. That was the catalyst.

I wanted to reach my audience when I couldn't, I wasn't seeing anyone. I wasn't seeing my students. I wasn't giving any talks. I wasn't being able to come do things like this. And I was bored. I didn't want to get out of the house. And I remember, okay, here's honestly what happened.

We're in late March, 2020. And Ryan Holiday texts me these photos of this building he had bought in a downtown boss drop to do his podcast out of. And he's like, I get to go hang out in here during those early days of the pandemic. He's like, I have a place to go. And I was like, okay, I need that. And so that was also an impetus. We rented some space. I was like, I'll do a podcast out there and it gives me a place to go and something to do. But I feel that it's the pressures of it. I get it. Like, then you get advertisers involved and they don't want you to take the summer off. They don't want you to, they're like, well, hold on a second. You have something here. And now suddenly you're on intake calls and

involved in emails about, you know, CPMs and things like that. Like, this is not the writers, this is not the Grisham life. This is not, this is Crichton. Yeah, I've just crossed over from Grisham to Crichton. Yeah, but I'll tell you what I did. So I made a rule upfront. I said, okay, this gets a half day a week. Like that was my rule for starting the podcast. It gets a half day a week.

If I wanna do anything else with it, I have to figure out how to fit it into that half day a week. And so I probably slowed down the growth of it, but because I could only give it a half day a week, I had to slowly let it grow enough because I could only give it a half day a week, I had to slowly let it grow enough that it could support for me to hire someone to take over all of the computer stuff. And that bought me a little bit more time and then I could spend some more time on this. And when I added video, we had to wait until I could hire someone to do that. But I've kept that

rule. It doesn't get to expand out of there. And that's been an interesting artificial constraint. I think it's helped keep it reasonable. That's good that you've adhered to that well you're very good at it there's something about professors who do podcasts like they're so good at just looking at the camera and just you know uh speaking directly to the audience without appearing to have to look at notes or any, you know, it's quite a talent. We one take those episodes, yeah. Because it's time efficient. I only have a half day.

I'm like, I'm looking for the cuts. Like, wow, he's still going. He hasn't looked down at all. Like, is there a teleprompter there? How is he doing this? Yeah, we just rock and roll. And I was like, oh, he's a professor. Yeah, we rock and roll professors.

He does this all the time. Exactly. Aim us at a mic or a camera and say talk and we'll go. That's great. I just got back from a month long sabbatical. Amos had a mic or a camera and say, talk and we'll go. That's great. I just got back from a month long sabbatical, which is a practice that I began five years ago when I was flirting with complete burnout and went begrudgingly away to try to detach,

which was a very uncomfortable experience, but much needed. But you're saying after leaving law where you were very burnt out and then coming into this cure for the burnout, after a while, you ended up back in a place again where you were- It's a longer story. Flirting with burnout again.

So I kind of petered out on law slowly. It wasn't a clean break. I did it for a long time as I became more and more immersed in kind of the ultra endurance stuff and that led to the book. But we were financially very lean for a very long time. And when this podcast started to kick in and became a commercial enterprise,

I became very devoted to protecting it and nurturing it and growing it on using slow productivity rules, but maybe not in the healthiest way. And after almost 10 years of doing it, like eight or whatever, I hadn't taken a break. And I think I was operating from a place of post-traumatic stress of like, I just can't be in that place of financial destitution.

And I was really intent on building something that would be sustainable and successful and solid to the point where it became difficult to take a break. But I did and it was transformative. And now I build it into every year. So every year I take a month off. So I just got back like a week ago. And I would say that this break, I was the most unplugged off devices, kind of detached from work that I've ever been. And I realized that it's an incredible luxury to be able to do that. But reflecting on that experience and how it informs how I prioritize my time and attention going forward has been something that, you know, I owe you a debt of gratitude for the work that you do.

Because, you know, you've been very, very, like, inspirational to me in that regard. inspirational to me in that regard. But I think it speaks to the dilemma of the modern day knowledge worker and your desire to kind of address this through the slow productivity book. So perhaps that's a way of like leaning into what the book is about and what this idea of slow productivity is and the kind of peril of the modern knowledge worker. and what this idea of slow productivity is and the kind of peril of the modern knowledge worker. Right, I mean, I think the plight of the modern knowledge worker is we don't have a good definition of productivity.

So we think we do, right? I mean, it's something like, yeah, I know what it means to be productive or not productive, but we don't actually have a great definition in knowledge work of what that means because knowledge work is not well set up for the classical definitions of what it means to be productive,

right? So in a factory, I can measure model T's produced per labor hour input. And it's a number, right? And then if you change something about how you build the model T's and that number goes up, you say this way is better, this is more productive. That came out of agriculture. Bushels yielded per acre of land. If you planted your crop the different way and that number went up, you're like, oh, this is a better way of doing it. Knowledge work emerges as a major sector in mid-20th century, right? The term is coined 1959. How do we define productivity here? Well, those did not exactly apply anymore because individual knowledge workers weren't producing one thing. They were doing many things. And maybe what I'm doing is different than what you are

doing. These are the projects I happen to have taken on. You've taken on these projects. The systems by which we were doing our work also are no longer transparent. So in knowledge work, how you organize yourself or manage your work is personal, which is a big change actually in the history of economic activity, but it's personal productivity. So there's nothing to even improve in an obvious way. So we couldn't use standard definitions of productivity. So what do we do instead? We said, let's use visible activity as a proxy for doing useful effort. Which is just a veneer of productivity, the appearance of productivity, the pseudo productivity.

Pseudo productivity. What are you talking about? Exactly. Right. So at least we'll do this. So if I see you doing stuff, that's better than you not doing stuff. And if we need to be more productive, let's work longer hours. You know, come in early, stay late. That's what we had as our definition of productivity. Now, I'm a technocritic, right? I'm a computer scientist. So, I'm always interested in how technology interacts with these socioeconomic systems. My contention is this really went off the rails when we had the front office IT revolution. So now we have computers and we have networks and we have laptops and then we get wireless internet.

Now suddenly you can demonstrate visible activity at any point, wherever you are. The fine grainedness of these demonstrations is much smaller, right? It's now not just I see you in your office. I have to actually be answering specific messages and work can follow you wherever you go. Also, the low friction nature of digital communications made potential work really skyrocket. So workload per worker really went up because it was just much easier now for things to be put on your plate. If I can just send you an email like, hey, can you handle this? That's much lower friction, much less social capital costs and having to actually come to your office and ask you to do something.

So workloads also spiraled. Pseudo-productivity did not play well in that environment. So if I could demonstrate busyness at any point in my life and there was a never-ending queue of work, this was gonna create a crisis. Because now every moment at the office or not, at home, home office, not in the home office, on the soccer field, wherever you are,

you're constantly now in the psychological battle, internally speaking, between do I demonstrate more productivity or not? This is what I think started to burn people out. It's what began to create a burnout crisis in knowledge work that you really don't see pick up until the early 2000s, right? If you look at time management books from the 1990s, look at, you know, First Things First by Stephen Covey, all optimism, all figure out your values and you can carefully plan your day to actualize all of your best interests, like rah, rah, very positive. You get to 2004, David Allen's getting things done. And now it's, how do we even find like some moments of Zen-like peace among the onslaught? There's no, everything some moments of Zen-like peace among the onslaught?

There's no, everything is gone except for how do we survive the onslaught? So by the 2000s, digital technology was cracking pseudo productivity. And so I think this is what began to rapidly burn out knowledge workers, that combination. And didn't necessarily translate into actual productivity or moving the ball forward on whatever the mission of the job or the corporation is. Well, I think it made it more apparent because you began to get, once you had these tools, these absurd situations.

Like early in the pandemic, for example, a lot of people found themselves in a situation where they had eight hours of Zoom, right? Zoom after Zoom after Zoom after Zoom. The entire day was spent talking about work with no time actually spent to do work. Not actually doing any work. Which is so absurd that it's like a, like a Kafka play or something like this is some metaphor for the nihilistic reality of life, but it was what

people were actually doing. So it became hard to ignore. And that's why I think the pandemic was the tipping point. Finally, for a lot of people, a lot of knowledge workers, they got, it got so absurd and overloaded so much time spent talking about work, so little time actually doing work that people began looking in the mirror and saying, what am I even doing here? like a good thing until it became so permeable as to be non-existent whatsoever, where there's no boundary or distinction or differentiation between when you're working and when you're not. And then you layer on top of that, this expectation of always being available with the expectation that you are going to immediately

respond to everything that's incoming. And it's not just email, it's got, it's email, it's Slack, it's DMs, it's LinkedIn. It's the number of inputs that people have and ways in which people can get in touch with you is overwhelming. So even yesterday, I came into the studio. I was like, I'm going to get ready to talk to Cal. I've been away for a while. I should probably check in on the inbox, checked email, checked my WhatsApp, responded to a whole bunch of texts. And by the time I was done with that,

it starts over again because there's a whole new tranche of replies to then get into. And then I looked up and it was, I got to the studio at, I don't know, 8.30 or something like that. It was three o'clock. I was like, I hadn't even begun to wrap my head around

like what I wanted to talk to you about yet. Yeah, what did you create? It's insanity. And then you spend your whole day in defense mode. You're not intentional about being on the offense, tackling the things that are most important. And then you leave feeling dispirited and feeling like you didn't actually accomplish anything and questioning.

And maybe, you know, and you're, are you? You're not really. Yeah. Well, this was, this is the idea of the book, right? Is why do we do that? Well, we don't have another workable definition of productivity. So for a lot of people, it's like, this is all I had. This is all my, my organization recognizes is activity, right?

And this is the way you're active in 2024 is you're on email, you're doing this chat. I don't know what else to, if I'm not doing this, then how does anyone know I'm doing productive work? So the solution to all this is let's have better definitions of productivity. Let's have alternative ways of thinking about what it could mean to be productive. Because I had written about, you know, I wrote a book about email and how damaging it was and how this culture was making everyone stupid. It was a terrible idea. It's like turning the lights off in a car factory to save money on your electric bill. It's like you are, but people are putting the steering wheels, you know, on the roof because they can't see

anything. And that's what email was to me. It's convenient, but it's destroying these companies. But why didn't people make changes? Even if they recognize this is very damaging to people's psychological sustainability, we're not actually producing anything valuable. It's because they said, well, what else do we do? Like, how else do I know if my employees are working? Like, what would productivity mean if it's not accessibility? And I thought, well, we could answer that. So let's answer it.

How do you, let's begin the process of answering that. So slow productivity is much more based on producing stuff that's good. And it's much less based on activity. So it's results oriented more than it is activity focused. It has three big ideas. The first is to do fewer things, which terrifies a lot of people when it's shunned.

The second is to work at a natural pace. So this idea, which is possible in a world of pseudo productivity, that you're going to just be full intensity nine to five, week after week, month after month, year after year with no variation. Like you can pull that off if what you're doing is just lots of email. You can't pull that off if you're doing serious cognitive work. So we need more of a natural varied pace. You can't pull that off if you're doing serious cognitive work. So we need more of a natural varied pace. And then finally, obsess over quality.

So counterbalance that or support that with an obsession over the quality of what you produce. I think that combination is engineered to be much more sustainable. It matches the human condition much better. So you can pursue that definition of productivity without, by default, burning out. And I think it's actually effective. It's going to produce a lot of valuable things in your company, your career. These things are going to do well. I want to get into each of the three, but I think before we do that, it should be pointed out that to engage with those three tenets requires at least some agency in your job

or a person at the top who understands this and is trying to create that culture beneath him or her. So I tried to design the ideas in this book that if you're a knowledge worker, even with no buy-in, you can still act to some degree on all three principles. This was the lesson I learned with my last book, which was much more organized on what can organizations do. In this case, like the cure the email problem turns out organizations just aren't willing to do it. Or if they're willing to do it, it's too complicated. It's too hard. And so what I'm really focusing on here is how can we put these ideas into play, even if you have to do it without the direct consent or blessing

of someone above you. So how does that work if your boss has a different expectation? So that's what we get into. Like, okay, can we get concrete? So, all right. So how does that work if your boss has a different expectation? So that's what we get into. Like, okay, can we get concrete? So, all right. So early on principle number one, do fewer things, right? What that actually means is do fewer things at once.

So my argument is if you have fewer things on your plate at any one time, from a mental health perspective, it's way more sustainable. You get rid of that deranging effect of just all I'm doing is talking about work. It also actually increases the rate at which things are finished. Because the issue with having too many things on your plate at the same time is that each of your commitments brings with it its own administrative overhead. So everything you've agreed to has its own little overhead tax,

like emails you have to send about it or meetings you have to go to. So if you have too many things on your plate at once, you say yes too many times. You now have a huge pile of this overhead tax coming to every day. So more and more of your day is spent servicing the things in your list without actually working on it. This not only takes up direct time, it also fragments your day more and more. So your ability to actually make uninterrupted progress, that also begins to degrade. So now the pace at which you're able to finish anything slows down. So yes, you said yes to more things,

but the rate at which anything is getting done is actually slower. So if you can somehow bootstrap your way, and I have ideas about how to do this, but bootstrap your way in the taking on fewer things at once, pretty soon you're gonna be rewarded for this. Because not only does it make your life better,

but your boss or whoever, your clients, will be like, oh, look at this. We're getting things done. This is great. You're a rainmaker over here. And so if you can bootstrap that, it's actually going to be pretty easy to keep going because you're going to be better at what you do. What would be an example of how you would bootstrap that? You said you had some ideas about how it would, like in a very concrete context. Yeah. So like, okay, here's the, this started as a thought experiment actually, but people are trying it. So I'm now proposing this as an actual thing to do.

