Full Length Episode | #167 | January 24, 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 167.

00:00:10.600 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ.

00:00:18.040 | No, Jesse again.

00:00:21.080 | No, I actually just talked to Jesse

00:00:22.480 | and he gave me permission to update you on what's going on.

00:00:26.600 | He's fine, here's what happened.

00:00:28.160 | Last week, he came for our weekly recording session.

00:00:33.160 | We do rapid COVID testing here at the Deep Work HQ.

00:00:37.400 | At least we're doing it now during the period

00:00:39.680 | where Omicron is high in the DC region.

00:00:42.920 | And our courageous esteemed producer tested positive,

00:00:46.320 | so he had to go home.

00:00:47.800 | He's almost done with his isolation period.

00:00:52.720 | So we considered, why don't we just record

00:00:55.680 | a little bit late this week, so that he could be here.

00:01:00.320 | But my schedule was such that I needed to stick

00:01:02.960 | with the existing schedule.

00:01:03.960 | So it just was bad timing that,

00:01:07.640 | we record two episodes at a time.

00:01:09.500 | Last week's recording session was actually pretty close

00:01:12.160 | to this week's recording session.

00:01:14.440 | So one COVID isolation period covered

00:01:17.640 | two weeks worth of recording sessions.

00:01:19.720 | But anyways, he will be out of isolation soon.

00:01:23.760 | He'll be back in the studio for next week's episodes.

00:01:27.360 | He's fine by the way, he feels fine.

00:01:29.560 | He's exercising all the time.

00:01:31.640 | I just saw him today.

00:01:33.560 | We had a weekly production meeting outside.

00:01:37.920 | So we're nice and safe, but I can attest

00:01:39.840 | that he is looking and feeling fine.

00:01:42.840 | Just working remotely on the show

00:01:44.480 | and we'll be back next week.

00:01:46.280 | All right, speaking of the show,

00:01:48.640 | we have an exciting announcement.

00:01:52.400 | Early on, early on in the history of the show,

00:01:56.360 | I began talking about this dream of we need video.

00:01:59.860 | And it became almost a running joke on the podcast

00:02:04.020 | because week after week, I would say video is coming soon.

00:02:07.240 | I'm recording things, video is coming soon.

00:02:09.400 | And it never did because it turns out actually,

00:02:11.360 | it's quite difficult to get this right.

00:02:13.000 | And I wanted to get it right, but we are finally there.

00:02:17.760 | As you hear this episode,

00:02:20.680 | Deep Questions video is available.

00:02:23.240 | You can go find it right now.

00:02:25.860 | Now I'll explain what video recording,

00:02:28.960 | why we're recording it, our philosophy,

00:02:31.160 | the plans for the video,

00:02:32.280 | but just so to get the logistics out of the way,

00:02:35.760 | right now the videos are being hosted on YouTube.

00:02:39.120 | We don't yet have a personalized URL

00:02:45.080 | because you have to, it's a chicken and the egg problem.

00:02:48.380 | I think you have to be around for a certain number of days

00:02:50.500 | and have a certain number of subscribers

00:02:52.160 | before they'll give you a simple URL.

00:02:54.560 | So what we've done is two things.

00:02:56.320 | One, there's a link in the show notes for this episode

00:03:00.760 | for the YouTube page

00:03:02.000 | that contains the Deep Questions videos.

00:03:03.680 | Also, there's a post on my blog.

00:03:05.480 | So if you go to calnewport.com/blog,

00:03:09.280 | you'll see a post there that has a link to it.

00:03:11.380 | All right, so what are we doing with video?

00:03:14.160 | Well, the idea was to videotape

00:03:17.800 | basically every question and deep dive,

00:03:20.120 | and then release each of those as a standalone video.

00:03:23.800 | Now, the reason why we're doing this,

00:03:26.620 | and I really wanna emphasize this,

00:03:28.200 | is that I am not a YouTuber.

00:03:32.380 | I have no interest in being a YouTuber.

00:03:35.780 | If I did, I would probably spend a lot more time

00:03:38.200 | on this podcast talking about Minecraft.

00:03:40.760 | I do not need people to smash the subscribe button

00:03:45.660 | and click the bell and to get notifications.

00:03:49.020 | I have no interest in making a living on YouTube.

00:03:51.680 | I have no interest in trying to use YouTube ads

00:03:56.160 | to make money.

00:03:57.000 | The whole point here is that I picked up pretty quickly

00:04:01.520 | into being a podcaster,

00:04:03.160 | that for this format of show,

00:04:06.500 | where I cover a lot of different material,

00:04:08.520 | so it's not just interviews,

00:04:09.720 | but as we do a lot of different questions,

00:04:12.180 | the biggest issue is that it is difficult

00:04:14.800 | to bookmark, save, pull out,

00:04:18.000 | come back to just one piece of content from the show.

