Ep. 251: The Efficiency Trap

00:00:00.000 | The slowing down the actual physical task of writing

00:00:04.120 | turned out to have very little to do with the rate

00:00:06.600 | at which I actually produced quality work.

00:00:08.780 | And so, aha, I had one of these deep question style

00:00:12.120 | light bulbs go off, an aha moment,

00:00:14.000 | and it brought up a question

00:00:15.720 | I wanted to dive deeper into today.

00:00:17.860 | I wanna make today's deep question,

00:00:20.760 | does working faster make work better?

00:00:25.080 | (upbeat music)

00:00:27.660 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions,

00:00:34.080 | the show about living and working deeply

00:00:36.420 | in a distracted world.

00:00:37.760 | I'm here at my Deep Work HQ,

00:00:44.500 | joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:47.580 | Jesse, I gotta tell you, the marketing worked.

00:00:52.000 | I have ordered a remarkable tablet.

00:00:54.400 | - Nice, when's it come in?

00:00:56.240 | - It takes a long time, Monday.

00:00:59.800 | - When'd you order it?

00:01:00.840 | - I ordered it on like Tuesday.

00:01:04.400 | - So, six days?

00:01:06.240 | - Yeah, okay, not that long,

00:01:07.560 | but still, it feels like long in today's world.

00:01:11.480 | I expect to, by Monday afternoon,

00:01:14.000 | to be looking thoughtfully towards a window

00:01:16.320 | as sunshine shines on my face

00:01:19.120 | before someone comes over

00:01:20.320 | with really expensive looking glasses on

00:01:22.720 | and looks down at the remarkable with me

00:01:24.240 | where there'll be a chart

00:01:25.280 | that'll draw a circle around something.

00:01:27.120 | 'Cause as I've learned from the videos

00:01:28.680 | that market the remarkable,

00:01:30.280 | it's a lot of looking into the sunshine

00:01:32.200 | and drawing arrows and circling charts

00:01:34.040 | while people look thoughtfully over your shoulder.

00:01:36.000 | So, I look forward to be doing that for hours.

00:01:39.440 | - Everything has charts.

00:01:40.360 | - Mine just charts, just circling charts.

00:01:42.720 | People be like, "That's it?

00:01:44.280 | "You have turned this business around."

00:01:46.320 | - You've solved interest rates and inflation.

00:01:48.640 | - A lot of high fives.

00:01:49.960 | Yeah, you have solved inflation.

00:01:52.360 | There will be no more viruses.

00:01:53.760 | We just didn't think that,

00:01:55.040 | there's nothing drawing our attention

00:01:57.040 | like an arrow to this particular bar in the bar chart.

00:01:59.960 | And now that you've done so on the remarkable,

00:02:02.640 | it all makes sense.

00:02:03.880 | So, I'll report back.

00:02:05.200 | I'll report back to everyone how it works,

00:02:07.920 | why I'm getting it.

00:02:08.760 | I did a thing before.

00:02:09.680 | Basically, I have a lot of different notebooks I use

00:02:12.320 | for capturing ideas or early work

00:02:15.920 | on many different types of projects

00:02:17.560 | 'cause I have many different hats I wear.

00:02:19.160 | And so, the idea of having one thing

00:02:21.080 | to contain all that information,

00:02:22.720 | not seven or eight different paper notebooks,

00:02:25.120 | and to have that be something

00:02:26.600 | that is no internet connection,

00:02:29.480 | it's just for doing that, and it backs up.

00:02:32.320 | Anyways, I think it could be good for me or not.

00:02:35.120 | I'll report back.

00:02:36.000 | Speaking of devices, Jesse,

00:02:38.160 | another thing that happened in my world of digital work,

00:02:43.160 | less nice, less sunshine on my face

00:02:48.040 | and people look over my shoulder proudly,

00:02:50.120 | is on my trusty laptop,

00:02:52.480 | I got something stuck under my shift key,

00:02:56.320 | the left-hand shift key.

00:02:58.400 | I don't know what it was.

00:02:59.240 | Something got under there,

00:03:00.680 | which means 50 to 75% of the time

00:03:03.880 | I would press the shift key, it wouldn't work.

00:03:06.360 | So, you have to just stop

00:03:07.400 | and just keep trying it again and again

00:03:10.240 | to get every capital letter capitalized.

00:03:14.200 | So, it's annoying.

00:03:15.160 | It was, okay, I can't just go at full speed.

00:03:18.040 | I have to stop and keep doing this thing.

00:03:20.360 | I brought it up, though,

00:03:21.280 | because that actually sent me down a rabbit hole

00:03:24.200 | that I wanted to explore a little bit on today's show,

00:03:27.160 | because what I noticed was,

00:03:29.120 | man, I can't write literally as fast

00:03:32.080 | if my shift key doesn't work very well,

00:03:33.520 | 'cause I have to keep stopping and trying to make it work.

00:03:36.400 | But this slowness that was infused into my writing

00:03:41.400 | had no impact on the overall rate

00:03:44.560 | at which I was producing good work.

00:03:47.120 | I was working on an article last week.

00:03:49.240 | That was annoying,

00:03:51.220 | but it had no impact on,

00:03:53.360 | did I finish a draft of this article or not?

00:03:57.160 | The slowing down the actual physical task of writing

00:04:01.760 | turned out to have very little to do

00:04:03.440 | with the rate at which I actually produced quality work.

00:04:06.400 | And so, aha, I had one of these deep question style

00:04:09.680 | light bulbs go off, an aha moment,

00:04:11.600 | and it brought up a question

00:04:13.320 | I wanted to dive deeper into today.

00:04:16.240 | So, I wanna make today's deep question,

00:04:18.320 | does working faster make work better?

00:04:22.760 | And so, the way I'm gonna structure my thoughts

00:04:28.020 | is we'll take as our starting premise here,

00:04:31.080 | work-related productivity systems or tools.

00:04:34.900 | So, all the different things that might enter our life,

00:04:37.880 | the remarkable tablet I was just talking about,

00:04:41.000 | complicated productivity software,

00:04:42.920 | notebooks, calendars, systems, like bullet journaling,

00:04:46.500 | this whole universe of systems and tools

00:04:49.660 | related to productivity,

00:04:50.940 | and I wanna divide them into three categories.

00:04:53.860 | And I think by dividing them into three categories

00:04:56.220 | and understanding the purpose of each category,

00:04:58.720 | we're gonna have a more nuanced understanding

00:05:00.880 | of what really improves work

00:05:03.260 | when it comes to these type of productivity ideas

00:05:05.220 | and what doesn't really matter much.

00:05:07.460 | Why, in other words,

00:05:08.460 | would I spend a lot of money on a remarkable tablet,

00:05:11.260 | but be okay that the shift key didn't work on my laptop

00:05:14.340 | and my rate of writing got much slower?

00:05:17.720 | All right, so that's what I wanna do today.

00:05:19.360 | So, let me start with the first of these three

00:05:21.460 | major categories of productivity systems and tools,

00:05:25.300 | and that would be those that add capabilities.

00:05:29.960 | So, a system or tool that enables you to do something

00:05:33.500 | work-related that you were not able to do

00:05:36.960 | before you got that tool.

00:05:39.360 | Let's say you buy a notebook

00:05:42.820 | that allows you to work on book ideas.

00:05:45.780 | You're a writer.

00:05:47.220 | You have a notebook that allows you to capture

00:05:49.980 | and elaborate book ideas

00:05:51.500 | when you're away from your office.

00:05:54.460 | That's something you weren't able to do before,

00:05:56.460 | but this new tool makes something newly possible.

00:05:58.660 | Oh, I can now capture thoughts in more locations.

00:06:02.760 | This is the way I think, for example,

00:06:04.080 | of the remarkable tablet that I just ordered

00:06:07.580 | is it makes it possible for me to have access

00:06:10.300 | to a dedicated idea notebook

00:06:12.220 | for all of the various different types of work I do.

00:06:14.520 | So, we have theoretical computer science proofs.

00:06:17.020 | We have sort of academic work on digital ethics.

00:06:19.580 | We have article writing, like New Yorker pieces, et cetera.

00:06:24.500 | We have the sort of Moleskine deep lifestyle notebook

00:06:27.160 | where you're thinking about

00:06:28.100 | general reflections on your life.

00:06:29.540 | And there's the notebook that has to do

00:06:30.900 | with the media company, the business that I run.

00:06:33.700 | I can't bring a notebook for all of those things with me.

00:06:36.460 | That would be a giant stack of notebooks.

00:06:38.820 | I can bring a remarkable with me.

00:06:40.500 | So, that's something I couldn't do before

00:06:41.880 | that I will be able to do when I have a remarkable.

00:06:43.880 | Have access to a unique notebook

00:06:45.260 | for six or seven different things

00:06:46.740 | in which I need to collect notes.

00:06:48.820 | The introduction of the internet was a big capability adder

00:06:53.080 | when it came along in the '90s and early 2000s,

00:06:55.820 | because now, for example, you could look up

00:06:57.820 | almost any piece of information that you need access to,

00:07:00.500 | you can get immediately.

00:07:02.180 | You couldn't do that before you had,

00:07:04.060 | let's say an early form of Google and the internet.

00:07:05.980 | Now you can.

00:07:07.780 | So, that's a system that adds new capabilities.

00:07:10.300 | A subscription to Audible,

00:07:11.960 | that allows you to listen to books

00:07:15.020 | when you're doing other things.

00:07:17.840 | So, before you had an audiobook subscription,

00:07:20.020 | you couldn't do that, right?

00:07:21.260 | So, it's a tool or system that gave you a new capability

00:07:24.480 | that you did not have before.

00:07:26.840 | So, that's the first category

00:07:27.940 | of productivity-related systems and tools.

00:07:31.940 | And in general, these can be very useful improvements

00:07:34.940 | if the new capability it adds

00:07:37.600 | connects to something you value

00:07:39.280 | or significantly increases the valuable things

00:07:42.860 | you can produce, it's a bit of a no-brainer.

00:07:44.860 | Yeah, keep your eye out for those.

00:07:46.800 | All right, well, there's a second category

00:07:50.180 | of productivity systems and tools.

00:07:52.580 | That is those that reduce pain points.

00:07:56.800 | So, a system or tool that reduces or eliminates an activity

00:08:00.000 | that you actively dislike or makes you unhappy.

00:08:03.600 | Pain points are the type of activities

00:08:06.460 | that can aggregate over time towards exhaustion or burnout.

00:08:11.380 | So, you have to be careful about pain points

00:08:13.200 | and oftentimes, there will be some sort of tool or system

00:08:16.460 | that can help you eliminate those.

00:08:17.660 | So, let me give you an example here.

00:08:19.800 | When I first started TA-ing college classes,

00:08:22.860 | so as a graduate student at MIT,

00:08:26.340 | I was mainly on a research assistantship,

00:08:28.020 | but you're required in MIT

00:08:29.420 | to do some teaching assistantships as well,

00:08:33.980 | so you get more exposed to teaching.

00:08:36.500 | I remember the first class I TA-ed was a big class,

00:08:40.140 | a big distributed algorithms class,

00:08:41.780 | you know, MIT, course six is large,

00:08:43.540 | there's a lot of students in these classes.

00:08:45.500 | And the obligations I had in that class as a TA,

00:08:49.140 | I remember had multiple pain points,

00:08:51.500 | including those surrounding the dealing with problem sets.

00:08:55.300 | So, when I first came into that class,

00:08:57.220 | you had everyone submitting problem set solutions

00:09:00.620 | in any format they wanted.

00:09:02.940 | So, handwritten or printed, often stapled,

00:09:07.580 | and sort of haphazardly submitted.

00:09:10.740 | And my advisor, the teacher I was doing

00:09:12.980 | a teaching assistantship for said,

00:09:15.620 | "Well, look, we gotta have Xerox copies of everything

00:09:17.700 | in case we lose one."