Imagine you have a shared document at the top. All right, here's the projects I'm currently working on, like actively making progress and dividing line. Here's the queue of projects that I'm gonna work on next in the order I'm gonna work on them. So now someone comes to you and says, hey, like I need you to work on, you know, the Johnson memo. And you say, great, just go to, here's my shared work document. Just, you know, throw it on there, make sure I point out anything I need to know. Or if you want me to follow up with you, just let me

know to do that. Now they have to confront the reality of your workload. And they say, oh, like Rich is working on these three things. There's seven other things in this queue and a couple of things are going to happen there. Either A, they're going to say, actually, you know what, nevermind. Because, you know, actually you have a lot going on. It's not some vague sense of you saying I'm busy. I can see what you're doing or their expectations will be reset.

Okay, if I give this to you, it might be a month till I hear back because I can see what this whole queue is. And it allows people to understand you're only actively working on a few things at a time. And you can even tell them, feel free to keep checking in on here. You can watch your project move its way up the queue and you'll see when it jumps into my active projects list, at which point it would make sense to actually bother me about things. This was supposed to be a thought experiment because it's a little bit contrived,

right? People are trying it. They're doing it. They're doing it. But isn't the exception or isn't there kind of a reality check here? Because the person who's calling you or emailing you and saying, I want you to do this thing is gonna be higher up in the hierarchy of the organization. And they're gonna say, they may look at that and they say, okay, but like, I need you to stop what you're doing

and do my thing first. It takes priority because they're answering to somebody else. And all they care about is making sure that the thing gets done so that they can report to the person above them. Yeah. So in this thought experiment, you say, okay, you add it to the top, you bump something out and you tell that person, you got to talk to the other person that I'm supposed to be doing this thing for. Yeah. Yours got bumped out, but it's at the top of the list. It'll go back in. So you know who actually does this very successfully is software developers. So they figured out a long time ago, okay, it doesn't work well to have all these different

features and stuff we need to add to a product just existing on various people's plates. Just like, hey, also add this feature, also add this feature, also add this feature. The idea of the stack. Yeah, that does not work. And so what do software developers tend to do instead? These agile methodologies that all seem to share a similar workload distribution strategy, which is we will collect the stuff that needs to be done as a team centrally, not assigned to anyone yet, but not lost either. Here it is. Like we have it as index cards on a bulletin board. These are all things that need to be done. And if someone comes up with something else that needs to be done, let's get it right up there so we won't forget it. Over here, we can have a column for each of

our developers. We put what they're working on in their column. And as soon as they're done with it, we'll move that thing to done and we can pull something new onto their plate. And then they'll work on that thing until it's done. So it gives the people who are coming up with the idea. So someone calls the development team from the marketing, whatever department, Hey, our clients really want this, like get this in our program. They can know their, their work, their requesting did not disappear. There it is. It's on the board. It's on the queue. They're going to make a decision every time someone frees up a slot, but it's pull, not push. I pull something new onto my plate when I'm ready, not you push everything onto my plate and then I have to somehow deal with it.

It works fantastically well for software development. I think we should explicitly be doing this in more knowledge work jobs. I'm talking literally index cards on a thing. Here's the one thing I'm working on. We're probably not going to get there anytime soon, but you can internally more or less simulate this by saying, here's what I'm working on. So if you don't want to create that document, which is, look, you got to have the right type of boss to get away from that. You can also do this more internally. So you can say, okay, when someone asks me to do something, I find a time on my calendar to do it. I have to go and

find and protect the time, right? It's not only a time management tactic. You know, you'll have time for it when the time comes. It's a reality check on your schedule. And you can earn a reputation pretty quickly as I'm very careful about my time. Like, okay, we know that about Callie. He's very careful about his time. We ask him to do something instead of giving the immediate yes or no. So instead of saying yes or no in the room, you say, yeah, great, let me go do, I keep very careful track of my time. Let me go find where the time would be for this. And I'll get back to you as soon as I do that

and let you know like when this might be able to fit. Then you go and you do that, you get back to them later. And you might be able to realistically say, if I don't move something else, the next time I can find 15 hours, it's gonna be six weeks from now. You earned a right to do this if people trust that, yeah, he's just organized by his time.

He's not lying. And you have more leeway in that. The trust piece is important because there's probably people who are trying to dodge work or just trying to do the least amount that they're going to be required to. But I think that central kind of portal of shared information through a

document or whatever else gives people the ability to see everything as it actually is, and also obviates a lot of asynchronous communication around it, because you can just look at that and there's no need for emailing back and forth about schedules, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, the asynchronous communication is the killer, not the idea of asynchronous communication, but volume of it. So this is why if you're only working on a small number of things, those things will generate emails

and you'll have to do the back and forth email dance. But if you have three projects, that's a lot less back and forth emails than 13 that you're actively working on. And it's the pile up of that asynchronous communication that really becomes the killer because now you're just constantly servicing ongoing conversations.

For people like yourself and myself, the idea of doing fewer things means learning how to say no. And the more successful you get, the more sexy and fun and cool all those things are that you have to say no to, which really requires you to like flex those muscles and be really clear about what it is that you're doing and what you're willing to sacrifice

to make that thing that you're trying to make. I think that's why it helps to deal with the reality of your time and less of value judgment just on the individual request, right? So, I mean, I think the way we think about yes and no is certain categories of things I say yes to, certain categories I say no to. And where we get in trouble is when the things in the category I say yes to come in faster than we can trouble is when the things in the category I say yes to come in faster than we can handle, right? So then those heuristics fall apart. So that's why dealing with actual time I think is important. How much time do I actually have available? The other thing that works well with what I call it temporarily good yeses. So yeses that you'll say yes to a

little bit, but you can't say yes to everything is quotas. For this type of thing, I do four of them a quarter. For this type of thing, I do it once a year, right? You have these quotas of how many you do. So you're still doing these things that you think are important, but on your terms, right? So I only do four of these. And so once you've already done four, you say, ah, sorry, I do do some of these, but I have a quota per quarter. I already hit my quarter. So my quota this quarter, so I can't do any more now, but maybe next quarter. It's like how I deal with peer reviews as an academic. I got to do them, but there's way more coming in than I can reasonably say yes to. So I have a quota, like this is how many I'm going to do this semester. And I just tell the editors, yeah, you know, I love doing reviews. Thanks for thinking of me. You know,

I have a quota I keep per semester and I just hit that quota. So I actually don't have any slots left to do this one now. That's a great idea. I love that. I'm gonna definitely put that to use. The constant problem that I run into is, and this is generally through email

and sometimes through DMs on social media, is just the deluge of requests or people wanting things. And they're all good people. And many of them are friends of mine and the requests are generally small lifts, but it's a death by a thousand cuts thing where I just can't accommodate all of them, but I'm such a people pleaser that I want to, or I'll make some mealy mouth response about how I'm busy now, which means you're gonna hear from them later, but it's very difficult for me to craft a response

that's kind and compassionate while also respecting my time and my boundaries around what I can and actually can't do. And that's, I have the same issue. Yeah, that is a hard one. And they don't fall into specific buckets. Every request is a little bit different. Yeah. Well, like for example, I think it's Adam Grant has this great document for, so you've requested a blurb. This is document that he sends.

Although he blurbs every book. Like it seems like his, he would think, yeah. And he responds to emails immediately. I've never, I've never, there's nobody who, in my experience, has responded to my emails faster than that guy. Well, this is an ongoing. I know he's doing that to everybody. And I will say, I did his podcast recently. I think it will be out before this episode came out. Him and I had a debate about that.

Because this is our internal war, is I wrote A World Without Email, and then he wrote this New York Times op-ed about, you should answer every email. And so we had like a sort of good natured debate. I want to hear that because the whole inbox zero thing is total insanity in my opinion. And at some point I just had to make peace with the fact that I'm just not going to respond to every email. And just because somebody emails you doesn't mean that they're entitled to a response. I wrote about that in deep work, how, and people got mad about this, but I think there's a kernel of truth in it. The way when I was in grad school, so MIT, the way the MIT professors,

the sort of imminent MIT professors dealt with this issue was I will only respond to your email if it's, I should respond to it, it's relevant to me, you've given me all the information I need, and I'm the right person to be asking this. And if it didn't satisfy any of those things, they just wouldn't respond. And then the students would learn, oh, well, either I need to rethink this through and maybe provide more information, or maybe this is not the right person to ask about. And that system actually worked out pretty well. And then people got mad and said, oh, you should answer people.

And this has been whatever. But I think that spirit can exist of not every email deserves, if not an answer, not every email deserves that you actually fulfill what's being request, you know, that just because it came in. But I agree, it's the asymmetry of the situation. I mean, for the person sending you that message, it's 20 seconds. Like this would be great, you know, if Rich did this. it's 20 seconds. Like this would be great, you know, if Rich did this. Sure, and fulfilling the request might take a half an hour, 15 minutes, an hour. Yeah, that's-

But those things add up is the problem. Do you get the, hey, can't we just hop on a call, emails? Well, that's a non-starter. Because I think for some people it's like, I have to start up and all I do is do calls all day. Ryan Holiday is very funny about that. He has all kinds of flippant, like funny things that he says about

like people who wanna have a cup of coffee with them. Yeah, yeah, he's thought. But how do you do it? Like what is your protocol around email, how you respond, how you deal with, like you're out there in the world and email is really the only way that people can get ahold of you.

And not even really. So one of the world and email is really the only way that people can get a hold of you. And not even really. So one of the things I did is I got rid of any general purpose public facing email address. So like on your website, there's no contact email. There's emails for various things, right? So it's like speaking, rights, whatever. Like here's various people to write to. And I have an email, this is critical for me, called interesting at calnewport.com. I say, if you have like a link or a book or something you think I might like, send it there. But I'm very clear. I say, I try to read-

But then people abuse that, I'm sure, right? Yeah, but I say, here's the key. I have a sentence right under it. I try to read these, but I can't respond to any. And it just resets expectation. So it doesn't matter. Yeah. And people still try to like ask questions, but they know they're fishing because the expectation was set clear. You know, I'm not going to respond to these. I try to read ask questions, but they know they're fishing because the expectation was set clear. You know, I'm not gonna respond to these. I try to read them.

I love, thank you for sending me stuff. I love it. I find a lot of cool links this way, but I can't actually respond to those. And so I don't. And I don't think people mind so much because the expectation was set clear. The harder is people I kind of know

or I've met before in some orbits. That is much more difficult. And there I've had to just fall down to the compassionate hard no. I don't know, you've probably found the same thing. The no has to be chiseled into the 10 commandments clear. You can't give any wiggle room. It has to be like, I cannot do this,

but then surrounded by a lot of niceness. But none of the niceness that gives wiggle room to like, well, maybe I could do this. I'll check in with you later on this. But I hate it too. I don't know, you probably feel the same way. I do, I don't, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to not respond.

It doesn't feel good to say no. I know, can't you just come like to my company would love that can you just come and Zoom? Yeah, okay, I hear you. Talk about like narrow problems. Yeah, these are high class problems. You know, it's like, you know, cry me a river. The idea, so the second idea of working at a natural pace

is on some level obvious. Like if you want to sustain your output over the long haul, you're gonna have to do it in a sustainable way. There was a line that I had in Finding Ultra. My coach, when I was training for these ultra endurance races, would say to me, the prize doesn't go to the fastest person. It goes to the person who slows down the least. So what does it mean to not slow down? And what are you doing in the process of not slowing down? And I think for me, the challenge or like where I feel confronted in that is the kind of dopamine addict inside of me

that likes to go all in on things and blot out the world and just grind it until you feel like you're going to collapse. Short of that, feeling like you didn't give it your best effort. When in truth, the best way is to deal with things in little chunks, like the way Ryan Holiday writes books, where he's always just kind of doing it. It is a natural pace and he's ultimately churning out book after book after book, similar to you. But that's a more uncomfortable space for me to embrace than the, I need to make the whole world go away so I can focus on this one thing to do my best work. Yeah, this is why I took inspiration from looking at people who were doing

just the absolute most impressive world-changing results. I was like, let's look at the extremes. I'm talking Newton Galileo, Marie Curie, or even more recently, like Lin-Manuel Miranda. It said, what pace did they work at? And the thing you come back to again and again is highly variable. They took their time. None of them just sat down and pounded away and then had in the heights or sat down and pounded away and had the Principia. It took a long time with variations in intensity. I'm working on it. I'm not. I'm working on it. I'm not, I'm working on it.

I'm not steadily coming back to it. And more importantly than just coming back to it, when they're working on it, taking really high quality swings. You know, when I'm working on this, it's getting my full, like this is the best thing I could be doing on this right now.