00:04:21.120 | If there's a particular question, you say,

00:04:22.600 | you know what, that really applies to me,

00:04:24.280 | and I really like that answer, and I wanna remember that,

00:04:26.120 | or I wanna send that to someone.

00:04:27.460 | It's very hard when all you have

00:04:29.200 | is an hour-long audio recording file.

00:04:33.080 | So my whole idea was if we have a standalone video

00:04:37.740 | for every question, now you can go and save a question.

00:04:41.740 | You bookmark it.

00:04:43.880 | You can email it to someone, like, oh, hey,

00:04:45.560 | remember how we were talking about Zettelkasten?

00:04:48.320 | Well, Cal just did a thing on it, here's the clip.

00:04:51.360 | You can keep whatever you wanna do with it,

00:04:52.720 | but I just think it's a way

00:04:54.680 | of extending the podcast technology

00:04:57.000 | so that it's more useful to you.

00:04:59.320 | So our goal is every question to have a standalone video,

00:05:05.080 | and we'll see if we meet that.

00:05:06.000 | Also, every deep dive, let's make those separate,

00:05:08.560 | and we're recording full episodes as well.

00:05:11.480 | So if you're interested in what does it look like here

00:05:13.620 | in the Deep Work HQ, what does Jesse look like,

00:05:16.220 | what does Cal look like, what's actually going on,

00:05:18.160 | we are releasing the full episodes as video too,

00:05:20.320 | because it turns out that some people

00:05:22.360 | prefer to watch podcasts instead of listening to them,

00:05:25.720 | which makes sense to me.

00:05:26.880 | There is something oddly compelling

00:05:28.380 | about watching people talk.

00:05:29.520 | You think it would be boring,

00:05:31.940 | but if there's a video of a podcast they like,

00:05:36.200 | and I have the time to see it, I like to watch the video.

00:05:38.400 | So we're recording the whole thing.

00:05:39.680 | That's why we have shifted the format

00:05:41.440 | to a live format more recently

00:05:42.880 | so it's not cut up so we can actually film the whole thing.

00:05:45.360 | Right, so anyways, that is the idea,

00:05:49.960 | is that you can now grab any question,

00:05:51.760 | any question you hear on this podcast today that you like,

00:05:54.580 | or from recent episodes,

00:05:55.500 | you should be able to go and find it.

00:05:57.400 | You know, it takes a little while to edit,

00:05:58.720 | so probably what we'll be doing is videos

00:06:02.280 | from each week's episodes will be trickled out

00:06:05.920 | a few at a time until they've all been released.

00:06:10.020 | Okay, second point about this.

00:06:12.980 | I have a mixed relationship with YouTube.

00:06:15.380 | I don't know YouTube well.

00:06:16.380 | I don't spend a lot of time on YouTube,

00:06:17.660 | but I know some people have trouble with it.

00:06:20.940 | It's not the same as social media

00:06:24.580 | where you are posting stuff and people are reacting to it.

00:06:27.900 | It doesn't necessarily have that same,

00:06:30.300 | I'm gonna make you feel, chemically speaking,

00:06:33.080 | just terrible at a moment's notice

00:06:35.100 | in the way that Twitter can do,

00:06:37.740 | in the way that Facebook can do,

00:06:38.740 | but it has an addictive nature, so I hear,

00:06:40.860 | because of these recommendation links.

00:06:42.780 | I went to watch a Cal video,

00:06:46.940 | and then I saw a recommendation that was interesting,

00:06:48.700 | and then I saw another recommendation that's interesting,

00:06:51.220 | and it's Nazis, right?

00:06:54.460 | So you go down these rabbit holes of recommendation links,

00:06:57.460 | and they bring you to weird places.

00:06:59.380 | So some people don't care about that.

00:07:00.540 | They go on YouTube to, like, I'm looking up this thing.

00:07:02.580 | They have no problems.

00:07:03.420 | Like I talk about in my book, "Digital Minimalism,"

00:07:05.580 | use YouTube like a library, not a TV channel.

00:07:08.140 | "Hey, I heard a question I liked

00:07:11.100 | "in episode 167 of Cal's podcast.

00:07:13.540 | "Let me go just get that episode."

00:07:14.940 | But some people have a hard time with it.

00:07:16.500 | So let me tell you about phase two of this vision.

00:07:19.520 | Concurrently, with all the work we were doing

00:07:22.820 | to get video ready, which among other things,

00:07:25.500 | meant we had to rebuild out this studio,

00:07:28.660 | light this studio, have the cameras

00:07:31.100 | going through switchers.

00:07:32.660 | I discovered at some point,

00:07:35.500 | no way I was gonna do this on my own.

00:07:36.940 | It's a big part of why we brought Jesse on,

00:07:38.580 | so we have someone who can actually produce,

00:07:40.820 | watch the videos in real time, produce them, et cetera.

00:07:43.660 | A lot went into that.

