Productivity Fatigue: Is Striving To "Get Things Done" Causing Burnout?

00:00:00.000 | So I've been a professional writer for two decades at this point. Throughout this entire period,

00:00:05.680 | off and on, my writing has touched on or been related to the topic of personal productivity.

00:00:12.480 | Not everything I write is about it, but it's sort of, my writing has surrounded that topic

00:00:17.040 | or touched on that topic off and on for two decades now. So eight books and around three

00:00:22.400 | million sales later, I wanted to look back at what I've observed up close over this period

00:00:27.920 | about our culture's changing relationship with the topic of personal productivity.

00:00:32.880 | I'll then conclude my thoughts about what I currently think is important for this topic

00:00:38.160 | and what you should care about when it comes to getting things done in our current 2024 moment.

00:00:44.480 | So it's going to be sort of a history, a personal history, if you will,

00:00:48.160 | of personal productivity. I'm actually going to start, we'll call this like the prelude,

00:00:53.360 | before my professional writing career began, I'm going to start in this period of 1989 to 1999.

00:01:00.800 | I'm going to call this the era of sage advice and optimism. So here's the thing, during this period,

00:01:09.280 | I was a student, I graduated high school in the year 2000. So the 90s was basically my whole

00:01:16.560 | elementary school, middle school, high school education. In this period, I was interested in

00:01:21.200 | business, especially technology business. I read a lot of books about Apple and Microsoft. All this

00:01:27.040 | was very exciting to me. Michael Lewis is the new new thing, et cetera. So I eventually started my

00:01:32.960 | own small little tech company as a high school student. And I was reading accordingly a lot of

00:01:38.640 | business advice books, which were kind of touching on organization and personal productivity. So I

00:01:44.320 | knew the space pretty well. The general sense of this beginning period, 1989 to 1999, the general

00:01:52.400 | sense surrounding personal productivity in the writing of this era was basically, look, you're

00:01:58.400 | fine not thinking about this stuff. It's not necessary. But if you do, if you're interested,

00:02:05.200 | there's some cool things you might get out of it. There was two major tones of book during

00:02:11.520 | this period. I'm going to load some of these sample books up on the screen here for those

00:02:15.280 | who are watching instead of just listening. Probably the most influential book of this

00:02:20.640 | period I have on the screen here now is Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective

00:02:26.880 | People, Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. This came out in 1989, sort of set a lot of the tone

00:02:33.520 | for personal productivity in the 1990s. He had a follow up book in the 90s as well.

00:02:38.560 | I'm going to read the sort of one paragraph description of this book.

00:02:42.160 | In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic,

00:02:48.400 | integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems.

00:02:54.240 | With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living

00:02:58.800 | with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity. All right, so let's think about this

00:03:04.240 | description. Right away, what should strike you is all of these words like principles, integrity,

00:03:12.720 | service, human dignity. This is not a book about, "Hey, let's get after it and crush it."

00:03:21.120 | It was actually very much focused on human flourishing and thriving.

00:03:25.680 | So this genre of book, they have systems in it. So Covey has systems. In particular,

00:03:32.480 | he says you should be organized about your time and you should be careful to make sure that the

00:03:39.120 | important things in your life get time, even though there's a lot of less important but

00:03:44.560 | urgent things that could crowd it out. That's his main point. And if you look at his methodology,

00:03:49.920 | he actually has you list out what he calls the roles in your life. So this goes way beyond just

00:03:55.200 | a professional. I'm a manager at this tech company. I'm a father. I'm on the leadership

00:04:02.400 | committee of my church, right? So you have these different roles in your life. And his whole system

00:04:07.360 | is about making sure that important but perhaps non-urgent tasks in each of these roles gets

00:04:13.760 | regular time. So it's this principle-centered, service-centered, human dignity. He wanted you

00:04:19.760 | to build a full life. So he had systems in this book, but they were just enough, just good enough

00:04:28.000 | to make sure that you could service what was important to your picture of a life well-lived.

00:04:35.120 | So it was systems servicing a good life. This kind of made sense coming out of the '80s,

00:04:40.800 | which was a very psychological age, a very sort of self-reflective sort of Freudian,

00:04:45.920 | neo-Freudian age. We think we were very looking interior to ourselves and trying to understand

00:04:53.200 | what our meaning in life, the baby boomers really big on this during the capitalist exuberance of

00:04:58.720 | the '80s. So it sort of carries that feel over. So it's technical, but not obsessive

00:05:03.200 | over its systems. It's basically saying you need to get your act together so that

00:05:06.800 | you can do stuff that's important, not because somehow the work itself, you want to get more

00:05:13.440 | of it done. So that was a huge bestseller, 15 million copies sold. I think it still may stand

00:05:18.320 | as the bestselling book in the sort of business productivity space. If we count Atomic Habits

00:05:23.920 | as a productivity book, that's sort of catching up, but it's nowhere near close there. I think

00:05:29.120 | Atomic Habits is maybe 5 or 6 million copies. This book, it sold for like a decade because

00:05:35.680 | there wasn't a lot else going on. All right. So that's one style of sort of 1990s, sort of

00:05:40.640 | optimistic. This is not necessary, but if you care about this, your life can get better.

00:05:46.000 | The other style I would call the Sage Advice Guide. So I'm putting a representative copy of

00:05:51.440 | one of these books up on the screen. This is How to Become a CEO, The Rules for Rising to the Top

00:05:59.120 | of Any Organization. It's a New York Times bestseller written by Jeffrey Fox that came out

00:06:04.240 | in 1998. This is another classic style in the '90s. Fox in this book, which was adapted from a

00:06:13.600 | talk he gave, an alumni talk, I believe at the University of Pennsylvania. It's provocative,

00:06:20.400 | big think advice. The book had rules. Each rule had like a page. They're pithy. And then it would

00:06:28.000 | have like some no-nonsense, interesting, thought-provoking advice. So I wish I could

00:06:33.200 | look at... I don't actually have a copy of this book. If I did, I would look inside of it. Okay,

00:06:36.640 | let's see here. Here we go. Here's some rules. Know everybody by their first name.

00:06:43.520 | No goals, no glory. Don't take work home from the office. Don't have a drink with the gang.

00:06:48.320 | So it was these rules would be a little provocative. And you're like, "Ooh,

00:06:52.000 | interesting. It's sage advice. And I want to sort of learn more from this person what he means."

00:06:56.960 | And again, it was like these useful nudges I could use to kind of help nudge my professional

00:07:03.680 | life into a little bit more order. So these were the two big genres of that period. The sort of

00:07:09.440 | optimistic, let's like build a good life, get your act together, we'll help you do it. And the sort

00:07:13.760 | of sage advice. Here's sort of like provocative wisdom. Okay. Then we get to what I'll call

00:07:19.360 | chapter one of this history, because it's where my professional career begins to intersect the

00:07:22.960 | history. This is the years 2000 to 2007. Otherwise, I think of this known as the

00:07:30.720 | productivity prong period. And I'll explain what that means in a second. So the 2000s

00:07:38.160 | felt like a major shift from the 90s. The book that I think captures that shift, I'll load up

00:07:44.000 | on the screen here, is David Allen's classic, Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free

00:07:50.000 | Productivity. This came out in 2002. Now I'm going to read you a little bit of the description here,

00:07:58.400 | because people think they know what this book is, but often they get that wrong. Let me read you a

00:08:02.560 | little bit of the description. And I'm going to explain why this is really an important turning

00:08:05.440 | point in productivity literature. "In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work.

00:08:10.880 | In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen

00:08:13.920 | shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of

00:08:19.840 | thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple. Our productivity is directly

00:08:24.480 | proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized

00:08:30.400 | can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential."

00:08:34.880 | All right. Remember, subtitle here is The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

00:08:38.480 | If you read this book, the tone is completely different than what came from before.

00:08:44.560 | So in the 90s, it's like, yeah, we have these jobs, they're fine. But if you want to do something

00:08:49.680 | special, we can help you do something special. Getting Things Done, the way this book reads,

00:08:55.120 | is, oh, my God, the work in these jobs is killing us. We're being completely overloaded

00:09:01.200 | with the amount of stuff. And he uses that word, Allen uses the word stuff all the time

00:09:06.160 | to describe this. We have all of this stuff coming at us and we can't keep up with it.

00:09:10.800 | And it's causing huge stress because we have all these, he calls them, the stuff creates what he

00:09:15.840 | calls open loops. All these things are in our world and we can't get our mind wrapped around

00:09:20.480 | all these things. It's not, OK, here's the three things I need to do this week and I see how I'm

00:09:23.760 | going to do it. It's a hundred things. We're drowning and it's stressing us out. And Allen

00:09:28.640 | didn't like this stress. Allen's like, we got to get away from the stress of all this stuff that's

00:09:33.440 | coming at us. We need what he called stress-free productivity. So his whole systems was about,

00:09:39.920 | how do we get all the stuff that's coming at us into these systems where we don't have to keep

00:09:45.360 | track of it in our head? And how can we then simplify work to basically, the system will

00:09:51.040 | help us figure out, do this next, do this after that, do this after that. We could just start

00:09:54.560 | cranking widgets as his followers likes to call it, just executing tasks and not have the stress

00:09:59.360 | of trying to keep track of all these different things. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt

00:10:03.760 | briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book,

00:10:08.720 | Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most

00:10:16.720 | of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:23.520 | I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video.

00:10:29.360 | So he's trying to free us from stress. Not like, hey, how do we do something extra? It's like,

00:10:34.960 | how do we survive? And this was a real change. It was a real change in the 2000s where we began to

00:10:40.640 | get more overloaded by work. The volume of work and the velocity with which this work was coming

00:10:45.360 | at us began to really increase. It was no longer obvious how to even just keep up with our jobs.

00:10:51.040 | As I've talked about before and I came to realize later, as I looked at this,

00:10:57.200 | this was a technological issue. It was the front office IT revolution.

00:11:00.720 | It was the personal computer plus digital networking like email and mobile computing

00:11:05.040 | that suddenly increased both the workload and the velocity at which the work was actually unfolding.

00:11:10.960 | So getting things done is a reaction. We didn't have these computers and networks in 1989.

00:11:15.520 | We had them in 2002. It's a reaction to this technological world, much more defensive in tone.

00:11:22.400 | What we did here is where things get interesting. The early 2000s, technology was leading us to be

00:11:30.480 | overloaded by our work and the speed at which the work was unfolding. We turned to technology at

00:11:35.760 | first as our solution to this problem. So the personal productivity world had a let's fight

00:11:41.680 | fire with fire mentality. They said, yes, these new tools have opened up a fire hose of incoming

00:11:47.840 | obligations, but maybe these same new tools will save us from that fire hose. So maybe what we need

00:11:53.520 | to do here is a two-step adjustment. This was the optimistic belief of the personal productivity

00:11:58.080 | world. All right, these new tools have unleashed a fire hose, but I think once we actually also

00:12:02.960 | deploy these new tools on the receiving side, we'll be able to better manage the fire hose.

00:12:08.160 | So the advice suddenly became very technical. We went from the sort of common sense systems

00:12:14.560 | of Stephen Covey, which was really like, write out what you're going to do for today.

00:12:18.320 | Have your five roles. At the beginning of each week, make sure that you put some time aside for

00:12:25.520 | each of those roles on your calendar to make sure that you're servicing everything that's important

00:12:30.080 | in your life. Write down your tasks. It was very simple stuff. Things got a lot more complicated.

00:12:35.600 | Let me load up a spreadsheet here, a flow chart rather. Okay, so what I have on the screen here,

00:12:40.560 | for those who are watching, this was the getting things done workflow. I don't know if you see

00:12:45.680 | this, Jesse, but it's, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. There's 15

00:12:51.120 | components to this flow chart that has branching decisions that have to be made with some recursive

00:12:56.720 | loops in it. This was this sort of productivity as algorithm type mentality. These systems got

00:13:04.160 | more and more complex. We were hoping to outsource our stress to these systems. These systems would

00:13:08.880 | manage the fire hose, and we at the other end could just have this mind like water, stress-free

00:13:14.480 | productivity experience of the system takes care of it, and I'm just sort of executing the tasks

00:13:18.560 | at the end. So it was like a algorithmic, techno-optimistic, super complicated system

00:13:27.040 | approach to productivity. This really spread online. So this is where we began to get blogs.

00:13:34.400 | So this was the age of blogs, pre-social media. We got blogs like Merlin Man's 43 Folders,

00:13:40.720 | which really focused on building these systems and using even more advanced technology and

00:13:46.640 | software to implement these David Allen type solutions. A lot of other blogs took off with

00:13:51.920 | the same sort of incredibly technical mindset. If we make the software and the systems more

00:13:56.880 | complicated, we can find peace. We can find saving from this new technology amplified fire hose of

00:14:06.080 | tasks. There is a term, a leet-speak term emerged for this productivity prong, PR0N. It was sort of

00:14:13.440 | a techno-lingo for these incredibly complicated techno systems for managing your work and your

00:14:19.440 | flows. So there's like this growing dread that work was becoming unsustainable, and the thread

00:14:25.840 | of hope we had using as our sort of gospel David Allen was like, well, if we just build complicated

00:14:32.000 | enough systems in response, we can somehow survive this. My professional writing career begins during

00:14:38.720 | this era. So my first book came out in 2005. My second book came out in 2006. So it was like in

00:14:46.000 | the core of this transition. Here's what's interesting about my books though. I had read

00:14:52.080 | GTD. I got into this world of productivity prong a little later, probably after my first two books

00:14:59.680 | came out, but I knew about this changing mindset and this changing world. But my two first books,

00:15:04.480 | which were written for students, I remember I was an undergraduate when I wrote my first

00:15:07.920 | one and a first year graduate student when I published my second one. So I mean, I was

00:15:11.040 | young. I felt even then that the GTD style thinking, though exhilarating, there was something

00:15:19.520 | not stale about it, but dehumanizing. It didn't feel quite right to me.

00:15:25.840 | So my first two books actually drew from the 90s style. My very first book, How to Win at College,

00:15:33.040 | was the Sage Advice Guide. I actually was directly influenced by How to Become CEO.

00:15:39.680 | I wrote it exactly the same way, provocative rules, but now aimed at students. Sage advice,

00:15:45.120 | provocative rules like, "Oh, I want to learn more about this. Let me read 75 of these and out of

00:15:49.440 | this, I'll get some nudges that'll make my student life better." So I wrote that first book like a

00:15:53.120 | 90s style book. Don't do all your reading, make your bed every morning. I mean, I sold that book

00:15:59.840 | to my agent because my agent had published Jeff Fox's How to Become CEO. And I wrote her and said,

00:16:07.520 | "I want to do that book, but for students." And of course that worked because she liked that book,

00:16:13.680 | because she had purchased and published that book and that worked out well.

00:16:17.120 | My second book, How to Become a Straight A Student, classic Covey. There's systems in it.

00:16:23.760 | Yeah, here's how you should organize your notes. Here's how you should prepare for papers. Here's

00:16:29.680 | how you should manage your time. But the systems were servicing a greater goal, which is I want

00:16:34.800 | to get good grades without being too overwhelmed. So it was like, we have this greater goal. Let's

00:16:38.160 | build good enough systems. But the focus was simplicity, reducing friction, systems that

00:16:42.720 | would be sustainable. The systems themselves were not fetishized like they were in early 2000s

00:16:49.040 | productivity literature, where the system itself is what was cool. Here, what you're looking for

00:16:53.760 | is I want my grades to be better. I don't want to work as much as I'm working. I don't want to be

00:16:57.600 | overloaded. The systems were just good enough. And it was the ideas were more important.

00:17:02.640 | Like, okay, if you want to study, active recall is more important than passive recall. You have

00:17:07.200 | to actually try to reproduce the information out loud as opposed to just passively read it.

00:17:11.600 | The systems to help you do that, it's not even that exciting. It's like flashcards. It's like

00:17:15.600 | moving back and forth. So it's very Stephen Covey. This thing is important in your life.

00:17:19.440 | Let's just build up some frameworks here to help you achieve that and give you some ideas for how

00:17:24.560 | to achieve it. So I was sort of out of step early in my advice writing career. I was out of step

00:17:30.240 | with what was going on in the cutting edge world of personal productivity writing. All right.

00:17:36.880 | Chapter two of this story, 2007 to 2013, roughly. This is the period of lifestyle design.

00:17:45.520 | Okay. So here's what happens here. This productivity prong movement, this idea that

00:17:51.520 | increasingly complicated systems will save us from the techno amplified fire hose, that began to

00:17:55.920 | falter as the 2000s went on. Merlin Mann at 43 Folders, for example, Merlin Mann got disillusioned.

00:18:04.160 | He's like, my God, I can't make my work life better just by having increasingly complicated

00:18:10.320 | systems. He had this book deal to write about these topics on 43 Folders. He gave back the money.

00:18:15.840 | He's like, I can't write this book. And then he shuttered the website. And he basically gave this

00:18:21.920 | sort of valedictory address where he's like, what really matters is creating stuff that's important.