I'm not trying to dance around what really matters, but also I'm doing other things and coming back to it, coming back to it. And they took their time. They took longer and they had variations in their intensity. So like Lin-Manuel Miranda writing his first play, which was in the Heights, not Hamilton. And it was a major play, eight Tony awards, right? Seven years he worked on this. He wrote a version in college at Swarthmore as a sophomore, and it was pretty terrible. And he worked on it off and on for seven years in those last few years that it picked up more momentum. And what they were doing is he was working with a couple of alums who had a theatrical production company in theater in

Manhattan. And Lin-Manuel Miranda was working, he was teaching and doing some column writing, and he had a freestyle rap troupe he was touring with. Freestyle Love Supreme. Freestyle Love Supreme. I have a friend who's in that. I've seen the show too. It's unbelievable. Yeah, so he was touring the world doing this,

but what they would do is they kept coming back to, we're gonna do readings. We're gonna do readings. We're gonna bring in actors and do readings of the play. And we're gonna come back again in a month or two. And so like, let's learn from what happened, make a bunch of changes and we'll come back and do it again so it's a slow and steady continuing to work on it continue to polish it so it was

neither i'm just all in all the time but it also wasn't procrastination right so he kept coming back to it and when he came back to it he was making the best possible swings like we're going to sit here with actors and we're going to listen to them read the play and see what's not working. That combination, keep coming back to it, taking the best quality swings, but having a good up and down pace of how often you take those swings. So you don't, whatever the metaphor here would be,

throw out your rotator cuffs if this is a golf swing. That is what the really great creative producers do. That's how they do it. Darwin writing the origin species, same thing, right? Marie Curie honing in about the isolate radium, two month vacation in the French countryside with her family. She came back to it after that, come back to it,

take breaks, come back to it. The reason the Lin-Manuel Miranda example is so powerful is that he is a modern age figure. So we can point to Greek philosophers, the OG knowledge workers, you know, where it was just, there was a lot of time and there wasn't as many distractions as we have today, where you could stare at the stars and, you know,

pontificate, you know, big ideas for hours and hours at a time. Our world doesn't necessarily function that way. And we have to be very intentional to kind of carve out those moments for boredom, deeper reflection, and the kind of indulgence of the creative imagination that's required to create something new,

different, and great. So Lynn is great. And I think there's a lot of, I think when you look to entertainment, the arts, filmmakers, those are the people that you see as great examples of this because they're not on social media.

They're not trying to be everywhere all the time. They go away for a very long time and then they come back and they're like, here's my thing. And the whole world stops and celebrates it. Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, all of these people. No phones.

Yeah, you've talked, yeah. Like they're not tweeting and they're not making TikToks. Chris Nolan doesn't own a smart, he doesn't ownino, all of these people. No phones. Yeah, you've talked, yeah, like they're not tweeting and they're not making TikToks. Chris Nolan doesn't own a smart, he doesn't own a phone. Well, he's great. He doesn't use a phone. It's a rich man, poor man thing.

He doesn't have a phone. I think he owns the house next door to his where that's his office. He works with his wife a lot. He's got his team of people and he goes super deep and it takes five years or whatever it does. He employs a lot of people with phones, I guess. Yeah, I'm sure.

Yeah, it's like, it's the rich guy thing where there's somebody else makes the call for you. I don't think he has an email address either. He doesn't email, yeah. And Quentin Tarantino, I think also doesn't do email. But Nolan though, it's more symbolic, right? So it's not, okay, literally, yeah, he literally doesn't have a phone, but he has an assistant who does.

It's more to not have a phone in Hollywood means I don't wanna hear about the opportunities. I don't want to hear from my representation about this and that. And when you get involved in this, I want to be left alone to work on the movie. But there's a bigger philosophy here about studying these figures, right? Which I articulate because I think it's important. Right early on in the book, I say, if we look to slow food as an example, like, so how did slow food approach cuisine? It said, let's look back to traditional cuisines because presumably these are things where people spent a very long time sort of evolving what works and what doesn't. So if we want a cuisine that is going to be more meaningful and sustainable than fast food, let's look back to the past.

And there's a lot of good ideas that have been involved there. So I said, can we do that with productivity? I said, well, knowledge work is new. It started in the mid-20th century at any large scale. What is traditional cuisine in this context? I said, well, there's traditional knowledge workers, people who worked with their minds for a living. Their circumstances were super different, like you're pointing out. They were Newton or Marie Curie or even Lin-Manuel Miranda. That's very different than someone who works in an office, but it's also an advantage of looking at them because what they had was a huge amount of flexibility to experiment with what works and what doesn't. So it's like, if we want to see a natural experiment on what's the absolute best

way to create valuable things with your minds, these are the people you want to start with because you'll get the principles out of it. Oh, work at a natural pace. Don't have too many things on your plate at the same time. Then we have to do the hard work of how do we adapt that to a job where I have a computer and an email address and I'm not a playwright and I'm not living in 17th century England. But I think we can do that. So that's the way I approach a lot of the ideas in slow productivity. Isolate the principles discovered by people

who had all of the advantage in the world to just explore and figure out what works. And then say, can we get that same idea into modern knowledge work? So taking a longer time for Lin-Manuel Miranda might be, I spent seven years working on this play and I just keep coming back to it once every couple of months. In the office context, what it might mean is take your initial timeline you come up with when you're thinking about how

long is it going to take me to do this project and double it because you're probably being way too optimistic about it and you want to give yourself more breathing room. It might mean, let's be careful about how we schedule projects so sometimes of years have more than room. It might mean let's be careful about how we schedule projects so some times of years have more than others. So our intensity can go up and down. And during the periods where we have less projects, don't fill the space. Let that be a less intensity period because we want variations in intensity. We can't actually go to the French countryside like Marie Curie or go to Lake George like Georgia O'Keeffe, but we can learn the principle, have variations in seasonality, right? And so we can adapt, we should study the traditional knowledge workers, not because we can replicate their exact approach to work, because of course

that doesn't exist anymore, but we can learn principles from it. And they're the right people to study for these principles because unlike modern knowledge workers, they had a lot of flexibility to try to figure out, well, should I do this? Should I work hard or not? Should I go intense and take a full break or should I go up and down? They experimented with all this. There's a lot of wisdom there. The hard part's adapting it to our modern jobs, but that's what I've been doing for a while, trying to figure out how to deal with these jobs. But fundamentally, it's a mind shift from this idea where we over-index on what we think we can accomplish in a period of, let's say a year. Oh yeah. And we wildly under index or under appreciate what we

can accomplish in a decade. And all I have is my own experience, but when I reflect back on it, anything worthwhile that I've done took 10 years. Yep. Flat out, period. And as an ultra endurance athlete, like I'm all about like the long run, you know, like anything great requires this massive foundation that takes a long time to build. You do it quietly and anonymously, brick by brick, nobody's watching, there's nothing sexy about it. It's very easy to just go a day and not do it

and no one will care. But it's absolutely required if you're going to build a pyramid that's going to be stable and move you in the direction you want to go. But that butts up against a culture that prioritizes the hack and the kind of overnight success story that gets kind of imprinted on our brains through scrolling on social media and the way that success stories are spun in news stories to make it look like they all happened pretty quickly when in truth, almost none of them have. Yep.

And so it's a lot harder to sell your version of the story, which is it's hard work. It's gonna take a long time. It's worth it. Here's how you can do it, but you're gonna have to slow down. You're gonna have to ignore all of these things. You're gonna have to resist all of the incentives

that are pulling you in a certain direction and stand firm on a different plot of turf. And that's gonna meet resistance from people around you as well. Like it's a big ask and it's not sexy in comparison to the guy who's saying you can lose all this weight in a quick period of time. You can run a marathon on only three hours of training a week or whatever it is that kind of our internet and our culture traffics best in. Well, I mean, yes, I think that's true. I think that's my story too, right?

I mean, the way I see my story is in college, I said, here's what I want to do. I want to do computer science and write. And like, I'm going to go all in on that. And it was a decade of, without really any accolades to show for it, just doing computer science as a grad student and a postdoc and writing books. My initial books, I signed my first book deal when I was just turned 21 years old, paperback originals, student study advice guides. That's the only book I could get deals for because I was 21 years old. But each of those books, I made intentionally more complicated than the last one to try to test out and develop new writing skills I didn't have before. So the first one was very simple. It was rules, two pages per rules, then a more complicated

chapter book. And then my third book, again, a student advice book, but now I'm writing it like a Malcolm Gladwell book because I wanted to practice doing more of contrarianism, idea writing, journalism. It took a decade, right? I didn't do any social media. I wasn't out there trying to get quick attention for what I was doing. I didn't parlay my student books. You know, there wasn't a lot of people writing these. I didn't parlay this into, here's a study tutor business.

I had friends who did this. I'm gonna hire a bunch of tutors and use my brand. And do a masterclass. Do a masterclass on it. Exactly. I didn't do any of that. An email funnel. Email, yeah, nothing.

And people thought I was crazy. Like, what do you mean you're not on social media? What do you mean do any of that. An email funnel. Email. Yeah, nothing. And people thought I was crazy. Like, what do you mean you're not on social media? What do you mean? But I was trying to hone craft. And I said early on, I was like, I want to be like successful professor. And I was like, I want to write my two specific things was these big idea hardcover books that I read as like a teenager. I want to write those. And I want to write for the New Yorker. Like that's what, these were the things I wanted to do. 10. Because before that, it was, you're a student and you wrote like how to study something. Like, is this like a real book? Like what's going on?

10 years before anything happened, they would all catch the attention of the world. Then you have to add another, geez, nine years onto that to get to, I start writing for the New Yorker and get my first New York Times bestseller, right? Got to get from, get from, so. And how old are you now, 40, 41?

41, so young. Yeah, that's a lot. But I think the- I started early. The thing that's important to understand is that you had a clarity on what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be. That was pretty firm and sketched out. I think that's unusual for a young person

to know exactly what they wanna do. And as a result, we are living our lives more reactively than intentionally. We're kind of bouncing around from job to job. And I think, you know, Steven Pressfield would say, "'Go out and have a million odd jobs "'because how else are you gonna figure out, you know, "'who you want to be unless you see the world and meet all different kinds of people? And if you want to be a writer, all of that is going to be material for what you write later.

That's a very different kind of picture of a path to pursue. But I think the more common story is the person who's like, well, maybe I want to do this, but I'm not sure, but I need to pay my rent. Well, right. So, I mean, the advice here that early on that really carried me through a lot of that period was that Steve Martin, born standing up, where he had a quote, and it wasn't actually in his memoir, but in the publicity he was doing surrounding that memoir. And he had this quote on the Charlie Rose show where he said, people are always asking me, you know, uh, how do I break out in the entertainment industry? How do I do what you do? You know, so do I have to get the right agent or what's the right, where do I need to live? Like what's the right club? And Martin said, the advice I always give, which is not what people want to hear, but it's what works is be so good. They can't ignore

you. Once you do that, everything else will come. And I remember reading that book and that was his whole thing was, it was, and I had a whole chapter about this in Slow Productivity that got cut for length and I loved writing it. We're just telling his 10 year story of cracking comedy, right? That's how it happens.

So then I wrote a book. That was that first idea hardcover book was called So Good They Can't Ignore You based off of the Steve Martin quote. And what it was arguing was this idea that you have to figure out in advance. This is what I'm meant to do. And then go match that to your activity. I said, as a fairy tale for most people. And in fact, if you study most people who love what they do,

their entrance into that path was much more haphazard and contingent than they tell after the fact. And so I opened that book on Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs later in his life talking at Stanford saying what was interpreted as him saying, you got to follow your dreams. That was the headline in the Stanford paper that was summarizing that. But it's not what he did, right? He stumbled backwards in the Apple computer. That was not where his passion and deep interest lay. So what really matters is doing something really well. And so even if you don't have some vision of this is what I want to be doing for sure,

I know that for a fact, you're always better off or almost always better off focusing on like, well, what's something right now I'm trying to do better than anyone I know? And even if that shifts over time, you don't know where that's going to lead you, but doing something really well is always the foundation for these stories of people ending up with really cool situations in their life. So at the very least, you're getting practice. You're never going to busy your way to something fundamental. There's no amount of social media activity or email or Slack or Zoom meetings that can ever alchemize into like a really impressive thing

on which you can build a really cool life. It just, the equation's not there. It's lead that will never turn to gold. Right, so this third pillar of slow productivity being obsessing over quality. Yeah. What's interesting about that, and I'm fully bought in on this, I believe this.

Again, back to incentives and kind of the way the internet operates, it rewards, it gives the rewards, at least in the short term, not to something of the highest caliber or quality, but to the thing that is configured perfectly for the algorithm to amplify it, right? Which is at odds or orthogonal to quality. And I believe that like, just use the podcast, for example, like if I want this podcast to grow, I have a choice. I can start trying to create thumbnails and titles that are gonna catch that algorithm. And to some extent you do have to play that. You gotta like do a little bit of that. And you're on YouTube. I don't know what your relationship with that is.

It's a whole thing. I try to do it in a way where I can sleep at night. But ultimately the real lever is the quality of the work that you're doing. How can I have the best conversation? How can I engage my, find the best guests that I can and engage them to the best of my abilities to produce something meaningful and helpful that for the audience that will stand the test of time

and be something evergreen that will be enjoyed by people all over the world. And that's a longer, it's again, it's a long play. It's not gonna translate immediately into views or subscribers or anything like that. But I wanna be proud of the work and it really is about craft for me. And I believe ultimately still at the end of the day

that that is really the only thing that matters and what's most important. Well, this is what I like about podcast, right? Let's think podcast versus YouTube. We have two different incentive structures there. What grows a podcast? It's really good. And it takes a long time.