00:09:20.300 | And so, I found myself spending all this time

00:09:22.540 | removing staples, wrangling, we'd have 50 problem sets,

00:09:26.420 | wrangling somewhere on one side, somewhere on other,

00:09:28.500 | someone to go through the copying machine,

00:09:29.860 | trying to make all these copies,

00:09:31.540 | getting them off the graders,

00:09:32.900 | then getting them sorted again, et cetera.

00:09:35.540 | And at some point I realized,

00:09:37.620 | there is a system I can introduce here

00:09:39.580 | that would reduce that pain point

00:09:41.140 | without causing any significant trouble.

00:09:43.540 | And I said, "Actually, students,

00:09:44.660 | I'm gonna standardize how we hand in problem sets.

00:09:48.940 | It's gonna be no staples, single-sided,

00:09:53.260 | standard size paper,

00:09:55.300 | and you're gonna come up the class at the beginning

00:09:57.460 | to hand these in, we need them alphabetical."

00:10:00.780 | So you look at the problem sets that are already handed in

00:10:04.060 | and put yours where it goes,

00:10:06.940 | so that when you're done handing in your problem sets,

00:10:08.740 | we'll already have them in alphabetical order.

00:10:10.660 | That reduced almost all the pain points,

00:10:12.100 | 'cause I can now just take this big stack

00:10:13.620 | and I could run it through the copier

00:10:14.740 | and it took 15 minutes.

00:10:16.100 | Everything was already ordered alphabetically,

00:10:17.860 | so I could just pull off this third,

00:10:19.540 | give it to this TA, this third, that TA,

00:10:21.060 | this third, that TA,

00:10:21.900 | and they could bring them back alphabetically, graders,

00:10:24.260 | and they could bring them back alphabetically

00:10:25.260 | when they're done.

00:10:26.100 | These were little things,

00:10:26.940 | but they got rid of a lot of big pain points for me.

00:10:28.900 | And for the students, who cares?

00:10:30.140 | Like, they don't, I won't staple it

00:10:32.340 | and take 30 extra seconds when I hand it in.

00:10:34.420 | For each individual student, it made very little difference,

00:10:37.060 | but for me, that new system eliminated a major pain point.

00:10:41.740 | Another example might be,

00:10:43.300 | and again, this kind of comes from my own life,

00:10:45.260 | but imagine you are something like a director

00:10:48.060 | of graduate studies at a university.

00:10:50.580 | I'm just sort of pulling this example out of nowhere,

00:10:52.700 | right, everyone?

00:10:54.180 | But imagine you're a director of graduate studies

00:10:55.940 | at a computer science program,

00:10:58.020 | and I don't know, like at a Jesuit university

00:11:02.300 | in like Washington, DC or something like that,

00:11:05.140 | near the Potomac.

00:11:05.980 | (laughs)

00:11:07.140 | It's been around since like the 1780s.

00:11:09.260 | So just hypothetically.

00:11:10.540 | Anyways, one of the responsibilities

00:11:13.040 | that someone in this situation might have

00:11:16.020 | is needing to sign add/drop forms

00:11:19.900 | for when graduate students want to add a course

00:11:22.780 | that they couldn't just sign up for normally.

00:11:25.220 | And there's these forms where you have to get a signature

00:11:27.500 | from the professor,

00:11:28.540 | and then you have to get a signature

00:11:29.660 | from the director as well to approve it.

00:11:32.940 | So imagine hypothetically,

00:11:34.460 | these forms came in all the time.

00:11:36.580 | People would just bring them to your office,

00:11:38.060 | sometimes with the professor's signature, sometimes not.

00:11:41.100 | You would have to scan them, sign them and scan them,

00:11:44.580 | and submit the electronic version,

00:11:47.460 | and file the other version,

00:11:48.980 | or give it back to the students,

00:11:50.100 | go get the professor and bring it back.

00:11:51.500 | And this is all fine if you have, let's say,

00:11:53.660 | I don't know, three of these a semester,

00:11:55.500 | but imagine instead you have dozens, right?

00:11:57.860 | A major pain point.

00:11:59.740 | But it turns out this is another place

00:12:01.220 | where you could put in place some tools and systems

00:12:04.260 | that will specifically reduce that pain point.

00:12:07.580 | So for example, in this instance,

00:12:09.420 | there could be new rules for the students.

00:12:11.980 | Okay, here's how it works.

00:12:13.880 | Get your form, get the professor to sign it,

00:12:17.900 | then scan your form, okay?

00:12:20.980 | And then you are going to email that scanned form to me,

00:12:25.140 | or even better, put that scanned form in a shared folder,

00:12:29.400 | Box is what Georgetown used, but it could be Google Drive,

00:12:33.620 | it could be Dropbox, it's forms to be signed.

00:12:36.820 | And then once a week, the director in this case

00:12:39.900 | could go to that box, take these already digital files,

00:12:43.660 | pull the digital signature onto them,

00:12:45.880 | and move them over to a signed shared folder.

00:12:50.620 | The instruction to the students is,

00:12:53.340 | he does this on Fridays, check back in after Friday

00:12:56.140 | to get your signed version.

00:12:57.940 | You can directly submit it to the registrar's office.

00:13:01.040 | Here's how you do it, and you CC the director

00:13:03.500 | and put this in the subject line,

00:13:05.180 | so that message will automatically get filtered,

00:13:06.940 | but he'll then have a record of it.

00:13:08.580 | But now you have reduced everything

00:13:10.060 | the director has to do in this

00:13:12.100 | from a ad hoc ongoing sort of annoying wrangling of papers

00:13:15.940 | and scans and people and submissions,

00:13:18.020 | to once a week, he goes to a folder,

00:13:20.140 | opens 10 documents, drags signatures, moves them.

00:13:22.860 | It takes seven minutes.

00:13:23.980 | Again, the extra work for the students here is minor.

00:13:26.820 | For each individual student, it means nothing.

00:13:29.380 | But for the professor, the director in this case,

00:13:32.180 | it's a reduction of a major pain point.

00:13:35.740 | Reducing pain points in my opinion

00:13:38.340 | is almost always a worthy endeavor

00:13:40.900 | and a great application of productivity tools and systems.

00:13:45.900 | It makes your work way more sustainable

00:13:50.260 | because it's not just the pain you feel

00:13:52.380 | from these activities in the moment,

00:13:53.700 | but the aggregation of that pain day after day,

00:13:56.020 | week after week that can really cause burnout.

00:13:58.440 | This then brings us to the third category

00:14:02.180 | of productivity systems and tools,

00:14:04.140 | and that is those that speed up common tasks.

00:14:09.140 | So take something you're already doing

00:14:12.220 | and simply try to make it faster or more efficient.

00:14:16.320 | This typically is through the use

00:14:18.220 | of new high technology tools.

00:14:20.460 | So for example, Zapier Automations.

00:14:23.660 | I can now, when doing some sort of activity,

00:14:27.380 | have an automation on my computer where I press a button

00:14:30.500 | and it takes this file and renames it

00:14:32.380 | and automatically moves it over there.

00:14:34.420 | So you can start to automate some of the digital movement

00:14:37.360 | of information on your machine.

00:14:40.280 | Something like autocompletes in an email client

00:14:42.740 | like Gmail does.

00:14:43.780 | That's an example of this category

00:14:45.460 | of productivity tools or system.

00:14:46.840 | I'm typing a common phrase.

00:14:48.580 | It finishes it for me.

00:14:49.960 | It saves me some time typing it.

00:14:52.220 | I'm typing an address in the to field in an email

00:14:55.980 | and it automatically suggests the name

00:14:57.540 | and I can click on it

00:14:58.380 | and that saves me a little bit of time.

00:15:01.820 | Tightly integrated note capture technologies

00:15:03.860 | fall into this.

00:15:04.680 | I have a complicated Evernote type setup

00:15:07.220 | where I wanna just very easily have this workflow

00:15:09.540 | where I can take all this different type of information

00:15:11.540 | that gets sucked into this one system

00:15:13.180 | where it gets labeled and I can view it in different views.

00:15:17.200 | If you look at productivity YouTube,

00:15:19.960 | there's a real focus on this category

00:15:22.120 | of productivity tools and systems.

00:15:23.760 | I've taken these things I do

00:15:25.120 | and they're all hooked up and integrated and automated

00:15:27.440 | and I've reduced the number of clicks I need to do.

00:15:29.800 | I've reduced the number of typing I need to do.

00:15:31.500 | Everything moves really quickly to where it needs to go

00:15:35.040 | with minimum input from me.

00:15:37.220 | So here's the thing about this final category

00:15:40.440 | of productivity tools and systems.

00:15:43.000 | They can sometimes be useful

00:15:45.040 | largely where they overlap with pain point reduction.

00:15:47.800 | So these are techniques you could use

00:15:49.420 | for pain point reduction.

00:15:51.200 | But for the most part,

00:15:53.540 | their impact on your actual output is minor.

00:15:58.540 | So it comes to producing things of value using your mind,

00:16:04.000 | typically the bottleneck,

00:16:06.180 | the thing that's going to control

00:16:08.140 | how long something takes or how good the thing is,

00:16:10.780 | is typically deep work.

00:16:12.180 | It's this thinking deeply to come up with the right idea

00:16:15.100 | and then the application of an expertise driven craft

00:16:18.200 | to produce a valuable product on the other side.

00:16:20.320 | This is where most of the time is taken up.

00:16:22.200 | This is the main thing that determines the value.

00:16:24.720 | The speed up type productivity hacks

00:16:27.800 | work on the margins of that.

00:16:29.600 | They work on the gathering of the information.

00:16:31.600 | They work on the taking the article after you writing it

00:16:34.520 | and automatically getting it uploaded to your newsletter

00:16:36.920 | with saving some clicks.

00:16:37.800 | So they save time on the margins,

00:16:40.280 | the intake and the output,

00:16:41.800 | but not in the core activity

00:16:43.180 | that actually determines most of the time

00:16:44.980 | something takes and most of the quality of what you produce.

00:16:48.340 | This is why when we went the other way with my shift key,

00:16:51.200 | instead of making a common task faster,

00:16:53.000 | we made a common task slower,

00:16:54.600 | it didn't impact the quality of the writing I did that week

00:16:57.800 | or the overall rate at which I produced that writing

00:16:59.960 | because typing was not the bottleneck.

00:17:02.760 | My bottleneck when writing a magazine article

00:17:04.720 | is not if only I could move my fingers faster on the key.

00:17:08.160 | I'm staring at this screen.

00:17:10.600 | I might rewrite the same sentence four times

00:17:12.940 | in a five minute area.

00:17:14.220 | A lot of writing is walking.

00:17:15.740 | How do I make this work?

00:17:16.860 | Why isn't this working?

00:17:17.780 | A lot of writing is revising.

00:17:19.020 | The speed of the typing negligible, right?

00:17:23.040 | That's nice.

00:17:24.440 | That's not what determines how long

00:17:26.700 | that task is going to take.

00:17:28.120 | And this is true for most cognitive activities

00:17:30.600 | that produce thing of real value

00:17:31.900 | is that the bottleneck is the thinking.

00:17:34.220 | The determiner of the value is the thinking.

00:17:36.940 | And that can't be sped up

00:17:39.660 | with productivity systems or hacks.

00:17:43.060 | So now if we consider the first two categories,

00:17:44.820 | we see, okay, these are still valuable

00:17:46.600 | because they're not actually trying to increase the speed

00:17:49.860 | at which you produce valuable information.

00:17:51.420 | When you're reducing pain points,

00:17:52.620 | no, you're trying to stop yourself from burning out.

00:17:54.680 | That's worthy.