00:18:26.800 | And you just can't be too overloaded to do that. And he just sort of left that whole business.

00:18:30.720 | And in general, this sort of very productivity prong type world began to falter because the fire

00:18:36.880 | hose of obligations got stronger. The velocity of work got faster and faster and nothing was making,

00:18:44.160 | none of these things was making that better. It was an interesting hobby for some people

00:18:48.320 | to build out their, you know, KGTD electro systems and database management systems,

00:18:55.600 | but it wasn't solving the problem. So then we get this sort of, I don't know,

00:18:59.760 | Molotov cocktail of a book in 2007. I'll load it up here. Tim Ferriss's The Four Hour Work Week.

00:19:08.160 | The subtitle was Escape Nine to Five, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. This is the

00:19:14.000 | expanded version on here. The original version came out in 2007. I remember it because I had a

00:19:19.680 | mutual friend with him, Ramit Sethi, who I knew were the same age Ramit and I. And Ramit was like,

00:19:25.040 | you got to read this book. My friend Tim wrote this book. You got to read it. This book was like

00:19:29.760 | a bomb being thrown into the world because instead of saying, how do we tame what's going on in work?

00:19:35.280 | He said, how do we walk away from this world in the first place? It was a book about, he calls it

00:19:41.920 | being the new rich, but basically how to actually just wash your hands of the sort of Merlin man.

00:19:49.280 | I am inundated with emails trying to keep up with them with increasingly complicated systems. Like,

00:19:54.080 | how do we just walk away from that? And he called this technique lifestyle design. And he sort of

00:19:59.760 | got in the weeds. I mean, he had a lot of technical ideas, which was popular, but his big objective

00:20:06.800 | was really pretty radical and non-technical and not about optimizing and certainly not about

00:20:11.840 | productivity. Tim Ferriss has completely misunderstood it this way. It was, how do you

00:20:15.840 | change the way you think about your work? And all of his suggestions were about start your own

00:20:21.840 | business, heavily automate it, learn how to live cheaper, do some work, then take six months off.

00:20:27.760 | It was like a radical new types of ways of living because people needed release from this,

00:20:35.120 | this increasingly overloaded world of constant incoming work and constant communication.

00:20:40.000 | So this book landed like a bomb. It was like permission, this period of like, let's stop

00:20:44.960 | trying to keep up and let's just wash our hands of what's happening here altogether.

00:20:52.880 | This was a sort of an exciting idea for sure. And that really, I think, set the mode. Yeah,

00:20:59.920 | the financial crisis hit soon after his book comes out. And really this idea is really starting to

00:21:05.280 | take hold. People are like, yeah, I mean, whatever, work to live, don't live to work.

00:21:09.280 | I don't want to just be answering emails in the cubicle and being stressed all day.

00:21:14.560 | And so this was, this really kicked off a really influential period. The blogosphere

00:21:20.480 | then changed over from productivity prod, four to three folders to this new movement

00:21:24.880 | based around minimalism emerged. And it was all about people simplifying their lifestyles,

00:21:29.520 | simplifying their possessions, simplifying their jobs. This is where you like my friends,

00:21:33.360 | the minimalist emerged. They left their stressful corporate jobs to live cheaper.

00:21:37.680 | During this period of their life, they moved to a cabin in Montana. We're writing essays from there.

00:21:43.440 | Leo Babouda, Zen Habits, classic blog of this period where he was able to use like the sales

00:21:51.360 | of his ebook to quit his job and live this really simple life with his six kids. And they lived in

00:21:57.200 | San Francisco and it was, this was this period of simplification. So we saw this Tim Ferriss

00:22:03.200 | influence really go through the sort of the online discourse as well. No one was talking anymore

00:22:08.000 | about building more and more complex systems to keep up with work. It was about these alternative

00:22:12.080 | lifestyles, how to get away from the crush of work, which, you know, the financial crisis was

00:22:17.520 | telling people it didn't get us anywhere. Anyways, after all this effort in the early

00:22:21.360 | two thousands, where do we end up? Like we all got laid off anyways, really interesting period.

00:22:25.680 | My third book publishes during this time, how to become a high school superstar,

00:22:30.720 | completely influenced by this because what had happened is my, in my personal writing life,

00:22:38.640 | after my second book, I started, that's when I started my blog and newsletter.

00:22:42.320 | And pretty quickly, and I've told the story before, but pretty quickly, my,

00:22:45.440 | my focus there shifted away from just study habits and over to how do you build a rewarding

00:22:52.960 | college career? It was like Tim Ferriss for the Ivy league student, you know, it was how do you

00:22:59.040 | avoid overload and stress as a student? How do you find meaning in your life as a student,

00:23:04.720 | get really connected to like the ideas and the idea of being a student? How do we make

00:23:09.360 | this not something you're grinding through to try to get to something next, but something that you

00:23:12.880 | enjoy while at the same time, doing well enough and being interesting enough that you'll have

00:23:16.560 | options after you graduate. It was during this period, I began to travel the country. I'd give

00:23:20.960 | talks at colleges around the country about reducing student stress about separating overload

00:23:27.120 | from ambition. How can you be an ambitious student who wants to do cool things and not have to have

00:23:31.040 | your life itself have a low quality while you're a student? The motto of my blog during this period

00:23:38.640 | became do less, do better, know why, which are the same sentiments you've seen echoed in my work

00:23:45.760 | ever since. So I was incredibly influenced. I'm a grad student reading Ferris readings in habits,

00:23:52.400 | reading the minimalist heavily influenced during this period. What matters is building a really

00:23:57.520 | good life. Work serves that be very careful about how this happens. So it's like this really

00:24:02.240 | interesting counter-cultural period that a lot of us have forgotten. So my third book lands in this

00:24:05.920 | space. How to become a high school superstar. Um, it's actually like a very subversive book.

00:24:11.040 | My editor left and then like three more editors got fired. And by the time it finally landed on

00:24:17.280 | the editor who published that book, they, they had no connection to it. They don't know what I had

00:24:22.240 | originally pitched. So I could write whatever I wanted. It's technically a college admissions

00:24:26.240 | guide, but it's written like a Malcolm Gladwell book. And the whole premise of the book is

00:24:30.160 | following these students. I called relaxed superstars who got into good colleges without

00:24:34.400 | being overloaded or stressed or grinding. I was, I was trying to push out this alternative

00:24:39.680 | notion of ambition and success that could be interesting and slow and engaging and not

00:24:45.600 | stressful. And the book got into the biology of impressiveness and how we, how we think about and

00:24:51.520 | measure and understand people's accomplishments. It's like a really interesting, weird kind of

00:24:55.040 | quirky book. It's the first time I had like ideas followed by advice that two-part structure. You

00:25:01.600 | seen a lot of my other books going forward, cool book, my least read book because of the title and

00:25:07.280 | the period where it came out, but also I think one of my most subversive. So I was heavily influenced.

00:25:11.520 | So I wasn't influenced by productivity Prawn. I basically, my early books were 90 style books.

00:25:16.320 | I skipped the whole productivity Prawn period, heavily embraced the lifestyle design period in

00:25:21.120 | my blog and in my third book. And then in my fourth book, 2012, I come out with so good.

00:25:26.800 | They can't ignore you. It's all about like, how do you build a career that you have control over?

00:25:31.920 | Like I said, don't follow your passion, get good at things, use that as leverage to build a career

00:25:38.160 | that you really like. Because at the time I really was allergic to this idea of work in which you're

00:25:43.120 | overloaded and lots of people can put stuff on your plate and you're stressed out and your work

00:25:47.280 | feels like you're in the office space movie. And I said, the only way to avoid that, you got to be

00:25:51.280 | really good and just dictate your own terms. And the stories in that book are of people who got

00:25:55.440 | really good and just decided what they wanted their work life to be like. Like the database

00:25:59.760 | developer, Lulu, who would do a freelance engagements, incredibly high paid because

00:26:04.320 | she was very good. And she would do an engagement for half a year and then take three months off

00:26:08.400 | and then do another engagement and then take another four months off.

00:26:11.840 | I was like, that's the way to do it. So those books were very heavily influenced by lifestyle

00:26:18.560 | design. The interesting thing is people don't remember that period. Like when people are

00:26:24.400 | thinking about productivity now, personal productivity, they forget that there was this

00:26:28.960 | very influential period in which it was very subversive and counter-cultural. I think they

00:26:32.640 | kind of jumped back in their memory to the productivity prong period. So like that's

00:26:37.840 | what personal productivity is. They also forget the nineties when it was sage advice and

00:26:42.400 | self-actualization and optimism. It's a much richer narrative than I think people realize.

00:26:46.640 | All right, this brings us to chapter three, 2014 to 2019. This is the period of fighting back

00:26:54.640 | So what happened during this period is a lifestyle design and minimalism,

00:26:58.320 | very aspirational, but most people still had jobs. A lot of those people got older. They

00:27:05.920 | got into their thirties or into their forties. I still have jobs. I got to support my kids'

00:27:10.240 | private school tuition or whatever. I'm not going to start an online business that sells

00:27:16.240 | French striped sailor shirts, an actual example from Tim Ferriss' book, which I can then

00:27:20.960 | automate with VAs from India and go to Mendoza, the mountains, and Argentina to drink wine.

00:27:27.280 | No, my job is still, I'm overloaded. The same problems are there that were there in the early

00:27:33.040 | 2000s. Tons of work coming at me, the velocity of work with email, and now we had Slack in the

00:27:38.080 | picture. It's just so fast. I'm interrupted all the time. I can't really get anything done. My

00:27:42.160 | workload is out of control. All those problems were still there. And we weren't all going to

00:27:46.560 | become Leo by Buddha and live off of our ebook sales. So this created a new period in which the

00:27:55.040 | books in the productivity space begin to say, let's fight back within the confines of work

00:28:01.440 | itself. Let's try to change work. Let's fight back and say, the way we're working, isn't working.

00:28:07.760 | And let's fight back against it. Not an escape plan as in the era before, not a plan to cope

00:28:14.320 | with it as in the area before that, but let's actually fight back. I think that the definitive

00:28:19.040 | book that kicked off this era, I'll load this on the screen here, is Greg McKeown's 2014 book,

00:28:24.720 | Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. So in Essentialism, I'll read you the description.

00:28:33.520 | Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin, simultaneously felt overworked and underutilized,

00:28:42.080 | felt busy but not productive, felt like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people's

00:28:46.720 | agendas? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the way of the essentialist.

00:28:51.840 | Essentialism is more than a time management strategy or a productivity technique. It is

00:28:56.400 | a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything

00:29:01.680 | that is not so it can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.

00:29:07.200 | So Greg was saying we have to fight back. And he was focusing in particular on the workload issue,

00:29:13.040 | that we had more and more work piling up on our plates. And he said, you got to push back and say,

00:29:16.640 | no, if I do fewer things, it's going to be better. I want to do things that matter. Stop giving me

00:29:22.640 | this other stuff. And he gives all these stories in the book about, hey, this actually works out.

00:29:26.560 | You're more valuable if you do that. You're not valuable trying to juggle 100 things.

00:29:30.240 | You're just trying to satisfy people in the moment when you say yes, but you're not satisfying

00:29:34.880 | yourself or your organization in the long run because you're overwhelmed and nothing actually

00:29:38.880 | gets done. So this kicked off this period of books about pushing back and trying to redefine work.

00:29:46.000 | My fifth book came out in this period, Deep Work, also a fighting back book. So if Greg was worried

00:29:54.240 | about workload, Deep Work was worried about the high velocity and interruption. It was saying,

00:29:57.840 | this is a terrible way to use the human brain to try to create valuable things.

00:30:03.200 | We've got to push back against this. Focus, undistracted focus is what really creates the

00:30:09.280 | value. So if your workday is set up to make it impossible to get undistracted focus,

00:30:13.520 | you're in trouble. You're running your Ford factory with the lights out. We don't know

00:30:18.880 | where to put the stuff on the car. We have to change the way we work and make focus something

00:30:22.800 | we really care about more than we care about responsiveness, more than we care about the

00:30:27.600 | speed at which things can be answered, information can move. Focus is the key state. We've got to

00:30:31.680 | practice it. We got to protect it. This was also a fighting back book. Gary Keller's one thing,

00:30:38.000 | another fighting back book. So this was a period where personal productivity books were really

00:30:42.560 | about how do we try to fix a knowledge work world that really isn't working right. At this point,

00:30:52.320 | I've now become a professor. Deep Work is the first book I write entirely while a professor.

00:30:57.040 | I write that while I'm an assistant professor at the time, sort of pre-tenure. I'm a computer

00:31:02.800 | scientist. I'm also beginning to get more interested in the impact of technology in our

00:31:06.800 | lives. So Deep Work is really the first book where I'm explicitly dealing with technology

00:31:13.040 | and how it impacts our lives. All of my books since then much more explicitly deal with that

00:31:18.560 | topic. When I start writing for the New Yorker a few years after that, I'm specifically dealing

00:31:24.400 | with technology. So this is, for people who get confused by my bibliography, this is the turning

00:31:29.040 | point where my writing has this technological thread through it. Where the books before it,

00:31:35.280 | so good they can't ignore you. The college books obviously were sort of just their own thing.

00:31:38.560 | All right, this brings us to chapter four in this short history of personal productivity.

00:31:44.720 | I'm going to put this from like 2019 to 2023. You could call this either the period of

00:31:52.720 | deconstructing productivity, or depending on your point of view, the productivity winter.

00:31:58.080 | Now the key book in this era that kicks it off in 2019, I'm going to put up on the screen here,

00:32:04.720 | is Ginny O'Dell's book, How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy.

00:32:12.000 | This book got a lot of elite press. Look at this list. It was a best book of the year by Time,

00:32:19.680 | the New Yorker, NPR, et cetera. The New York Times Book Review really liked it,

00:32:25.040 | called it a complex, smart, and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual,

00:32:29.280 | then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto. I'll read you one paragraph from this.

00:32:36.160 | "Far from the simple anti-technology screed or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often,

00:32:42.400 | How to Do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency

00:32:47.200 | and technodeterminism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, the book will change how you

00:32:51.840 | see your place in our world." By the way, a quick aside. This is always something that catches my

00:32:57.600 | ire. Look, it says, "Far from the simple anti-technology screed that we read so often."

00:33:03.600 | No one is writing those screeds. Again, everything that talks about technology

00:33:07.520 | always posits this world in which everyone is saying we should stop using technology,

00:33:11.200 | so that the author who's saying, "Well, that's too simple," somehow seems like an intellectually

00:33:15.520 | complex hero. I'm yet again to find a book that says, "Let's just all stop using technology."

00:33:20.480 | Anyways, this book had a really big impact, especially in elite circles. I knew it well

00:33:26.640 | because my sixth book, Digital Minimalism, came out the same week as Jenny's book. So,

00:33:33.920 | we were covered together a lot because Jenny's book wasn't really about work and productivity,

00:33:40.160 | but that's the way it eventually became interpreted. I'll get to that in a second,

00:33:43.200 | but it was meant to be about the attention economy and looking at our phones.

00:33:46.640 | Our two books got covered a lot. Gio Tolentino wrote in the Page of the New Yorker a long article

00:33:54.400 | where she grappled with both my book and Jenny's book. The New York Times Book Review did a big

00:33:59.280 | roundup that included my book and Jenny's book. The Ringer had an article that talked about my

00:34:04.560 | book and Jenny's book. So, we sort of got to know each other. We were being covered a lot

00:34:08.560 | in the press. Odell's work kicked off this new period because it did something new. It brought

00:34:14.400 | academic formalisms into thinking about these types of issues of work and productivity.

00:34:22.560 | In particular, Odell was heavily influenced and, I guess, studied the Italian Marxist Franco

00:34:30.240 | Berardi. So, she was basically adapting a Berardi-style Marxist argument to the more

00:34:39.920 | modern tools of the information age. We don't need to get into the details of it. Berardi had

00:34:45.520 | basically updated a lot of modernist Marxist ideas to knowledge work. This was one of Berardi's big

00:34:54.160 | contributions. He helped update it to a knowledge work era. Then, Jenny further updated it and

00:35:09.120 | applied his approach. In particular, she was talking about our relationship to our phones.

00:35:14.000 | So, she had these narratives about reusing social media, etc., all the time. In a Berardi-style,

00:35:20.880 | we had internalized these narratives of capital production. Every moment was something to be

00:35:25.120 | monetized. It was sort of classic newer Marxist-type stuff. Quickly, however, her critique

00:35:32.960 | was generalized by the receiving audience because it talked a lot about our need to be productive

00:35:37.760 | all the time in this sort of internalized way. That's why we're using social media all the time.

00:35:41.360 | But it generalized real easily to just work and productivity.