I mean, there's a few exceptions, right? Oh, you mean just in the audio space? Audio space. Forget about YouTube. Forget YouTube for now. Forget YouTube and all that, right? Because discoverability is a different thing. It's a different thing.

And it's not algorithmically driven. That's right. But the thing about YouTube and podcast, and you know, I don't know if I fully believe this, but talking to a real YouTube specialist, a YouTube podcast specialist, all he does is YouTube for podcasters. And he says, yeah, YouTube doesn't grow the audio. It doesn't grow the podcast audience. It's its own thing. You're reaching people who watch on different audience and you can reach them. And it's nice to reach them because that's people who might not.

And it's good for other reasons. So it's an audience you're reaching. So if you're trying to sell a book or something like this, that's a big audience now who you can talk to and you can show them things. And if you have a course or something or whatever, but they're not gonna come over and greatly increase your audio numbers.

That's just, it's the audio grows on its own. It's a different audience. And what grows a podcast is they have to be really good and it takes a long time. I mean, you've been doing this for 12 years. Yeah, coming up on 12 years. Yeah, it takes a long time. Yeah, I mean, there's a few exceptions,

like Huberman, I guess. Yeah, I mean, Huberman had astronomical growth, but he benefited from guesting on a bunch of shows right before he launched. So he had a higher profile than most. Yeah, I think Jocko had a similar job. Jocko, because he was on Tim. Yeah.

Lex Friedman, who's an interesting case. But Lex is not. He was on Rogan a bunch of times. But he did his podcast for years. Right, that's right. The AI podcast. But it was an AI podcast, and it was just, it was a very geeky kind of thing. It's a very different thing now. But interestingly on YouTube, like he

doesn't, he put, you know, like he doesn't play the clickbaity game at all. And he's been very successful as an outlier transcending the need to kind of fall prey to those, you know, incentives. Yes. Then that's the question you said before the internet rewards doing more of the playing to the algorithm but i guess the question is what's the reward there the reward is actually in this sort of fake denomination of the platform we'll give you more subscribers and then you can point to that number and be like yay my subscribers are higher or something like that it's not a real reward though no you're just chasing a shadow chasing a shadow yeah so i i'll dispute the premise, that what we're chasing in that social game is real rewards. I mean, occasionally it is, but I also think the, these platforms are very, very good

at grabbing the outliers that create rather relatively quickly, huge financial success from having a big followership purely in a social domain. Those are outliers, but they put it out there because then everyone thinks, well, that could be me. Like I could post something. This seems easier than hosting a podcast. I mean, my kids are all elementary school age, elementary school age kids. What do they want to do is they want to be YouTubers because they can imagine doing it. They're like, oh, I could imagine doing it. It's just talking. And some of them make a lot of money, right? So you sort of have this illusion in a way that people didn't have

about book writing, for example. They sort of understood it's hard to write a book. It's hard to sell a book. It's hard to get someone to convince you to write a book. And so you get seduced by the low barrier to entry plus the lottery effect. You could just start and you never know,

it could take off, which by the way is exactly what TikTok then explicitly exploited. So TikTok then came around and said, oh, this effect is very powerful. And since we can control exactly who sees what, here's what we're going to do. When you're new to TikTok, we're going to every once in a while, especially early on, just show your video to a bunch of people. And then you're like, oh my God.

And then you're hooked. You're hooked. You're like, I got 7. And then you're hooked. You're hooked. You're like, I got 7,000 views on this video. Maybe I'm one post away from being a TikTok influencer. Everyone's gonna say, so it just directly feeds you just enough to stay hooked. It's all a seductive game.

It's interesting with YouTube now being at the age that it's at, that there's a whole generation of creators who have burned out and left the platform and mental health has become a big topic of conversation among those content creators in a good way. I would imagine your book is probably pretty popular with a lot of YouTube creators. And this one certainly will be popular with them as well.

Like how do you do this in a sustainable way? And, you know, to my point about taking a sabbaticals and having been doing this podcast now for 11 years, like you have to, it has to be sustainable. You can't produce on a pace that is gonna lead to burnout because you're not gonna make it for the long haul. So the long haul is what's important. If we are looking at framing this in the context of decades,

which is what is required to be good, I think. So how do you build that in to, you know, prevent those things from happening? Yeah, I mean, I think there's some of these YouTube game streamers that are almost like a Greek tragedy because there was this reinforcing cycle of, okay, you got to post so much footage of you playing these video games that it became like the Midas and the Golden Touch. Yeah, like, oh my God, I like video games. I like YouTube. And it becomes, you see it in their eyes as their eyes dead end for, oh my God, I got to play like six hours of video games today because I have to keep, well, here, don't be if this is cynical. I'll tell you what my YouTube strategy

is and then you can tell me if this is reasonable or not. So here's the way I thought about it. So I think video is important, right? Because I learned from looking back in history, the way television ate radio's lunch, even though radio was cheap and we had really good, we knew how to produce radio programming that was interesting and it was portable and you could have it in your car. And it was a very good technology, like audio podcasting is now.

And television came along and it was like a much clunkier technology. It was a small screen. We didn't know how to make compelling content for that format. It was expensive and you had to stay like one room in your house to watch it. And it just destroyed radio, right? Because people like to watch other people. And so I see this future in podcasting, for example, I think the future is going to be

video. I think it's going to be on smart TVs. And I'm thinking it's not going to be YouTube. It's not going to be algorithmically distributed content. I think that era is going to die. I think it's going to be much more like I have an app for the Rich Roll Network and it's a horizontal carousel of the latest episodes of the episodes on this network. And just like with Netflix, like, oh, there's a new episode

of this show and I want to watch it. I want to watch it on my TV. It's going to be cable TV times a thousand, like an indie version cable TV. Right now, however, YouTube's the only game in town for practicing with video or getting video out there. So what I'm trying to do is the firewall approach. I'm going to make my podcast and I'm making it for the audio audience. And I want to make the best possible podcast. And the only number I care about is the curve of downloads. Like are people down, is a show growing audio.

Over here, I have a YouTube guy. So he can take the video. We filmed the whole podcast. It's a whole different thing. And I tell the YouTube guy, you can't touch the video, but whatever you wanna do with thumbnails, whatever you wanna do with titles, whatever, right? YouTube, I guess, you're talking to an algorithm

and the algorithm talks to other people on your behalf. You can do what you want with the thumbnails or titles. Don't tell me about numbers, though. That's like you're on this side of the firewall. So we can practice video and maybe reach a whole other younger audience that get exposed like me in the show. But I don't want that algorithm to influence me at all because if I did, it would take six episodes before it was, okay, here's 17 hacks for making your productivity system working with Gen AI.

Yeah, there's plenty of ways that we could reductively take the Cal Newport canon of knowledge and turn it into viral videos. Yeah. And then you become a cartoon character. Yeah. As a result.

Yeah. Yeah, we don't want that. I don't want that. You don't want that. I don't think the world wants that, Rich. Well, I think it's, time will tell what will happen with podcasting. I agree that I think video is important

and I think there's something about the audience making a visual connection with the person that they're listening to that is much more indelible than just audio. Although the real advantage of podcasting is it's the one form of medium that you can take with you and do something else while you're enjoying it. Like I actually don't watch other podcasts on video.

All of my podcast consumption is audio only, but I'm aware that smart television consumption of YouTube and podcasting is skyrocketing, you know, and it's growing really quickly. So I think there will be, I know YouTube is very intent on trying to create an ecosystem that's very favorable to podcasting,

but I think there will be something else that will come along. And I would like it to not be algorithmically driven so that we're not getting crazy thumbnails and those incentives that are driving that kind of behavior disappear I would like it to not be algorithmically driven so that we're not getting crazy thumbnails and those incentives that are driving that kind of behavior disappear and the podcast can just be what they are. I mean, Netflix learned this, right? So Netflix's original idea was how are we going to differentiate? We're going to have the recommendation algorithm. This was the big thing

with Netflix business model was you're just going to have this stream of suggestions that you're gonna love. And this is what's important. And they learned over time that like, actually people have their own ways of doing curation, right? They say, show me the top 10. I'm interested. What are the top 10 movies playing on your thing right now? But I'm gonna curate by hearing about things.

People are gonna tell me the same way we did with cable TV. How'd you hear about Mad Men? Well, someone told you like, hey, A&E has this new show and it's really crazy. The streamers figured that out and they no longer push recommendation as the core of their business anymore. All they're pushing is content quality. The idea of we want shows that people like and they tell other people about it, right? So this is why I think the algorithmic model that YouTube is embracing, it's not what people want. And people want a more high friction, cybernetic distributed curation, meaning there's some technology, there's some human, there's

back and forth. Someone's telling me about something. This group really likes this. We want an actual messier way of curating. This thing is really good. This one isn't. Someone told me about this. Now I want to watch it. See, I don't think curation, that's what Silicon Valley is getting wrong in the content space. Curation is not the problem people need solved, right? I think it's backend, it's infrastructure. How do you open up the ability to produce high-end content, media content to more and more people? So there's more diversity of content from good things to arise from. Like that's the actual role of Silicon Valley in it, from good things to arise from. Like that's the actual role of Silicon Valley in it,

but they want it to be curation because then you have a proprietary algorithm and you can get lock-in. But I don't think people want, curation's not the problem. You know, I can figure out what movies are good or what television show I wanna watch, what podcast. I'm gonna learn about it from other people.

I'm gonna hear about it. You know, I think a more human curation is a healthier way to deal with digital content. So what would that look like then? You think it will be a lot of siloed, different applications that are smart TV aligned or whatever that's, yeah. But the problem is there's more and more consolidation

of where people go for their information and content. So trying to drive people to some other site when everybody's going to YouTube or Spotify or what have you becomes a heavier lift. Yeah, but if it's an app on a smart TV, it's sitting next to Netflix and Max and Hulu. I'm already used to the idea that I'm clicking on a chiclet on my smart TV. So it's not like the Rich Roll podcast app. It's like the podcast app for smart TVs. So I think there's gonna be some of those, but I think there will be some Rich Roll podcast apps.

And then when you hear about it, I download that app once, and now it's on my, just like I downloaded HBO, you know, when I wanted to watch True Detective. Yeah, and then you see your carousel or whatever. Then you have it on there. Yeah, I mean, I think this is gonna be a higher threshold world, right? Because to survive at that level,

it's probably gonna be subscription-based, not ads-based. Most shows aren't gonna be able to survive there. But where I think we're gonna end up is in a place where there's more great content than there was in the age of cable and just streamers. But not, I mean, we're always promised this world whenever there's a new indie content development technology, everyone gets this implicit promise of, oh, now anyone is going to be able to like have an audience and reach people. Now still, most people aren't going

to reach an eye. It's still very hard to produce something that people really like, but the gates are down. The threshold is high, but the gates are down. So lots more people can try and the stuff that makes it past that threshold and people are downloading on their smart TV, that's going to be a more interesting, diverse group of experimental content than it would be in an age of just cable. In some sense, that's what social media did so cleverly, among other things, is the Web 2 revolution came along. Hey, now anyone can start a blog. Anyone can publish information. You don't have to hack HTML and you don't have to write for a magazine. can start a blog. Like anyone can publish information. You don't have to hack HTML and you don't have to write for a magazine. But the problem was no one read most people's blogs

because it was actually easy now to publish, still pretty hard to get people to pay attention because you had to have something people cared about. Then Facebook came along and said, okay, here's our model. Our model at first is attention. You post and here's the social contract. Your friends post, you go and like their things and they'll come and like your things and everyone can feel like they have an audience. So what they were actually selling was this sense of you had an audience.

That's what social media sells is this sense of people care what you have to say. But the reality is when you leave that bubble is it's very hard to get people to care what you have to say. But if you can persist, then it could be pretty cool that it can have a lot of impact. And in have to say, but if you can persist, then it could be pretty cool, that it could have a lot of impact.

And in order to persist, you need to adhere to the slow productivity rules. It all comes back to slow productivity. But back on this obsession, obsessing over quality, yes, I think the best will always win over time with some caveats. Like this can easily be confused with perfectionism, which you write about in the book. So somebody can say, well, I'm obsessing over quality, but they're not actually doing anything. They're in their own way because they're not going to release something until it's perfect.