00:07:44.720 | Concurrently to all of those efforts,

00:07:47.420 | which have been going on pretty seriously

00:07:48.580 | since the last summer, I've also been working

00:07:51.180 | with a fantastic branding web development technology company

00:07:56.180 | that actually does quite a bit of work

00:07:58.600 | with the music industry.

00:08:00.060 | But anyways, they have been working with me

00:08:03.140 | also since last summer.

00:08:04.180 | We're developing a portal, a standalone website.

00:08:09.180 | So not calnewport.com, but a different website

00:08:12.180 | that is going to be a collection place

00:08:17.580 | for all of this content.

00:08:19.860 | So it's where the podcast will live.

00:08:22.500 | Each podcast episode will have its own dedicated page

00:08:25.900 | where there'll be a player for that podcast.

00:08:28.620 | The description show notes will be there

00:08:30.700 | and separate videos for every single question

00:08:33.700 | will be right there on the page as well

00:08:35.020 | that you can just watch right there.

00:08:36.900 | All of the videos that we record and release to YouTube

00:08:40.020 | will also be accessible through this portal

00:08:42.060 | when we launch it.

00:08:43.220 | And they're gonna be arranged

00:08:44.660 | in Netflix style horizontal carousels.

00:08:47.900 | So it's a place you can go that is free

00:08:50.180 | from the YouTube algorithm.

00:08:51.780 | It's just the video setup and carousels

00:08:53.740 | in exactly the way that Jesse and I want them.

00:08:56.400 | This portal when it launches

00:08:57.900 | is completely mobile responsive.

00:09:01.100 | So you can load it up on your iPad,

00:09:03.360 | you can load it up on your phone

00:09:05.420 | and it's just like you're using

00:09:06.660 | the Netflix app on your phone.

00:09:08.060 | You can just scroll through the different categories,

00:09:09.860 | their horizontal carousels,

00:09:11.020 | oh, I wanna watch that video.

00:09:12.500 | On the back end, the videos are still for now

00:09:14.140 | hosted on YouTube,

00:09:15.140 | but they get sucked into this custom built ecosystem

00:09:18.620 | we're creating.

00:09:20.420 | So you can listen to the podcast,

00:09:21.700 | watch videos, et cetera,

00:09:23.100 | read my newsletter, all that stuff.

00:09:26.140 | You can do it in a environment that we're custom building

00:09:30.540 | to be free of those distractions,

00:09:32.300 | to be free of the addictive impulse.

00:09:35.840 | And so we're probably about,

00:09:37.400 | look, I hate to predict,

00:09:39.360 | I'm always so wrong with predictions.

00:09:40.960 | Right, how many times did I say,

00:09:42.120 | okay, we're gonna have video next week,

00:09:44.040 | cut to six months later,

00:09:44.960 | but we're probably one to two months out

00:09:46.880 | from the portal launching.

00:09:48.900 | All right, if that makes sense.

00:09:50.120 | Most of it's built,

00:09:52.000 | then we had to get the videos up and running

00:09:53.880 | and then we can do the final testing.

00:09:55.660 | So knock on wood,

00:09:57.840 | that portal will be up soon.

00:10:00.500 | All right, so anyways, that's the exciting announcement.

00:10:01.920 | I think this is a important step forward for the podcast.

00:10:06.640 | The ability to view, save, and share with other people

00:10:10.400 | individual questions or deep dive discussions,

00:10:14.100 | I think is needed.

00:10:16.480 | It was needed.

00:10:17.600 | And so keep your eyes out for that.

00:10:20.720 | Link in the show description.

00:10:22.000 | You can also find a link for the videos

00:10:23.480 | at calnewport.com/blog.

00:10:26.640 | All right, so that's enough announcements.

00:10:30.120 | I would want to move on now with our questions.

00:10:32.860 | And as always, we will start with questions

00:10:36.320 | about the deep work.

00:10:39.180 | The deep work, man, I'm tired.

00:10:43.120 | I need some more sleep.

00:10:44.240 | Deep work.

00:10:45.280 | All right, question number one.

00:10:46.480 | Question number one about deep work.

00:10:48.420 | This comes from Joshua.

00:10:51.840 | Joshua asks, how do I decide how much work is enough?

00:10:57.680 | He elaborates that he works in software engineering

00:11:02.680 | and he feels like there is always more work to do,

00:11:06.000 | some new goal to push forward,

00:11:07.440 | something to optimize, something to improve.

00:11:10.080 | Well, Joshua, it's a good question.

00:11:12.680 | I've been thinking about this recently,

00:11:14.960 | and actually I want to test out with you in my answer

00:11:18.600 | a new idea about this.

00:11:21.120 | So an experimental system,

00:11:23.240 | and we can see if it actually works.

00:11:24.480 | It'll be a sort of breaking news advice

00:11:26.200 | I want to offer you.

00:11:27.160 | But here's the big picture that sets up this advice.

00:11:29.900 | Maximizing output is not sustainable.