00:35:47.600 | So anyways, it introduced this whole notion of we can use these Marxist academic formalisms

00:35:54.560 | in critiquing productivity. This was a hit, especially in more elite circles. It's timed

00:36:04.080 | very well because you have the post-Donald Trump election. As part of the left's backlash against

00:36:12.320 | that, you saw in many areas what were formerly more academic narratives on topics burst into

00:36:20.240 | the mainstream. We began to get all these much more complicated left-wing academic ideas burst

00:36:28.800 | into the mainstream post-Trump. So, it was a perfect time for a very smart academic critique

00:36:34.160 | of productivity to ride those tailwinds. Soon, you would find basically any conversation you

00:36:41.040 | would have with a reporter about productivity was using this sort of terminology, this sort

00:36:45.920 | of Odellian terminology. It was where we began hearing about the performativity of work, etc.

00:36:51.920 | Once this was part of the slip string, then we had other modes of critique came to productivity,

00:36:58.240 | in particular the postmodern critical critiques, which were really big in identity politics and

00:37:05.200 | critical race theory. These aren't Marxist now. These are postmodern-style critiques.

00:37:10.320 | These began to really be applied as well. So, there's a lot of sort of elite academic style

00:37:16.240 | energy turned on the topic of productivity, which is sort of why I think of this as the

00:37:22.320 | productivity winter. So, the goal of these critiques was the deconstruction of productivity,

00:37:27.840 | seeking the problematic that's inherent in the substructures that hold up the whole notion of the

00:37:33.280 | concept of productivity. A lot of focus began on who was being left out of term. They would use the

00:37:39.600 | term "discourse." This is a postmodern term, a Foucaultian term, actually. Who was being left out?

00:37:45.280 | Why do we even need the work in the first place? I mean, look, if you're an academic,

00:37:50.400 | it's really interesting to study the elite discourses around productivity because it was

00:37:55.680 | mixing different, way different, sometimes contradicting styles of analysis were all being

00:38:02.320 | put here. So, you would have like a Marxist analysis would really jump in and be like,

00:38:06.320 | "Why do we even work in the first place?" This is like the late-stage capitalism. It's a very

00:38:11.200 | Marxist modernist argument. But then you have these postmodern arguments also piling on,

00:38:17.040 | even though they don't play nicely with Marxist modernist arguments, talking about the discourses

00:38:22.160 | and the way that productivity plays with like received language, a sort of negative theory,

00:38:27.200 | literary critical approach. These don't play well together, but they were all piling on

00:38:32.000 | the issue of productivity. So, a lot of the focus began during this period on who does this advice

00:38:39.840 | not apply to? What's problematic about it? Have you given sufficient like caveats to signal your

00:38:45.280 | awareness of this analysis or this, or who might be upset about it? Missing someone in your

00:38:51.600 | discussion became much more important than whether the advice you were giving had generally was

00:38:57.680 | useful or not, or was accurate or not. It really became an interesting moment. But what's interesting,

00:39:03.760 | we also got a lot of sort of standard sort of postmodern trauma language, psychological language,

00:39:10.640 | exhaustion language, et cetera. Interesting period. All of this though I'm going to fuel,

00:39:15.600 | I think the same fuel exists throughout this whole period, which is we are exhausted by knowledge

00:39:22.160 | work. We have too much work on our plates and the velocity of working on this work is too fast.

00:39:27.520 | The same problem that began in the early 2000s, the same fire that began burning the same 2000s

00:39:35.600 | and burned and caused the lifestyle design pushback and then led to the fighting back

00:39:39.920 | era of books, the same fire was there. And if anything, we get the pandemic during this period,

00:39:45.520 | which makes that fire even brighter. It's the same thing fueling it. It's just the response

00:39:50.000 | to it now because of the political moment and Odell's really smart book. And by the way,

00:39:56.000 | this is like one of the smartest books on productivity I've seen written in a long time,

00:40:00.080 | because it's actual, this is like original academic work that Odell was doing. She was

00:40:04.320 | adapting Barati's argument from knowledge work to the attention economy. It was recognized because

00:40:09.600 | I think it was truly really smart work, but this became the vector through which we dealt with the

00:40:14.560 | same fire that already been there. So for this three or four year period, this is how we were

00:40:18.880 | dealing with the unsustainability. This was our primal scream of rejection of what work had become

00:40:23.920 | was, okay, we're going to just sort of deconstruct productivity itself. Now, of course, that wasn't

00:40:28.160 | going to solve the problem. It wasn't going to solve the problem that we had too much to do in

00:40:32.480 | the velocities too fast. We could deconstruct and problematize and yell into the wind about like

00:40:37.360 | discussions of productivity as much as we wanted, but the problem, all that productivity talk was

00:40:41.600 | trying to solve is still there. So this brings us to chapter five, where we are now. It's not

00:40:47.760 | exactly clear where we are now, but I would say we're moving out of that moment of the productivity

00:40:55.760 | winter and into some sort of new phase of our engagement with unfortunately the problems that

00:41:00.880 | still exist and have existed now for over two decades. So one sign that we're moving out of

00:41:07.600 | the productivity winter is, two months ago, I published my book, Slow Productivity.

00:41:14.160 | One of the first books in steep work that sort of was explicitly dealing with this issue,

00:41:19.120 | in elite circles, the sort of deconstructing productivity crowd, it got sort of a mixed

00:41:24.240 | review, right? Because they're still around and it's still like, why are we talking about

00:41:27.600 | productivity? Who are you leaving out? Are you signaling the right things? Why do we even care

00:41:31.280 | about work? And why aren't you talking about deconstructing capitalism? That's still there,

00:41:35.360 | but the general audience is buying the book. So Slow Productivity comes out two months ago,

00:41:41.440 | debuts number two on the New York Times bestseller list. Might've been number one,

00:41:45.840 | if not for James Clare, Atomic Habits. There was a big bulk order that week too. They had the

00:41:52.560 | symbol. So there was a big bulk order that week, but whatever, it was a popular book.

00:41:55.680 | It's the biggest first two months I've ever had with a book. We've moved 75,000 units in just

00:42:01.760 | a couple of months. It's people are interested in this topic from a more practical perspective again.

00:42:08.720 | So even though the productivity winter crowd is still like, we shouldn't be giving advice,

00:42:15.680 | we should be deconstructing it. People want to talk about it again. So we're entering in some

00:42:20.000 | sort of new phase. The characteristics of our current relationship with personal productivity,

00:42:26.640 | I think builds on a lot of our experiences of the last 20 years. I wrote down a few points,

00:42:32.080 | I think roughly characterize our current moment. One, we're wary of the potential for sort of

00:42:39.920 | exploitation or managerial shenanigans or institutional excesses at work, things that

00:42:46.640 | the productivity winter crowd cares about. But we also still care about the idea of work and

00:42:51.920 | doing things well as appealing. We do want advice. We might not accept it all and that's okay.

00:42:59.680 | We want just to hear good ideas and we'll decide what we like and what we don't.

00:43:03.840 | That's characteristic of the moment. We're ready to hear ideas even if they don't all apply to me.

00:43:09.040 | Let's get more ideas out here. Three, the goal in discussing productivity right now needs to

00:43:14.880 | be about two things at once, doing great work, having sustainable and flourishing life. We

00:43:20.800 | somehow have to mix those two things together. We've now tried the rejecting work thing several

00:43:28.160 | times. We tried it with the lifestyle design interlude. We've tried it with the deconstructing

00:43:33.680 | productivity and late stage capitalism interlude. It's just not sticking. So we do want to talk

00:43:38.240 | about doing work better. We also want to talk about our life being sustainable and flourishing

00:43:43.200 | as a non-negotiable as whatever system we talk about. I would say we do care about the nitty

00:43:49.920 | gritty of organizing tasks and time. I've seen this even from more of the elite crowds,

00:43:54.240 | but we only care about this to the degree that it helps with our bigger goals. It's a very Stephen

00:43:58.400 | Covey. I want to be organized with my stuff, but I don't care about the system that much. I don't

00:44:05.680 | want to fetishize my system and build some complex computer thing and build flow charts and argue

00:44:11.200 | endlessly about the details of it. I just want a good enough system that my stuff and time is

00:44:16.080 | organized enough that I can make progress on the point before, which is I want to do well in work

00:44:20.480 | and I want my life to be sustainable and flourishing. Finally, I think we agree there's

00:44:25.520 | something broken about the high-tech office that needs more systemic fixes. The way we're working

00:44:30.160 | isn't working. We need to actually have major changes to the way we think about and structure

00:44:34.880 | work. But in the meantime, I want to work on what I can do as an individual to make my life better.

00:44:39.280 | So again, two thoughts in our heads at the same time. How do we advocate for making work

00:44:44.880 | better structurally while also making my specific life and work better right now? I think these are

00:44:51.760 | the things that are in the air right now, what people are looking for from personal productivity.

00:44:55.520 | I don't know what to call this. One alternative is humanistic productivity. It's productivity that

00:45:01.600 | is grounded deeply in the dignity of humans and the drive of humans to live flourishing lives.

00:45:07.920 | So what should we care about specifically then in this humanistic era of productivity?

00:45:14.080 | 2024, what are the things now if you are interested in productivity that you should

00:45:18.480 | care about? Well, I'll give you my answer. So if you listen to this podcast or read my book,

00:45:23.040 | Slow Productivity, I really have four pillars that I think define the way I'm engaging with

00:45:27.680 | personal productivity right now. Number one, you should do fewer things at once.

00:45:31.680 | Doing too many things overload is a huge cause of derangement and exhaustion and burnout,

00:45:39.040 | and it's not a great way to produce things. Two, you should work at a natural pace.

00:45:42.480 | Give things the time that's actually required to get them done, the realistic amount of time.

00:45:48.240 | Vary your intensity over time. Slow down. It turns out what people want, what clients want,

00:45:56.400 | what your bosses want, what you need in your life is you need clear deadlines. That's good.

00:46:01.120 | You need to be held accountable and go after deadlines. But no one knows or cares if that

00:46:06.000 | deadline is very realistic or very short. So just make them very realistic. Your life will be better.

00:46:12.400 | Craft really matters. You should care a lot about quality and craft. That's what makes work

00:46:16.880 | sustainable. When you're doing something you're proud of, you're going to get much more out of

00:46:20.560 | work. Also, when you're doing something you're really good of and proud of, you get more leverage

00:46:24.720 | to control your work and get the nonsense out of it. So that's got to be a core of any modern sense

00:46:29.040 | of personal productivity. And finally, you need to organize your time. You need to organize your

00:46:34.000 | tasks and you need to organize how you collaborate and communicate with people. It matters. If you

00:46:38.240 | don't care about these things, it's a huge unforced error that's going to make it very

00:46:43.040 | difficult for you to succeed with any of those other pillars. However, you don't want to worry

00:46:48.000 | too much about those things. You want good enough organization of your time and your task and your

00:46:53.440 | communication that it helps the three pillars that come before, but no more than that.

00:46:57.920 | We're done with that early 2000s period of fetishizing systems.

00:47:02.880 | So you have to be organized, but we don't obsess over organization. Those are my four pillars for

00:47:07.280 | what personal productivity should be right now. So anyways, I think this is a really interesting

00:47:11.040 | history because we only typically get little bits of it when people are talking about this.

00:47:16.560 | When people think about personal productivity, they'll think about, "Oh, like the early 2000s

00:47:22.000 | productivity prong period, this is what it is." Or they'll think about maybe the Stephen Covey

00:47:27.840 | period, or maybe they just think about now the deconstruction period, but we never get the whole

00:47:31.600 | story. I think it's much richer and more interesting and a reflection of our culture over

00:47:36.560 | the last 30 years of what we're doing and what we're thinking and what we're dealing with.

00:47:40.480 | It's a much more interesting narrative. I think a lot of people just simplify this to,

00:47:45.520 | "There's a hustle culture and everyone's telling us to get more done and systems." I don't know.

00:47:52.160 | Not only just simplistic, but wrong. This is a much richer field. My entire professional life,

00:47:59.120 | my writing has orbited advice and being organized and productivity is often close,

00:48:05.600 | sometimes not too close, but often closer, I'm surrounded. So I've watched this close up.

00:48:10.720 | That is the saga of productivity over the last 20 years. I like this humanistic productivity place

00:48:15.440 | we've ended up now. I think it's learned and built on all the lessons that we have encountered over

00:48:20.800 | the last 20 or 30 years. But I'm sure this definition will continue to evolve as things

00:48:25.280 | go forward. But anyways, in honor of the two month anniversary of Slow Productivity and the

00:48:29.920 | two decade anniversary of me being a professional writer, I thought it'd be interesting to really

00:48:34.800 | get the deep history of what we've been doing with this topic over the past 20 years.

00:48:38.960 | So there we go, Jesse. It's a complicated history.

00:48:44.400 | What do you think is going to happen in the next 10 years?

00:48:46.480 | It depends on what AI does. I think whether or not AI has a big impact will affect the next 10 years.

00:48:53.680 | I'm hoping we're going to see more systemic changes in the way we run knowledge work.

00:48:57.520 | If we can dampen down the underlying fire of too much to do and too high of a velocity of work,

00:49:03.360 | you can tamp down that fire, we'll all get a lot more breathing room and I think it'll be better.

00:49:07.600 | So I hope that comes next. We might be running out of what we can do as individuals unless AI

00:49:11.920 | does something different. So I hope we actually tamp down that fire. We'll see. I mean, I've

00:49:17.440 | written whole books about this. It's difficult. But we'll see. Anyways, it's a cool field and

00:49:22.480 | it's a rich field. Not one to dismiss. There's all sorts of different voices at all sorts of

00:49:27.200 | different levels who are getting into this. All right. Well, anyways, we've got a cool Q&A coming

00:49:31.520 | up where Scott Young is going to join me. We'll answer questions. He'll tell us about his book.

00:49:34.960 | But first, let's briefly hear from one of our sponsors.

00:49:37.760 | All right. This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. So I saw an interesting comment

00:49:50.800 | recently on an interview I did where we were talking about productivity, so relevant to the

00:49:56.080 | deep dive. And someone in the comments said, yeah, but can you address the difficulty of worrying

00:50:02.320 | about organizing your work when you're dealing with psychological pain? It's really difficult.

00:50:08.640 | Just like if you had really bad knee pain, it'd be really hard to focus on, let me organize my task

00:50:13.840 | and make good use of my time and care about these pillars of slow productivity because you'd be so

00:50:18.160 | distracted by your knee pain. Well, this commenter was saying, what about psychological pain? I think

00:50:22.400 | it's a fantastic point. We need to take that seriously. If there is distress mentally,

00:50:29.200 | be it ruminations, anxiety, depressive symptoms, this is something we have to address as a core

00:50:37.280 | part of thinking about just flourishing professionally, being productive in whatever

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00:51:29.360 | with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions, one word, today to get 10% off your first month.

00:51:39.040 | That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com/deepquestions. I also want to talk about our friends at Notion,

00:51:49.840 | a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It's a workspace

00:51:55.760 | designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. We're fans of Notion's here

00:52:00.080 | at the Deep Question podcast because I am a big fan of building custom information systems for

00:52:07.440 | the work you do regularly. Otherwise, what you end up doing is just your work unfolds with just a

00:52:13.360 | bunch of emails and files attached to emails, and you're trying to track down various Word documents

00:52:17.680 | that are somewhere in your archive. Notion lets you build these data-centric systems and data

00:52:23.840 | views and processes. You can customize them for exactly what you need. We've used them here,

00:52:29.680 | for example, for keeping track of our advertisers for the podcast. Notion allowed the system to be

00:52:35.440 | built out where you can see the information, all different views. Show me the ads we're reading

00:52:39.680 | this week. Let me look at this advertiser. Show me all the ads we've done for this advertiser.

00:52:43.680 | Let's look at this advertiser. And this day when we did the reading, we'll put the pointers right

00:52:50.080 | there to where in the episode the timestamp was, et cetera, these custom systems that just made this

00:52:54.640 | repeated task easier. Well, one of the things I wanted to tell you about Notion is that they have

00:52:58.640 | been increasingly integrating AI directly into the app, and this has been a game changer.

00:53:06.080 | So the AI that they've integrated, it's directly in the tool. It's not a separate

00:53:10.080 | chat window you open up in a separate browser tab. It's right there in the Notion tool.

00:53:15.200 | It allows you to do things, for example, like generate ideas for text. Can you make action

00:53:22.160 | items from, I just put in a transcript here of a meeting. Can you automatically generate

00:53:26.160 | action items? Also, and this is the part I like the best, it allows you to interrogate your data.

00:53:31.760 | So you're like, I'm looking for, can you help me find all natural language? Can you help me find

00:53:38.800 | the ad copy from this advertiser from February? And using language models can say, yeah, here it

00:53:45.920 | is. Here's the information. So now you can find, as your systems get more complex, you can find the

00:53:50.800 | information you're looking for easier. So Notion with the power of AI is a fantastic tool for

00:53:56.640 | anyone who's doing anything non-trivial with information and wants to build the type of smart,

00:54:01.760 | custom processes I talk about here and in my books. You've got to give Notion a look.

00:54:07.520 | Here's the good news. You can try Notion for free. When you go to Notion.com/Cal,

00:54:11.200 | do that in all lowercase letters, Notion.com/Cal, C-A-L, and start turning ideas into action.