Or maybe even, you know, a little light dusting of avoidance or procrastination or some kind of analysis paralysis. Like we can tell ourselves we're obsessing over quality, but is that really what we're doing? Yeah. Well, these are both big issues people have with it. And I think there's a couple of things that help. One, we have to clarify when you obsess over quality, you're not obsessing over the goal of producing the best quality thing that anyone can do, right? Because that is something that paralyzes people right away. If they think obsess over quality means, yeah, your goal is to become the best writer,

podcaster, computer programmer in the world, right? And they rightly realize, well, I'm never gonna do that. So that's not the goal. The goal is not to obsess over quality en route to being the very best at what you do in the world, but just you care about the quality of what you do and how good that is and where that is, as it depends on what you're doing and the competition and your talents. And don't worry about that. It's just, I want to do what I do increasingly better, whatever that means. So I think that's important. And then two,

to avoid the procrastination trap or the perfectionism trap, I think it's really useful to have the mentality of, I think of it internally as the next one's going to be great. So it's like, this is how I tackle writing books. Because once I get going in a book, and I'm in the reality of it, and I'm like, oh my God, like, this is fine, but is it great? And this, I just read this book, this book is brilliant, and my book is not that. And how do I not just like stop and obsess? I was like, yeah, okay. The next book, that's going to be the great one. This one, I'm just going to finish, but I'm going to start thinking that the next one's going to be the one that's great. So the next one going to be a great mentality means you ship what you're doing. You still, you care about quality, but you, you ship by taking the pressure off. This one has to be the best. Seth goes to an idea of like ship the work. Ship the work. Your job is to finish it and ship it. Ship it, and you wanna ship good stuff,

but you don't have to ship the very best thing you can do because the next one's gonna be the very best one. I mean, a lot of writers do this. They start, I do this for sure. I mean, you work on the next book in your head while you get far along to the writing process of the current book. Do you already know what the next book is?

Yeah. Are you like Ryan, where it's just literally a seamless like wheel, like from one to the next? It's not, well, the last four books, so the last two, I do two book deals basically is what I'm trying to say. So Deep Work came out and I took a break

and then I sold together Digital Minimalism in a World Without Email. Then I took a break. And then I sold together Slow Productivity with the next book. So I do, I pair books. I got it. Yeah, I take a breather.

The idea of high quality work raises the issue of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. To really care about quality requires an intrinsic desire to create something of quality. If you don't have that and you're relying on an extrinsic motivator like a boss or somebody like that, who's like, it better be good, but you don't have that and you're relying on an extrinsic motivator, like a boss or somebody like that, who's like, it better be good, but you don't really care. That doesn't feel like a sustainable solution. So for the person who is a knowledge worker and they're in a situation where maybe they're not super, you know, kind of nourished by what they're doing and maybe don't care as much as they should, it's hard to tell somebody or to engender a sense of intrinsic motivation that has to be self-generated and really only occurs when the thing that you're working on is something that

you care about, independent of what job you're in. I mean, yes and, right? I mean, the way I think about that is if you really don't care about what you're doing, if you really could take it or leave it, then that is a problem. But on the other hand, you can have an appreciation for craft. Like, I want to figure out the puzzle of how to do this thing really well, even if it's not some deep-seated passion I've always had. If you have that, you can start obsessing about quality. It doesn't have to be,

this is the thing I was put on this earth to do in order to find yourself really caring about craft. Because what really matters is, and what humans are wired for is an appreciation of craftsmanship. And we were wired for that. Like I want, I have this intention. I want to make manifest concretely in the world and I want to do. And we're wired for that. Like, I have this intention, I want to make manifest concretely in the world, and I want to do it well and be recognized for it.

Like, those are the levers. In fact, in that book I wrote a long time ago, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I talked about some of the research surrounding where job satisfaction comes from. And my argument was none of this research is saying that what we're finding is that the strongest predictor for job satisfaction is match of the job to a pre-existing interest. That's not what we see in the literature. What do we see? We see people get great satisfaction when they have a sense of mastery, when they have a sense of like what they're doing is respected, when they're able to connect to other people that, you know, the connected people matters as well. But these things are agnostic to content to some degree. So, you know, I mean, if you're, I'm trying to

sell e-cigarettes or something like that, and you're like, I really am not aligned with this. And so, you know, you might have trouble with it, but if it's something that I could get better at, I'll get recognized for doing it better. It's hard, but there's a craft, the master, that's pressing play on a program that is wired into the human psyche, you know? So you can obsess over quality even if you're not curing cancer. Even if it's just reaffirming a value that like, I do what I say I'm going to do, or if I say I'm going to show up at this time or deliver this project to the person above me on time, under budget, or what have you,

like there's a sense of pride in that that is uncoupled from what it actually is, if you don't care about that widget itself. And then there's two other advantages that happen directly related to slowness, right? Is that, okay, as you get better at what you're doing, and even again, what you're doing is I'm very good at you know customer conversion on email crm like something really specific it's not my passion but i'm getting really really good at this it connects to slowness in two direct ways one the more you get obsessed about doing something well the more busyness seems distasteful and superfluous so like if you want to get away from busyness the more you focusing on doing something really well, the more you actually just grow a natural distaste for the busyness. I mean, you see this, like anytime you see a hacker or like a 10X performer, they're the

ones that are not on email all the time. They're not on Slack all the time. It's because you lose your taste for that when you have something else to put your attention. And then two, and this is why it's a virtuous cycle. As you get better at something, you get more leverage. And that leverage you can use to take more of the junk off your plate, to take more of the busyness off your plate. So getting better at something makes it easier for your life to get slower. And as it gets slower, you get all the other ideas together. That needs to be your foundational activity. If you want to do fewer things at once, if you want to work at a natural pace, this is probably the most important thing you can do to support that, is choose something that matters and say, I'm going to start doing this really well. What's your feeling about apps, productivity apps, things that help you with your to-do list or help you track your projects, et cetera. Helping, not helping. My sense is that, you know, there's this idea that technology will save us, that we're just around the corner from

the next breakthrough that's going to free up time, make us more productive, provide us with more free time to indulge in slow productivity. This has never been the case. Like every new innovation that's supposedly intended to accomplish that ends up doing the opposite or there's all these unintended consequences as a result that complicate our lives rather than simplify them. Well, I think this has been the issue with Silicon Valley's engagement

with productivity technology is that we end up with the tail wagging the dog. So the story they tell is the tool comes first because it's a sexy story that you can sell a lot of SaaS descriptions on. Here's how you become more productive. You get the right tool and that tool somehow will then allow you to be less burdened and more efficient and more organized. The tool comes first. The tool is going to deliver the benefit. This is the whole, right now, I wrote this New Yorker piece last fall about this whole revolution in the software service, team productivity softwares.

The reality is that has it backwards. Like what matters is you figure out how you want to work. What's important? What am I doing? What am I not doing? What are my systems? And then once you know what you're all about, you say, oh, how can I use various technology tools

to help this? But it's deploying the tools on behalf of something you already figured out. So you're like, I use email, but I use email very specifically because I know what I'm focusing on, what I don't do. And I use email to send the artwork over to the whatever team.

And that's useful. It's me deploying the tool, not just hoping if I start using this tool, productivity will somehow follow. I mean, the same thing happened with Slack. They somehow just said, you'll be more productive if your team has Slack. And so you just give Slack to everybody. And now everyone spends all day on Slack talking to each other and sending gifts back and forth.

Yeah, on paper, it seems like great. Like, oh, we can solve this asynchronous, I mean, sort of semi-asynchronous by having everyone kind of share the information together and this will like remove the need for email. Yeah. But it just becomes another thing that you need to check and be on top of all the time. Yeah. So I think almost every really effective organizational system you can come up with, and I spend a lot of time thinking about these and writing about these, almost all of them can be implemented with like some combination of shared documents

and an email address and a calendar. Like we don't really need advanced technical tool. Technology is useful. Like I want to have email around when I'm designing a productivity system, because this is how I want to deliver information to people. It's how I'm going to want to broadcast information. It's how I'm going to get, you know, answers to questions that can be answered with one message, but I'm certainly not going to use it for back and forth conversation. I probably want some sort of shared document or file system. So we have a way of asynchronously collecting information that's easy to view. So there's these basic technologies give us useful capabilities, but they don't teach us how to use them. It's like going into a group of builders and giving them all hammers. Like you

invented the hammer. Like now you have hammers. Hammers are great. Have you ever tried to put a nail in wood without a hammer? It's really hard. And then you just give them the hammers and now they're just running around just like hammering nails into things. Like, oh, actually the hammer is not so useful. We can't harness that utility until also we figure out like a plan for building a house. Like, oh, we want to put a board here and a board here and nail that together. Oh, now I have a real good use for the hammer, but the hammer itself does not encode how to build something.

You also have to have a plan. So I think a lot of these technological productivity tools could be used as part of a intentional plan about how do we want to actually run our team or run our lives, but they're not going to give you that plan and just adopting the tool or downloading the tool or subscribing to it. That's not going to give you that plan. And just adopting the tool or downloading the tool or subscribing to it,

that's not going to give you productivity. It's the systems, the intention that's going to give it to you. Then you can go get the tool you need to implement it. The modern knowledge worker isn't really given an education in how to spend their time effectively. Most people are just dropped into their job. They're kind of told what the expectations of that job are. And then they're given sort of discretion as to how to manage their own time and get things done.

And I think we can all agree that we're not great at, our instincts are not great about how to deploy that attention to drive the ball forward in the best possible way. What do you think are the biggest or most common mistakes that most people make when they wanna be more productive, it in the best possible way. What do you think are the biggest or most common mistakes that most people make when they want to be more productive, but they're kind of making the wrong decisions about how to do that? Well, 90% of people just do almost nothing,

right? I would say 90% of knowledge workers have an inbox and they sort of look in there frantically. Oh my God, what's overdue and what's driving it? And they have a calendar. So that's the one system people do use consistently is they will look at their calendar and if they have a meeting, they'll actually go to it. So they have an inbox and a calendar and they just rock and roll.

Like, oh, they're sending lots of emails, jumping back and forth between the calendar meetings. They do basically nothing. So like our baseline here is pretty low. I saw a tweet the other day that was pretty funny. It was somebody, you know, in jest saying, I got so bored at work today that I actually started working. Yeah. What fun is that? Right. Which kind of like says it all. Right. I mean, let me, can I push back on even the fundamental, there's an argument I've been making is that the fundamental

premise that all of this is left up to the individual was a mistake, right? When you say, okay, productivity is personal. Like we know that phrase, it's very common, personal productivity. I mean, until 1959, it would be a nonsense phrase. Productivity is how good is our crop yield system working? Productivity is how good is our, how can we measure the output of our production system? So what do you mean make it personal? This is like the thing organizations think about. What's the right way to do what we do? Well, you tell the Les Moonves CBS as an example, that story as an example of that. Yeah, he came in, right, and CBS was in third place. They hire Les Moonves. He shows up at the headquarters television city and he says, why is the parking lot half empty at three o'clock on a Friday? I know how I'm going to solve the

problem of us being in last place. You have to be at the office all day long. This is how we're going to solve it. And that's the only lever you have to pull. Just be here longer, work longer hours. But I think it was actually a huge mistake. And it's one that we came by honestly. I mean, I tracked this down eventually. This idea that everything is left up to the individual largely is due to a single person. It was Peter Drucker, the management theorist, invented the idea of management theory,

coined the term knowledge work. He's the one who coined it in 1959. He helped the business community understand how is this different than factories? Like, what is this knowledge work. He's the one who coined it in 1959. He helped the business community understand how is this different than factories? Like, what is this knowledge work? What do you mean we're gonna have a whole building full of people and all they do is like do things with paper and we don't build anything, right? And his job was to, he explained it, right? This is what he did. And his big point he was making, which was correct, was knowledge work often requires skills and creativity. Often individual knowledge

workers know more about what they're doing than their managers. So we do have to give a lot of discretion to the knowledge worker to figure out like, how am I actually going to do my work? How am I going to figure out the ad campaign? Or how am I going to figure out the marketing strategy? We're used to this now, but this was a very big deal because the whole mindset up to this point was you have a bunch of smart people figure out the right way to build a car and then you tell the workers, here's how you do it, right? And he was like, we can't do that in knowledge work. It's too complicated.

And you got to just, you got to trust the discretion. So he was right about that. But we interpreted that too broadly. So instead of just saying, yeah, don't tell the computer programmer specifically how to write code or don't tell the ad man, you know, in Mad Men, like how to come up with the code ad campaign. We said we also will leave it up to the individuals to figure out everything about how work is identified, how it's assigned, how workloads are managed, how they collaborate about the work they're working on. We left that up to the individuals as well. And I think that's what led to this world of great that I'm just going to be on email all day. If we're all just in this

on our own and no one has any control over the system. So, I mean, I argue what we probably should have done is said, yes, the actual execution and work, don't tell a knowledge worker how to do that. They're skilled and creative and it's idiosyncratic. How we organize the work, no, no, we're going to have something to say about that. Let's have the board where we keep track of the things that need to be done so that it's not on everyone's plate. Let's keep track of who's working on what major projects and no one's doing more than two things at a time, right? How we actually identify and assign and collaborate about work. That is something that we probably should have had organizational input because the better systems can't be implemented by an individual. I can't,

as an individual, change the way everyone else communicates, but a team leader can. So I think we overextended Peter Drucker's notion of autonomy. And that's what led to this, made possible this state of knowledge work, where it's just chaos. All we're doing all day is talking about work, and it's so difficult to try to actually change that. But what you just shared seems so self-evident on some level obvious. It doesn't feel like it should be that heavy of a lift to implement that in the workplace.

Why is the workplace so resistant to these ideas? Yeah, so I tried. So I wrote a whole book, A World Without Email, and I made exactly this point, right? I was like, this is, and I just, I documented how we got here, why it was so painful. This is my code and I'm gonna put it into the mainframe and then we're going to get a result. This is the computer program. And then realizing the world doesn't work this way, Cal.