00:17:55.540 | When you're adding new capabilities,

00:17:57.560 | you're giving new targets for your energy to focus on.

00:18:00.840 | And that too could be really useful.

00:18:03.340 | Or you're adding new inputs into the work you're doing

00:18:05.900 | that you did not have before.

00:18:07.460 | So that could open up new possibilities

00:18:09.140 | for what you produce.

00:18:10.260 | That could be really useful as well.

00:18:13.100 | So there's value in those first two categories that is clear.

00:18:16.000 | The value in the third category is more tentative.

00:18:19.600 | It's sometimes applies, sometimes not.

00:18:23.840 | This third category, however,

00:18:25.940 | is what most people think of

00:18:27.740 | when they think about personal productivity.

00:18:31.060 | As mentioned, this third category

00:18:32.460 | is what dominates productivity YouTube.

00:18:35.000 | There's a, it's great content.

00:18:36.860 | There's great satisfaction.

00:18:38.100 | Look at how all these pieces click together

00:18:40.140 | and everything automates from here to there.

00:18:41.900 | It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

00:18:43.980 | It's like getting a woodworking product project

00:18:46.220 | to actually work and all the pieces fit together.

00:18:48.260 | It's satisfying in the moment,

00:18:49.940 | but again, it has very little to do

00:18:51.200 | with the actual production of value.

00:18:52.740 | It's why there's a sense of emptiness

00:18:54.580 | that pervades a lot of classic productivity content

00:18:57.620 | is because people who do actually wrangle

00:18:59.440 | with hard things for their lives say,

00:19:00.660 | this is really unrelated to what I do.

00:19:03.680 | You look at Aaron Sorkin

00:19:08.140 | writing a script or something like that.

00:19:10.700 | It doesn't really matter if he's using Final Draft or not,

00:19:14.020 | or has good macros, or whether or not

00:19:16.300 | he has a complicated Scrivener setup

00:19:18.740 | that he's using when using Final Draft.

00:19:20.420 | I mean, it all might matter a little bit to him

00:19:22.100 | in terms of efficiency or annoyance,

00:19:24.000 | but it has no impact

00:19:25.540 | on whether that movie script gets written or not,

00:19:27.340 | or whether or not that script wins an Oscar.

00:19:29.540 | So I think it's useful to make these category distinctions

00:19:33.060 | because it gives us two important conclusions.

00:19:37.120 | One, there is a lot within the world

00:19:39.740 | of productivity systems and tools

00:19:42.000 | that we should not be dismissive of.

00:19:43.980 | Even the most late-stage capitalist anti-work,

00:19:47.980 | subscribe to my sub stack about why you shouldn't

00:19:51.220 | go in the business, whatever crowd that's out there,

00:19:54.080 | will should admit that this is not all just

00:19:57.300 | guys with slicked back haircuts on YouTube

00:19:59.900 | trying to get you to automate the way that files move

00:20:02.420 | from your Dropbox into your tablet setup.

00:20:05.820 | Pain points and capability addition,

00:20:07.680 | these might not be sexy, but they're very important

00:20:09.760 | and they can make a real difference on the quality of work.

00:20:11.960 | And the other conclusion we have to draw here

00:20:13.960 | is that just speeding things up by itself

00:20:16.300 | is working at the margins of knowledge production,

00:20:18.700 | at the margins of value production.

00:20:20.560 | If it's fun to you, it's a fine hobby,

00:20:22.860 | but don't let it get in the way of that actual work.

00:20:26.240 | So anyways, I think this distinction,

00:20:27.640 | I'm a big ontology guy.

00:20:28.760 | I think having these distinctions helps navigate

00:20:31.960 | this increasingly contentious and complicated world

00:20:34.500 | of understanding productivity.

00:20:35.980 | Is it evil?

00:20:36.820 | Is it good?

00:20:37.640 | Is it useful?

00:20:38.480 | Is it a mirage?

00:20:39.320 | And the answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes.

00:20:41.420 | It's all of these things.

00:20:42.720 | And only with these right categories

00:20:44.520 | can we better navigate those inherent internal complexities.

00:20:49.240 | So at least that's the way I'm trying to think now

00:20:52.520 | about the world of productivity advice.

00:20:55.600 | - So you're gonna fix your keyboard?

00:21:00.080 | - My system for this is just keep using

00:21:01.920 | until it gets better.

00:21:04.020 | And I think it's better now.

00:21:05.560 | It's better than it was.

00:21:07.120 | People say you can take the key off.

00:21:09.400 | I'm telling you, if I take a key off,

00:21:10.940 | that thing's not getting back on.

00:21:12.600 | You know, it's like some plastic things

00:21:14.400 | that have to click on just right,

00:21:15.600 | and I worry that I'll never get it back on again.

00:21:19.360 | - How often do you have to get new computers?

00:21:21.400 | - I mean, I have a lot of computers.

00:21:23.720 | It just depends.

00:21:24.560 | Like my Georgetown machines,

00:21:25.480 | they replace every three years, I think.

00:21:28.520 | - But your Georgetown machines have the keyboard imprints

00:21:32.120 | on the fingers?

00:21:32.960 | - Yeah.

00:21:33.780 | - They do?

00:21:34.620 | - Yeah.

00:21:35.440 | - Oh, so you write on them all like that?

00:21:36.600 | - Yeah.

00:21:37.440 | - Oh, wow.

00:21:38.280 | - Yeah, well, I often write on my,

00:21:39.100 | my laptop is often my Georgetown machine.

00:21:40.280 | We have some other laptops,

00:21:41.460 | but I usually just try to use one machine on the go.

00:21:45.800 | - The one that we showed a picture of?

00:21:47.160 | - That's a Georgetown laptop.

00:21:48.080 | - Oh, okay.

00:21:48.920 | - Yeah. - Okay, that makes sense.

00:21:49.740 | - That's a Georgetown laptop, yeah.

00:21:50.580 | And I have various desktops

00:21:52.080 | and a pile of tablets this tall.

00:21:54.280 | And yeah, we have some computers here in the HQ.

00:21:57.580 | - I thought you had multiple laptops.

00:22:01.080 | - We do have multiple laptops,

00:22:02.620 | I usually just try to use one.

00:22:04.340 | - Yeah.

00:22:05.180 | - Yeah, all of my files are in Dropbox

00:22:06.980 | in a synchronized shared directory structure.

00:22:09.700 | So it doesn't really matter which computer I'm using,

00:22:12.200 | they all have the same files.

00:22:14.260 | And the only program I use that's not web-based

00:22:17.020 | is typically Scrivener.

00:22:18.660 | But all my Scrivener files are in Dropbox,

00:22:21.980 | so I don't have to worry about losing them.

00:22:24.700 | All right, so anyways, we have some questions coming up.

00:22:26.300 | These questions all very roughly are going to orbit

00:22:28.700 | around the same issue of sort of productivity hacks

00:22:31.260 | and the tension between speeding things up

00:22:33.020 | or actually doing better work

00:22:34.260 | and where this stuff is useful

00:22:36.060 | and where we're just deluding ourselves.

00:22:37.340 | So we'll sort of apply what we just discussed

00:22:40.300 | with a bunch of real world questions to follow.

00:22:42.940 | First, however, I wanna mention one of our sponsors

00:22:45.180 | that makes the show possible.

00:22:47.180 | And that is our friends at Grammarly,

00:22:49.180 | our longtime sponsors at Grammarly.

00:22:51.560 | What I'm excited about now

00:22:52.740 | is a new product feature they have called Grammarly Go.

00:22:57.260 | So those who have followed my writing,

00:23:00.140 | let's say for "The New Yorker"

00:23:01.100 | knows that I've been reporting recently

00:23:03.260 | on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

00:23:06.660 | And my stance on this tends to be

00:23:09.420 | what you should be looking for is focused applications

00:23:13.700 | of these new artificial intelligence technologies.

00:23:15.980 | This is how it's gonna enter our life,

00:23:17.620 | is in very focused but very effective applications,

00:23:20.360 | not as some sort of big general new intelligence

00:23:23.720 | that just does everything for you.

00:23:24.960 | And Grammarly Go is an example

00:23:27.240 | of exactly this type of useful way forward

00:23:29.680 | with these tools that I've been talking about.

00:23:31.860 | It brings the general power of large language model power

00:23:36.060 | to generative artificial intelligence

00:23:37.860 | to the very specific task of my professional writing,

00:23:41.960 | I do as a knowledge worker

00:23:44.080 | in various apps for various purposes.

00:23:48.060 | So with Grammarly Go, it's like you have a assistant

00:23:51.300 | that can sit here and make your writing better

00:23:54.020 | and help that writing go faster.

00:23:57.660 | So one of the things you can do with Grammarly Go,

00:23:59.640 | for example, is ask for prompts.

00:24:02.440 | You can say, "Hey, can you outline some ideas

00:24:05.920 | on how to decorate a taco truck?"

00:24:09.160 | Or like, "What's an outline?

00:24:10.460 | Give me a rough outline for a business plan

00:24:12.580 | for my yoga studio."

00:24:14.140 | Or "I need 10 possible captions

00:24:15.740 | for this post I just wrote over here."

00:24:20.080 | All of this is stuff that's gonna save you time.

00:24:21.880 | Oh, great, now I have a rough draft

00:24:22.960 | of something I can edit off of.

00:24:24.160 | I can look at a list of captions and say,

00:24:25.520 | "Hey, this one's pretty good."

00:24:26.520 | Number seven, let me just edit it a little bit.

00:24:29.040 | So it's as if you have a writing assistant

00:24:30.720 | that you can task with doing things

00:24:32.880 | that help you complete your writing project better.

00:24:35.320 | It also can work with tone.

00:24:38.200 | So this underlying technology, as we know,

00:24:40.520 | is very good at language and the structure of language

00:24:43.640 | and the different variants of language.

00:24:45.280 | So now you can say things to it,

00:24:46.960 | such as, "Okay, I just wrote a paragraph.

00:24:48.920 | Can you make this sound more exciting?"

00:24:51.240 | Or, and I think this is critical,

00:24:53.080 | "Can you make this sound more professional?"

00:24:55.280 | And it'll take what you wrote and just update the tone

00:24:58.480 | into something that matches it.

00:25:00.960 | In fact, the new Grammarly Go offering here

00:25:04.080 | allows you to customize your preferred

00:25:06.720 | style of communication.

00:25:08.360 | They have a setting called Set Voice

00:25:10.680 | that allows you to actually customize the voice you want

00:25:14.240 | in your professional communication.

00:25:15.520 | So when you ask it to summarize something

00:25:18.700 | or to write a paragraph about something,

00:25:20.620 | it'll do so already in your voice.

00:25:22.640 | You don't have to really work on this

00:25:24.180 | to make it sound less like commander data from Star Trek.

00:25:27.860 | It'll actually already by default sound like you.

00:25:31.400 | These are the type of applications in the genre of AI

00:25:33.160 | that I think are important, focused,

00:25:36.320 | solving a real problem.

00:25:38.140 | So I think you will be amazed at what you can do now

00:25:41.440 | with Grammarly Go.

00:25:43.480 | So go to grammarly.com/go

00:25:46.560 | to download and learn more about Grammarly Go.

00:25:49.120 | That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/go.

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00:26:12.780 | And then you go and you look up

00:26:13.620 | how much life insurance you have from your work

00:26:15.180 | and you realize, oh,

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00:26:17.900 | So you need life insurance if you have a family.

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00:27:56.340 | All right, Jesse, let's get into the weeds here.

00:27:59.700 | Do some questions.

00:28:01.460 | People are talking about productivity, nuts and bolts,

00:28:04.740 | and we can try to put our new framework

00:28:06.940 | for thinking about these tools and systems to use.

00:28:09.460 | - All right, first question's from Mark.

00:28:11.860 | I noticed that you seem to think tools don't matter

00:28:13.940 | when it comes to how productive you can become.