00:54:21.120 | And when you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. That's Notion.com/Cal.

00:54:26.640 | All right. So now let's get to our Q&A with special guest host, Scott Young.

00:54:33.840 | All right. So it's time to answer some questions. As I previewed, we have a special guest to help

00:54:39.040 | me with the questions today. My longtime friend, Scott Young. Scott is an expert in a lot of areas.

00:54:47.440 | I often think about him as sort of one of the leading voices in thinking about learning,

00:54:52.560 | how you learn things, how you learn new skills, how you learn new subjects. I also, with Scott,

00:54:59.120 | always feel like the way he approaches life and talks about life really resonates with the deep

00:55:05.280 | life we talk about here. I think Scott is very intentional about how he approaches things. So

00:55:09.920 | his advice is infused with that deep life magic we love here. So anyways, I'm happy to have him here

00:55:15.920 | so we can get a couple opinions on these questions. Scott, the reason why you're here this

00:55:20.880 | episode versus another is that you do have a new book that came out. I think it came out or is

00:55:25.920 | coming out tomorrow. So if you're listening to this on the day the podcast drops, it's coming

00:55:30.320 | out on the 7th, I believe. The book is called Get Better at Anything, 12 Maxims for Mastery.

00:55:37.760 | Scott, I have my blurb here. I'm going to read my own blurb. I said, "The ability to efficiently

00:55:43.360 | learn hard things is like a superpower. In this phenomenally wise book, Scott H. Young reveals

00:55:49.120 | exactly how to obtain it." So Scott, thanks for helping me out here at the Q&A. Do you want to

00:55:54.880 | give us before we get going, what's your sort of elevator pitch you've been testing out for the

00:56:01.120 | book right now? Why is my audience interested here? Yeah, so the book is sort of a deep dive

00:56:05.840 | into how learning works, understanding what are the fundamental ingredients that you have to get

00:56:09.760 | right to make improvement. And so I break it down to three components, which we subdivide into these

00:56:14.880 | 12 maxims. So there's C, learning from other people. Most of what we know comes from other

00:56:20.000 | people. And so the ability to learn and understand what the best practices are, what the right way to

00:56:25.680 | perform skills are, solve problems are, really determines to a large extent how quickly we can

00:56:29.840 | learn ourselves. Do, which is practice. Obviously, you need a lot of practice to get good at

00:56:34.480 | something, but not just every kind of practice is equally good. And so I spent a lot of time

00:56:38.720 | talking about how, you know, sometimes we need to make tweaks to our practice so we actually make

00:56:43.520 | progress and don't just plateau. And then finally, feedback. We need to get corrective information

00:56:49.040 | from the environment, from other people, in order to fine tune our performance. So there's a lot of

00:56:53.680 | interesting research on how feedback works, when it works, when it doesn't work. And I go into a

00:56:58.560 | lot of those details in the book. So if you've wanted a handbook that will sort of map out this

00:57:02.560 | really complicated domain of learning science, cognitive science, it will give you a lot of

00:57:06.800 | pointers for getting started in your own improvement efforts. I don't know if you remember this, Scott,

00:57:11.040 | but in the early days of my Study Hacks blog, back when, you know, we first knew each other,

00:57:16.400 | I used to have a link on the side to the Cambridge Manual for Performance. It was like the academic

00:57:24.800 | book that Anders Ericsson wrote. I love Cambridge Manuals. The Cambridge Manual, it was this dense

00:57:30.560 | book. And my readers were like, "Well, you know, I know you're like Anders Ericsson, but my god,

00:57:36.560 | I can't follow this." So we've come a long way because you make this information so much more

00:57:42.000 | accessible. Let me ask you, I mean, before we get to the readers' questions, question for you from

00:57:45.280 | me, so, you know, from my list, Cal asks, "What is it, like, a lot of my audience wants to master

00:57:53.280 | things, right? I want to learn this skill so I have more leverage. I'm trying to, like,

00:57:57.120 | change some aspect of my life, etc. What is it that people are most likely or often miss from

00:58:03.520 | this framework when they just try to go after mastering things without mastering the process

00:58:09.440 | of mastering things?" - Yeah, I mean, it's hard to point to one exact thing because I find with,

00:58:14.560 | like, different skills there tends to be different tripping points. So, I mean, you and I have had a

00:58:18.640 | lot of conversations about writing and the writing industry, and it seems to me from, like,

00:58:23.520 | viewing people who, like, want to write books that this C component, this ability to, like,

00:58:27.600 | learn what is the best practice, what are the ingredients you need to have to succeed as a

00:58:31.120 | writer, are just missing. And so the problem is not that people aren't doing enough writing,

00:58:35.680 | even though you have, like, things like, I know your favorite month is National Novel Write Month,

00:58:39.520 | but you have things like this where people are, like, churning out all their writing because they

00:58:43.920 | think the problem is that I'm not writing enough. And the problem is actually you don't understand

00:58:47.760 | how this field works, you don't understand how to navigate what are, in some cases,

00:58:51.760 | a fairly narrow corridor of success. But then there's other skills where, you know, the problem,

00:58:56.080 | I think, is often it is very much leaning on this lack of practice or the right kind of practice. So,

00:59:02.240 | you know, I've spent some time learning languages, it's a bit of a hobby of mine,

00:59:05.680 | and I can say, you know, with definite certainty that the maximum, you know, the majority of people

00:59:10.080 | who go through language classes, you know, Spanish class in high school, the problem,

00:59:14.480 | the reason they don't speak Spanish after it is that they have not done enough speaking,

00:59:18.160 | enough listening to achieve fluency. So they know about grammar and conjugation and some vocabulary,

00:59:24.240 | but they don't feel comfortable speaking it, and so they're never going to use it outside

00:59:27.200 | of the classroom. And so I think, you know, part of writing this book and part of working on it is

00:59:32.080 | sort of trying to label and identify these common problems and what are the mechanisms behind it,

00:59:37.280 | so you can see yourself in them and be like, oh, this is my issue right here, and this is sort of

00:59:42.000 | what research says is the best way to overcome it, you know. And so the real, the diversity of

00:59:47.520 | problems are often a bigger thing than just like, well, just do this one thing. One simple trick,

00:59:52.240 | it's not quite, but I think if you understand the manual, you can make progress.

00:59:55.440 | - You're speaking our language here, yeah, especially with the C portion. We're always

00:59:59.920 | talking about that evidence-based planning. My audience could probably say this with me,

01:00:05.280 | don't write the story you want to be true about how you get good at something. Learn the story

01:00:10.800 | that actually is true. It might not be what you want, but there's great power in actually

01:00:16.720 | understanding, oh, this is how this field works. This is how you, this is what skill means. Here's

01:00:22.560 | how it's measured. Here's how people get good at this skill. We always love to write our own

01:00:26.800 | stories. National Novel Writing Month is a big one. If I just do this, just force myself in

01:00:32.000 | one month, I will have this brilliant book that everyone will buy. It's not the way it works out.

01:00:37.360 | All right, so we've got a bunch of questions here. Now, to match the deep dive I did earlier,

01:00:42.560 | they're all roughly surrounding productivity and productivity-related issues. So Scott,

01:00:48.320 | in my deep dive, I was talking about my history, like the evolution of the field of productivity

01:00:53.760 | from when I first started working in it to where it is now. So they're kind of vaguely around there,

01:00:58.480 | but I think this will be a good chance to talk about mastery and just other things you think

01:01:02.000 | about. All right. Yeah. First question. This comes from Alex. Alex says, "My file organization

01:01:09.520 | system can be a hindrance to deep work blocks. In my job, I run a lot of tests. So I usually have

01:01:17.120 | separate folders for each test with a text file of the reason for the test and the conclusion,

01:01:22.400 | but I spend too much time searching through my project archives for similar cases to apply to

01:01:27.120 | new projects. An approach like the PARA method by Tiago Forte is okay, but I can't quite abstract it

01:01:35.840 | to my case." All right. So this is an in-the-weeds questions. First of all, Scott, I know you know

01:01:41.440 | Tiago. Do you know the PARA method? Do you know what he might be referring to there?

01:01:44.640 | Yeah. Yeah. So he talks about this in "Building a Second Brain." I won't give a spiel about what

01:01:50.320 | the PARA method is. I think that's probably something best left for Tiago. But if anyone's

01:01:53.280 | interested, Tiago, yeah, he wrote "Building a Second Brain," a very interesting book on this

01:01:57.360 | kind of like emerging... It's old, but it's also new, this trend of like doing note-taking systems.

01:02:04.240 | And the PARA method, I think he has a second kind of follow-on book just focused on that,

01:02:07.680 | about like how do you organize your knowledge and information. Now, I think it's interesting

01:02:11.680 | because I spend a lot of time thinking about this from a writerly context of like writing books,

01:02:16.960 | because with this book in particular, I had a lot of research that I had to cover. And I remember

01:02:22.480 | when I was writing my first book, "Ultralearning," I was not too careful about how I organized the

01:02:26.480 | research. And I was like, "I'm going to print off all these academic papers." And I just had like

01:02:31.040 | binders of papers. And then when it came to like, "Where was that paper that said X?" Oh my God,

01:02:36.800 | it was a nightmare. It was just like trying to find these things and looking over documents

01:02:40.640 | and this kind of stuff. And so I do think when you're dealing with big projects with lots of

01:02:44.800 | files, having a good file system is going to be very important. Now, it sounds like this is like

01:02:49.920 | a programming kind of question. I don't want to give like a programming specific answer. I'm not

01:02:53.840 | in this person's job dealing with lots of different tests. But I think the big thing that you want to

01:02:59.840 | think about when you're creating any kind of sort of external knowledge management system is you

01:03:05.920 | have to think about like what is the context when you're going to want to retrieve it? What is the

01:03:09.920 | context when you're going to want to be able to retrieve that? And you want to be, as you're

01:03:13.280 | creating it, creating tags or little breadcrumbs that you can find that information later based on

01:03:19.360 | that information. So a big thing that I did when I was going through all of my research is that

01:03:26.000 | there was a big period of time where I was just reading research and I didn't have like,

01:03:30.160 | "This is what the book is going to be yet." And then once I sort of started having ideas,

01:03:34.480 | I went through all the research and kind of categorized it as opposed to like, "Okay,

01:03:38.720 | this is about this topic or this topic in research." And I put these little tags on it.

01:03:44.640 | And then that way, when I was looking for information on expertise, for instance,

01:03:49.200 | or transfer of learning or problem solving or this kind of stuff, it was much easier to find

01:03:54.400 | those particular breadcrumbs. So I think part of the problem is if you just sort of organize things,

01:03:58.560 | you make this big complicated file system. If you're not thinking about what's the retrieval

01:04:02.720 | context, what is the situation where I'm going to be looking for it? What are going to give me the

01:04:06.800 | keywords that come to mind? What are going to be these systems that I'm going to want to pull up?

01:04:10.720 | You're right. It can be very difficult to find things later. So I think that's something that

01:04:14.560 | I don't think there's a one sentence answer for everyone. But if you can think about where you're

01:04:18.480 | going to retrieve the information, it makes a big difference in designing the system.

01:04:22.720 | Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of good enough low friction systems when it comes to personal

01:04:27.360 | systems. Like it's good enough. I can largely find what I need for the most part pretty easily. And

01:04:32.880 | the friction of using it is very low. This is the problem I often have with more complicated

01:04:38.480 | information management systems is the friction of just using the system, of entering everything

01:04:43.440 | into the system begins to become an obstacle that you stop using it. It's like the old-fashioned

01:04:50.480 | Zettelkasten where you have to have all these numbers with the slashes and eventually you stop

01:04:54.880 | writing the numbers and the slashes. So let's reveal our actual technology for our book writing.

01:05:00.560 | Let's see if this is useful. So I use Scrivener. And when I'm working on a book, so I just have,

01:05:06.800 | there's a research folder in Scrivener and I create sub folders for different topics.

01:05:10.720 | And I put in links and articles and my own notes into those folders. I might have 30 different

01:05:17.200 | folders by the time I'm working on a book. I sometimes lose things, but for the most part,

01:05:21.840 | I'm like, okay, I can more or less find what I'm looking for. These 30 self-named folders is

01:05:26.320 | enough. It's a good enough system. And the friction is very low. If I can just grab an

01:05:30.480 | article and throw it in a folder and Scrivener, and I know it'll sit there until I need to go

01:05:34.800 | to it. What actual tech did you use working on your latest book?

01:05:39.280 | Yeah. So I had two processes because most of the research was derived from either reading academic

01:05:46.240 | papers, which I downloaded and placed in one giant folder. So there's like 600 papers in this

01:05:51.680 | one folder. And I also like sorted, I had like a queue of like to be read, read, and then like

01:05:56.480 | ones that I decided I'm not going to read just because that also helped clear things up. You

01:05:59.840 | don't want to like be mixing up things. Like what am I reading next versus what I've already read.

01:06:06.000 | And then for books, every time I would finish a book, I would go through it very quickly,

01:06:11.600 | copy any important highlights. So if it was a paper book, I would just make very brief notes

01:06:17.040 | about like quotes and things that were important. Like if they mentioned some research or some

01:06:21.120 | finding that I thought was interesting, I would put it. And also I would do like my kind of high

01:06:25.840 | level retrieval. This is what the book was about. These were some of the issues that were brought

01:06:28.960 | up so that when I reflect back on the book, I have like one page that I can search through as

01:06:32.960 | opposed to the whole book. So I did that with books and yeah, with papers, any digital document,

01:06:37.360 | I would do highlights. And especially if there was something that was going to be a theme,

01:06:42.640 | like something that, you know, I knew I was going to be wanting to talk about later. I would

01:06:45.760 | sometimes occasionally using the, just the Mac preview thing, just put an annotation with like

01:06:50.960 | one word about that thing. So if this is a, you know, interesting study about transfer, I could

01:06:55.760 | just write transfer or I could just write, you know, problem solving or one of those things.

01:06:59.680 | Now, as I said, the way it works for me is that I did a lot of this research, not quite knowing the

01:07:04.560 | shape of the book. So there was a period where I was still figuring out what's the best way to

01:07:09.680 | organize it, where I actually went through all of these notes and put them in a system called

01:07:14.080 | the archive, which is closer to Zettelkasten system. But for me, it wasn't about like

01:07:18.000 | maintaining that system. It was just kind of like, okay, I've got like 500 papers here and I need to

01:07:24.160 | compress them further because even looking through those highlights is going to take too long.

01:07:27.840 | And so I need some kind of like, you know, all the research on this is just in one big thing. And I

01:07:32.880 | have like 20 citations that I can just remind myself, oh yeah, this was the paper where someone

01:07:37.360 | said this example or this kind of thing. - Wait, how does that, how does archive,

01:07:40.720 | how does that work? - Yeah, so the archive is a

01:07:45.120 | software that uses, like just uses like TXT files. So it basically allows you to make a bunch of like

01:07:51.840 | very simple notes and then you can link to other notes in there. So I could say like, I made one

01:07:56.880 | where it's like expert novice differences, 'cause that's a whole area of research. And then I went

01:08:01.200 | through, when I was going through my papers, every time there was a paper like, okay, so-and-so and

01:08:04.480 | so-and-so talk about expert novices, like so-and-so in this book talks about this. And I would give

01:08:08.800 | these examples and ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. And then that way, when I was writing the chapter where I

01:08:13.360 | talk about some of these, some of this literature and expertise, and it's sort of like, oh, I want

01:08:18.320 | to say, you know, these are some of the fields where this phenomenon has been found. I already

01:08:21.520 | have the five things, 'cause they're written down there. But I think that process of converting it

01:08:26.320 | to a, like a sort of Zettelkasten system, for me at least, was not something that was like,

01:08:32.160 | I was just doing continuously throughout the whole project. I kind of, it's the same as you,

01:08:35.840 | like I started with a, like a relatively easy, simple system. And then once there was so much,

01:08:41.440 | it was like, okay, I'm going to refactor. You know, using a programming analogy, I know there's a lot

01:08:45.360 | of programmers who follow you, Cal. You know, that's often what you're doing when you're writing

01:08:50.800 | code, is that you like start working on a library and you work it, and then it gets messier and

01:08:55.040 | uglier. And then you're like, okay, let's refactor it. And you kind of rewrite the library, because

01:08:59.360 | now you know what the shape of it's going to be. So I think of that way with research. I don't think

01:09:02.880 | I would do that with every book, but with this one, which was a lot more like, what's the state

01:09:08.080 | of the science for different fields? And I don't even know how I'm going to use it exactly. It was,

01:09:12.000 | it was kind of necessary. So I spent like a couple of days just reorganizing notes.

01:09:15.600 | All right. So here's a nerd question on that, though. So let's say in the archive,

01:09:19.280 | you create a page for expert systems or something like this. How are you then connecting that to

01:09:26.400 | papers on expert systems? Is this like a back linking system or each of those papers?