It didn't work this way. So I was like, what's going on? Like there, and I was like, and this is not, and then people will try to, because I'm an academic, so I'm around a lot of academic types and, and they come from more, so the more of the left-wing background, like, no, no, this is like a labor dynamic. It's just, it's a, It's an exploitative relationship. And no, they don't want to make those changes because it's a power dynamic and they get more value. And I was like, no, that's not the case. This is a terrible way to work. So it's like hurting the bottom line. It's bad for the owner of the company if everyone's on email all day because nothing's actually getting shipped. Their clients aren't actually paying for email usage. They're paying for the things. It's bad for everybody. So yeah, why wouldn't we fix this? We're in a

non-optimal Nash equilibrium. No one person can fix this on their own, but it's a really bad place that we've ended up. What I learned, so here's my new theory, is I went down this rabbit hole of this notion coined by the economic historian Alfred Chandler called managerial capitalism. And he really studied the rise of larger organizations in the 20th century that have, you know, large groups of managers, which is different than it was in the 1900s or the early 20th century where companies tend to be smaller. And here's the owner and the owner's right there. And then there's the people who work for the owner, you know, and they're relatively small scale. Then we got really large organizations. He argues this is a new type of capitalism,

managerial capitalism. And the key thing about managerial capitalism is how those organizations run is not directly exposed to market signals. So with a small company, if I stop using email and we get more efficient, I can get an advantage over my competitors. And so I'm going to do better. You're going to go out of business. My way of doing it is going to spread and these bad habits would go away. In managerial capitalism, the rules by which these large organizations function, what they're trying to optimize for is other things unrelated to market signals, meaning like actual productive output. And some of the things he identified that are optimized for is things like stability,

reduction of risk for the managers themselves, right? There is no internally, you want the company to do well enough to stay alive, imagine your capitalism, but you also want things to be stable. You want control. You don't wanna take big risks. I mean, it's not even a,

it's not like there's something insidious going on here. It's just a natural thing that happens when these organizations get larger. So we can have huge organizations running hugely ineffectively, reducing what they produce and yet not have market signals clear out. This is just a stupid way to organize.

I mean, that's the natural course of most companies that gain a certain level of scale and size. They become bloated, more bureaucratic, calcified, and stuck in antiquated ways that don't serve them until they finally sort of decay, right? But it's the rare company that can be like an Amazon or an Apple that can kind of transcend those forces that drive most Fortune

500 companies or like publicly traded, you know, market companies in that direction. Yeah, no, I think that's true. And so what happens is most companies just don't change. It's too hard. And that was my simple explanation for why that book didn't change the world. It's really hard to come in and say, we're not all going to just be on email all day, because what do you have to, it's not that simple. Now you have to say, here's what we're going to do instead. And now you have to start breaking down all the different things that all the different teams do. And for each of these things, figuring out how are we going to do this work? How are we going to keep track about it? When are we going to talk about it? What's our system going to be

for this type of work? And then you're not going to get it right the first time. So now you have to iterate on it and you have to do this times a thousand, a thousand different processes. And everyone's upset about it because it feels bureaucratic and it's such a hard lift. And there's not a super strong market signal that says, yeah, but if you get this right, you're going to put everyone else out of business. So we said, can we just give everyone an email address and it works. Let's just rock and roll. Also, human beings are messy and they operate on emotions, you know, mostly, which is a tough pill to swallow for a computer programmer, right?

Like I sort of look at you in a similar way that I look at like Shane Parrish, for example, who's also a computer scientist whose work, you know, kind of crosses over yours a little bit in the Venn diagram, but it's all about like better heuristics for making decisions. And it's this idea that you're gonna have this idea,

it's sort of like code and you're gonna apply this code and then human beings are all gonna adapt and everything will be perfect and better, right? Yeah. But in truth, human beings are, they're mysterious. It's hard to understand why they do what they do. Like it reminds me of, do you see Michael Clayton? Yeah.

When Sidney Pollack, like George Clooney's character says to Sidney Pollack, like, well, why did somebody do that? And he's like, because human beings are fucking, you know, like you can't understand, I can't remember the word, but it was like, because human beings are unfathomable or something like that, you know, like you can't understand. I can't remember the word, but it was like, because human beings are unfathomable or something like that. You know? I don't know if that gives comfort to a coder. Well, here's what I think you're, you might be right is what is the one

example of the type of company where they are willing to do these like very optimized ways of thinking what's the right way to assign work. It's software development companies. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. The nerds are doing it. Back to that. The nerds are doing it. And other people are like, you want me to do what with an index card? Nah, I'm just going to jump on Slack. To be an adherent of slow productivity, you do have to buck the system a little bit. And that's going to require an added layer of discipline, I suppose. So what's the message to the person who struggles with discipline or perceives themselves as an undisciplined person? Well, you have to practice it. Yeah. I mean, I think about discipline more as something you eventually come to believe about yourself than like an intrinsic trait that you have or don't

have. I think a lot of people think about intrinsic. I'm not a disciplined person. That person's a disciplined person, right? Like I don't want to run ultra events. Rich did. Rich is a more disciplined person. But discipline is something that you come to believe about yourself through like practicing experience, you know? So I talk about it like playing the guitar. You know, you don't say, I picked up a guitar and I was terrible. I'm not a guitar person. You say, if I want to learn, it's going to be good for me to know how to play the guitar. Yeah, I'm going to have to practice and I'm going to get better at it and it's going to take time. And then eventually people are going to say, you're good know how to play the guitar. Yeah, I'm going to have to practice and I'm going to get better at it and it's going to take time. And then eventually people are going to say, you're good at the guitar.

And yeah, discipline, I don't think it's that much different. It takes practice. If you haven't had a lot of it in your life, yeah, you're not going to David Goggins it the next day, you know, but a year from now, you can be way more disciplined. If you start practicing with the small things, like on my podcast, we often talk about the way we,

you know, our plan for this is break your life into the major buckets that matter. And then just have one small daily discipline you do in each of those things. Like just barely above the threshold of trivial, not too hard, but like above the, so not work out an hour, that's too hard, but also not like

touch my nose but something like i do 25 push-ups you know every morning before i get ready do that in each of the areas of your life the details don't matter what matters is it changes the story you tell about yourself and so you do that for a few months and like you know what i am able to do some things that are non-urgent or required but because they connect to things i value and i was I was able to actually stick with it and do it. And I mark it and I have people actually mark it every day in their planner. Like I'm doing this every day. They have a symbol for each of them. And then you can raise the ante after a couple months. Well, let me add like one more serious thing into here. And you just build up, you build up the discipline. But I think you're right to point out that that is a key initial factor. And it's an overlooked factor in a lot of advice of this type because the people writing it, like me, have already gone through that process.

It's like, yeah, I already have discipline. So the question is what to do with that. Oh, let's optimize. Okay, so you want to do slow productivity. And we often do skip. Some people, they haven't got to the stage yet where I'm ready to put in place these highly disciplined different ways of thinking about things. I first have to actually build up the discipline itself. Yeah, and that takes time.

It's another kind of slow productivity thing because you're not going to feel – if you're motivated by securing some kind of reward, you're going to be left lacking. reward you're going to be left lacking because you have to do it until you develop that intrinsic kind of motivation around it in a sustainable way. Otherwise you're going to, you're going to flame out. And it's just not something that you can compel somebody to have. They have to develop it for themselves. The good news is though, it is itself very addictive. Yes. You know, it feels really good. It builds on itself. Yeah. And then you start realizing the things you were doing instead before the, you know, compulsively on social media or over drinking or whatever it is. Oh,

these were like a low fidelity simulation of what it actually feels like to start to get a consistent discipline on things that matter. And people kind of recognize you of that. Because now that's hitting those deeply wired evolutionary cues of discipline and leadership. This is critical for you to pass on your genes. We're really going to reward this. And it's why you see as people get disciplined about anything. I mean, I'm sure this was, I mean, I know this was your experience from your book. All these other things in their life that were perhaps harmful, you know, you now,

you can start stripping some of these things away because you have this other thing that you're like, oh, I like this better. You know, I like being in control of things and aiming towards things I care about, you know, not just arbitrary discipline, but discipline on things that matter. My family, my work, my community, these types of things, it becomes addictive. And so that's the good thing. It's the flywheel there gets turning. It's hard to start that flywheel, but once that flywheel gets turning, the disciplined flywheel, that thing will spin, which is the good news. Have you always been like this? Have you always been disciplined and have this level of clarity

around what you're doing? Was this an evolution? Like what kind of kid were you? I didn't have it as a kid. Yeah. It's an interesting point. I was not well organized or disciplined as a kid, right? We, I was telling my wife the other day, I don't know where I had this memory, but they give out like awards in our middle school. And what the award I got was the homework and homeroom award, because that was me like, oh my God. Doing it at the last minute. At the last minute, right? So I was very, I think I was smart and I was very ambitious, but I was not at all disciplined.

And honestly, you know what turned out around for me was the first student loan statement when I went to college. And then I was like, oh, wow, this is expensive. And I'm gonna have to pay this all back. And it just, that turned it around on me. And I said, okay, I wanna get serious about this. Also, I did some college athletics, which I think really helped as well.

You were a rower, right? I was a rower, yeah. Until I developed a heart condition, congenital, just out of nowhere, like can't row anymore. And so I took that discipline and my fear of all the money I was gonna owe. And I said, well, what else can I do with this? And the first thing I did with this,

so I rode my freshman year, had to stop into the year. Sophomore fall, I come back and I put this discipline into experimenting with the best ways to study. I said, well, why don't I be more organized and disciplined about how I study? Because I was like an okay student. But I said, how do I take notes, how do I write papers? And I ran this series of experiments, what really works and what doesn't? And I found, okay, most students are terrible at studying. If you're at all intentional about how you manage your time, but also what techniques you do, you can do much better.

So my grades jumped up to a 4.0 and I had a 4.0 all the way out until my senior spring, I had one A minus. Like if I had started this once a quarter earlier, I probably would have been valedictorian. I was like top 20 out of the class of whatever. Well, what is the secret to studying better? Well, it was pretty obvious things.

When I actually did the experiments, I figured out like, oh, active recall is everything. Passive recall is meaningless. You have to be replicating the knowledge you need to know out loud without looking at notes as if you were teaching a class. And if you can do that, you'll remember it forever. And if you can't, you don't know it.

And it's a mental strain, but it's very time efficient, right? I got smart about how I took notes. Like, what really matters? I got all the friction out of my system. I began doing autopilot scheduling. Okay, if I know I have a problem set due every week on Thursday, when and where do I do this work? I don't want to think about it. I just need to know it's on my calendar. I have three sessions. Here's where I

do them. I do them on the same times, the same days. I don't want to have to be thinking, oh, do I have something due tomorrow? These type of things completely turned everything around, right? I mean, I became a very, very good student. And then now the flywheel starts going. And so then I turned it over to writing. And so the other thing I decided was like, what's my extracurricular going to be if I can't row? And I said, well, you know, I was always a good writer and I was always, you know, I was a precocious reader and writer. And I was known more for that than mathematics or anything. So I said, I'm going to do writing. And then I just very entrepreneurially and systematically

just made my march. I started writing for the humor magazine and just did the work and worked my way up to be editor in chief of that, you know? And then after that, an entrepreneur friend dared me to write a book. I was like, I'm going to figure out how to do this. And like, I figured out how to do it and how does the industry work? And I sold my first book after my junior year. And so then this flywheel gets going. And so by the time I'm leaving college, knowing I wanna be a writer and a computer scientist, like now I'm going full speed with this,

you know, discipline. And you become the person, you're like, I'm the person who can study well, get good grades, execute on goals, write books. You've all proved that, you've proved that to yourself. And so that becomes part of your identity. And then I really leaned into that at grad school it's very helpful that I was writing books

because I wanted to change the story about like grad school is the hardest thing and it's all encompassing and it's gonna crush us. So no, no, I'm writing books at the same time, how hard can it be? And like my thing was, my advisor hates this. Did you do a dissertation and the whole deal? I wrote it, yes.

I wrote an unrelated book while I was writing my dissertation. Oh my God. Because- You're a freak. But it's not. What I was realizing was, okay, so for writing the dissertation- If you're organized in your time, it's actually doable. Grad school is so easy. That's the problem. It's not- For people that don't know, you did grad school at MIT. I know, but- And undergrad at Dartmouth. I mean, it's hard. Here's what's hard about it. The actual thing you're doing, so I was a theoretician.

So I can't speak for grad students who have to work in labs. I know that's harder. I was a theoretician. So the actual work was very hard in the moment. You had to solve these proofs and they had to be good enough to get accepted at these very competitive venues with 20% acceptance rates. And if you couldn't do that, they kick you out. So it was like this very high stakes thing,

but there's only so much time you could spend doing that. That was the reality of is, how long can I work on math proofs each day, right? And that's what happened in the dissertation is they clean your, all you should be doing is working on your dissertation. And I was like, okay, but how long can I work on a math dissertation per day?