00:11:34.600 | It almost always leads to some notion of burnout

00:11:38.520 | or some notion of pain.

00:11:39.720 | If your goal is how can I get more done?

00:11:44.340 | Can I add even more onto what I'm doing?

00:11:47.600 | You're trying to maximize that amount.

00:11:49.880 | This is not a road that long-term

00:11:52.200 | is going to lead somewhere good.

00:11:55.080 | In the short term,

00:11:56.240 | it's not necessarily a counterproductive play.

00:12:00.720 | In the short term, in certain jobs or certain positions,

00:12:03.740 | hustling on lots of different things

00:12:05.320 | and trying to maximize that output can be impressive.

00:12:08.520 | It can open up new opportunities.

00:12:09.960 | It can accelerate the pace at which let's say a business

00:12:12.880 | is able to find its footing or figure out what works well.

00:12:15.440 | So it's not that it's entirely negative in the short term,

00:12:18.100 | but long-term, I think it is negative.

00:12:21.760 | Two things happen.

00:12:22.720 | One, long-term you burn out.

00:12:24.660 | You burn out and then long-term that significantly hurts

00:12:30.160 | obviously what you're able to produce.

00:12:32.680 | If you go strong for two years

00:12:34.760 | and then completely burn out

00:12:36.060 | and basically leave the industry,

00:12:38.420 | your lifetime productivity obviously is much lower.

00:12:43.040 | Two, I think the quality goes down.

00:12:47.680 | So the issue with maximizing output

00:12:49.380 | is that when you do more and more things,

00:12:50.980 | you're context switching more,

00:12:52.000 | you're burning up through more energy

00:12:53.340 | so that the care with which you're able to approach

00:12:55.800 | each individual thing goes down.

00:12:59.160 | I'm a big believer that your best lever,

00:13:01.320 | if your interest is impact or interestingness in your life,

00:13:05.040 | your best lever is doing the thing you do best better.

00:13:07.880 | It's almost always the right lever.

00:13:09.720 | Almost always gonna open up more opportunities,

00:13:13.680 | create more impact

00:13:15.000 | and lead to a more interesting professional life.

00:13:19.260 | If your focus is what do I do best,

00:13:20.580 | how do I make that better?

00:13:21.920 | Now that's different than the approach

00:13:24.860 | that you're talking about that you're tired of,

00:13:26.680 | which is the approach of how can I do more?

00:13:28.880 | It's a quantity over quality mindset.

00:13:31.560 | Now again, short-term maybe it looks impressive,

00:13:33.280 | short-term maybe it opens up opportunities,

00:13:35.800 | but focusing on a small number of things,

00:13:37.360 | doing them really well,

00:13:40.120 | that's gotta be the sustainable play.

00:13:41.600 | I've long believed that.

00:13:43.360 | All right, so let's test out as promised a new system

00:13:47.120 | and this is preliminary.

00:13:48.160 | So, take all this with a grain of salt,

00:13:50.360 | but here's one way to think about limiting your work

00:13:55.360 | without let's say crippling your ability

00:13:58.240 | to actually do anything of value.

00:14:00.600 | Let's break up the work on your plate into three categories,

00:14:04.360 | small, medium, large.

00:14:07.680 | The extremes here are the interesting ones

00:14:10.840 | from the planning perspective.

00:14:11.760 | Small is administrative work and tasks.

00:14:13.840 | These are small things,

00:14:14.720 | most of them don't take very long to do.

00:14:17.040 | There's a certain baseline of small tasks

00:14:19.040 | that are unavoidable.

00:14:20.160 | You're a software developer,

00:14:21.240 | you have to submit your TPS reports

00:14:23.160 | or Lumberg is gonna yell at you.

00:14:25.200 | On the other extreme, you have large work.

00:14:27.840 | And I think this, as the projects that require

00:14:31.720 | more than a week or two to complete,

00:14:34.160 | this tends to be the category where you find the things

00:14:36.360 | that really move the needle.

00:14:38.180 | It's the producing the next release of the software,

00:14:41.600 | it's writing the next book, et cetera.

00:14:44.040 | And then you have medium, which is,

00:14:45.480 | it's an important in between.

00:14:47.480 | These are things that aren't tasks in the sense that,

00:14:51.160 | give me 20 minutes and I'll be done.

00:14:53.640 | They might take multiple sessions or an afternoon,

00:14:55.860 | but they can typically be completed in less than a week.

00:14:59.080 | Hey, Cal, we need you to process these faculty applications

00:15:04.080 | and put your feedback into this spreadsheet

00:15:08.160 | before our meeting on Thursday.

00:15:09.440 | That was my, that's my week this week, for example.

00:15:12.160 | I have a meeting later today,

00:15:13.840 | we're discussing faculty applications

00:15:15.520 | and I had to read through a bunch of applications

00:15:17.720 | and put my notes into a spreadsheet.