01:09:31.040 | Oh, I just, yeah, I would just put the name. I would just put the name like a, you know,

01:09:35.760 | like the really brief citation, like, you know, this is like, you know, Simon, whatever, 2008,

01:09:40.640 | or, you know, that kind of thing. And then because the way I saved, I saved all of the file names for

01:09:45.840 | the papers with like first author name, and then, you know, title of the paper. Then you just, you

01:09:51.360 | know, if you want to find the paper, because there's like 600 files in this folder, you just

01:09:55.200 | like sort by name, and then you scroll, scroll to find the name. Because usually, there were some

01:09:59.840 | examples where you actually like finding the correct paper by that person could be hard.

01:10:05.040 | You know, I, a lot of people seem to have the last name Anderson in this field. So I have like,

01:10:09.280 | I had to like put different Andersons, because there's like multiple ones. But,

01:10:12.560 | but I mean, for the most part, you know, there's going to be like, I'm only going to have maybe,

01:10:17.440 | you know, less than a dozen papers by a single author. So if I say, you know, Simon,

01:10:21.360 | and then the date, it's usually fine finding it. But it wasn't so much for me, it wasn't so much

01:10:26.160 | about like, I need to make this like an extremely user friendly system. It was just, you know,

01:10:30.800 | the problem that I often have with writing, and I'm sure you do as well, is that you read an

01:10:34.960 | enormous amount. And if the if the idea is not really, it's not really referenceable by like,

01:10:42.240 | well, I know it's from this book, or I know it's, you know, so and so's biography, or so and so's

01:10:46.960 | this, it can be hard to find things later. And so I think, you know, like, I also did that with

01:10:53.120 | some stories too, I wrote about Octavia Butler, and there wasn't a single source, I kind of went

01:10:57.600 | through like dozens of different interviews. And so when I was compiling things for her,

01:11:02.000 | I made a special file where I was like, okay, it's from this book, it's from this book,

01:11:05.280 | because otherwise, you're just like, you're looking through like, a dozen books to be like,

01:11:08.880 | where did this thing come up? That was pretty good. That would work well for this paragraph

01:11:13.200 | that I'm writing right now. - Yeah, yeah. Well, that's interesting.

01:11:16.160 | I mean, I would say, especially with scientific papers, when you're writing books, this type of

01:11:21.280 | having something helps. I had so my slow productivity in science, a lot of science,

01:11:26.800 | because my whole point with that book was I was taking a break from science papers.

01:11:30.000 | But for email, for example, I remember one of the things I did is I said, I'm going to read

01:11:35.200 | every paper Gloria Mark wrote. And I was like, okay, her research is like, I just need to know

01:11:39.520 | this research in and out. But then I had a folder of 25 Gloria Mark's papers, or it's just Mark's

01:11:44.960 | 1986. So then I wrote a key. So I made a document, and it was like, okay, each name, and a description

01:11:52.480 | of like, okay, here's what's in this paper, here's what's in that paper. And that was very useful.

01:11:56.720 | So I'd be like, Oh, I know Gloria wrote something relevant to this. And I could look through that

01:12:00.080 | key and be like, yes, it was this 2006 paper, then go to that paper and pull out the quotes.

01:12:05.440 | But I think what we have in common here is good enough, like you build a system that

01:12:11.520 | like solves the big problems you have, as opposed to where I would worry for Alex is thinking about

01:12:17.920 | the system doing more cognition. That's typically where I haven't seen a lot of success. So this

01:12:24.000 | idea of I'm building a very complicated system, not to make it easier to find something that I

01:12:30.000 | sort of remember, or like I read a few papers on this, where are they, but this, this idea that

01:12:35.120 | the system itself is going to surface new insights I didn't already have that I'm going to follow

01:12:41.040 | serendipitously out of these links in these maps are going to emerge. Oh, I didn't even think about

01:12:47.520 | that idea, I can make a chapter about Yeah, to me, that often belies the complexity and

01:12:52.480 | difficulty of getting a good idea. And it's a very personal subjective in your brain process.

01:12:58.880 | So good, I think that's a good distinction, you can have a system needs to be as complicated as

01:13:04.160 | needed, based on the volume of information. So Alex, whatever is complicated enough, and no more

01:13:10.880 | complicated than that. Yeah, so that you're like, okay, I can more or less like find the different

01:13:15.440 | test. And it might be a naming convention for your folders, it might be, I actually have tags,

01:13:22.160 | and I'm going to have, I'm going to move these into a system where I can have tags and tag them

01:13:25.600 | different things. But just complicated enough, and no more complicated. I think an idea that's

01:13:32.400 | really useful here, when we're talking about this is that there's a balancing act. Because the more

01:13:37.840 | complicated and sophisticated your note taking system is, like the more work you're doing,

01:13:42.400 | as you process information, you're going to slow down your throughput. And, and like, for me,

01:13:46.960 | I think the big thing in writing a book like this is just like, can you read, like 10 times what

01:13:52.000 | a normal person would read on this topic, that's how you build that kind of knowledge base, you can

01:13:56.480 | know what you're talking about. And so you don't want to slow that down too much. But you don't

01:14:00.960 | want to have the opposite problem where it's like, you know, 30% of the time, you just can't find the

01:14:06.000 | thing that you know, you saw, and you spend all day looking for it. So it's kind of you're doing

01:14:11.280 | a bit of this balancing act. And I think it does depend also, again, like I said, on how much

01:14:15.200 | information is in it, if I have a, you know, if I'm writing an essay on a topic, and there's going

01:14:19.280 | to be 10 papers, I don't worry about anything. But if it's going to be like, I'm writing,

01:14:23.440 | you know, you're writing a book, and you have hundreds, then so your system should scale to

01:14:28.000 | like, how difficult is the search cost going to be for finding this later compared to the,

01:14:32.960 | you know, extra work of annotating and organizing in the beginning?

01:14:36.640 | Exactly. Yeah. And I like your idea of you read a bunch of stuff. And then later,

01:14:41.200 | when you're moving stuff into a more retrievable system, a lot of filtering is going on. There

01:14:45.680 | probably was a lot of stuff you read initially, that turned out to be not at all relevant. And

01:14:49.200 | who wants to sit there creating, you know, a complex, whatever for each of these papers that

01:14:54.400 | you, you weren't going to use. All right, we, uh, this next question is a tricky one, a neo.

01:15:00.160 | It's an interesting one. He says, despite a track record of high achievement in the appearance of

01:15:06.640 | being adept at nearly everything I tackle, my secret is that my effort towards my goals is

01:15:12.640 | minimal. I've become what I call a goal machine, achieving maximum grades on exams and excelling

01:15:18.320 | in interviews, despite my procrastination and suboptimal effort. This paradox of achieving

01:15:23.120 | great results with minimal understanding is taking a toll on me, leading to a destructive cycle of

01:15:27.760 | diminishing effort and quality in my work. How do I become the person I've so convincingly portrayed

01:15:34.400 | to discover my potential by genuinely committing to my values? All right, well, Neo, this is nice

01:15:40.400 | and self-aware. Um, a couple of points I'll say right off the bat, and then we're going to get

01:15:45.200 | Scott's take on this is this, uh, there's a gambit of being a goal machine where you sort of

01:15:50.160 | procrastinate minimal effort, but kind of just at the end, like put in the push and, and get things

01:15:55.360 | done. Uh, that's not going to be sustainable. You're, you're a student right now. Yeah, you can

01:16:01.120 | kind of get away with that as you move through the ranks of your professional life. Uh, that's just

01:16:07.200 | not going to cut it. Things are just going to get harder and more competitive. And this approach

01:16:12.080 | that worked as a student will just stop working. So like you're right to point out, you need to

01:16:17.200 | refactor here. Uh, it's much harder to be impressive in, let's say a world where you're trying to get

01:16:24.480 | paid a lot of money to do something than it is to impress an interviewer when you're still a

01:16:30.400 | university student. So, so I think this is the right time. Uh, Scott, I'll give you my, my piece

01:16:36.080 | of advice here that I'm interested in, in your take on it. Um, this is where I'm going to push

01:16:40.080 | lifestyle centric planning on a Neo. What you, this is the time to start thinking about in your

01:16:46.080 | twenties that are looming ahead of you, what you want your life to be like all aspects of your

01:16:51.680 | life, not just your professional life. Don't get specific. I want to be having this job living in

01:16:56.720 | this place, but be broad, right? Like what does my day look like? And what type of place do I live

01:17:02.240 | in? What's the character of my work? What's the character of my life outside of the work? Am I

01:17:07.520 | walking by the lake and thinking big thoughts or am I, uh, you know, in the skyscraper sort of where

01:17:13.200 | we're making moves and doing things that are high impact. Am I spending a lot of time with friends

01:17:17.920 | or outside? Am I instead in the art scene, like really get this image of what you want your life

01:17:22.480 | at 25 to be like, and then you're going to work backwards, work backwards from this understanding

01:17:28.720 | of like, this is the, this type of life, these aspects to it. That's what I'm looking for.

01:17:32.800 | Look backwards and say, how do I move closer to there with my existing opportunities and obstacles?

01:17:37.280 | Now you have a reason for the work. I'm doing this professionally, this non-professionally,

01:17:41.680 | this over here, because it's moving me towards this lifestyle, this highly resonant and appealing

01:17:46.160 | as opposed to where you are now, where I bet this is pretty abstract.

01:17:49.680 | The game is, can I get good grades? Okay. You know, can I win at that game? The game is,

01:17:54.080 | can I get a prestigious job that's competitive? Okay. Can I win at that game? Those games get

01:17:59.360 | tiresome. So that's what I'm going to suggest is lifestyle centric planning.

01:18:02.720 | What's your take here though, Scott?

01:18:04.640 | Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. It's a, it's an interesting kind of question because even

01:18:10.320 | when the person stating it is like, I'm like, I'm, I'm just hearing what Anil is saying that,

01:18:15.040 | you know, this is, uh, like I'm doing really well in everything successfully, but I'm not

01:18:20.480 | working very hard, solve my problem. And I'm scratching my head a little bit. I'm like,

01:18:24.240 | I'm trying to read between the lines of like, where, where the problem is, what the distress

01:18:28.400 | is. Cause for most people, I mean, if like, if I were saying, you know, this is a personal finance

01:18:32.400 | blog and like, the problem is that I make too much money and I spend too little, like, you know,

01:18:36.160 | can you, can you help me, you know, financial guru, because my savings are just accumulating

01:18:40.880 | and I don't want you. So I'm trying to hear, did you hear the key, the key phrase hidden in here?

01:18:45.440 | This is what's catching my attention, leading to a destructive cycle of diminishing effort and

01:18:51.120 | quality of my work. So I think he's sensing this is a, it's like what I used to call deep

01:18:55.600 | procrastination on my blog. I think he's sensing this is starting to like his, the minimalness is

01:19:01.840 | getting more and more minimal and like pretty soon it's going to stop producing the results.

01:19:06.160 | Like he's, he's feeling that will that will to do the like last minute push to get things done. I

01:19:12.080 | think he's feeling that will starting to dissipate. No, I think, I think you're right. And I think

01:19:16.720 | it's very, my, my sort of point in listening to you is it's always interesting to hear people

01:19:21.120 | when they describe situations. Cause I feel like you do need to dig under the surface, like what

01:19:25.520 | is the real problem? What's the real worry here? And so, you know, I think what you said is actually

01:19:31.040 | absolutely right. That some of it is that I think a lot of people, especially if you have a lot of

01:19:36.240 | aptitude and things are fairly easy for you, you maybe don't think a lot about your goals

01:19:41.040 | because you know, you're not in this sort of like, I have to prioritize, I have to choose this or

01:19:45.680 | this other thing. Um, there's just kind of like, well, they wanted me to do this assignment, so I

01:19:50.240 | did it and they wanted me to do this. And you're not really thinking about what do I want? What do

01:19:54.000 | I actually want to achieve? So I think that what you said is absolutely right. That's number one.

01:19:58.160 | The second thing I was thinking about too, is that it also sounds to me like maybe this person

01:20:02.960 | needs to like up the challenge level of what they're doing. I think that like the human brain

01:20:07.680 | is an effort saving machine. We are designed to be lazy and to avoid wasting calories and to avoid

01:20:13.280 | doing things that are like beyond what is the minimum required. That is how we are engineered.

01:20:18.480 | So there's nothing irrational about, you know, my classes are easy. I get A's all the time,

01:20:22.960 | so I don't study until like one night before the exam because why would I, right? That makes sense

01:20:28.000 | in a kind of perverse way. And so I think, you know, for me, what was, you know, as someone who

01:20:33.600 | was a fairly good student without working too too hard in university, I think one of the things that

01:20:38.400 | made a big difference for me was deliberately seeking out challenges that were at that

01:20:43.120 | threshold of my ability. Those goals which were, you know, I might be able to achieve this if I get

01:20:49.040 | my act together, but I won't if I just, you know, try to coast on it. And so things like, you know,

01:20:54.080 | starting a successful business, building a writing career, some of the personal projects that I've

01:20:58.160 | done were of that kind of forcing function. And so if you are a high aptitude young person who

01:21:03.600 | seems adrift and is worried about your self-destructive habits taking over, that's what

01:21:07.920 | I would be looking for. What do you want and how do you take on challenges that are deserved of

01:21:13.840 | your abilities, that are deserved of like where you're at and that are going to force you to

01:21:18.000 | actually try your best and not just coast? - I think that's really smart. I mean,

01:21:22.000 | I think that was exactly me as well. I, you know, my story in college, I studied how to study

01:21:27.680 | and kind of cracked a system, right? And I was getting four Os, you know, every quarter and it

01:21:32.400 | wasn't taking a huge amount of time. And so I began writing books. So like I need to do something

01:21:37.280 | else. I have to fill something else in here. I need something. So I think that's really wise.

01:21:42.000 | All right. So Neo, I'm going to summarize both answers. I think they overlap. So A,

01:21:46.480 | you have to have something you're working towards that you want to work towards. And the reason why

01:21:51.120 | I emphasize the lifestyle centric planning is when I used to work with and advise elite college

01:21:56.400 | students, when I had the early days of my blog, they would run into this problem of deep

01:22:00.560 | procrastination where their will to work would suddenly dissipate, right? And they just,

01:22:05.520 | they couldn't do any more work. I called it deep procrastination because it wasn't depressive

01:22:09.920 | symptoms. They weren't a hedonic. They weren't, I can't imagine having joy in life. Like I just

01:22:14.480 | can't do the schoolwork anymore. And my argument, like my eventual and my analysis with deep

01:22:19.440 | procrastination is it was a mixture of, um, I don't know why I'm doing these hard things.

01:22:25.280 | Plus the things getting hard enough. And when these two things, uh, came together,

01:22:30.000 | the work gets harder and harder as you move through school and you have no, you're like,

01:22:34.000 | I don't know. I'm just doing this to win the game. And I've been doing this my whole life.

01:22:36.720 | You can try your motivational center. So having something you're working towards that you chose

01:22:41.440 | and actually gives you that shiver, that resident, that, that residents of, Ooh, that's what I want

01:22:45.600 | my life to look like. Um, I certainly had these like very clear things of what I wanted my life

01:22:50.480 | to look like in my twenties and then in my thirties, that breaks you out of that cycle.

01:22:55.120 | Because now it's, uh, I, we can put up with hard things. If we know why we're doing and we believe

01:23:01.200 | in why we're doing it. If we don't, that's a dangerous combination, but I love your addition

01:23:04.720 | as well as you might just be a little bit bored and you know, uh, your school's too easy. You've

01:23:09.120 | kind of cracked the code. So do as part of your vision, hopefully you have something in there

01:23:15.360 | that requires or will be helped by you taking on some new challenges, something that, um, pushes

01:23:20.320 | you and where you realize like right away, Hey, I started doing minimal effort here and just boom,

01:23:25.520 | got knocked down like, Oh, minimal effort. Doesn't cut it here. Like you probably need,

01:23:29.760 | you probably need one of those, one of those worlds. All right. Here's a quicker question.

01:23:33.920 | It's from Jenny. I've seen a lot of people talk about monk mode. Does this actually work? Uh,

01:23:41.280 | monk mode, meaning you sort of, uh, I first heard this from Greg McEwen where he like I'm

01:23:46.720 | disappearing. I'm going to like a shed for a month and all I'm doing is writing, uh, Adam Grant.