00:28:15.940 | Meanwhile, most other productivity YouTubers insist

00:28:18.780 | that choosing and using the top 10 productivity apps

00:28:22.340 | is the number one thing

00:28:24.100 | to optimizing productivity and efficiency.

00:28:27.020 | Thoughts?

00:28:28.460 | - Well, so Mark, it's a great question

00:28:30.100 | because it shows off exactly the framework

00:28:31.900 | that we just talked about in the deep dive.

00:28:35.660 | I'm a big believer in personal productivity

00:28:37.620 | as being important.

00:28:38.620 | I'm also very different seeming

00:28:40.500 | than typical productivity YouTubers,

00:28:42.560 | and it all comes down to those three categories

00:28:44.940 | into which we can sort any discussion

00:28:48.500 | of productivity tools and systems.

00:28:51.740 | So I'm a big believer in productivity tools and systems

00:28:54.020 | to add new capabilities to your life.

00:28:55.420 | I'm a big believer of productivity tools and systems

00:28:57.300 | to reduce pain points.

00:28:59.620 | I don't care as much about using these tools and systems

00:29:02.640 | to speed up the common task

00:29:04.180 | at the margins of actual knowledge production.

00:29:07.620 | This is what productivity YouTubers typically do look at.

00:29:11.500 | Complicated integrations of systems

00:29:13.620 | that are made to speed up the steps

00:29:15.180 | that surround the actual bottle neck of thinking hard,

00:29:18.700 | come with new ideas, producing original knowledge.

00:29:22.620 | There's a reason why they focus on that in YouTube

00:29:25.080 | is because, well, first of all, it makes for good content.

00:29:29.900 | I really think there's a similar thing going on

00:29:32.100 | with a lot of these productivity YouTube videos

00:29:34.720 | that you would see with a lot of,

00:29:36.660 | let's say YouTube cooking videos.

00:29:38.460 | There's something really fulfilling

00:29:40.180 | when you see people start with these various ingredients

00:29:42.660 | and they grind it and do whatever.

00:29:44.140 | And in the end, they get this finished pie

00:29:46.220 | or this really well prepared cup of coffee

00:29:50.140 | with the cream just right on the top.

00:29:51.540 | It's visually very appealing,

00:29:53.080 | but also it is cognitively appealing.

00:29:55.500 | Our brain likes to see pieces come together

00:29:57.380 | into a nice whole.

00:29:59.060 | And so it is essentially productivity cooking

00:30:02.560 | when you see this integration of this tool to that tool.

00:30:05.180 | And the person shows how everything

00:30:06.660 | automatically populates and this syncs with that.

00:30:09.060 | And it goes to this tool and over here,

00:30:11.240 | I can write here and it updates over there.

00:30:12.980 | It's like producing a pie.

00:30:15.020 | It's good content.

00:30:17.240 | The other types of categories of productivity systems

00:30:20.740 | and tools is not so good content.

00:30:22.480 | A video rapidly cut of someone changing the policy

00:30:27.380 | by which their students submit problem sets

00:30:29.380 | so they don't have to spend so much time at the copier

00:30:31.200 | is not that exciting.

00:30:32.800 | Watching a director of graduate studies

00:30:35.420 | figure out how to cut steps out of the process

00:30:38.980 | of approving add drop requests.

00:30:41.420 | That's just not that exciting.

00:30:43.200 | It's often very bespoke

00:30:44.620 | and the solutions often aren't that interesting.

00:30:46.680 | They don't require advanced tools.

00:30:48.440 | They don't require breakthroughs in technology.

00:30:51.680 | You're not wearing a virtual reality helmet

00:30:54.200 | as you interact with a large language model generative AI

00:30:57.600 | using haptic feedback goggles.

00:31:00.120 | You're typically sending someone an email

00:31:01.840 | and saying put this in Dropbox by Friday.

00:31:03.920 | Again, it's not as exciting.

00:31:06.620 | Now here's the thing.

00:31:07.560 | I don't mind the speeding up thing.

00:31:09.320 | I mean, I think it's interesting content.

00:31:11.960 | I think a lot of people like it.

00:31:14.160 | I think this is often missed

00:31:15.920 | by the anti productivity critics.

00:31:19.400 | What they miss is when they look at this content

00:31:21.800 | is they try to extrapolate that or generalize that

00:31:25.760 | to be this is productivity.

00:31:27.680 | And the message here is that everyone should be doing this.

00:31:30.100 | But really when you look at that type

00:31:31.680 | of specialized YouTube productivity content,

00:31:34.040 | again, it's like looking at someone who does unboxing

00:31:37.160 | or cooking and you wouldn't look at someone

00:31:39.480 | who had a cooking channel

00:31:41.760 | where they really carefully prepare these things

00:31:43.400 | and say like, well, this is,

00:31:44.720 | we shouldn't all be obsessed about cooking all the time.

00:31:46.920 | And it's not, this is just big cooking,

00:31:49.040 | trying to get us obsessed about cooking.

00:31:50.240 | It's not, there's like some people like to watch that.

00:31:52.080 | It's much more specific and narrow

00:31:54.680 | than I think critics actually give it credit for.

00:31:57.440 | Also, I don't know, some people enjoy speeding up things

00:31:59.920 | on the margin.

00:32:00.760 | Sometimes it gives you a faster cognitive runway

00:32:04.440 | into the deep work.

00:32:05.760 | If I have a really clean setup

00:32:08.800 | that gets everything just ready for me to start writing,

00:32:11.520 | it's not actually going to change

00:32:13.320 | how long it takes me to write something.

00:32:14.800 | It's not gonna make my writing better,

00:32:16.560 | but maybe it makes it 20% easier to get started writing.

00:32:19.780 | And again, that's an advantage that could add up as well.

00:32:23.020 | So I have nothing against focusing on speeding up

00:32:26.680 | the margins with these productivity hacks and tools.

00:32:30.360 | I just think it's important that we recognize

00:32:32.360 | that this is just one avenue out of many

00:32:36.680 | that make up the map that is thinking about productivity

00:32:39.040 | and its potential impact on your life.

00:32:40.560 | So I do do things different

00:32:42.200 | than those productivity YouTubers

00:32:44.480 | because I just don't look as much at that one category,

00:32:46.800 | but we're all dealing with the same, I guess, general topic,

00:32:50.780 | which is how you organize your information

00:32:54.300 | and organize and set up your professional actions.

00:32:57.820 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:33:00.800 | - Next question is from Andrew.

00:33:02.920 | I work for a government contractor.

00:33:05.080 | They have a strict device policy

00:33:06.720 | that bans third-party apps and platforms

00:33:09.000 | such as Trello for productivity.

00:33:11.120 | I am depressed I will never be as efficient

00:33:13.060 | and deep as people working for other companies.

00:33:15.720 | What should I do?

00:33:16.780 | - Again, this question highlights some themes

00:33:20.700 | that we have been hitting on here.

00:33:23.560 | What it's doing, I believe,

00:33:25.280 | is conflating the type of things you see in particular

00:33:28.840 | in that third category of productivity tools and systems,

00:33:31.000 | speeding up common tasks,

00:33:32.380 | and conflating that with producing good work.

00:33:36.180 | That somehow the better suited my systems and tools,

00:33:41.160 | the faster the steps related to the work I do,

00:33:43.820 | the more integrated the tools are with my work,

00:33:46.480 | the better I'm gonna produce,

00:33:47.980 | the better quality work I can produce,

00:33:49.200 | the faster I can produce work,

00:33:50.280 | and often that's not the case.

00:33:52.440 | In the end, you have to write the report.

00:33:54.480 | The chapter has to get prepared.

00:33:57.240 | The business strategy has to come together.

00:33:59.600 | The team, you have to understand what's going on

00:34:01.840 | and figure out the plan that's gonna properly manage them

00:34:04.580 | towards meeting their objectives.

00:34:05.900 | And that's what's gonna eat up most of the time.

00:34:07.560 | And that again is gonna be you thinking.

00:34:10.240 | Tools aren't gonna help or,

00:34:14.200 | I was gonna say it can't help or hurt.

00:34:15.560 | They could hurt if you're looking at your phone at TikTok

00:34:20.560 | while trying to think up these big thoughts,

00:34:22.780 | they will actually hurt,

00:34:23.700 | but there's only so much the tools can help you there.

00:34:25.720 | So Andrew, what I'm trying to say here

00:34:26.800 | is you don't have to despair

00:34:27.760 | that you don't have access to particular tools

00:34:29.680 | that you see various people use as part of their systems,

00:34:32.400 | just build systems that work for you.

00:34:33.960 | And what you really wanna focus on here,

00:34:36.380 | again, is reducing pain points and adding new capabilities.

00:34:39.600 | And I wouldn't worry as much about,

00:34:41.440 | and do I have everything integrated and as fast as possible,

00:34:44.720 | because that doesn't matter as much.

00:34:46.760 | And once you know what you're trying to do,

00:34:48.740 | the specifics of the tools will often matter

00:34:52.080 | less than you think.

00:34:53.520 | Once you know in general, okay,

00:34:54.880 | here's the process I wanna use for whatever,

00:34:57.000 | this particular type of report

00:34:59.040 | that I have to work on week after week,

00:35:01.520 | 98% of the time, you'll realize that email

00:35:03.640 | plus basic file sharing, plus just talking to people

00:35:06.320 | and coming up with an operating procedure is what you need.

00:35:09.360 | Rare is the case where you really do need

00:35:13.400 | a bespoke piece of third-party software

00:35:15.240 | to actually do that work.

00:35:17.600 | So Andrew, you don't have to worry so much.

00:35:19.760 | This is more boring than you think.

00:35:22.240 | Use the basic tools you have access to, that's fine.

00:35:25.240 | Have a process-oriented mindset

00:35:26.800 | and just be looking for pain points you can eliminate.

00:35:29.380 | Look for new capabilities, new sources of information,

00:35:32.680 | et cetera, new tools that allow you

00:35:34.240 | to do something you couldn't do before.

00:35:35.360 | Okay, care about that.

00:35:36.480 | But when it comes to these tightly integrated systems

00:35:38.960 | where everything moves very quickly and connects,

00:35:41.160 | it doesn't matter that much that you don't have it

00:35:43.280 | if you're focusing on the other pieces.

00:35:45.920 | Basic tools can be used to build

00:35:48.360 | really complicated productivity structures.

00:35:52.500 | I mean, I like Trello, Jesse, he mentioned Trello,

00:35:55.420 | but I don't think it would have any impact at all

00:35:58.860 | if you said, look, Trello doesn't like you,

00:36:01.260 | you've been banned for life,

00:36:02.260 | Cal Newport can't use Trello anymore.

00:36:04.340 | I could come up with an alternative

00:36:06.740 | that solves the basic problems.

00:36:08.840 | It would be a little bit slower, a little bit clunkier,

00:36:10.540 | but again, a little bit slower, a little bit clunkier,

00:36:12.300 | doesn't matter.

00:36:13.200 | What really matters is capture matters

00:36:18.380 | so I don't have to think about something,

00:36:20.140 | a place that has relevant information matters,

00:36:22.020 | and then beyond that is all these little details

00:36:23.700 | of little efficiencies, they don't add up that much.

00:36:26.460 | 'Cause in the end, the thing that's on that Trello card

00:36:28.420 | you have to do is gonna take you hours.

00:36:31.380 | And whether you had it in a nice Trello card

00:36:34.740 | or you're using bullet points in a Google Doc,

00:36:37.040 | it's still a thing that's gonna take you three hours.

00:36:40.500 | And so it took two minutes over here

00:36:43.060 | versus one minute over here

00:36:44.260 | because of some sort of integration

00:36:45.420 | gets just overwhelmed by the time to actually do the task.