00:15:19.400 | And that's not a large project.

00:15:21.380 | It's not something that's gonna take weeks and weeks.

00:15:24.080 | It's not a core, like this really moves the needle

00:15:26.140 | on your career, but it's also not a small task.

00:15:28.020 | I can't say, hold on, I'll be right back.

00:15:30.160 | I just need to go over there and look at these applications.

00:15:31.880 | That took about four hours.

00:15:35.760 | So less than a week, more than 10 minutes.

00:15:38.040 | All right, now we have categories.

00:15:40.320 | How do we tame it?

00:15:41.280 | First things first, let's get real serious

00:15:44.280 | about the small.

00:15:45.680 | I'm a big believer that if you do not tame

00:15:48.640 | the small administrative, it can be a background hum

00:15:51.320 | of overload and anxiety that makes almost everything else

00:15:53.660 | difficult to do.

00:15:54.500 | So let's get our handle around the small.

00:15:56.120 | And I don't wanna go too much into detail here

00:15:59.240 | because we could do a whole episode

00:16:00.640 | on taming the administrative.

00:16:02.200 | And this is something that I still need to think about

00:16:04.600 | some myself, but you wanna eliminate some things,

00:16:07.360 | you wanna automate things,

00:16:08.400 | you wanna have better communication processes for things.

00:16:10.920 | So it's not just emails arriving randomly.

00:16:13.680 | For more on that last idea, see my book,

00:16:15.320 | "A World Without Email."

00:16:16.560 | But really the goal here is to get your small

00:16:20.960 | administrative task automated/corraled.

00:16:24.760 | There are set times when I work on these things

00:16:29.120 | and do a better systems engineering and do batching

00:16:32.520 | and do elimination.

00:16:33.920 | I am able to just know here's when I work

00:16:36.720 | on administrative stuff happens.

00:16:38.640 | And some of this is just simple, your batching email.

00:16:40.880 | Some of this is way more complicated.

00:16:43.360 | I have an office hours on this time.

00:16:45.800 | And this is when you come to me if you have quick questions

00:16:47.600 | and that's when I deal with those quick questions.

00:16:49.480 | In a recent New Yorker article,

00:16:51.120 | I even suggested sort of off the top of my head,

00:16:54.000 | imagine a system and most people can't get away with this.

00:16:57.280 | I just love this idea.

00:16:58.800 | Imagine a system in which you have

00:17:00.560 | a couple administrative blocks

00:17:03.880 | pre-assigned on your calendar,

00:17:06.620 | maybe three times a week, one hour each.

00:17:10.040 | And you have slots.

00:17:13.040 | I don't know how many, 10 slots on a shared Google Doc

00:17:16.680 | for each of these sessions.

00:17:18.920 | You say, okay, if you need me to do something quick,

00:17:20.640 | answer a question, fill out a form, get back to you,

00:17:22.720 | that's great, I'm happy to do it, I wanna be useful.

00:17:25.360 | So you just have to go find

00:17:28.360 | one of my upcoming administrative blocks

00:17:30.520 | where there's a free slot,

00:17:31.800 | enter the information from what you need from me,

00:17:33.840 | where to find the files, et cetera.

00:17:35.640 | And when I get to that session,

00:17:37.240 | I'm gonna go down that list.

00:17:38.900 | The number of slots I have on this document are such

00:17:41.580 | that I should have time to get through everything.

00:17:43.440 | And that's when that work will get done.

00:17:44.520 | And oh, if all those slots are filled this week,

00:17:46.680 | that means I don't have time for this this week,

00:17:48.440 | you'll have to find a future slot.

00:17:50.760 | Like imagine a world like that,

00:17:52.080 | as opposed to our current world

00:17:53.160 | where that person will just shoot you an email

00:17:55.640 | and be like, take care of this

00:17:56.720 | and give you none of the information.

00:17:58.520 | The stress of how much email we have

00:18:03.840 | really seems to dumb down the detail and sophistication

00:18:08.640 | with which we talk.

00:18:09.480 | I mean, if you were to come to me and talk to me in person,

00:18:11.220 | you need something from me, you would get into it.

00:18:12.640 | You'd be like, yeah, yeah,

00:18:13.880 | let me tell you about this thing.

00:18:14.920 | Here's this form, don't worry about these two things.

00:18:17.520 | And then once you get it signed,

00:18:18.720 | actually why don't you just put it in my mailbox.

00:18:21.080 | I don't need it till Friday.

00:18:21.920 | We'd have a very normal conversation.

00:18:24.280 | In an age of email overload,

00:18:25.680 | instead what we get is,

00:18:27.080 | you have six seconds at the keyboard,

00:18:30.700 | you form fill good, think good with a typo.

00:18:34.560 | And then like a signature under it that says,

00:18:37.740 | sent from an iPhone, excuse the typos, right?

00:18:39.480 | It's just crazy.