01:23:53.280 | So I wrote about this in deep work. I called it the monastic mode of deep work. Um, or, or maybe

01:24:00.160 | I called the bimodal mode. I confused these up, but I was thinking about Adam Grant where he would

01:24:04.080 | have periods of the year where he would just disappear to work on research, be out of touch

01:24:08.560 | and other periods where he was back. So monk mode, I guess, is spreading online again. Um,

01:24:14.320 | I think you might have the same take on this as I do, which is it's less about monk mode

01:24:21.120 | working to me than it is the way the hyperactive hive mind constantly context switching that we

01:24:28.720 | call normal work today. How bad that is like monk mode is just escaping from that. So like me and

01:24:34.720 | you, I know neither of us disappeared to cabins for six months, the right, but I think we're,

01:24:41.040 | we're just much more careful in general in making our day to day work, something that we don't have

01:24:46.560 | to escape so dramatically from trying to just in general, see, I don't want to just constantly be

01:24:52.080 | context switching between a lot of things. So we don't have as much to escape from. Um, I don't

01:24:58.080 | know what do you say? You don't escape to a cabin, right? Like you're also, I think of you as being

01:25:01.680 | pretty careful about like how you, how you work. Yeah. I mean, I think so again, I think I don't

01:25:08.400 | place so much emphasis on the like retreat into the wilderness. Now that that's always bad,

01:25:14.160 | but just to me, sometimes that can also be a little bit of a fantasy distracting from what

01:25:19.280 | the real problem is that like, well, the problem is that I'm in this physical location, like

01:25:22.560 | sometimes, but usually the problems in your head, right? Usually the problem is not like, well,

01:25:27.120 | that you couldn't do any deep work here, but that it's hard. And it's like easier to like open your

01:25:31.920 | phone and do that kind of thing. And so, um, I do think it's not necessarily monk mode, but one

01:25:36.240 | thing that I noticed, especially when I embark on like bigger cognitively challenging projects,

01:25:40.720 | and maybe you can attest to this Cal is that, uh, you know, right now, for instance, I am in the

01:25:46.240 | kind of promotional mode for my books. I'm like emailing every old friend and be like, Hey, you

01:25:50.320 | know, like I've got a new book. Can I send it to you? And it's, it is like a hive mind kind of

01:25:54.160 | thing. I open my email and there's lots of little communications and like, who do I have to message?

01:25:57.600 | And it's very, um, extroverted, socially focused, this kind of thing. But when I'm writing the book,

01:26:03.520 | I find that the challenge is that, okay, I've got like this 30 page dense paper to read that I think

01:26:09.280 | is important for me to read, but it's a little boring. You know, it's not like this is, this

01:26:13.840 | isn't a Harry Potter book or something like, you know, murder mystery novel or something like,

01:26:17.280 | and I just churning through the pages. I'm like, wait, what's that word? And I'm going to look up

01:26:21.200 | keywords and like, Oh, maybe this citation, this kind of thing. And so I think the real challenge

01:26:25.680 | that we have in doing, um, you know, work that, that requires cognitive demands is that you're

01:26:31.920 | sitting and maybe you want to like read for three hours straight, but after like 15 minutes, your

01:26:36.320 | brain is telling you, you know what, maybe go on Twitter, maybe, maybe check that email inbox. Maybe

01:26:41.360 | there's some distraction that would be like a, like a break from doing this kind of work.

01:26:45.600 | And so I think what, um, what this kind of monk mode or something akin to that can be helpful for

01:26:52.080 | is that you have to sort of shift yourself into a mode where you are getting used to doing that

01:26:56.800 | kind of work. It's a little bit like training for a marathon. Like if you don't run ever,

01:27:00.400 | and then you run for 20 minutes, your lungs are screaming, your body's tired. It's like,

01:27:04.080 | okay, I've got to stop now. I don't think that past a certain point, it's so much that your

01:27:08.560 | physical fitness is increasing. It's just, you're learning to switch off that part of your brain.

01:27:12.640 | That's like, do something else, do something else, do something else. And so I think when you get

01:27:16.640 | into this or like, I need to do a lot of deep work mode, I think it is helpful to kind of create some

01:27:21.280 | constraints around your work so that you're prioritizing this deep work. You're able to get

01:27:25.680 | longer stretches in. You're able to just like, okay, I just sat and I read all day and it wasn't

01:27:30.240 | like agony. That does take a little bit of building up to get to. And so I think, you know,

01:27:34.240 | that's where this can be helpful is if like, if you're in the cabin in the woods, you don't have

01:27:38.640 | the friends, this kind of thing, maybe it's sometimes easier to transition to doing that.

01:27:43.440 | But I think the transition to doing that is what's really important.

01:27:46.400 | I love the practice message. Yeah. And supporting, right? So what supports it? I mean,

01:27:50.480 | slow productivity. I talk about rituals and location. Have a separate location where you

01:27:54.880 | do the monk mode work. It doesn't have to be a dramatically different location,

01:27:57.840 | but it's okay. Instead of being at the home office desk, I go to the screened in porch,

01:28:03.120 | you know, but it's a place that I only associate and then have rituals. You know, I go for a walk,

01:28:06.800 | I make a certain amount of tea that helps, but I love this idea. The more you practice,

01:28:10.880 | the better you get. This is connected to your book though. Right, Scott? Because

01:28:13.920 | what is all the, the, the key efforts in mastery that you talk about are efforts that require

01:28:20.560 | sustained concentration. And that's something you have to be, you get used to, right? Like the more

01:28:25.040 | used to your, like, I just do this on a regular basis. There's periods of my day where I'm just

01:28:30.080 | locked in on something and I'm not distracted. And it's kind of hard. I mean, I talk about this

01:28:33.920 | in deep work, right? The, uh, the more comfortable you are with that, the more comfortable you'll be

01:28:38.560 | with learning something hard. It's the same basic cognitive muscles are, are being stretched. So

01:28:44.080 | I'm assuming you would, you would see the same problem where if I live a full Linda stone,

01:28:48.800 | partial continuous attention lifestyle, I'm just constantly moving back and forth.

01:28:52.800 | I'm not very comfortable focusing. If I then say, you know what I'm going to do

01:28:56.640 | is I'm going to start learning something really hard. I'm going to struggle in just the sense

01:29:02.640 | that my mind is not used to the feeling of cognitive strain that is going to be involved

01:29:08.240 | in learning something hard. Yeah. I mean, I think, so one of the things that I find

01:29:14.160 | important in this regard is, uh, when you, when you're approaching this kind of task,

01:29:18.880 | it is helpful to like be more deliberate about, you know, we do this in our course life of focus,

01:29:24.000 | where you are being very explicit about like, these are my deep work hours.

01:29:28.160 | You put the computer away, but you kind of remove yourself physically from those distractions. It

01:29:32.400 | doesn't have to be a different location, but it can just be some way that you're pushing them away.

01:29:36.800 | Because I think as you build the skill, the way I think of it is it's, it's a little bit like,

01:29:41.440 | um, you know, it gets thrown around too much, but like addiction and this motivational hardwiring

01:29:46.480 | is very similar that, you know, if you were a gambling addict and you're like, Oh, I'm going

01:29:50.160 | to go like live right next to the casino, it would be very difficult when you're in the habit of

01:29:54.960 | going to the slot machines all the time to resist that. So you might want to get yourself removed

01:29:58.800 | from it. Don't have any reminders, don't have any things that's going to make you think about doing

01:30:02.320 | this. But then maybe once you've done it more and more, it will be fine. Okay. I just don't gamble.

01:30:06.560 | I don't think about that. So you could even like walk through Las Vegas and not feel as much

01:30:10.400 | temptation. And so similarly with deep work, I think some of the difficulty is that if you're

01:30:15.040 | not used to the sustained cognitive effort, maybe because it's a new role, new task, new project,

01:30:20.160 | this kind of thing, like it can be exhausting, but it's also what is exhausting about it is

01:30:24.960 | you're kind of your motivational hardwiring being like, this is easier. This is more fun. This is

01:30:28.960 | more appealing. And that actually you can, that will quiet down if you can stick to it. And so

01:30:35.120 | that's sort of that, that transition can be hard, I think, for people. And you have to believe that

01:30:39.280 | that's going to happen, that after you do it for three months, Oh, actually sitting and reading

01:30:43.120 | for four hours straight is doable by a normal person. You don't have to be some kind of like

01:30:47.040 | savant, like focus person to do it. I like that shrink monk mode. Monk mode doesn't have to be

01:30:53.520 | this month. I'm going to monk mode. You have a little bit of monk mode every day. That's sort

01:30:57.520 | of, okay. These are, I have a monk hour here. I mean, you start with like a half hour. I have

01:31:01.040 | like a monkish morning. Yeah. I use that phrase somewhere. God, I have written too many things,

01:31:06.800 | but somewhere, somewhere I use this phrase monk mode morning. And it was a CEO who ran his own

01:31:14.400 | sort of small company. It was like a 15 person thing. And I remember this was his thing, monk

01:31:18.960 | mode morning. And he said, no one can schedule anything with me until I figure out what it was.

01:31:23.040 | But it was like 10, 30 or 11. And he's like, that's it. We just, let's just work around that.

01:31:27.120 | But until 10, 30, 11, I don't plug into anything. I'm just like working on it. And he's like,

01:31:31.520 | it transformed everything. That regular drumbeat of the uninterrupted allowed him to make progress

01:31:38.400 | on a lot of the big things that really mattered. And he got a lot better at it. And then it really

01:31:41.280 | made a difference for the business. And it turns out having to wait until 10, 30 or 11 before

01:31:45.680 | you can call or get an email response or set up a meeting with someone,

01:31:49.760 | people adjusted. It wasn't a big deal, but the benefit was. So monk mode morning. I remember that

01:31:55.360 | M cubed. All right. Here's a long question, but it's interesting. And I think you might

01:31:59.600 | have a quick answer, but okay. Adam, look at this. This is our third A name. I always interested in

01:32:07.280 | that. We have three A names. - You sorted alphabetically when

01:32:09.360 | you were bringing the sheet here. - In my archive text-based planning

01:32:13.280 | system, I sorted alphabetically. All right. Adam says, "In my earlier years,

01:32:18.800 | I thrived on structure and processes. Crossing things off was therapeutic and enabled me to

01:32:24.080 | get a lot done." Fast forward to 2024. And in my work, a lot of the time a task isn't as simple as

01:32:31.040 | task A complete or not complete. Task A actually involves a series of 10 or 15 steps

01:32:37.760 | with various blockers, context, and definitions of completion. I've delved in the productivity

01:32:42.880 | applications, but none seem to be the all-in-one solution I'm looking for.

01:32:47.840 | This has led to looking to AI as a savior, but I'm now realizing that the rudimentary large

01:32:52.480 | language models don't solve the problem. Am I better off going back to basics in this time

01:32:56.720 | of technology apps and AI growth and trusting my process, or should I pick just one program and

01:33:01.600 | become an expert with it? Well, my listeners know I'm going to say, go back to basics. An app is not

01:33:09.760 | a substitute for a process. You have to figure out what am I working on? How do I want to work on it?

01:33:15.520 | What do I have to keep track of it? And then go find the tools to implement that. And nine times

01:33:20.640 | out of 10, those tools are going to be boring. It's going to be a Google Doc, maybe a Trello board,

01:33:26.080 | right? It's not going to be that interesting. And mainly, I mean, look, it looks like, Adam,

01:33:31.520 | you kind of have been up to now, you're used to like what we call productivity light,

01:33:36.320 | the sort of zero to one binary flip from I just am completely reactive to I keep track of things,

01:33:43.440 | I cross things off. I sometimes think of this as like bullet journal productivity. It's nice,

01:33:48.800 | it looks good. I can kind of keep track of the books I've read and like what I want to work on

01:33:52.880 | today and I can illustrate the borders. When you get into these high end knowledge work jobs,

01:33:57.760 | productivity light doesn't cut it anymore. Like your bullet journal can't keep up with

01:34:02.320 | 75 emails a day. It can't keep up with the administrative overhead of a shifting array

01:34:07.440 | of 12 ongoing projects. It can't keep up with a calendar that's averaging 20 to 40

01:34:12.960 | events per week. Like the systems, you have to go from productivity light to productivity heavy.

01:34:17.200 | But it's the process that rules. I don't use any complicated software. I use Google Docs,

01:34:24.000 | I use my calendar, I use Trello. So you figure out how do I organize and have a process for

01:34:30.000 | working this work and then you find the tools. I have some concrete suggestions, but Scott,

01:34:34.480 | I mean, you don't work in a complex process oriented knowledge work job.

01:34:41.040 | So from kind of from the outside, like what's your take on this idea of like the tool,

01:34:45.440 | you know, is there the right tool I need that's going to solve this versus other

01:34:49.600 | ways of thinking about organizing effort?

01:34:51.680 | Well, so I'm not sure if, it's Adam, right? Adam's the questioner.

01:34:55.040 | Adam, that's right.

01:34:55.920 | Yeah, Adam. I'm not sure if my experience directly parallels Adam, but I'll share it anyways. But

01:35:01.360 | I found for me, and maybe you can comment on this as well, Cal, that when I got interested

01:35:08.320 | in productivity, when I was like first doing it, this kind of checklist-based approach

01:35:12.880 | just seemed like that's what productivity was. You write down all your tasks and then you check

01:35:17.200 | them off. And especially if you're a student, it's like read this chapter, complete this essay,

01:35:20.640 | do this kind of stuff. It really fits that mold. And now when I think about my work,

01:35:25.120 | two things have changed. One is that I've gotten to the somewhat enviable position that a lot of

01:35:30.240 | the checklist-based stuff have been delegated. I don't have the checklist-based tasks anymore.

01:35:34.160 | Someone else does the like, here's the eight mechanical steps you have to do every single

01:35:38.400 | time you do this, and they check it off. I don't do them anymore. But then what was left,

01:35:42.480 | what was remaining was this core of like these hard problems that is sort of like,

01:35:46.720 | they're not something you can just check off. It's sort of like, okay, write a best-selling book.

01:35:51.120 | Okay, what's the tasks there? I mean, you could make a task list, but the thing is,

01:35:55.440 | you're going to start working on the tasks and realize, no, that's not the right way to do it,

01:35:58.640 | or you're not doing it properly. You certainly can't approach it with the mindset of like,

01:36:03.040 | just check off this one and move to the next one, and then you're going to have a best-selling book,

01:36:06.480 | or you're going to have something successful here. And so for me, I think I naturally gravitated

01:36:12.400 | more and more as I get older, as my career matures, to the kind of deep work sort of system

01:36:19.120 | that, you know, what I'm trying to do is ensure that there is a deep focus on important tasks,

01:36:25.680 | and that there is a lot of flexibility in how those get executed. And I'm not really like trying

01:36:30.720 | to break it down into, okay, well, I've just got to do these 10 little things. I mean, I still do

01:36:34.800 | that. I still have that sort of segregated somewhere else. But what I'm really trying

01:36:38.160 | to do is like, how can I have like six hours to just work on this book chapter and like,

01:36:43.520 | grind through it and think through it? And like, in the moment, I'm constantly going back and forth

01:36:48.000 | between research and doing this, and it's problem-solving. Like, there's no template I can

01:36:51.920 | follow. But the enemy of that is, well, I'm going to just, I'm going to spend 30 minutes and write

01:36:57.120 | 500 words every day, like that kind of mindset that you see so often on Twitter. I'm like,

01:37:01.920 | you know, I don't know, I was reading somewhere, someone was saying like, you know, you could write

01:37:06.000 | a book every three months, because if you write this many words per day, then that totals a book.

01:37:11.440 | And then I was just thinking, well, you know, like, good for you, if that's how you can write

01:37:15.760 | books. But I mean, for me, it's not the metric. It's not the metric. Sometimes you can write 5,000

01:37:20.240 | words. Sometimes you spend days trying to figure out the opening sentence. And so I think this

01:37:26.160 | shift towards harder, more ambiguous tasks that have complexity built into it, I think, to me,

01:37:32.240 | that's why the kind of a little bit more using the time metric, a little bit more using, this is the

01:37:37.040 | chunk of time that I'm devoting to this. This is what chunk of time I'm going to push everything

01:37:40.720 | else off of so that I'm not having interruptions and distractions has been more important to me.

01:37:44.800 | But I mean, you can weigh in on this. You have a lot more like, multiple job descriptions,

01:37:49.440 | responsibilities, calendar interference. But I mean, I think it reflects your time

01:37:53.840 | block planning to some extent. - Yeah. I mean, if we use the

01:37:56.880 | terminology like shallow versus deep productivity, deep being like the really complicated jobs.

01:38:01.120 | I'll give you an example. I'm going to give you four processes that like you probably need all

01:38:06.080 | four of these. And for each of these, the tech to implement it is boring, right? Okay. So just

01:38:11.920 | based on my experience with these type of jobs, I've been dealing with people with these type of

01:38:15.280 | jobs. The first of all, you need some sort of structured task management, right? So you need

01:38:19.680 | a place of keeping track on your different projects, what needs to be done, where you can

01:38:25.600 | collect relevant information. So if someone sends you a file about that task, you're waiting to

01:38:30.240 | work on or sends you an email about it, you can add it to where that thing lives. So all the

01:38:34.320 | information lives in one place. Why I call this structured is because you can have, I use Trello

01:38:40.800 | for this, but you can use a Google doc for this. You want to have categories, right? So here's like

01:38:44.640 | tasks for a particular projects. Here's tasks that I'm trying to work on this week. Critically,

01:38:49.200 | here are things I'm waiting to hear back from other people on. So you have a place for,

01:38:53.840 | I'm waiting to hear back from this person on this. Once I hear back from this, then I can move on and

01:38:57.680 | do this, right? So you can keep track of, here's all the stuff that I know so far needs to get done

01:39:03.200 | for the various things I'm working on. Relevant information can live right there with the task.