00:36:50.420 | I mean, I like the tools, don't get me wrong.

00:36:53.980 | I mean, I like when things are fast and they're just nice,

00:36:55.980 | it's pleasing.

00:36:56.820 | It's like keeping your car really clean,

00:37:00.280 | but it doesn't really matter

00:37:01.900 | in terms of how long it takes you to get to work.

00:37:03.780 | - Yeah.

00:37:04.620 | - I say that because we just detailed our minivan.

00:37:09.020 | Six hours.

00:37:10.000 | - Wait, you did it?

00:37:12.220 | - Well, we hired someone.

00:37:13.180 | - Yeah.

00:37:14.020 | - Six hours, yeah.

00:37:15.220 | He retired from the industry

00:37:19.740 | and found religion after that job.

00:37:21.180 | He was like, here's what he said.

00:37:24.340 | And I'm quoting him.

00:37:25.180 | This actually, we have a very dirty minivan

00:37:26.660 | 'cause we have a lot of kids and they're not very neat.

00:37:28.860 | And he emerged from the minivan six hours later.

00:37:31.180 | And all he said was, "There is no God."

00:37:34.320 | And then he dropped his tools and joined a monastery.

00:37:37.180 | So I don't know.

00:37:39.020 | It doesn't speak well for the cleanliness of our car.

00:37:42.180 | That's what he said, there is no God.

00:37:43.500 | And joined a monastery.

00:37:45.140 | All right, let's keep rolling.

00:37:47.780 | What do we got next?

00:37:49.020 | - All right, next question's from Damair from Nigeria.

00:37:53.780 | How do top writers like you

00:37:55.260 | ensure your research process is efficient?

00:37:57.820 | Put another way, how do you avoid over-researching?

00:38:00.860 | Research is seductive.

00:38:02.100 | And I, for one, often find myself sucked helplessly

00:38:04.940 | into research rabbit holes.

00:38:07.340 | - Well, I don't know if efficient is the right word here.

00:38:10.740 | I would say professional writers

00:38:11.980 | don't particularly care about the efficiency

00:38:15.580 | of their research habits.

00:38:17.700 | Some of the most lauded nonfiction writers, for example,

00:38:21.660 | use what are probably very slow habits

00:38:23.780 | in terms of manually looking through papers and archives

00:38:27.540 | and taking notes by hand.

00:38:29.900 | They don't really focus on,

00:38:31.940 | I wanna really quickly process this information necessarily.

00:38:36.500 | Because again, that's not the bottleneck

00:38:39.940 | for producing the good writing.

00:38:41.380 | The hard part is synthesizing the information

00:38:43.700 | and actually doing the work of writing.

00:38:46.940 | So they wouldn't use the word efficient.

00:38:48.780 | There is, however, as you're rightly pointing out here,

00:38:51.260 | the termination problem.

00:38:53.260 | When do you shift from research,

00:38:55.060 | whether you're in the moment being efficient

00:38:57.460 | or being Robert Caro, turn every page style inefficient,

00:39:01.220 | how do you shift at some point from researching into writing?

00:39:06.220 | Typically, what professional writers have to help them here

00:39:09.900 | is professional necessity.

00:39:12.540 | This article needs to come out.

00:39:15.180 | I don't know how much patience my editor is gonna have

00:39:17.740 | if I take another few months.

00:39:19.500 | Or if you're a book writer, this advances run out.

00:39:24.100 | I don't know how much longer we can pay the water bill

00:39:26.540 | if I don't actually get this book done,

00:39:28.580 | I do need to start writing.

00:39:30.020 | So I think the big differentiator with that issue

00:39:33.020 | between professional and non-professional writers

00:39:34.980 | is the professional writers have strong incentives

00:39:37.620 | to not take too long.

00:39:39.180 | Now, the other incentive is I wanna write something good

00:39:41.780 | because otherwise this magazine will stop hiring more,

00:39:43.940 | people will stop buying my book.

00:39:45.140 | So then they have this, I think, very healthy tension.

00:39:47.740 | I need enough research for this to be good,

00:39:50.220 | but I can't do research forever

00:39:51.460 | because I need to put this thing out.

00:39:53.020 | And those things work together and that often works out,

00:39:56.620 | it's not perfect, but that often works out

00:39:58.860 | to provide a pretty good balance

00:40:02.740 | between those two incentives.

00:40:04.420 | And what happens over time

00:40:05.420 | is professional writers develop a gut.

00:40:08.100 | I know I have it, I just, I've written enough things

00:40:11.420 | that I know I have what I need now,

00:40:13.100 | I'm imagining the article as I go along,

00:40:15.140 | I have what I need to get into it.

00:40:17.100 | And then I can go back and fill in the gaps later,

00:40:18.820 | there'll be some places the writing will reveal

00:40:20.900 | I need a better source here or there.

00:40:23.460 | You just, you do it enough time

00:40:25.020 | that feedback helps develop a gut.

00:40:26.980 | And then after a while you dive into your research,

00:40:29.860 | you're either efficient or inefficient, doesn't matter.

00:40:32.340 | You have a pretty good signal at a pretty reasonable time,

00:40:34.380 | let's shift from this over into writing.

00:40:38.420 | So it's a problem you have if you're not in that situation,

00:40:40.860 | if you're writing, let's say,

00:40:41.820 | as an independent or autonomous project,

00:40:44.100 | you in some sense have to simulate that back pressure.

00:40:49.660 | You have to simulate this needs to be good,

00:40:51.900 | but I can't take too long on it.

00:40:53.340 | And the best ways to do that

00:40:54.460 | is to have some sort of deadline.

00:40:56.900 | It could be arbitrary.

00:40:58.660 | Some people who have a brand of self-discipline

00:41:01.740 | that means if they set a deadline for themselves,

00:41:04.140 | they'll actually obey that

00:41:05.260 | and feel really bad about missing it.

00:41:06.940 | Other people need to get others involved.

00:41:08.660 | I promise you this draft of my thesis

00:41:10.700 | by the end of this month,

00:41:12.180 | and you do the best you can within those constraints.

00:41:14.780 | This is why I often say,

00:41:16.700 | if you're trying to become a writer,

00:41:17.860 | find ways to take on commissions for money for an editor,

00:41:21.380 | even if the money is $50

00:41:22.900 | and if the editor is probably gonna accept it,

00:41:25.500 | you want this type of back pressure because it is useful.

00:41:28.900 | And in this case, it's gonna help you,

00:41:30.300 | A, push your research to be good,

00:41:32.100 | but B, not take too long

00:41:33.260 | because you have these competing forces.

00:41:34.700 | So the demo there, that's what I'd suggest

00:41:37.660 | is you need to create that tension in your life,

00:41:39.860 | that dual-headed tension.

00:41:41.540 | This thing needs to be good, but I can't take too long.

00:41:45.140 | And when you try to serve both of those constraints,

00:41:47.220 | you end up finding over time a bit of a sweet spot

00:41:50.380 | and you hit that sweet spot enough times,

00:41:51.900 | you develop a gut,

00:41:53.060 | and then it's not so hard in the future

00:41:54.740 | because in the future, you just know,

00:41:56.700 | yeah, this is enough to start writing.

00:41:59.460 | Let's rock and roll on it.

00:42:02.700 | - Research.

00:42:03.540 | Yeah, writers are often very old-fashioned

00:42:06.460 | in their techniques.

00:42:07.780 | Some are like high-tech, but I don't know,

00:42:11.020 | they're so focused on just the craft of writing

00:42:13.620 | that it's like little things make a difference.

00:42:16.780 | I want a good place to store my notes,

00:42:18.460 | but I mean, they have systems,

00:42:19.820 | but the systems I'm saying are often not these things

00:42:22.700 | that you would put on a productivity YouTube.

00:42:24.460 | It's like rubber band these index cards together.

00:42:27.700 | I have these Xerox papers.

00:42:29.540 | I mean, the best is I don't wanna give away too much of this

00:42:31.820 | 'cause I go into detail of this

00:42:32.900 | in the "Slow Productivity" book that's coming out in March,

00:42:37.020 | but I really get into John McPhee's habits.

00:42:40.780 | He has systems that are very specific,

00:42:43.420 | but they are very inefficient.

00:42:46.340 | He's typing things and cutting them out with scissors

00:42:49.380 | and arranging them on plywood, and it's like slow,

00:42:53.500 | but it doesn't matter

00:42:54.340 | 'cause he's writing a 30,000-word article,

00:42:56.180 | and no matter how slow you make that process

00:42:58.620 | of how he deals with information,

00:42:59.900 | it's gonna be swamped by the time required

00:43:03.020 | to actually write the article, so it doesn't really matter.

00:43:04.860 | He just needs something that works for him

00:43:06.260 | just to sort of structure his efforts.

00:43:07.580 | So writers have systems for sure,

00:43:09.300 | but they are not automated.

00:43:11.980 | My computer is automatically,

00:43:14.740 | my smart house sensor talks to my computer

00:43:17.100 | when I walk through the door,

00:43:18.340 | so the computer can activate

00:43:19.660 | and automatically pull the latest drafts

00:43:21.380 | out of my various Dropbox folders,

00:43:24.180 | and then a Zapier script takes that

00:43:25.940 | and produces a text-to-audio summary of my last notes

00:43:30.740 | that can play in the speaker

00:43:32.180 | that follows me through the house until I sit down.

00:43:34.260 | No, no, no, it's more like I have this burlap sack

00:43:38.780 | in which I keep the copies of my manuscript,

00:43:41.740 | and I always bring this burlap sack with me

00:43:44.120 | to the same stool at the bar

00:43:45.860 | where I drink a pint of Hefeweizen

00:43:48.620 | before I start using napkin.

00:43:51.100 | The writers have systems, but they're not high-tech.

00:43:54.180 | - So did you talk to McPhee?

00:43:55.980 | - I did not talk to McPhee, no.

00:43:57.540 | I talked to one of his editors, though,

00:44:01.100 | one of his book editors who has an affiliation

00:44:02.820 | with Georgetown, and we had a good conversation.

00:44:05.600 | He's still around.

00:44:08.180 | He's like 87, 89.

00:44:11.220 | He's not a young man.

00:44:12.580 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:44:13.500 | A great writer.

00:44:15.220 | All right, let's do one more question here.

00:44:18.460 | - All right, researcher at heart,

00:44:21.980 | a 31-year-old professor.

00:44:24.380 | I'm an assistant professor of psychology

00:44:26.200 | on a tenure-track position.

00:44:27.700 | I hate everything about teaching.

00:44:29.780 | I hate that I am inexperienced.

00:44:31.340 | I hate the lack of help and resources

00:44:33.960 | to do it better and more efficiently.

00:44:35.980 | I hate how exhausted it makes me,

00:44:38.020 | how it can take my whole day with the preparation,

00:44:40.460 | stress, replying to student emails.

00:44:43.140 | How would you approach this problem?

00:44:45.580 | - Well, my first advice,

00:44:47.860 | do not open, when you go up for promotion,

00:44:51.900 | do not open your teaching statement with that paragraph.

00:44:55.180 | That'd be advice number one.

00:44:57.220 | That would be the world's worst teaching statement

00:45:00.260 | in your promotion package.

00:45:01.340 | I hate teaching.

00:45:02.500 | I hate everything about it.

00:45:04.260 | That's my first piece of advice.

00:45:05.380 | Don't put that in there.

00:45:07.340 | All right, let's step back here a little bit.

00:45:09.300 | I think partially,

00:45:10.780 | and this is gonna sound weird at first, I'll explain.

00:45:14.660 | You're thinking about this too much.

00:45:16.460 | You're self-analyzing and self-reflecting

00:45:20.580 | and focusing on what you don't like

00:45:22.380 | and what's not going right

00:45:23.520 | and my recommendations aren't where they are

00:45:25.020 | and how much time is this taking

00:45:26.340 | and you're spiraling here.