00:18:40.320 | Imagine a world where you had to go find a slot

00:18:42.100 | that I had free.

00:18:43.300 | And if the information was not there that I needed to do it,

00:18:46.980 | you would just see a note at like insufficient information

00:18:49.460 | and you'd have to find another slot.

00:18:51.380 | All right, that's extreme because it would annoy people,

00:18:53.660 | but man, I think we should annoy people more.

00:18:55.140 | That'd be great.

00:18:56.420 | Stepping back, the point here is small work,

00:18:58.840 | I want you to have corralled.

00:19:00.900 | This is when it happens.

00:19:02.060 | I know how much time it takes and where that time falls.

00:19:06.360 | All right, step two in my experimental system.

00:19:10.180 | Look at the time that remains.

00:19:12.140 | Now how much time remains depends on

00:19:15.200 | how much you wanna work.

00:19:16.180 | If you're in a normal nine to five office job, it's clear,

00:19:18.860 | you're working backwards from roughly 40 hours,

00:19:20.900 | but hey, if you're a small business owner,

00:19:23.200 | you're a freelancer,

00:19:25.500 | you can set this number to whatever the hell you want.

00:19:27.380 | And it could be like, okay, I work 20 hours a week,

00:19:29.940 | let's see what I can do with that.

00:19:31.860 | So whatever the hour is, whatever hour amount it is,

00:19:34.340 | you work backwards to say how many hours are left.

00:19:38.140 | The next thing I want you to do is figure out

00:19:40.900 | how do I partition these remaining hours each week

00:19:43.660 | between medium and large?

00:19:46.340 | Is it 50/50?

00:19:48.300 | Is it 10/90?

00:19:50.020 | Again, this really depends what your job is.

00:19:53.340 | If you're a novelist, for example,

00:19:56.380 | that should probably be 10% of the remaining time,

00:20:01.140 | medium, 90% large.

00:20:02.500 | Because mainly what you should be doing

00:20:04.120 | is writing your novel.

00:20:05.420 | And the 10% is like, okay, I have to do,

00:20:07.940 | get back some interview questions

00:20:09.740 | or fill out this thing for publicity.

00:20:11.460 | Like there's not that much stuff

00:20:12.840 | and 10% of your time should get it done.

00:20:15.220 | But if you're in a project manager job,

00:20:17.780 | you might have a very different equation there.

00:20:20.500 | Where you're like, actually, maybe 80% of my time is medium.

00:20:22.860 | It's gonna be sort of short-term things

00:20:24.800 | that need to be dealt with to keep my team going.

00:20:27.840 | We have to figure out,

00:20:30.900 | get this report together for this client.

00:20:33.060 | We have to figure out how to deal with a,

00:20:36.460 | someone's on leave and how we're gonna reassign to work.

00:20:38.540 | A lot of what you do is medium.

00:20:40.060 | And then maybe you have 20% of your time for large.

00:20:42.180 | You're like, I need to be working on one large project

00:20:44.980 | at a time because there's some big swing ideas I have

00:20:49.420 | and the medium is gonna keep my job.

00:20:51.660 | But this one large thing I'm working on

00:20:53.260 | is what's gonna get me to my next job

00:20:55.240 | or let me start my own business.

00:20:57.860 | So you figure it out.

00:20:58.700 | What's my division between medium and large?

00:21:00.820 | All right, now you have a number.

00:21:03.420 | Yeah, I have this many hours a week to work on medium.

00:21:05.680 | I have this many hours a week to work on large.

00:21:07.480 | And then you just work backwards and say, okay,

00:21:09.180 | so how many large things can I sustain

00:21:12.500 | with that many hours a week?

00:21:14.700 | And there's your answer, Joshua, for that question.

00:21:17.460 | Then you look at medium things.

00:21:18.660 | Well, how many with this many hours a week,

00:21:20.820 | how many is sort of these medium one week size projects

00:21:23.220 | can I handle at a time?

00:21:24.720 | There's your answer.

00:21:25.720 | And then those are the slots you have free for work.

00:21:30.020 | And as you finish something,

00:21:31.100 | you pull something else into it.

00:21:32.700 | Now, what do you do with this other work?

00:21:34.780 | Again, this is another whole discussion,

00:21:36.800 | but essentially either your company or your team

00:21:40.560 | or just you on your own need some sort of external system

00:21:43.520 | in which incoming work is filtered.

00:21:45.040 | Then once it's in there, it's stored.

00:21:47.080 | And people understand that this is not being worked on.

00:21:49.740 | It's being stored.

00:21:51.200 | And you pull work out of that system to fill in these slots.

00:21:53.600 | And again, that's a whole other discussion.

00:21:55.100 | Let's not get into that right now.

00:21:56.180 | But basically what I'm suggesting here, Joshua,

00:21:58.040 | is that you're very carefully figure out

00:22:00.040 | based on how much I wanna be working,

00:22:03.680 | how much time do I have available?