01:39:08.400 | And I can have different categories here of just like, these are tasks for this project,

01:39:12.720 | but I'm not actively doing them. Here's tasks I'm working on this week. Here's things I'm

01:39:16.560 | waiting on. Any sort of thing can hold this information. You could have a Google docs for

01:39:21.760 | different types of projects. You can have a Trello board with different boards for different types of

01:39:25.920 | projects or roles. The technology is boring, but you need something like that. You probably need

01:39:30.880 | to do multi-scale planning at this level of complexity, Adam, right? So for the quarter,

01:39:35.920 | you check in like, what are the big things I'm working on? You check that quarterly plan every

01:39:39.600 | week when you make your weekly plan. All right. So which of these things am I trying to make

01:39:43.040 | progress on this week? When am I doing it? Do I need to move some meetings around so I have some

01:39:47.520 | more open time? Do I need to add some new meetings to my calendar to make progress on it? What's my

01:39:51.920 | game plan this week for making progress on the things I want to make progress on? And then you

01:39:56.160 | have a daily time block plan where you look at the weekly plan. So you are grappling with the

01:40:00.720 | things you need to do at multiple scales. The other thing I think you need, Adam, is to work

01:40:06.080 | with non-interruptive communication. So if you have a bunch of things going on like this, the

01:40:11.520 | real enemy, if we're going to get into Weed's deep productivity nerd stuff, the real enemy is going

01:40:15.920 | to be the context switches. If you have six ongoing projects that are each generating emails

01:40:20.880 | and Slack messages that you pretty much have to see and respond to pretty quickly because that's

01:40:24.800 | how things are being worked out, you're sabotaging your ability to actually do this work. And so you

01:40:30.160 | need to have structured communication. This means daily office hours, anything that requires more

01:40:35.040 | than a one message response. You say, just grab me at my office hours. We'll do a five minute

01:40:38.960 | real-time conversation, figure this out. The various groups you work with have to have standing

01:40:43.600 | maybe twice a week meetings to just go through a lot of things at once. You should have a docket

01:40:48.320 | for each of these groups. As people think up things that there's a question or something we

01:40:51.840 | have to figure out, you add it to the docket. And when you get to the meeting, you go through that

01:40:56.160 | docket one by one. So you don't have to email people or Slack people when something comes up

01:41:01.760 | that you worry about. You throw it on the docket. None of this stuff requires big tech, right?

01:41:07.200 | Office hours requires that you open up a Zoom window and keep your door open. A docket is a

01:41:11.920 | Google doc or a Dropbox where you have a text file in it, right? So I'm giving you these examples,

01:41:16.640 | Adam, not because that's the magic collection, but these are things that work really well.

01:41:21.600 | So they're representative of the type of processes that deep productivity processes

01:41:25.360 | that work in these complicated knowledge work jobs. None of them require complicated tech,

01:41:30.560 | and they're certainly not unified in some sort of master tool that's going to do this work for you.

01:41:35.600 | In the end, it's still you doing planning at multiple scales and executing. This stuff helps

01:41:40.800 | keep things organized, but it's still you doing this work. The tech is not that interesting.

01:41:45.120 | So I come back to that. Silicon Valley wants us to believe the tool

01:41:51.600 | is what will give us the productivity. Whereas, and I wrote a New Yorker piece about this last

01:41:56.560 | fall, it's the other way around that we figure out what we need to be productive and then go

01:42:00.640 | and find the tools. The problem is most of those tools have already been invented and are very low

01:42:03.920 | cost. So this is not great for the Silicon Valley companies. Google workspaces is not that expensive,

01:42:10.240 | like that plus Trello. You don't need any more, an email, like email, you can send files back and

01:42:15.840 | forth and you're good. Monday.com isn't even needed. All right, I have a final question here.

01:42:22.880 | Let's shift broad. Let's get philosophical here. All right. This is Sean. What are the most

01:42:30.160 | underrated habits for living a great life? There's a lot loaded into here. Let's make our job easier,

01:42:38.400 | Scott, by noting that he's talking about underrated habits. So we don't have to say

01:42:42.400 | these are like the most critical or like this is the core. We can think more like, okay,

01:42:48.800 | what's something that we have discovered in life is like very useful that we didn't really realize

01:42:54.560 | maybe before life? This is a deep question. I mean, there's lots, there's lots. I think

01:43:01.200 | so some underrated habits that I think are important, at least in my life, like one,

01:43:07.360 | and it seems to be rare these days is, and this is, I'm speaking, obviously not going to apply

01:43:12.000 | to everyone here, but you know, for Cal and I might attest to this, like having family dinners

01:43:17.840 | together, like having a space where you and your loved ones actually like talk and spend time

01:43:24.080 | together so much is like, go, go, go, go, go right now. And so I think human connection and being

01:43:30.080 | able to spend time, and you can extrapolate this to like time with your friends and this kind of

01:43:33.840 | stuff. It's often in our productivity obsessed world where we're on, you know, both of us talking

01:43:39.760 | about this. There is often this kind of sense that those, you know, hanging out with friends,

01:43:45.040 | spending time with people that you're close with, that those are sort of frivolous activities that

01:43:49.040 | those should occupy like once all the important stuff has been done. But I think really like,

01:43:54.160 | you know, other people are the source of our happiness and misery in life. And so, you know,

01:43:59.440 | you can make more money, but if you don't have people around you that you have good

01:44:02.960 | relationships with, I think that's, that's a big thing. The other thing I think,

01:44:07.280 | this is, this is just for me, but I'm going to say this, hopefully extrapolate, but I think also

01:44:14.080 | time for hobbies. I think hobbies are kind of this, again, a frivolous thing that people like

01:44:18.800 | kind of very dismissive of that, you know, it's not work. And it's not just like pure entertainment.

01:44:23.840 | It's not something that you just like, just, you know, sit back and turn on Netflix. But I feel

01:44:28.400 | like we have a real desire innately to, to do skill based things that don't have the pressures

01:44:38.320 | and kind of the societal kind of requirements to be economically productive and do this kind

01:44:43.760 | of thing. And so I think hobbies, again, time with family, time with hobbies, these are like

01:44:48.640 | the first things on the chopping block when we're busy and chaotic. But they're really sources of

01:44:54.880 | our happiness. You know, I think having some things, having some project that you can just get

01:45:00.080 | consumed with and that the other parts of the world can fade away, all of life stresses,

01:45:04.160 | all of like the other things are not going to be there because your attention is occupied in

01:45:08.880 | something important, I think is really important. And it's something that I think, again, too often

01:45:14.320 | it, you either go one way or the other, you like, you get rid of it or you try to make it into work

01:45:18.800 | or you, you know, say, oh, well, this is too much effort. So I'm going to, I'm going to watch

01:45:23.440 | Netflix or play video games or something instead. So, so those would be my two picks for underrated

01:45:28.480 | habits for happiness. Look, I'm typing this in. This could be, this could put us out of

01:45:32.560 | business, Scott. I am typing this question in the chat GPT. I'm kind of curious. This feels like,

01:45:37.920 | what are the most underrated habits for living at great? Oh, I spelled it wrong. All right. So

01:45:44.560 | we're going to get, if these are good answers, we're in trouble for living a great life. Exactly

01:45:50.640 | the way he worded it. All right. Living a great life often involves a combination of well-known

01:45:56.640 | habits like exercise, healthy eating, and maintaining strong relationships. However,

01:45:59.840 | some underrated habits can significantly enhance one's quality of life. Gratitude,

01:46:04.160 | practice, mindfulness, meditation, continuous learning, prioritizing sleep, unplugging from

01:46:12.240 | technology, acts of kindness, setting boundaries, embracing failure, physical touch, spending time

01:46:18.400 | alone. It's a pretty good list, actually. I don't know if those are underrated. We're done, Cal.

01:46:22.000 | Let's retire right now. Let's, let's retire. Just hope, you know, hope that like the, the,

01:46:26.560 | the book rollies that came in, those are enough to live on because we're out of a job now. We're

01:46:33.040 | just going to have, just going to have chat GP deep faking our faces for the rest of time. So

01:46:37.360 | that giving, giving chat Cal Newport style advice to people. I guess we have to just get very

01:46:42.960 | radical and controversial. That's the only thing we have left here, Scott. Yeah. It's all about

01:46:46.960 | giving up sleep and being angry at the world. That's the real truth to happen. These contrarian

01:46:52.000 | takes that chat GPT is not going to be able to get. Rob a bank once a month. Yeah. Oh, that's

01:46:59.440 | interesting. Under, okay. That's, that's actually a pretty good list. I'm not going to call those

01:47:03.280 | underrated though. So I'm going to say that whole list chat GPT gave are like, yeah, that's like

01:47:08.400 | what I w that's what most people would think of. So that's like, what are common, what are common

01:47:12.960 | habits? Underrated is hard. Like what are the things, I mean, I can think of the big advice I

01:47:17.040 | give that isn't widely given elsewhere. It's not underrated for me. We talk about it a lot,

01:47:23.200 | but I mean, I think like, for example, my, my whole framework of if you want a life that like

01:47:29.920 | a deep life, like a life that's really intentional and meaningful for you there's two approaches.

01:47:34.480 | And this is sort of what I'm exploring in the new book I'm writing approach one, which is like

01:47:38.080 | really common in 20 and 21st century, like Western culture is like pursue a big goal.

01:47:44.400 | And then sort of hope is a side effect of that. Like your life will be good, right? So like this

01:47:50.720 | job or this accomplishment or whatever I'm a big believer. No, no, no. Just work directly towards

01:47:57.440 | the, the details of the life you want. Like what, what defines what makes a good life good to me?

01:48:03.200 | What are the details of this lifestyle? Okay. How do I just like directly actually try to get to

01:48:07.040 | that thing? Like, I want to, I want to, I want to be like sort of a quieter life. I want to be kind

01:48:10.880 | of in the country. I want to be in creative work, but I want to have like autonomy and I want to be

01:48:14.800 | deeply connected to a community. Okay. There's a hundred different ways I can combine various

01:48:19.280 | things. And let me think about like, how do I directly engineer the lifestyle I want as opposed

01:48:24.080 | to hoping that a big change will bring in its wake a desirable lifestyle, which it, which it usually

01:48:29.200 | doesn't. So working backwards from the lifestyle, instead of working forwards towards a big goal

01:48:33.920 | that you hope will fix everything. I think that's underrated. We get, we get, we run out of ideas,

01:48:39.120 | I think. And we just think, okay, passion or accomplishment, um, or just like a single cause.

01:48:47.200 | Like if I just give all in on this one cause, like it'll, all the other parts of my life are

01:48:51.440 | going to come together. Um, why not just directly? It's like you talk about transfer theory a lot in

01:48:55.760 | your book. Um, instead of doing sort of related activities to get good at the thing you want,

01:49:01.600 | just practice the thing you want. Like people often say to me, like, should I meditate? So I

01:49:05.680 | get better at like focusing on my work. And I say, well, what you should really do is like practicing

01:49:10.400 | focusing on your work, like increasing the interval, like trying to produce better stuff.

01:49:15.120 | And, uh, so maybe there's a, there's a connection there. So I don't know if it's underrated, but I

01:49:18.800 | think it's this lifestyle centric planning I'm going to keep coming back to is my underrated,

01:49:23.760 | underrated by the culture at large approach to living a great life.

01:49:27.280 | Yeah. I think also, and maybe this is, this is just sort of my perspective on a lot of that. I think,

01:49:32.240 | uh, we are kind of, um, a somewhat self diluted species in that a lot of like the, the source of

01:49:39.360 | our motivation is a kind of status anxiety and status obsession, but that's really unpalatable

01:49:45.120 | to like say that out loud that like, what I want to do is just have people think I'm important,

01:49:49.680 | right? Like, you don't want to say that no one wants to say that. So you come up with these

01:49:52.800 | delusions that like, well, once I become a millionaire, then I'm going to be happy because

01:49:56.880 | I'll have more time for fishing or something like that. So I think part of what requires courage is

01:50:01.840 | in some ways pushing back on this idea that like, um, you know, recognizing that actually, you know,

01:50:08.800 | trying to like at all costs, win various status games in your life is actually like, that's not a

01:50:14.800 | good game to play. You shouldn't be playing that game. And you're, and so you have to be honest

01:50:19.520 | with yourself that you're going to find it appealing, just like you find eating too much

01:50:23.280 | sugar and fat appealing, or just like you find, you know, being on your phone all day appealing.

01:50:27.600 | But if you have the discipline to be like, this is a false path, this is not actually going to make

01:50:31.200 | me happy. I think you open up the door to being like, well, what actually would make me happy?

01:50:36.160 | Maybe it's having more time with my families or some time for some hobbies or do something

01:50:40.000 | interesting like that, you know? - I'm a big believer in sustainable status,

01:50:42.880 | like, because we do, we do seek that. And there is like an ongoing positive part of like,

01:50:50.800 | if you're doing something or have done something, your position is impressive in some way. There is

01:50:54.320 | like a sort of sustaining benefit you get from that. And there is a sustaining negative impact

01:50:59.600 | to feel like nothing I'm doing right now has any sort of cultural, social status. But my

01:51:05.840 | sustainable status idea is when designing your lifestyle, choose something that you're going for

01:51:11.680 | that can give you sufficient status that like, you're not anxious or feel bad about your position.

01:51:19.840 | And it's like, yeah, this is an impressive thing I'm proud of, but does it make more and more

01:51:22.960 | demands of you? Like, I do this, I do this well, I'm proud of doing this. It's an important thing.

01:51:28.960 | It's hard. I have some distinction in it and knowing like, that's good. Now I have this status

01:51:34.160 | I can build on and get rid of that anxiety, but it's different than, no, I need to be the very

01:51:38.720 | best in the world at this, or I need to make more money. You know what I mean? So it's still like,

01:51:42.640 | I write about this topic. I write novels and I like writing novels. I think these are good novels.

01:51:48.480 | I'm not super well-known, super best-selling author, but like I write and I do it professionally

01:51:53.760 | and I'm proud of it. And so I think there's something there. All right, we're running low

01:51:56.960 | on time, but we usually, Scott, we do a case study, right? I read a case study from someone

01:52:01.920 | who wrote in about applying the type of advice we talked about. I have a short case study I want to

01:52:05.520 | read. Um, because I want to, and then I want to ask you briefly about it because I think, uh,

01:52:10.960 | there's some stuff you've done in your life that are similar maybe, or you might have some

01:52:14.240 | interesting thoughts here. All right. So here's a case study from Cassandra who wrote in and said,

01:52:19.040 | uh, writing in with a somewhat unconventional effect that slow productivity has had on my life.

01:52:26.080 | I'm a mom to two kids, one of whom is almost four and the other is 10 months. This week. I had a

01:52:32.800 | zoom out moment about how often I rush or cajole my toddler into my own knee jerk, frenetic pace

01:52:38.800 | of grownup life, all the hurry ups, less goes five more minutes, et cetera. Obviously toddlerhood

01:52:44.240 | requires coaching. Otherwise no one would get anywhere. But my renewed foot renewed focus on

01:52:49.600 | embracing a natural creative pace has bled into my off work hours in a really life affirming way.

01:52:56.160 | Being led around the house by an infant learning to walk feels like the ultimate embodiment of

01:53:00.560 | doing fewer things at a natural pace and obsessing over a uniquely intangible sense of quality.

01:53:06.560 | And I'm better able to adjust, embrace my kid's sense of observation and play instead of carrying

01:53:12.000 | over my stress about time management and output for my work life. So I like this idea of slow

01:53:17.840 | productivity. You can think about this in your life. These ideas carry over to your life outside

01:53:21.680 | of work that you just slow down, don't do so many things, um, revel in like the quality of

01:53:28.560 | the situation. Like it's not pseudo productivity now being translated to the world of life outside

01:53:35.200 | of work. Like my toddler needs to be more efficient. So I, I love that point. Um,

01:53:40.480 | and I think about Scott, like some of the things you do, like, for example, uh, particularly

01:53:45.760 | consolidating your writing to one part of the year so that you could have a slower other part of the

01:53:49.920 | year. Um, some of this is probably with your family in mind. I mean, so how do you, I feel

01:53:54.560 | like you have engineered a sort of slowness into your life outside of work as well as, as in work.