Like three hours? You know, what else am I gonna do? I'm organized about my time. So I was like, okay, but how long can I work on a math dissertation per day? Like three hours? You know, what else am I gonna do? I'm organized about my time. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna write another book and then that will give me something to think about so I won't be too stressed about the dissertation. It wasn't a big deal. Right, right, right.

And probably toggling in between them allowed you to return to each project fresh and gave you those kind of intermittent intervals where you can kind of, everything percolates and you can kind of intermittent intervals where you can kind of, everything percolates and you can kind of have that, you know, your subconscious is working on it when you're not working on it, right? Well, it also alleviated stress too. So it was a secret to my mental health was because I'm at so high stakes this world. And so I don't mean it's easy. I mean, it doesn't take much time is what I meant to say. But so something would go wrong in my grad school career.

So a paper would get rejected. And I'd be like, I'm never going to get a paper. And again, I'm going to get kicked out. I would lean into the writing. Yeah, but I got these books and this is really interesting. Then something would be going, you know, it's not going great in the writing world. And my first book came out in a year into my grad student career. It didn't do anything at first.

So I could lean into the grad school, but I got this math stuff. So I would bounce back and forth psychologically between the two things. So if one was struggling, I could lean into the other thing a little bit and say, yeah, but this thing's interesting. And then when that was struggling, I could lean into the other thing. And that was useful. So I do kind of like having two things for that reason. More than two things, you have overload. So it's a very fine line to walk there. What is the thing that does hold the power to distract you? Like, where's your sensitive weak point? Yeah. Well, lots of things do. You know, I don't always admit this, but part of the reason why I don't use social media is I don't trust myself. I think that would get, I'm very distractible. If I had that opportunity,

especially now that I'm more of a public figure, I mean, that'd be impossible. People are talking about you. Like, how could you possibly resist? Looking at that, if you knew people were like saying things to you, I think that I don't trust myself. I'd let my kids go hungry.

So I worry about that. So what's left in my life that does still distract me? Baseball can do this. Yeah. Right. I learned MIT is a real Red Sox, especially the theory group baseball nerd place. And so I picked that up. So if there's a trade wars going on, you know, okay, we're at a trade deadline.

Yeah. I'll look at that too often. Other things I've been careful about, I exercise, I'm very careful about news consumption because that got me for a while early in my career during the 2004 presidential election cycle. I found myself just had this cycle of websites I kept going through. And so I realized like, okay, I need to of the cycle of websites I kept going through. And so I realized like, okay, I need to be much more careful about my news consumption. So I try to basically eliminate anything that will have a persistent, will persistently be around and be highly appealing because I don't know if I have the cognitive fortitude to resist it. You're a movie buff though. You like going to the movies.

Yeah. Yeah. I saw all 10 best picture nominees i got it under the wire this year too just saw the last one well you're in a company town so i know it's sort of like but i love it anyway like that is my favorite thing to do i love it too now yeah but also i mean i wrote about that in the book that um learning a lot about movies helped my writing because if you study what makes movies great, that process is not intimidating because I'm not a director. So it's just interesting. And oh, this is great.

Look at these directors and they have this vision and you're just being exposed to raw creative impulse. I found that was helping me in my writing. I was getting inspired by what people were doing in this other art form. And then that was giving me ideas about taking risks in my writing. Whereas if I was just directly studying writing, it's harder.

Because now it's uncanny valley. You're studying people who are kind of doing what you're doing, but a little differently. All the stresses of your job as a writer kind of getting involved in it. So I found studying an unrelated creative art completely from a hobby perspective re-energized the art I do for a living. Yeah, it's interesting. I can relate to that. I mean, I find myself, I like going to bad movies too. Ah.

Because then you can just sort of think about like, what went wrong here? Or why did they make this choice? Or why didn't, you know, that narrative work? Like, what was the weak point there? Like all, it's all instructive, you know, and it all finds its way into writing in different ways. Because even if you're writing a nonfiction book, you still have to give it structure.

You have to make it compelling. It has to move in a direction that engages the reader. And so there's things that you can glean from screenwriting because it's all storytelling, right? And there's plenty of stories in your book and you learn how to tell a story that's going to connect with the people you're trying to, you know, impact. I mean, for example, I mess with genre formats a lot in my books. And that's something I really got emboldened to do watching the directors that really do this, right? Tarantino does this, right? You play with genre, you take genre tropes that are very familiar, and then you play with these things that are very familiar and you can have these like really interesting cinematic experiences.

Well, I sort of do the same thing. I take like a peer advice genre trope, but I mix in other things. So, and some of this is subtle, but I think a lot about it, right? Like the stories in my book are not written in the standard advice guide style of stories. I instead write them in a New Yorker style. So like I kind of bring that in the play and I bring in a sort of academic theorizing. And then I mix that in with, you know, have a shared document that has this on it. Like I'm playing, I feel like I'm playing with the advice genre and mixing it in and adding other

elements to it and subverting it. And you think a story is going to go this way and then it goes a different way. And it's not told like every other story. It's told in the New Yorker iceberg style. Studying the plain with genres and movies really emboldened me there. I was like, oh, there's really interesting stuff in here. You know how an advice book is supposed to read.

And then you zag it this way and this way. You can create like a really interesting experience for people. Yeah, you did that successfully. I mean, I'm thinking of the story you tell about the Beatles and Sergeant Peppers. You think the story is going to lead in a certain direction and you kind of twist it. Yeah. And you give a lot of- In a way that you don't foresee it. And you give a lot of detail. And there's a whole way of, there's different ways of writing these

stories. And so there's like a highly citational, deep research way of writing stories that I think is actually more effective when you port that into advice guides. A lot of advice guides have what I call like the Wikipedia format story. It's like everything is pat, everything that happens in the story just directly leads towards the conclusion you're trying to make.

It was, you know, the Beatles were having a really bad time and then they started doing this and then they were the very best in the world. Like these really sort of pat and you can tell the writer's just trying to get through the story and just trying to get enough details to stretch it out. So you go the other way and you focus on density of details and you let the story wander and set the stage. Not everything you're writing about in the story is like directly pointing towards the point you want to make. You have more of a nonfiction experience. I want to bring you into

this world and like what's going on here. Some non sequiturs where the story unfolds, like these type of details. It's interesting and they're subtle, but you know, I like playing with them. Yeah, it's cool. What is the main message that you want to convey from slow productivity to the person who's listening or watching right now? Like, what is it that you want them to get out of this book? I think the pseudo productivity approach is killing you inside. And you probably recognize this is true, right? If you're a knowledge worker, this is why you're feeling the way you're feeling is pseudo productivity is soul deadening. There's other ways to organize your work that is not going to do that and is going to be effective. And so, you know,

I tell people at the end, slow productivity is an alternative to pseudo productivity. There might be others as well. In fact, there probably are. The key thing, if we do anything, is just at least I'll admit, we have to start talking about alternatives to pseudo productivity. We have to name pseudo productivity. We have to realize why this is not producing stuff and it's making people miserable. And then we have to declare clearly, this is what I do instead. And not everything that everyone declares is going to work for everyone else. And some might not even work at all, but we have to actually start having that conversation because what happened in the pandemic is people got completely burnt out from pseudo productivity and it led to this anti-productivity backlash. But the whole thing I think was really confusing and mixed up and it

was unclear who was mad at what and is it, is this, is it capitalism's fault or is it the, is it Instagram hustle culture? And it was like this weird sort of everyone wants to be mad at something and nothing. It was just a mix of upsetness and sort of like justified exhaustion. And like that didn't really get us anywhere, right? No, it resulted in the whole quiet quitting thing. But that lasted for two months. Sure. And then also the kind of ongoing discourse around return to work versus work from home, which really isn't the point. The point is if you can create legitimate accountability metrics and tools to measure productivity, it actually shouldn't matter. This is what, and I made this argument, I wrote, I coined this term a couple months ago in the New Yorker, the great exhaustion

is where we are. We had the great resignation. We had quiet quitting. We had the hybrid work wars. Now knowledge workers are at the great exhaustion. And my argument is a lot of that stuff that was happening in the pandemic was a proxy battle for this real battle. We just didn't realize it. Like, why were we fighting so much about some of the details of where work happened or didn't happen? It's not that the key to our happiness was schedule flexibility. It was just the only thing that was there for us to fight about. But our real discontent was not the details of a hybrid schedule. The real discontent underneath it all was pseudo productivity. And so quiet quitting also were burnt out. So quiet quitting, you know, maybe I'll just stop doing work and that didn't work out. The great resignation had a lot of knowledge workers just leave the workforce because they were exhausted from this stuff. But all of these things were circling without actually identifying the real issue, which is pseudo productivity is not sustainable. So we looked for enemies

and we looked for reform and resistance, but we weren't actually reforming or resisting the underlying thing that mattered, which is as long as visible activity is our proxy for useful effort, and we have computers and email and laptops and smartphones, we're gonna be miserable.

And so like, that's what we actually have. And once we know that's the problem, we're like, oh, the solution is not just quit if you can. And if you can't like quietly quit and hopefully no one notices, or if you just get your schedule right, you'll be happy. Then we realize like, oh, so how do we solve the pseudoproductivity problem? And we start talking about alternatives. So the person who's listening to this, who is a knowledge worker and has a boss, like how do they kickstart that? Do they go to their boss or whoever they report to and say, let's have a conversation about what productivity means

and how to kind of better configure this? Like how does one initiate that change within their own workplace? Yeah, start doing without talking. Right. So don't have this conversation right away. I would do, what things do I do right off the bat? Well, first I would find my thing

I'm gonna obsess over quality in, right? Because again, that's the glue in the engine for all of these other things. So I'm gonna find in my work, this is the thing I'm gonna start to master, right? And build up, you know, start small, build your discipline, start going after that. That's gonna make everything else easy.

Two, then I would look at my workload. So then I would jump back to the first principle and say, how can I start preventing me from having too many things on my plate at the same time and start going through these sort of nitty gritty tactics like I talk about in the book. We went through a lot of these examples, but more transparency on your workload and quotas, and maybe you're using a simulated poll system, subtle things you're doing to try to start bringing that workload down, right? So you began to get the benefits of not having too much overhead tax. And then right away after that, I would be saying, how do I subtly put some variation to the intensity of my work without telling anyone I'm doing this yet? Let's just get started subtly. You know what? I don't schedule meetings on

Mondays. I'm not going to tell anyone that. And when people ask, hey, when are you available? I'll give them lots of days and they're not going to notice that like, hey, there doesn't usually happen to be any Mondays. So I'm going to do something like that. Like Mondays are going to be a little slower. And you know what? In December, I'm going to keep December slower. So I'm going to be careful in the fall about my projects to have stuff that ends before December or picks up in January. I'm not going to tell anyone about this, but I want like that month to be quieter and not try to fill the space.

So you begin doing small things in all three areas. That bootstraps the whole thing. Then once this thing gets rolling, you get more and more radical, you get more and more aggressive, you gain more control, you take bigger swings, you earn bigger swings. And then you can really ramp up the slowness to where you want it to be.

But you can get started right away without anyone needing to know. In fact, don't tell people this is what you're doing. Yeah. I mean, after the fact, after the fact you say it came from this book, but don't tell them before you do it. Don't give them something to argue about, just do it.

Right, and then the results speak for themselves. Yeah. And then that creates its own trajectory. Yeah. New trajectory, momentum. And then you results speak for themselves. Yeah. And then that creates its own trajectory. Yeah. New trajectory momentum. And then you gain escape velocity from the pseudo productivity star of exhaustion. And once you get that escape velocity, pretty soon people are like, what's going on with, you know, Rich? Like, wow, he's really got it dialed in, you know?

I mean, this is great. Like he's not on email all day. He's just working on this one thing. And people will begin to get pretty impressed. Like once you can just escape that gravitational pull of pseudo productivity, then you can go visit whatever planet you want to visit. How do you specifically escape the gravitational pull of email if you're reporting to somebody who has that expectation that you're just going to be going back and forth all the time? Like, is there a certain kind of language or reply where you can say, listen,

I'm working on the thing over here. I'll get back to you at the end of the day, or, you know, I'll report back to you on this day at this time when I have something to talk to you about. Yeah. How does that work? Yeah. Well, I mean, the obvious thing to do is just the fewer things you're working on at the same time, the fewer things you're talking about. So that's the obvious thing. That helps. Okay. With what's left, how do you prevent that conversation from taking things over? You have to put in place the alternative for collaboration. So the issue with email and why we can't solve it with the type of tactics people suggest, like just wait to check your email. Why doesn't that work? Because if back and forth emailing is how collaboration is happening on a particular project, you can't wait till 3 p.m. to check your inbox.