00:45:29.100 | Teaching is, some people enjoy it more than others.

00:45:32.860 | Depending on the subject for some people,

00:45:34.300 | it can be a bigger footprint than others.

00:45:36.300 | It should not dominate your mind this much.

00:45:39.240 | So here's what I'm gonna suggest.

00:45:40.460 | I'm gonna suggest what we're gonna do

00:45:41.900 | is a fixed schedule productivity approach here.

00:45:46.540 | You're gonna figure out what is a reasonable amount of time

00:45:48.900 | to spend on courses given my particular academic position

00:45:52.460 | and trajectory, right?

00:45:53.820 | How much is it two days a week,

00:45:55.660 | most of that day is a three hours a day.

00:45:57.340 | You're gonna figure out a reasonable time schedule.

00:46:00.860 | And then what we're gonna do is work backwards

00:46:02.600 | from those constraints and say,

00:46:03.860 | what's the best possible teaching I can do

00:46:06.780 | within those constraints?

00:46:08.660 | We'll elaborate that in a second.

00:46:10.740 | And then third,

00:46:11.900 | you're gonna not think about that much beyond it.

00:46:13.820 | It'll do what it'll do.

00:46:14.740 | And you know what that's gonna be?

00:46:15.740 | It'll be better than you think.

00:46:17.460 | And over time, the ratings will get even better

00:46:19.500 | from your students as you just become more used to it.

00:46:21.300 | It's not gonna be as bad as you think,

00:46:23.860 | putting time constraints on the teaching

00:46:25.380 | because it's gonna push innovation and your processes

00:46:28.300 | and reduction of pain points and adding efficiencies.

00:46:30.980 | And it'll be fine.

00:46:32.940 | And you will get fine ratings

00:46:35.640 | and they'll probably go up over time.

00:46:37.060 | And maybe you're not gonna get high ratings and that's fine.

00:46:39.740 | But that's just what you should do.

00:46:40.840 | And I don't want you to think about it much more beyond that.

00:46:42.900 | You've given that part of your life what you should give it.

00:46:45.920 | And it doesn't really require much more thought than that.

00:46:48.540 | Again, here's the thing about research track professoredom.

00:46:53.060 | You can't get tenure for being a good teacher.

00:46:55.540 | You can lose tenure if you're negligent.

00:46:58.820 | You can at a research institution,

00:47:01.300 | if you're a negligent teacher,

00:47:02.380 | you can lose tenure if you're a terrible teacher.

00:47:04.860 | But otherwise it's a bit of a no op

00:47:06.860 | for the tenure case that you'll eventually come up.

00:47:08.720 | So I don't want you wasting so much energy on it.

00:47:10.940 | All right, so let's go now

00:47:12.260 | and elaborate these steps a little bit more.

00:47:14.820 | Fix your time constraint that you think is reasonable.

00:47:18.700 | This will allow me to put a lot of time into this,

00:47:21.080 | but give me a lot of time left over for research

00:47:22.880 | and my other obligations.

00:47:24.960 | Two, say what's the best I can do within that constraints.

00:47:28.880 | And here's where all of the actual

00:47:30.720 | in the weeds innovation is going to happen.

00:47:33.720 | You need to look for pain points

00:47:35.000 | and see if there's ways to eliminate those

00:47:36.700 | without really affecting the student experience.

00:47:39.680 | I think a relevant example here was me talking

00:47:42.600 | in the deep dive earlier about my TA experience

00:47:46.340 | in grad school, right?

00:47:47.680 | Overhauled how students submit problem sets

00:47:50.260 | in a way that barely changed anything for them,

00:47:53.020 | but eliminated a major pain point for me.

00:47:55.780 | Think through how you can be doing that

00:47:57.380 | on many other different aspects of teaching.

00:48:00.380 | You mentioned in your longer response, for example,

00:48:02.980 | about how like you're always dealing

00:48:04.140 | with student emails all day.

00:48:06.180 | There's ways to deal with this, to constrain that more.

00:48:08.940 | We're adding more office hours,

00:48:10.540 | but moving more communication to the office hours

00:48:12.660 | by having more structured

00:48:13.980 | for the things they're writing about.

00:48:15.220 | There's more structured systems

00:48:16.420 | for how they talk about a grade request or this or that.

00:48:19.220 | There's things to do here,

00:48:21.040 | as opposed to just saying, this is just overwhelming

00:48:24.140 | and they always want me in and what can I do with it?

00:48:25.860 | There's pain points here that can be reduced

00:48:27.420 | and the students won't even notice it, right?

00:48:29.260 | I mean, again, typically what students want

00:48:31.460 | is clarity and fairness.

00:48:34.700 | And I know how this course functions.

00:48:37.080 | I know how I talk to the professor.

00:48:38.660 | I know how the grading works.

00:48:39.960 | And it's consistent and it's fair.

00:48:41.660 | That's what they care about.

00:48:44.260 | Not so much, why can't I have full accessibility?

00:48:47.060 | Why this system seems harder

00:48:48.500 | than me just emailing a professor.

00:48:49.700 | They don't care so much about that,

00:48:50.580 | but they do want clarity and they do want fairness.

00:48:54.300 | So look for the pain points to eliminate.

00:48:57.340 | Get better processes for, okay, how do I prep lectures now?

00:49:00.740 | And I don't want this to be good,

00:49:02.220 | but I don't wanna spend too much time.

00:49:03.180 | Let me rethink the way I do problem sets or evaluation.

00:49:05.400 | So I'm not just up to my ears and grading all the time.

00:49:07.660 | Maybe there's an alternative way to do this

00:49:09.060 | that's gonna be more straightforward,

00:49:10.340 | but it's gonna, for me,

00:49:11.520 | without really affecting the student experience,

00:49:13.960 | I'm gonna figure out what type of lecture format works best.

00:49:17.240 | I'm struggling with trying to get the class to interact.

00:49:19.500 | So we're gonna do something different with it.

00:49:21.120 | I can find something that works well enough

00:49:22.440 | so I don't have to think about it again.

00:49:24.600 | Again, there is a huge amount of innovation here

00:49:26.640 | and it all comes backwards to,

00:49:27.720 | here's my fixed amount of time I can spend on this.

00:49:30.540 | I wanna do the best I can.

00:49:31.880 | And then I will accept whatever results that produces.

00:49:34.580 | I can tell you from experience,

00:49:37.000 | it's gonna produce better results than you think.

00:49:39.440 | And two, it doesn't matter if it makes you

00:49:44.040 | into Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society or not.

00:49:46.400 | I don't want you thinking about it too much more beyond that.

00:49:49.020 | It's I've handled this,

00:49:50.120 | I'm giving this a good amount of time.

00:49:51.860 | I've got rid of pain points that don't need to be there.

00:49:54.580 | I've changed around things to better suit my strengths.

00:49:57.180 | And then I'm a whatever,

00:49:59.460 | middle of the road rated professor.

00:50:01.340 | Let's move on and think about other things.

00:50:03.840 | And if that doesn't work,

00:50:04.680 | you could do the Dead Poets Society thing.

00:50:06.380 | That might also work.

00:50:07.220 | Just stand on your desk a lot.

00:50:08.660 | Make your students stand on your desk.

00:50:11.060 | I do that in my discrete mathematics course.

00:50:13.780 | So stand on your desk.

00:50:16.020 | And I play emotional music.

00:50:18.140 | It gets a little weird after a few weeks of doing that.

00:50:20.820 | But I stand on your desk and play emotional music.

00:50:23.100 | Like, "Captain, my captain,

00:50:24.660 | what is the expectation of this guy

00:50:26.420 | if we replace the six with another three?"

00:50:29.780 | No, well, actually, I realized, bless you,

00:50:33.500 | we have one more question lurking here.

00:50:34.900 | I just missed it.

00:50:36.140 | So let's do one more.

00:50:36.980 | We got time.

00:50:37.800 | - Sounds good.

00:50:39.100 | All right, this question's from Danny,

00:50:40.540 | a postdoc from Texas.

00:50:42.540 | I'm currently a postdoc.

00:50:44.060 | I have heard many times from multiple people,

00:50:46.580 | if you ain't busy or looking tired,

00:50:48.380 | you're not doing it right.

00:50:50.200 | I do not feel busy or tired.

00:50:51.940 | As a matter of fact, I really enjoy being a postdoc.

00:50:54.560 | I've been implementing and following your theories

00:50:56.700 | for a couple of years now, which has helped.

00:50:59.140 | But as someone who is striving to get into academia

00:51:01.580 | for teaching and research purposes,

00:51:03.540 | I am nervous if I am going into a field

00:51:06.660 | where if I'm not perceived by people

00:51:08.380 | as being overwhelmed or drowning.

00:51:10.820 | - Yeah, this is common.

00:51:14.260 | This is common in academia, because here's the thing.

00:51:16.900 | It's a weird job to be a grad student, a postdoc,

00:51:20.140 | or an assistant professor,

00:51:21.140 | but especially a postdoc or a grad student.

00:51:22.820 | It's a weird job because it, unlike other jobs,

00:51:25.300 | doesn't have this diverse input of tasks and obligations

00:51:30.300 | you need to be working on all day long.

00:51:32.700 | Your friends went to investment banks

00:51:35.820 | and they are working 10 hours a day

00:51:37.540 | and they have spreadsheets they have to fill out

00:51:39.380 | and emails they have to answer

00:51:40.500 | and meetings they have to go to

00:51:41.600 | and decks they have to update.

00:51:42.780 | They always have, that feels like work.

00:51:44.660 | And then you're a postdoc or a grad student

00:51:46.940 | and it's your advisor's like, write a paper,

00:51:51.100 | I'll see you at Christmas, and it doesn't feel like work.

00:51:53.900 | And so there's a tendency that people get worried,

00:51:57.060 | they get anxious about this,

00:51:59.080 | and they want to invent busyness.

00:52:01.720 | They want to invent the same type of overload

00:52:04.820 | that they hear their friends at real jobs talking about,

00:52:08.020 | 'cause at least they can tell themselves, I'm not lazy,

00:52:10.820 | I'm working hard, I'm busy all the time.

00:52:12.780 | So if this doesn't go well,

00:52:14.340 | it's not gonna be because I just wasn't doing the work.

00:52:16.340 | I think expansiveness and autonomy and schedules

00:52:18.860 | can be very uncomfortable for people

00:52:20.800 | if they're not used to it.

00:52:22.460 | And so you get a lot of grad students and postdocs

00:52:24.460 | who try to lean into finding pain points of business.

00:52:27.820 | But here's the reality is that it's actually,

00:52:29.860 | with some exceptions, exceptions that typically involve

00:52:33.360 | lab work is very time consuming, these are easy jobs.

00:52:37.160 | And I think it's okay.

00:52:38.480 | I love being a grad student, I love being a postdoc.

00:52:41.160 | They're not super demanding jobs.

00:52:43.560 | As you become a professor, it gets more demanding

00:52:45.440 | because there's other types of responsibilities

00:52:47.240 | that are layered on,

00:52:48.080 | and then it becomes much harder to juggle.

00:52:50.380 | That's okay.

00:52:52.820 | They're not paying you that much money.

00:52:54.480 | So it's okay that it's not,

00:52:57.280 | I need to do nine hours a day of busy work.

00:52:59.600 | You are completely safe to sidestep that culture

00:53:03.500 | of my hair is on fire, dissertation hell.

00:53:06.840 | Everything is so hard, what a hard job.

00:53:08.600 | I'm so overloaded, I'm so busy.

00:53:10.620 | It's okay to say I'm working on one research paper

00:53:13.500 | and I give it three good hours a day.

00:53:16.320 | And then I'm training for a marathon

00:53:19.580 | because I don't really have a lot to do

00:53:21.420 | on a lot of other days.