01:53:59.840 | You, like, you're willing to try interesting things. Yeah. Well, I mean, I really resonated

01:54:04.800 | with this comment because I have a four year old and a 16 month old right now. So I, I'm very much

01:54:10.320 | in the same zone of like, you know, having the two kids about the same age and one thing, you know,

01:54:15.520 | and I'm not, I don't make any like special claims to be some kind of, uh, master parent. I've got

01:54:21.360 | like the, the, the wisdom of how to do it, but I will reflect on an observation that I had is that,

01:54:26.400 | um, you know, I have a four year old and he, he wants a lot of attention from me. And, uh, sometimes

01:54:31.840 | when I'm like trying to do some household chores at the same time, and he's like, you know, I want

01:54:35.680 | to play, I want to do something else. And he's wanting my attention. I get, I can get a little

01:54:39.600 | bit, you know, frustrated, like I'm trying to get this done right now. You know, I need, I need this

01:54:43.040 | space, this kind of thing. And, uh, it was, it was pretty recently. I, I had, um, my, my wife

01:54:48.480 | and my daughter were not, uh, not at home. So it was just the two of us and we had a lot of chores

01:54:53.360 | to do. And I was just kind of like enlisting him and helping me and he just loved it. Now, part of

01:54:58.560 | it was me letting go of the idea that I have to get this done in the most efficient way possible

01:55:04.000 | because him helping me with the task probably slows it down a little bit. Like, I think we were

01:55:08.320 | like, you know, scrubbing the deck or something like that. And so he's, he's throwing the water

01:55:12.320 | on there, but he can't do it quite the way that I would in this kind of thing. And so I think,

01:55:16.880 | you know, that idea of, you know, letting go a little bit of some of the processes is good. I

01:55:22.160 | think the productivity mindset that we apply to work, um, can be very disastrous if you try to

01:55:27.280 | apply it to parenting. Um, it's just, things are on a very different rhythm there. And so

01:55:31.840 | I do think there's a, there's a real place for like trying to flip your mindset and not have a

01:55:38.400 | quite so efficient minded approach, especially for certain types of things like that.

01:55:42.160 | - It's almost like a slower version of productivity. If only someone wrote a book about

01:55:48.080 | that. Uh, I will tell you what, I'll tell you what book someone did write, uh, Get Better At

01:55:53.600 | Anything, 12 maxims for mastery. For those who are watching, instead of listening, you can sort

01:55:58.400 | of see the book behind Scott's head there, uh, on the shelf. Uh, the book is, when you're listening

01:56:05.200 | to this, the book is either available or it's going to be available in a few hours. So go buy

01:56:08.480 | the book. I mean, basically this is my now recommended handbook for when you're going

01:56:12.880 | through my sort of deep life methodology and you get to something like, I want to get really good

01:56:17.120 | at this because that's going to open up all these interesting options in my life. Read Scott's book

01:56:21.360 | for the, how to get really good at this piece. It's, it's deeply based on the science, but is

01:56:26.000 | actually like approachable. Like, oh, I get it. Do this, do this, do this. Yeah. This is not easy,

01:56:30.160 | but this is what actually, what actually works. Um, I'm glad you finally wrote this book,

01:56:34.640 | Scott, because I know you've been talking about it for awhile. Um, so thanks for helping me out

01:56:38.560 | with the questions. I think we got a lot of cool answers in here. Um, and thanks for writing the

01:56:43.520 | book, Get Better At Anything. Yeah. Thank you for having me. It was lots of fun. All right. Well,

01:56:50.160 | that was fun. I'm glad Scott could join us. We've got two answers for the price of one in that

01:56:54.080 | segment and definitely check out his new book. All right. We have a final segment coming up

01:56:58.080 | where I'll talk about the books I read last month. But before we do, I want to talk about

01:57:04.400 | some more sponsors that make this show possible. All right, let's talk about our favorite to say

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02:00:53.680 | All right, let's move on to our final segment. As long time listeners know, I aim to read five

02:01:01.280 | books a month. The first podcast of each new month, I talk about the books I read

02:01:05.600 | the month before. So this podcast is coming out in early May. So I want to talk about the books

02:01:12.240 | I read in April, 2024. All right. The first book I read was an empire of their own by Neil Gabler.

02:01:22.480 | This is a history of the early tycoons of Hollywood. So I read this when I was out in LA

02:01:28.880 | doing my book tour. At least I started it when I was out in LA doing my book tour. And then I

02:01:33.760 | got back to it and finished it in April. So I put my books in the month where I actually finished

02:01:37.520 | them. I mean, it's a very good book. It won a bunch of awards. It's Neil Gabler, who I really

02:01:42.640 | like. The book Neil Gabler wrote that I liked best was his epic biography of Walt Disney,

02:01:49.200 | which is fantastic. So Neil Gabler is great. This book was late 80s, early 90s. It feels it.

02:01:53.920 | So if you read any of these sort of biography type books from that period,

02:01:58.640 | they're very psychoanalytical. The focus is really on the psychology of these tycoons,

02:02:03.920 | and which is interesting, right? They're all typically first or second generation

02:02:09.040 | European immigrants. Either they came over as young kids or were born right after their

02:02:14.960 | parents came over. And it really gets into the psychology. Everyone who is profiled as Jewish,

02:02:21.760 | there's a lot of talking about this sort of changing relationship with their religion versus

02:02:27.360 | their parents, who were coming out of sort of the shuttles of Eastern Europe and how they sort of

02:02:32.400 | cast off that baggage, the next generation in the US. So a well-written book. It felt a little slow

02:02:40.160 | for me, mainly because what I was looking for, I was looking for a technical history. I wanted to

02:02:45.360 | know about the early film technologies and the content, how the studios took off, the marketplace

02:02:52.000 | for this. And the book was about the people, not about the business. So for me, that was a little

02:02:57.280 | bit of a disappointment, but it's clearly a well-written book, especially if you're used

02:03:00.160 | to that sort of 80s style of psychoanalytical biography. Then I read Co-Intelligence by Ethan

02:03:08.720 | Mollick. Ethan Mollick's a professor at Penn. He has a very popular email newsletter where he just

02:03:16.160 | keeps you up to speed with the latest, coolest, interesting things happening with AI.

02:03:20.720 | He's become the kind of go-to AI expert for companies, for the White House. He's the guy

02:03:29.040 | who has his finger on the pulse of the very latest, greatest tools and how people are using them. And

02:03:33.760 | so he has 150,000 people that subscribe to this newsletter. I subscribe to it. I need to keep up

02:03:38.800 | with this stuff for my own reporting, et cetera. So he had his first book come out, this portfolio

02:03:42.800 | book, My Same Publisher, where he's just, it's like, "Hey, let me just bring you up to speed

02:03:46.560 | with what's happening in AI right now, how it works, how people are using it, what might be

02:03:51.520 | coming." And so it's exactly what you would want from this book. "Hey, Ethan, you're up to your

02:03:57.600 | eyeballs in AI. Bring me up to speed." It's conversational. He doesn't get too technical.

02:04:04.080 | There's some cutesy stuff in there where he has AI write stuff and he talks about it,

02:04:08.960 | but it's mainly like, "Let me just bring you up to speed. Here's what a language model is.

02:04:12.400 | Here's why it's different than other things. Here's what's being used. Here's how it's being

02:04:16.320 | used. Here's how it's going to impact various sectors." I call this a service book sometimes.

02:04:22.240 | People need to know about this thing more right now. This person knows a lot about it.

02:04:27.040 | So a good read, a quick read too. It's not a long book.

02:04:29.520 | Then I read Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Interesting book. So Carl Sagan,

02:04:37.200 | it's a nonfiction book. It's written in the '70s and it's a lot about neuroscience and evolution.

02:04:45.440 | What do we know about the brain? A lot of this was new then. It'll sound more familiar to the

02:04:53.920 | modern ear, but a lot of new stuff happening in neuroscience. It's a little bit esoteric

02:04:58.960 | in that it kind of jumps from thing. I should say not esoteric, but maybe like eclectic.

02:05:03.840 | It jumps from thing to thing. So he gets into the evolution of our brain and how our brain evolved

02:05:11.760 | from primate brains and how our fear of dragons, this is where the title comes from. We might have

02:05:18.000 | this evolutionary footprint in our brain of being afraid of reptiles that slither.

02:05:23.920 | Because our primate ancestors had to be afraid of this. And from that came our fantasies of

02:05:28.640 | dragons. There's kind of a Jungian aspect to that. So it's a good book on neuroscience.

02:05:33.600 | He's a good writer. He pulls together. These ideas were really new back then. Anyway,

02:05:37.280 | so he writes this book. He's a professor, has becoming sort of more of a public science

02:05:42.320 | personality, not a neuroscientist, but an astronomer or planetary physicist,

02:05:48.560 | depending how you want to talk about it, but writes this book about neuroscience,

02:05:51.440 | wins the Pulitzer Prize. So he kind of just writes this book and wins the Pulitzer Prize.

02:05:56.240 | This type of thing doesn't happen anymore now. I think the win of Pulitzer either for this type

02:06:01.920 | of book just doesn't really happen. It can't just be like, here's a bunch of interesting ideas about

02:06:05.600 | a type of science I thought about, and then you win the Pulitzer. It could be like your life's

02:06:10.400 | work, like E.O. Wilson won a Pulitzer for his book on ants. But also they're more, I would say,

02:06:18.800 | distributed. These type of Pulitzers are more distributed with intent now.

02:06:22.160 | Like, we're also giving a Pulitzer to this because this topic is important. This was just like a

02:06:25.840 | smart guy writing a cool book with interesting ideas, interesting time. But I liked it. I knew

02:06:31.120 | a lot of the stuff about brains, but I was like, this is a good writer. And I really admire Carl

02:06:34.320 | Sagan. As you might imagine, I'm very interested in his trajectory and that scientist who did

02:06:41.760 | increasing sort of public communication about science. And, you know, I do a little bit of

02:06:44.800 | that with technology as one way to think about what I do is I do a lot of public communication

02:06:48.400 | about technology, how it affects us, how to navigate it. So I definitely look at him

02:06:52.320 | as like an interesting example. All right. The next book I read was The Perfect Mile

02:06:59.760 | by Neil Bascom. This book, it's a sports book, a narrative sports nonfiction book in the style

02:07:08.800 | of Boys in the Boat. And it's about the quest to break the four minute mile.

02:07:15.040 | The thing about this book, I'm going to loan it to you, actually, Jesse, I think it's fantastic.

02:07:19.040 | Yeah, it's a really good book. I've got to give Neil credit. It's first of all,

02:07:25.840 | there's an obvious narrative spine to it. It's like Seabiscuit or Boys in the Boat.

02:07:29.520 | Part of what makes these books work is there's a clear narrative spine.

02:07:32.960 | Is Seabiscuit going to win the races? Is the crew team going to win the Olympics?

02:07:38.400 | You're right. And this has the same thing. Are they going to win and how are they going to break

02:07:41.600 | the four minute mile? So you have this narrative spine of competitions, but it gets into the lives

02:07:46.480 | of these four runners. Basically, they all go to the same Olympics, and they all have a bad

02:07:54.000 | experience at the Olympics. We have an Australian runner, we have an American runner, I guess it's

02:07:58.480 | three runners, an Australian runner, an American runner, and Roger Bannister, the British runner.

02:08:03.200 | And they're all trying to redeem themselves from this. And they all decide the way I'm going to

02:08:08.480 | redeem myself is I'm going to break the four minute mile because they were dealing with the

02:08:12.560 | shame of not doing well in the Olympics. And they represent all three different training styles.

02:08:17.760 | Bannister was from the British amateur style. He would train an hour and a half a day, that's it,

02:08:23.760 | but it was very focused training and he was very analytical about how to solve this.

02:08:27.360 | And then you had the Australian who was just running crazy workouts, working out harder than

02:08:35.360 | anyone had ever worked out before, just obsessive like a maniac. So Roger Bannister was just trying

02:08:41.680 | to like, "Can I break the four minute mile in one race?" Whereas this other guy who was training so

02:08:47.040 | hard, he could run these fast miles day after day after day after day. Bannister didn't have that

02:08:51.840 | stamina, but Bannister's like, "I don't need that stamina. I'm not a professional racer, I'm a

02:08:56.080 | doctor. I want to be able to..." So it's different. And then the American was dealing with the college

02:09:00.080 | system where like, "I'm a part of a track team. I'm a college athlete," vision of amateurism. So

02:09:05.600 | you had these three different versions of amateurism. British amateurism, which is like,

02:09:09.200 | "This really is a hobby and I do on the side because it's good to be disciplined."

02:09:13.840 | Then you had the Australian version of it, which is like, "My whole life is built around just

02:09:17.680 | training to do this one thing." And you had the American version of it, which is very collegiate,

02:09:21.200 | which is, "No, I'm a member of a track team and we get a lot of support and we have expert coaching

02:09:26.000 | and our colleges pay for it and our expenses are paid for, but I have to run five events in each

02:09:29.840 | meet. So it's hard for me to specialize in trying to do this one thing because I'm part of a team."

02:09:35.440 | And it all comes together and finally Bannister does it. And then there's this one extra big race

02:09:42.880 | afterwards where the Australian guy is like, "I'm going to destroy Bannister." Because the Australian

02:09:47.440 | guy then breaks Bannister's record and they get together for this final race and Bannister beats

02:09:53.360 | him. And so it's really redeeming. I found myself cheering for Bannister. I don't know why. It was

02:09:59.120 | a great book, really well researched, really well written. The Perfect Mile. Finally, the final book

02:10:04.720 | I read was To Heal a Fractured World by Jonathan Sachs. I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of the

02:10:11.360 | late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs. I think he was a modern Orthodox rabbi. I think he was modern Orthodox,

02:10:19.760 | but was the chief rabbi of the UK. So was very involved with the royal family and all sorts of

02:10:25.200 | cool stuff. Anyways, fantastic writer. So in the world of Jewish thinkers, what Sachs is known for

02:10:31.920 | is his secular philosophical knowledge. And what he's able to do is, in a way that I feel like

02:10:39.120 | professional philosophers can't because they get so in the weeds, is he can just pull in and

02:10:43.440 | summarize. He's like, "Well, here's what Nietzsche thought about this and Spinoza was thinking this.

02:10:47.600 | And here's how this differs from the Kantian worldview. And then the Marxism was saying this."

02:10:51.760 | He could just easily pull from and summarize and connect together all of these different

02:10:56.080 | philosophies and then put the Abrahamic monotheism just in the mix of this and show how it's

02:11:00.640 | different. So it's very worldly and secularized, but also very approachable. So I've been finding

02:11:05.760 | him a very interesting, not just theological instructor, but actually just philosophical

02:11:12.400 | instructor. This book, To Heal a Fractured World, it's a book of ethics. So he's extracting,

02:11:19.520 | here is the system of ethics from Judaism, but he's connecting it to all these other

02:11:23.360 | sorts of systems of thought as well. Kind of the key argument, I mean, this is like something that's

02:11:29.120 | not like an idea he uncovered, but he really gets into, I just, I really find this history

02:11:34.320 | interesting. The rise of monotheism, however much this would be 4,000 years ago, basically,

02:11:41.520 | small part of the desert by the Mediterranean Sea. These ideas that came out of this small group of

02:11:48.640 | people is like the foundation on which not just all the Abrahamic faith, but like all notion of

02:11:53.840 | modern ethics comes out of. The dignity of the individual human didn't exist until the small

02:12:00.720 | group of people began writing down these ideas. That didn't exist. It was like, no, we kind of

02:12:06.480 | all had our roles to play and the gods were kind of using us as pawns and in Homeric Greece, like

02:12:12.720 | what really mattered, it was like you would, the heroes and the beautiful heroines and being infused

02:12:18.640 | with the spirit of the gods temporarily and making life interesting. And this was, the human has

02:12:24.480 | dignity. The idea of peace as a positive objective, like we take this all for granted, didn't exist

02:12:33.120 | before. It's like, no, war is like how you have a worthy life, dying bravely in war. It's what we

02:12:39.520 | do. We fight each other. The idea that peace was an objective, government by consent of the people,

02:12:46.320 | that comes back to these same ideas as well. Sort of the Abrahamic covenant with God influenced all

02:12:51.680 | the enlightenment thinkers about, wait, government is not just this guy was told by God that you're

02:12:57.040 | the Pharaoh and that's it. In the story, you can do whatever he wants. And it was like, no,

02:13:01.920 | you can have a covenantal relationship with those in power. You're here because with our consent,

02:13:07.280 | all of the, basically all the main ideas that have built the modern liberal world emerged 4,000 years

02:13:12.560 | ago in a small desert surrounded by these massive empires that were thinking about things completely

02:13:18.800 | differently. And so I love tracing all the things back to their origins. And this book does a good

02:13:24.720 | job of it. He's a great writer. So I enjoyed it. To Heal a Fractured World by Jonathan Sacks.

02:13:32.400 | All right, Jesse, that's what I got. Good episode. I'm going to mention, I'm going to

02:13:38.240 | London. I'll mention this the next episode. I'm going to London soon, but I'll talk about that

02:13:41.440 | more in the next episode. Until then, I think we're good. So until then, as always stay deep.

02:13:46.800 | Hey, so if you liked today's episode where I gave you a short history of personal productivity,

02:13:52.720 | I think you'll also like episode 285 in which I dive into what I call the productivity paradox.

02:14:00.480 | Check it out. How is it possible that the people who are most impressive are also often the least

Productivity Fatigue: Is Striving To "Get Things Done" Causing Burnout? | Cal Newport

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