00:22:05.820 | What then does that allow in terms of how much I can do?

00:22:10.820 | And that's just a reality check.

00:22:12.540 | That like actually like this is how much you can do

00:22:14.580 | if you wanna stick to roughly that amount of work working.

00:22:16.780 | And this is after you're being very efficient, right?

00:22:18.900 | But the main thing you're doing here that's super productive

00:22:21.720 | in the old school sense is that

00:22:22.820 | you're taming all these small tasks,

00:22:24.940 | you're getting them consolidated,

00:22:26.220 | you're automating things, you're improving processes.

00:22:27.940 | You're being very careful with your time.

00:22:29.820 | What remains, you're just being very honest.

00:22:32.180 | How much of this, how much stuff can I actually do?

00:22:34.400 | Now, if you don't like that answer,

00:22:35.500 | there's two things you can do.

00:22:37.140 | One is you can change your ratios.

00:22:38.920 | You might say, I gotta be doing more large things.

00:22:43.380 | Like what am I doing with myself here?

00:22:44.660 | I'm doing too many TPS reports.

00:22:46.020 | So change that ratio.

00:22:47.300 | Or you might be saying, this is not enough medium stuff.

00:22:50.280 | I can't keep up with what my job requires

00:22:53.900 | if I only have this much time to work on medium projects.

00:22:57.120 | Then you have to just face the reality and say,

00:22:58.580 | I just don't do large projects.

00:23:00.220 | Or I spend very little time on large projects.

00:23:02.740 | And that's just reality.

00:23:03.580 | Two, you can change the hours.

00:23:05.100 | I'm gonna add more hours to it.

00:23:07.060 | I'm gonna start work early.

00:23:08.500 | I'm gonna work Sunday mornings.

00:23:10.460 | I'm gonna add another hour every day.

00:23:12.660 | And that extra hour lets me do like one large project.

00:23:15.620 | Those are your options,

00:23:16.460 | but you're facing the productivity dragon,

00:23:18.380 | and you're facing the productivity dragon.

00:23:20.000 | Here's my new twist in a quantitative fashion.

00:23:24.300 | You don't just see it as this general

00:23:26.500 | mess of smoke and fire.

00:23:27.820 | You're measuring its weight

00:23:28.940 | and how far its flames can go and its strength

00:23:32.060 | and coming up with like, what can I do with this year?

00:23:35.100 | I'm stretching that metaphor.

00:23:36.460 | All right, but anyways, that's what I'm thinking, Joshua.

00:23:39.220 | Maximizing, just generically speaking,

00:23:41.220 | is gonna burn you out,

00:23:42.060 | make you less productive in the long run.

00:23:44.660 | You should have a number for how many big projects

00:23:47.700 | and medium projects you can do at a time.

00:23:48.900 | Stick to that number

00:23:50.060 | and figure out that number systematically.

00:23:53.200 | All right, let's move on now.

00:23:56.260 | We have a question from Steven.

00:23:59.180 | By the way, a quick, now that we're doing video,

00:24:04.440 | I think about these things.

00:24:06.980 | This isn't a side, but there is a guy on YouTube

00:24:11.780 | that some of you have been sending me his videos,

00:24:13.940 | and he's very popular, 2 million subscribers.

00:24:16.140 | And his name is John Campbell.

00:24:18.420 | And he's, I think, a doctor in the UK,

00:24:22.100 | and he does COVID update videos.

00:24:24.260 | Like, here's what's going on, mainly like UK-centric.

00:24:26.340 | Here's the numbers, here's whatever.

00:24:27.700 | And they're insanely popular.

00:24:29.100 | And the two things that make them so popular,

00:24:31.500 | it's not that there is like some sort of new content

00:24:33.500 | or something like that.

00:24:34.660 | He has a great accent,

00:24:37.020 | but two, he has a camera that aims down at his notes,

00:24:42.020 | and he literally just cuts to this camera,

00:24:46.100 | and you see him underline words

00:24:49.700 | or put check marks next to things he just talked about.

00:24:51.900 | So I just checked off Joshua's question on here.

00:24:55.060 | You would think, objectively speaking,

00:24:56.880 | that that would be the least interesting visual content

00:25:00.960 | that you could imagine,

00:25:01.900 | especially in this cable news age of graphics and chyrons

00:25:05.560 | and sweeping whatever.

00:25:07.500 | It's incredibly compelling.

00:25:08.740 | He has 2 million subscribers.

00:25:09.980 | It is really compelling to watch someone

00:25:12.340 | just sort of cross off and underline things

00:25:13.940 | they're talking about.

00:25:14.780 | So my point is, Jesse, when you hear this

00:25:17.000 | and you're editing it,

00:25:18.100 | I think we gotta get an overhead cam in here

00:25:20.020 | so people can watch me check mark off

00:25:21.740 | and underline things with the questions.