00:53:22.260 | That's okay.

00:53:23.100 | That is a perfectly reasonable schedule for a postdoc.

00:53:28.060 | What was I doing?

00:53:28.900 | When I was a postdoc,

00:53:30.100 | I injected a lot of non-postdoc related things

00:53:32.260 | into my life because A, it didn't take that much time,

00:53:35.400 | and B, I knew as a professor,

00:53:37.260 | I was gonna have a lot of other things to do.

00:53:38.700 | So I wanted to get used to fitting the stuff

00:53:40.500 | I was doing as a postdoc to research,

00:53:42.140 | which I would still have to do as a professor.

00:53:44.220 | I was like, I wanna be really comfortable doing that

00:53:45.740 | in a relatively small amount of time

00:53:47.660 | because even though I could, as a postdoc,

00:53:50.160 | take the papers I'm working on

00:53:51.960 | and find a way to take up my whole day with it,

00:53:54.260 | I can't do that as a professor

00:53:57.220 | because I'm gonna have classes to teach

00:53:58.540 | and service obligations and family.

00:54:01.460 | They're gonna have way more distractions.

00:54:03.100 | So I better get good now at doing just this thing

00:54:06.280 | that I'm tasked to do as a postdoc research,

00:54:08.700 | doing this in a reasonable amount of time.

00:54:11.060 | And so I did a lot of other things.

00:54:11.900 | I wrote a book.

00:54:12.880 | I was sculling.

00:54:15.460 | I was taking sculling classes on the Charles through BU.

00:54:18.740 | I would go for a long midday run and exercise.

00:54:21.920 | I'd run home across the Charles on the Mass Ave Bridge

00:54:24.860 | and then would exercise on one of the floating docks

00:54:27.780 | and would get lunch and watch a show

00:54:29.980 | and then take the subway back from Charles MGH to MIT

00:54:33.020 | and do a little bit more work in the afternoon.

00:54:34.940 | I mean, I had huge breaks out of my day

00:54:37.860 | and that was all designed.

00:54:38.900 | I was like, I cannot let myself get into the mindset

00:54:40.900 | of this work needs to take up the whole day

00:54:42.340 | because everything's gonna get

00:54:44.600 | for real busier in the future.

00:54:47.380 | And so if I make this fake busy,

00:54:48.860 | how am I gonna handle that in the future?

00:54:50.620 | So this is all to say,

00:54:52.040 | you can ignore that culture of busyness.

00:54:53.700 | If you have good organizational systems,

00:54:56.140 | it sounds like you do, you listen to my stuff

00:54:58.460 | and you don't have a really hard lab position

00:55:00.380 | where you're overseeing seven grad students

00:55:03.920 | and a bunch of undergraduates as part of a giant NIH grant.

00:55:06.540 | If you don't have one of those situations,

00:55:07.780 | just lean into it.

00:55:08.620 | Like this is a pretty easy job and that's great

00:55:10.940 | 'cause life will get harder soon enough

00:55:12.540 | and you can be fine with it.

00:55:13.940 | And as for the question of whether that's gonna hurt

00:55:15.660 | your academic trajectory, no one cares or notices

00:55:19.860 | how you feel or how quickly you answer emails

00:55:22.340 | or how busy you are.

00:55:23.740 | All that matters for that is what did you publish?

00:55:26.600 | How good was it?

00:55:27.440 | How many people cited it?

00:55:28.640 | That is all that matters.

00:55:30.380 | Some of the most famous academics in histories

00:55:32.600 | were basically misanthropes and did nothing,

00:55:37.020 | were pains, were lazy, were irresponsible.

00:55:39.340 | It didn't matter.

00:55:40.780 | Papers are all that matters.

00:55:42.100 | So just focus on doing your research well.

00:55:44.240 | No one is gonna say, we wanted to accept you

00:55:46.800 | and we love your work and we love your papers,

00:55:49.180 | but we heard that like you often don't work past five

00:55:52.140 | or whatever, no one cares.

00:55:53.700 | Let's care about your papers.

00:55:54.740 | So lean into it.

00:55:55.580 | Postdocs a great job.

00:55:56.420 | It's a fake job, an awesome job.

00:55:58.020 | I miss it.

00:55:59.600 | You're okay not being busy.

00:56:00.940 | Those really are easy jobs.

00:56:03.740 | And they're not easy jobs, but they're hard

00:56:06.860 | because of the autonomy, honestly.

00:56:08.460 | I really do think it breaks a lot of people.

00:56:11.140 | They're like, especially at the elite school,

00:56:12.860 | you go to a school like MIT or something,

00:56:14.500 | it's just write some papers, let me know how I can help.

00:56:18.060 | It really is.

00:56:19.180 | I'll check back in at the end of the semester.

00:56:21.960 | And that can drown you or it could be super exciting.

00:56:25.140 | And some people are like, this is great.

00:56:27.140 | I'm like writing papers and have all these hobbies

00:56:30.300 | and whatever.

00:56:31.140 | And some people just have to find a way

00:56:33.780 | for this to be hard and for me to be busy.

00:56:37.040 | And it's really clear.

00:56:39.980 | It's like binary.

00:56:40.820 | You're either one or you're the other.

00:56:42.660 | - Yeah, it's a good job.

00:56:44.620 | The easiest jobs I ever had.

00:56:45.980 | - People always think I'm crazy when I say

00:56:48.380 | I wrote a book during my dissertation

00:56:50.020 | because writing my dissertation did not take enough time.

00:56:53.400 | I was like, well, how long can I spend on this?

00:56:54.920 | Like, what am I gonna do?

00:56:56.200 | It was like two hours a day.

00:56:57.440 | So let me write a book at the same time, unrelated.

00:57:00.180 | Grad students love to hear that from me.

00:57:04.320 | Write a book while you do your dissertation.

00:57:07.040 | All right, I wanna move on and close up the show

00:57:09.400 | with something interesting.

00:57:10.600 | Before I do though, let me just briefly mention

00:57:12.360 | our friends at Blinkist.

00:57:14.540 | The Blinkist app enables you to understand

00:57:18.860 | the most important things from over 5,500 nonfiction books

00:57:22.960 | and podcasts in short summaries that you can read

00:57:26.180 | or listen to that require only 15 minutes of your time.

00:57:31.180 | So if there's a book you're thinking you might wanna read,

00:57:34.360 | but you're not sure, you get the summary from Blinkist.

00:57:37.920 | They call them Blinks.

00:57:39.000 | You can listen to it.

00:57:39.900 | It takes about 15 minutes so you can read it on your phone,

00:57:42.500 | learn the main ideas of the book and decide,

00:57:44.180 | do I wanna buy this or not?

00:57:45.880 | Use this as your main tool for triaging your reading life

00:57:50.880 | and it will make a big difference.

00:57:52.940 | It will prevent you from buying books you don't need to buy.

00:57:56.320 | It'll point you towards books that are very meaningful,

00:57:58.540 | end up being very impactful for you.

00:58:00.140 | And it will, in general, let you have the lay of the land

00:58:02.740 | of these topics because these summaries

00:58:04.220 | are giving you the big points.

00:58:05.780 | So even if you listen to the Blinks of five books

00:58:08.660 | on a topic and only buy one,

00:58:10.740 | you're still getting the major points

00:58:12.580 | out of all five of those books.

00:58:15.100 | And so you're gonna come away

00:58:16.080 | with a pretty expansive knowledge of these areas.

00:58:19.340 | So I like to think about Blinkist as a critical sidekick

00:58:25.220 | for anyone who embraces the reading life.

00:58:29.520 | Both Jesse and I use it in this way.

00:58:30.940 | We both triage reading lists using our Blinkist accounts.

00:58:34.900 | Yeah, I don't know if you use collections at all.

00:58:37.720 | - But I haven't yet, no.

00:58:39.420 | - I mean, it's an obvious idea.

00:58:41.160 | I'm glad they did it.

00:58:42.940 | Some of these are curated by writer friends of mine,

00:58:44.720 | like people we know, like Adam Grant has one, for example.

00:58:47.540 | And they'll curate a list of here's 10 books

00:58:50.260 | on a topic that I think are really good.

00:58:51.980 | That's kind of cool because if you're looking

00:58:53.140 | for new things to read, you say, great,

00:58:54.900 | I'll just work my way through the Blinks

00:58:57.100 | of this curated collection.

00:58:58.780 | And probably, I don't know, two or three

00:59:01.340 | out of the 10 books will really remain

00:59:04.260 | and catch your attention after you listen to the Blinks.

00:59:06.980 | But those are two or three books

00:59:07.900 | you never would have thought to read.

00:59:09.060 | And you get all the information

00:59:10.420 | from the Blinks of the books you don't read.

00:59:11.820 | So I like that they do that as well.

00:59:13.220 | So not only does it help you triage the books

00:59:14.900 | you already are thinking about reading or not,

00:59:18.140 | it can point you towards books

00:59:19.860 | you might not already know about.

00:59:21.340 | They also have a cool new feature right now

00:59:22.780 | called Blinkist Connect, which is a two

00:59:25.980 | for the price is one type of offer.

00:59:28.820 | It allows you to share titles with other people.

00:59:32.780 | So you're sharing your premium account with another person.

00:59:35.300 | So it's essentially like you have two premium subscriptions

00:59:37.660 | for the price of one.

00:59:39.500 | So if there's a reader in your life

00:59:40.600 | who you think might benefit from Blinkist,

00:59:43.540 | this Blinkist Connect will allow you to share that gift.

00:59:46.380 | So right now, Blinkist has a special offer

00:59:49.020 | just for our audience.

00:59:50.980 | Go to blinkist.com/deep to start your seven-day free trial

00:59:54.780 | and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

00:59:57.720 | That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T,

01:00:00.460 | blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off any seven-day free trial,

01:00:04.900 | blinkist.com/deep.

01:00:07.140 | And don't forget that for a limited time,

01:00:08.460 | you can use Blinkist Connect to share that premium account.

01:00:11.460 | You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one.

01:00:14.940 | I also wanna talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

01:00:19.660 | You need a VPN and ExpressVPN is the one I recommend.

01:00:24.660 | Why do you need a VPN?

01:00:26.900 | Well, here's the thing.

01:00:27.740 | When you use the internet,

01:00:29.700 | people can watch what you're doing.

01:00:33.720 | If you're connecting to a wireless access point,

01:00:35.540 | anyone nearby can actually read those packets

01:00:38.580 | off the radio waves.

01:00:39.580 | And even if the contents of the packets are protected,

01:00:42.240 | they can see the destination of those packets.

01:00:45.060 | That's not protected.

01:00:46.580 | So they can say, hey, this guy over here,

01:00:48.980 | this Jesse is, you know,

01:00:51.460 | he's going to blinkist.com right now.

01:00:53.120 | I can tell who he's talking to, right?

01:00:55.020 | So they know who you're talking to.

01:00:56.160 | Your internet service provider.

01:00:57.460 | So even when you're at home,

01:00:58.620 | directly wired into your internet service provider,

01:01:01.220 | they can watch who you're talking to

01:01:03.860 | and they can sell that data,

01:01:05.980 | which a lot of internet service providers do.

01:01:07.700 | Hey, here's the type of websites

01:01:08.940 | that this customer of mine goes to.

01:01:10.100 | Let's choose ads to show them.

01:01:12.420 | The VPN stops people from doing that.

01:01:14.820 | Here's how it works.

01:01:15.660 | Instead of talking directly to blinkist.com,

01:01:18.820 | if you use a VPN, you would instead send an encrypted request

01:01:21.640 | to a VPN server and say, hey,

01:01:23.940 | I wanna talk to blinkist.com.

01:01:25.580 | And then that server talks to the website

01:01:28.380 | or service on your behalf,

01:01:29.820 | gets the response, encrypts it and sends it back to you.