Because what happens is we have to reach a decision on something before the day is over. And if that's going to take six back and forth messages, I have to see your second message pretty early on so that I can get it back to you in time for you to get back to me. And so we actually have to hit this ball back and forth over this net pretty quickly. So I have to check my inbox a lot. So what you have to do is not just resolve, I'm going to check email less often or tell someone, I'm going to check email less often. You have to have an alternative way for that back and forth to happen. It's all about alternatives. So like one really easy thing you can do

is have office hours every day and have a simple rule that email is great if you want to send me something. Email is great if you want to send me a question that I can answer with one message. For anything that requires more back and forth, grab me at whatever office hours is coming up next that's convenient, or I'll jump into yours. We'll do it in real time during this first time. Right, and office hours being sort of figurative and literal in the sense that you're kind of open

for that type of communication during that time period. Yeah, four to five, Zoom is on, my phone's on, my office door's open. So like, yeah, just grab me. Some people do this twice a day, like a half hour block, midday, an hour at the end. It's like, yeah, anything we have to talk about, you don't have to schedule it. You don't have to just jump in my office. I just call me. Well, two minutes, we'll knock it out, right? People are like, well, that's overhead though. Like why put that time? Isn't so easy to answer an email. The issue is not answering one email. It's the six emails going back and forth, each of which required 10 checks of your inbox

while you waited for it. That's now 60 inbox checks that you've avoided by keeping this half hour free for your conversations. It's also the opportunity cost of in the mental drain of like taking yourself out of whatever you're working on, going to the email. And then it doesn't appreciate how long it takes to kind of get back into the mindset and frame of mind

to like do the actual work thing again. Like there's an acclimation that takes place. Like, and every time you toggle back and forth, you're just eroding that more and more and more. Well, it could take up to 15 or 20 minutes. That's the problem. Psychologists call this attention residue, but your mind, you can't just switch it from one target to another and completely be in this new context and then completely switch it back to the original context. Our brain is way slower than that.

You have to start suppressing certain neural networks and activating others. It's why, for example, I think about it, when you work on anything hard, it always feels like the first 10 or 15 minutes, you're having a really hard time. Yeah, it's the worst. And then you get into that kind of sense of flow, though it's often not literally matching Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of flow. We just use that term colloquially.

And suddenly it gets a lot easier. What happened after 15 minutes? Our brain finally finished finding all the relevant neural networks and activating them and inhibiting all the relevant neural networks and activating them and inhibiting all the networks for the thing we were doing before. It takes time. So then we can really rock and roll for a while. So what happens if you check your inbox every five minutes? Every time you go over there, you like create one of these cascades of attention

redirection because your inbox is full of highly salient things from people that need things from you that are different than what you're doing. So your brain goes haywire trying to load up all this context But then you wrench your attention back to the original thing before that finishes and now you're trying to reload the original thing But before you can do that you look back at your inbox and everyone is in this state of reduced cognitive capacity all day long It's the equivalent of honestly like having a tumbler of scotch and like every 20 minutes taking a slug during your workday in terms of like the impact on your ability to think it's also the difference between feeling good at the end of the day and feeling like shit like if you're just playing defense and swatting back emails and responding to texts all day long and you never actually

work on the thing that you care about or that's most important, you're gonna go home that night and not feel great about what you did or maybe even who you are, right? But if you prioritize doing the hard, the deep work first, or you have a good session with that, and then you deal with whatever the annoying stuff is, you just feel better about yourself. And that's not just psychological, that's also neurological. So the human brain is not meant

to jump back and forth between all these contexts all along. So part of that bad feeling, the feeling of disease, the feeling of exhaustion is actually your brain being sick. It's like, I can't do this, right? So it's not just psychological. I didn't really accomplish much today. And so I feel bad about my presentation of self. There's a neurological exhaustion, right? So, I mean, if you were in a work environment where there was weird flickering lights and it was really irritating you and giving you a headache and the room was kept too cold, you'd be like, this is not a good environment for a human being to try to work. We're doing that same thing with all the context shifts. It's just happening more hidden inside of our brain.

So part of that exhaustion that was everyone's feeling is causing all this burnout. It's not just psychological, it's neurological. Our brain is calling uncle. So when I was on my sabbatical, I only checked my email twice and shockingly the sky didn't fall. So Cal, should I just never check my email again

like part of me is like what if i just like select all delete well never opened it again what would happen it's like the fantasy it is a fantasy right i was i was just having this conversation with someone else the other day the fantasy is throwing out the phone it's like another fantasy people have right yeah but the right answer to that is, well, don't throw your phone out. Make your phone something that you're not worried about. Like, that's the solution for email is how do you make it so that checking that inbox is not scary. It's not something that completely drains your energy and takes up your whole day. And what does that mean is taking like a lot of the stuff in there that is just causing this context shifting back and forth and moving it out of there.

Let's have better ways of dealing. I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to do that. This thing we now do through this system, it's not done through email. I don't want to do that. Cleaning up your inbox so that it's no longer scary. You know, that's, that's, I think the goal. Easier said than done. Yeah. If only someone wrote a book about that. Yeah, I know. But I feel like there's also a distinction between people who are managers and people who are creators.

People who are creators hate email. They don't wanna have meetings. They don't want anybody to talk to them. They just wanna like go and make their thing. And then managers love meetings. They wanna be in constant communication. They just want to like go and make their thing. And then managers love meetings. They want to be in constant communication. They want to keep tabs on people. They want feedback. They care about the welfare of the people that they work with. And that is their like, that is their deep work. Like that's what they're good at. That's what they enjoy.

So those personality differences and how they show up in the workplace, I think is an important distinction in terms of how you message these ideas around slow productivity and how they apply to individual personality traits. like Paul Graham's managers versus makers schedules and how managers think differently than makers. I do think that's true. I think people in different positions think about what's important to them differently. So like how slow productivity applies would be different. That being said, I think we push that too far sometimes. Right, like there's interesting research I uncovered

that was looking at managers and email. And like what they found is the more email a manager was sending, the less time they spent on what were called managerial activities, managerial leadership activities. So the stuff that also really matters, like figuring out what do we need? Who really needs something they don't have? How are we falling short of our goals? How do I better support the vision-based things that helps a team excel? The more email they have, the less time they're doing that, and the more time they spend on what the researchers call productivity activity, which was just replying to emails.

So there's this notion that you could be a better manager if you weren't on email all the time. So then I went down this rabbit hole. This wasn't in this book, but the last book. And one of the examples I found, it actually reminded me of you. I mean, this is your dad, right? It was George Marshall. Right.

So your dad wrote this great biography of General George Marshall who ran the U.S. military during World War II. It's like no one has a harder job than he had, right? The whole military, and I like to say like spoiler alert, but like it went okay. Like we won, right? So he did a good job of it, right? He didn't work past five. He didn't work past five. I mean, he did sometimes, but he tried not to work past five because he did a good job of it, right? He didn't work past five. He didn't work past five. I mean, he did sometimes, but he tried not to work past five because he had a heart condition,

as doctors said, like, hey, you might die. So you have to figure out, you know, how to do this. And so he completely revamped the way that the War Department actually functioned. He said, okay, let me think this through. If I just have to be responding to everybody about everything all day long, it's going to take all this time. I'm never going to get this all done. So he radically restructured the war departments. The number of people that could report to him directly was smaller. This required an act of Congress, which was hard because a lot of those people that he was going to move out were congressionally appointed.

And then he created, he said, we're going to rethink how all of our communication happens. So if you're going to come into my office for a meeting, you better be, have briefed, sent me a brief ahead of time and know exactly what it is you need me to help you with here. Like, what is exactly the problem that you can't figure out on your own? And like, we can productively solve right here. And that drastically reduced the amount of time he was spending just in long conversations. It left them more time to do strategic thinking as well. Won the war, right? Your dad would probably agree that George Marshall more than anyone else probably won the war. So even with managers, like we have this idea that like what managers need to be doing is talking to people all the time and being responsive, but maybe not.

Like they too suffer from the stuff that really makes a difference, just like everyone else. When they're constantly context shifting, they're feeling exhausted, all they're doing is talking all the time. We gotta wrap this up, but I wanna end it with a question around how to effectively make a change. So somebody is gonna read your book, they're gonna be inspired, they're gonna be reflecting upon the extent

to which they are not productive and how they waste their time and are determined to make this change. Maybe they lack a little discipline, but discipline isn't an entire stranger. What is the first thing that somebody can do to make this shift, to rearrange their relationship with their work,

their productivity, and the things that they care most about executing on? I mean, they could just answer the question, what do I actually think it means, or what do I want it to mean to be productive in this job? It's like, put down on paper somewhere, your alternative to pseudo productivity. So if it's not going to be, I'm very active and I leave a real clear digital trail of my activity, what is it going to be? And you get specific, like, well, this is what it's going to be is I am going to own this thing and it's going to transform our company because I'm going to completely change the way we do whatever CRM management of our customers. So my code, I'm going to be the very best platform developer on the team. You get a clear, and this is going to be, this is what productivity means to me.

And like doing this, this is what I'm going to do. This is what my value is going to be. Great. Now that I recognize that, let me start rebuilding my work life around that. So I'm not coming from a place of just trying to prune away stuff I don't like, but I'm coming at it from a place of trying to support something that I think is important. And that's going to be a much more sustainable foundation. I mean, it can't be just, I'm too busy. I'm kind of mad at everyone else that I'm busy. And so I want to just start saying no and cutting things back because I'm lashing out against the state of busyness. It has to be instead for this to last. This is what I want productive to be. And this is super sustainable. Why am I making these changes? Because I'm trying to get closer to that.

So like get your definition that is your alternative to the status quo, get that thing etched in stone, right? And then you know what you're trying to pursue. Yeah, that's great advice. Knowing that I have a book to write this year, that I'm still doing the podcast, running this operation, any advice for me personally?

Knowing a little bit about how my life functions? I'm gonna say time bounce, right? So it's gonna be, and this could be somewhat drastic. Like, okay, I write, I don't know when you write best, but it might be like, I write every morning and I do that till 1030. All right, let's make everything else. How do we make everything else work

if that's gonna be the case? Okay, we're gonna have to rearrange some of the podcast production. There might be some things we don't do anymore, but this is the new time bound and then work backwards from it. I do a lot of that. Like this is just what's gonna happen.

It was like me saying about my podcast, this has to exist in a half day a week. And then that led to lots of innovations. That led to lots of innovations that led to lots of small tweaks and big tweaks and even big things on like the pace to how I grew the show or what I did or didn't do. So maybe if you're trying to write a book, that's the thing to do because you have some autonomy here. No, I have plenty of autonomy and lots of flexibility, but a lot of improvement in how diligent I am about how I kind of deploy my time and attention.

Well, we can just tell the rest of your team, not to let you in here until you're done with your, Rich, where are your pages? No, we're in a good place with the whole thing. It's more about now it's on me to kind of execute on that. But it's interesting, like I do, to your point, I set up kind of rules and guideposts, like, okay, we're only gonna record podcasts on these days, but then I'll get you know, to your point, like I set up kind of rules and guideposts, like, okay, we're only gonna record podcasts on these days,

but then I'll get an email, well, this person that I've been trying to get on forever, but they're only available on this day that doesn't happen to be on this other day. And then you're like, well, do I say no? Because I might not get another chance to have this person on. And then I break my rule.

Yeah, but what if you, but your rule- And then the more, and then it becomes easier to break it again, et cetera. And then everything kind of bleeds into each other. And then the whole thing is up in flames. Well, okay. But then you could have a rule. I love brainstorming about this though,

but I'm thinking like, okay, but the rule is we record two podcasts a week. That day floats because it depends on guest availability. That's fine. So what matters is there's podcast days and non-podcast days. And there's a clear way what matters is there's podcast days and non-podcast days. And there's a clear way I think about a podcast day versus a non-podcast day. And that could drift, but I have like really stark rules about the non-podcast day that like I'm pretty

unreachable. And then the podcast days, maybe we're just all, we do everything on those days. And that like, this is the way I deal with teaching days. For example, teaching days are also the days I do all the Georgetown stuff, like students grading, talking to my TAs and like teaching days are a very clear thing. And then there's non-teaching days and I deal with them differently. And in some sense, like what days those are maybe doesn't matter so much as I have clarity about there's different types of days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the goal. I think we've, we're working towards that. We're, we're doing pretty good. I mean, there's a little kink, few kinks we've work out, but that's definitely the wavelength that I'm on to do that.

So anyway. You'll get there. I'll keep you posted, but I won't find you on social media and I don't even know how to email you. Yeah, it's okay. I'll send by like a messenger. I'll fax you a message.

We'll fax. How's it going, Rich? You do that, you probably do that. F's it going, Rich? Do you do that? You probably do that. Fax me back. Oh my God. But I'm only at the office during these hours. There's just enough like sort of resistance to doing that, that actually might work.

It might work. You know what? This isn't so important. Like how many times am I gonna do this? Like I've done it enough, right? Jamming fax machines actually were a huge productivity boon because it meant nine out of 10 things you could fax. Like, you know what?

I don't even wanna bother. Right, forget about it. Yeah. Well 10 things you could fact like, you know what? I don't even want to bother. Right. Forget about it. Yeah. Well, this was great. Um, I appreciate you coming and sharing today. Uh, the new books, low productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. It really is a lost out art that we need to recapture. Um, you nailed it once again. Uh, your work is so important and vital. And, uh,

I wish you the best with this book and all your affairs at your service, my friend. Thank you, Rich. Anything I can do to help amplify this message, I think it's really important. Thank you. And try to see Dune 2 in IMAX, maybe at the Egyptian while you're here in town. Oh, I gotta see movies here. Yeah. Yeah. You have great theaters here. Yeah. Cheers. Until next I gotta see movies here. Yeah. Yeah, you have great theaters here. Cheers. Until next time. Thanks, man.

Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive,

as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts,

on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was

produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. plants.