01:01:31.840 | So what does the people sniffing the packets

01:01:33.740 | out of the air see?

01:01:34.740 | What does your internet service provider see?

01:01:36.980 | Just that you're talking to a VPN server.

01:01:39.820 | And they will say, and they will shake their fist

01:01:42.320 | demonstrably as they do so,

01:01:44.420 | foiled,

01:01:46.020 | foiled by this VPN I say.

01:01:48.020 | This is exactly how people talk,

01:01:50.560 | who sniff packets or work at ISPs.

01:01:52.860 | So it's a way to actually get back privacy

01:01:54.680 | in what you're doing.

01:01:55.520 | Most people don't even realize

01:01:56.660 | their privacy is being violated this way.

01:01:58.580 | VPNs pull you back.

01:02:00.180 | If you're gonna use VPN,

01:02:01.080 | I would suggest the one that's rated number one

01:02:02.780 | by CNET and TechRadar,

01:02:04.380 | and that is ExpressVPN.

01:02:06.300 | The software is very easy.

01:02:08.140 | It works with the other,

01:02:09.260 | any app you already use to access the internet

01:02:11.620 | on any of your devices,

01:02:12.780 | just click a button, turn on the VPN.

01:02:14.740 | Now you're protected.

01:02:16.020 | Everything else just works the way it normally would.

01:02:18.180 | They have servers all around the world.

01:02:19.660 | So you're almost certainly not gonna be far

01:02:21.940 | from a nearby server to connect to.

01:02:23.620 | And remember, close is good because close is fast.

01:02:26.180 | They also have a lot of good bandwidth to use connections.

01:02:28.440 | So you need a VPN,

01:02:29.580 | and I would recommend using ExpressVPN.

01:02:31.840 | So protect your online privacy

01:02:33.320 | by visiting expressvpn.com/deep today.

01:02:37.660 | That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com/deep.

01:02:42.560 | Don't forget to use that /deep

01:02:44.360 | because that will give you an extra three months free.

01:02:48.160 | Expressvpn.com/deep.

01:02:51.160 | All right, Jessie, that brings us to our final segment

01:02:56.480 | of the day, which is something interesting.

01:02:58.120 | It's where I like to highlight something interesting

01:03:00.100 | that you, my listeners, have sent

01:03:02.540 | to my interesting@calnewport.com email address.

01:03:07.220 | Now, before we get to today's thing I wanted to highlight,

01:03:09.420 | there's something I wanted to mention briefly

01:03:10.820 | from a friend of mine.

01:03:12.180 | It's a friend of mine from the productivity world

01:03:15.120 | that goes way back to the early Web 2.0,

01:03:19.120 | early 2000s days when I first started getting involved

01:03:21.980 | in writing about these things.

01:03:22.980 | It's my friend, Mike Vardy, who I've known forever.

01:03:25.740 | He's one of the OG online productivity thinkers.

01:03:29.520 | Anyways, I just wanted to mention

01:03:30.760 | that he has a Kickstarter going for a new book of his.

01:03:34.240 | So he's experimenting

01:03:36.040 | with the direct-to-consumer book model.

01:03:38.280 | I'll bring this up on the screen here,

01:03:39.920 | but if you're watching, and if you are watching,

01:03:42.040 | by the way, I should say this is episode 251.

01:03:46.440 | So go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia

01:03:50.120 | or thedeeplife.com and look for episode 251

01:03:53.400 | if you wanna watch what I'm showing you

01:03:54.600 | on the screen right now or the entire episode as a whole.

01:03:57.840 | But anyways, he has this new project he's working on

01:04:00.180 | called "The Productivity Diet."

01:04:03.620 | You get it directly through Kickstarter.

01:04:05.600 | He's already met his goal,

01:04:07.360 | so you will for sure get the book if you pledge.

01:04:10.140 | Anyways, check it out.

01:04:11.060 | The link is in the show notes.

01:04:12.920 | There's a good video where Mike explains his philosophy,

01:04:14.880 | but he's one of the original guys who thinks

01:04:16.840 | about in-the-weeds practical productivity

01:04:20.700 | in a way that makes your life sustainable.

01:04:24.160 | Check it out.

01:04:25.120 | Anyways, let's get now to the actual thing

01:04:29.240 | that someone sent me that I wanted to highlight,

01:04:32.020 | which was a link for this hotel,

01:04:33.780 | which I'm loading up on the screen now if you're watching.

01:04:36.760 | It's called the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

01:04:39.520 | This is in Newport Beach, or no, Newport, Oregon,

01:04:42.520 | not Newport Beach, the beach in Newport, Oregon,

01:04:46.300 | named after me, so I feel like I do need to be here.

01:04:50.240 | And it is a hotel that is quote unquote

01:04:52.400 | truly for book lovers, and I thought this was cool.

01:04:57.320 | So here's the idea with this hotel.

01:04:58.560 | It overlooks the ocean.

01:04:59.720 | There are no telephones, TVs, or Wi-Fi

01:05:04.400 | in rooms at Sylvia Beach Hotel.

01:05:06.980 | The allure is beach quiet, gathering one's thoughts,

01:05:09.680 | writing, reading, and savoring the wonder of ocean and sky.

01:05:14.200 | So their idea here is you come here

01:05:16.700 | to think and not be distracted.

01:05:19.600 | They are in particular focused on writers.

01:05:22.060 | How do you know this?

01:05:23.480 | The rooms, each room is themed to a particular writer.

01:05:28.480 | I'll show you a couple of examples here in a second.

01:05:31.920 | They also have a great third floor oceanfront library.

01:05:34.560 | Jesse, we got a book tickets here.

01:05:36.980 | You go to the library, you just read books,

01:05:38.860 | you look at the ocean, you have author-themed rooms.

01:05:43.200 | I'll show a couple on the screen here

01:05:44.440 | for those who are watching.

01:05:45.960 | No Cal Newport room yet, but I am hopeful.

01:05:50.080 | Look, here's a John Steinbeck room.

01:05:52.540 | So if we load up the picture of the John Steinbeck room,

01:05:56.820 | you see there is a "Of Mice and Men," "Grapes of Wrath" style

01:06:01.820 | 1920s car packed with all sorts of gear on it

01:06:05.300 | that's built into the wall.

01:06:06.580 | The headlights are actually lamps

01:06:08.100 | and there's a cool writing table there.

01:06:10.040 | There's another one I saw.

01:06:13.940 | Here's a J.K. Rowling room.

01:06:15.900 | So it looks like you're in a Hogwarts type situation,

01:06:20.800 | I suppose.

01:06:21.960 | So we see there, there's an owl, there's Hedwig.

01:06:25.160 | Anyways, I thought that was cool.

01:06:27.120 | And I like this idea of a location you go just to think,

01:06:32.120 | it has no distractions, but also the staging of it

01:06:36.780 | just puts you in the mindset of authors,

01:06:38.340 | puts you in the mindset of reading.

01:06:39.860 | So I'm showing this for two reasons.

01:06:41.920 | One, 'cause I wanna go.

01:06:44.300 | So maybe they'll hook me up, revisit the Newport,

01:06:48.840 | Newport heads to Newport, Oregon,

01:06:50.320 | and I can be in the J.K. Rowling suite

01:06:53.240 | and look over the ocean and be fantastic.

01:06:55.560 | But two, I think this is underscoring

01:06:57.160 | a more generalized principle,

01:06:58.920 | which I talk a lot about on the show,

01:07:00.500 | which is setting matters when it comes to producing

01:07:05.080 | original, creative, or valuable deep thought.

01:07:07.480 | Setting can put you into a better mindset.

01:07:10.160 | It makes it more conducive for the cogitation that you seek.

01:07:13.600 | So even if you're not going to this particular hotel

01:07:16.400 | on the Oregon coast, this general idea

01:07:19.540 | of going a bit over the top to signal to yourself

01:07:23.000 | and your brain, I take this thinking seriously,

01:07:25.480 | to help give yourself the right cues to think properly

01:07:28.500 | does make a difference.

01:07:30.380 | Yes, you have already a drab home office

01:07:33.240 | set up technically at your house,

01:07:34.800 | but you could still take that garden shed

01:07:37.000 | and convert it into a writing room.

01:07:40.400 | And you might decorate it Steinbeck style

01:07:43.180 | and wow, this seems so weird and over the top

01:07:45.080 | and stupid and superfluous, but it's not

01:07:46.800 | because what you're doing is just trying to set up

01:07:49.040 | the conditions that are going to maximize

01:07:51.040 | your brain's ability to slip into

01:07:52.680 | and produce the best possible thoughts.

01:07:54.580 | So I'm increasingly a fan of leveraging setting

01:07:58.280 | as a critical component of deep thinking.

01:08:00.320 | So this hotel clarifies and purifies that general idea.

01:08:05.320 | We all could perhaps have a touch of that book lover hotel

01:08:10.000 | in our day-to-day professional lives,

01:08:12.560 | but the message there is general.

01:08:15.360 | I don't know, Jesse, I don't know what would be

01:08:17.360 | in a Cal Newport room at this hotel.

01:08:20.680 | - Some bookshelves for sure.

01:08:22.920 | - Yeah, I guess it'd be, I don't know what'd be in there.

01:08:25.360 | Yeah, some books.

01:08:26.440 | - One of the machines you have in the other room.

01:08:29.440 | - Some sort of weird machine, a computer with a keyboard

01:08:31.480 | that doesn't work, I think would somehow.

01:08:33.680 | - Are your, what's the machine called in the other room?

01:08:37.240 | - 3D printer.

01:08:38.080 | - Yeah, your 3D printer.

01:08:38.900 | - Yeah, okay, we have a 3D printer,

01:08:40.320 | a keyboard that doesn't work.

01:08:41.960 | I think it could be nerve wracking.

01:08:43.760 | Like what if-

01:08:44.600 | - Time block planner.

01:08:45.420 | - Time block planner.

01:08:46.260 | - A rower.

01:08:48.680 | - The rowing machine would be in there somehow.

01:08:50.840 | Yeah, I don't know how popular this room's gonna be, Jesse.

01:08:53.120 | This doesn't sound conducive to deep thought.

01:08:56.520 | That'd be the worst if this hotel was,

01:08:58.440 | hey, we have a room dedicated to you

01:09:01.880 | and we want you to come out for the dedication.

01:09:03.080 | You're all excited and you get there

01:09:04.100 | and it's just really distasteful.

01:09:05.760 | It really could be a sort of look in the mirror

01:09:09.280 | type moment or something like that.

01:09:11.200 | You're like, okay, you get there

01:09:12.960 | and it's full of German pornography or something like that.

01:09:16.880 | You're like, I don't know if I'm coming across the way.

01:09:19.920 | I'm not sure if I'm coming across the way I think I am.

01:09:21.480 | The dismembered mannequins,

01:09:23.360 | just like a pile of dismembered mannequins in the room

01:09:26.000 | and a wall full of German pornography.

01:09:28.720 | Hey, it's the Cal Newport room.

01:09:29.840 | Like we're really pushing this.

01:09:32.080 | Like, I don't know if the world sees me

01:09:34.560 | the same way I see me.

01:09:35.520 | I'm not sure about this.

01:09:36.800 | It might be a mixed blessing.

01:09:38.720 | Why is there a rowing machine in here?

01:09:41.120 | I don't know about this.

01:09:43.080 | Oh well, we can all dream about

01:09:45.640 | going on vacations like that.

01:09:47.480 | Anyways, let's wrap this up.

01:09:49.520 | Thank you everyone for listening or watching.

01:09:51.960 | I hope you enjoyed the show.

01:09:52.800 | We'll be back next week with a new episode

01:09:55.400 | and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:09:57.860 | (upbeat music)

01:10:02.020 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 251: The Efficiency Trap

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