00:25:23.940 | If it works for Campbell, it works for us.

00:25:25.260 | All right, that's an aside.

00:25:27.340 | Let's get to Stephen's question.

00:25:28.460 | Stephen, my apologies.

00:25:29.760 | Stephen asks, "Why don't you show overhead camera shots

00:25:33.620 | "of your notes?"

00:25:34.460 | See, Stephen knows it.

00:25:35.700 | Stephen knows what's going on.

00:25:37.140 | No, I'm joking.

00:25:37.960 | Stephen really asks, "I've really gone all in

00:25:42.380 | "on time blocking, and it definitely works.

00:25:45.720 | "Now though, it feels like I have even more to do,

00:25:48.580 | "and I find myself feeling as though

00:25:49.980 | "I am forgetting something,

00:25:50.960 | "even though I do a shutdown ritual and weekly plan.

00:25:53.340 | "Is this normal?

00:25:54.520 | "And with time, does this feeling go away?"

00:25:57.940 | Stephen, it does go away.

00:26:00.100 | The thing you need to lean into to make it go away

00:26:02.860 | is the shutdown ritual.

00:26:04.060 | I created the shutdown ritual for exactly this issue.

00:26:08.940 | I was suffering from this as a grad student at MIT.

00:26:14.500 | I was having a hard time shutting down.

00:26:16.660 | Like I'm forgetting things,

00:26:17.740 | or I need to keep making progress on a problem.

00:26:20.660 | I've talked about this before on the show,

00:26:22.220 | but at the time there was like a key theorem

00:26:24.020 | for my PhD dissertation, and it was not working.

00:26:27.940 | I was like, "Oh man, I gotta keep thinking about it,

00:26:30.260 | "'cause if it doesn't work,

00:26:31.100 | "the dissertation's not gonna work, it's a problem."

00:26:33.440 | And I was like, "I need a way to just kind of shut down,

00:26:35.460 | "like shut down, here's what I worked on today,

00:26:38.440 | "this didn't work, here's why,

00:26:39.760 | "here's the next avenue of attack I'm gonna do tomorrow,

00:26:42.320 | "and write that down as part of my shutdown ritual

00:26:44.380 | "so I could just trust it.

00:26:45.800 | "All right, I don't have to keep thinking about this tonight."

00:26:49.340 | And aside about that, by the way,

00:26:51.740 | just a tip to aspiring doctoral students,

00:26:55.880 | because I was bored and antsy in general,

00:26:58.900 | I was writing books and doing things like this,

00:27:00.620 | I had a ton of publications,

00:27:01.960 | what you normally do in theoretical computer science,

00:27:03.940 | is say, "Yes, it's time to write a dissertation."

00:27:05.580 | Of course, I'm gonna draw from these mini publications

00:27:08.740 | I've spent a lot of time on,

00:27:10.180 | and I'm gonna pull together ideas

00:27:11.620 | I have already published and presented and has peer reviewed,

00:27:15.140 | and I'm gonna expand upon it,

00:27:16.960 | and this is what I'm gonna do for my dissertation.

00:27:18.780 | That is what you should do.

00:27:20.500 | Instead, I said, "I don't know, I'm kind of bored,

00:27:22.740 | "I'm just gonna do something from scratch.

00:27:24.840 | "I'm gonna come up with a brand new idea,

00:27:28.080 | "pull it out of the air,

00:27:29.820 | "and do a whole dissertation in a six month period

00:27:32.960 | "on mathematical concepts that I'm just gonna invent.

00:27:35.400 | "I haven't published, I haven't gone through them,

00:27:37.060 | "I have no collaborators on them, just because I was bored."

00:27:39.780 | It worked out, the thesis was fine,

00:27:42.060 | but it was nerve wracking,

00:27:44.300 | because exactly what I'm talking about here,

00:27:45.740 | I'm halfway through this thing,

00:27:46.740 | like, "Wait, maybe my idea doesn't work here,

00:27:48.620 | "because I'm doing it from scratch,

00:27:50.420 | "as I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation."

00:27:52.860 | So it was quite stressful.

00:27:53.980 | Anyway, so I invented the shutdown ritual.

00:27:56.020 | It works, it takes some time.

00:27:58.180 | Let me just briefly review what you have to do

00:28:00.180 | to make the shutdown ritual work properly.

00:28:03.060 | Mechanically, the idea with the shutdown ritual

00:28:05.320 | is that you go through

00:28:06.420 | and you review every potential open loop.

00:28:09.600 | All right?

00:28:12.800 | Loose notes have been processed.

00:28:14.840 | There's no critical email that needs an urgent response

00:28:18.360 | that I missed.

00:28:19.200 | I've looked at my weekly plan on my calendar.

00:28:21.040 | I know what's coming up.

00:28:22.680 | I know what's coming up tomorrow.

00:28:23.840 | I see a plan for tomorrow.

00:28:25.400 | If there's some things I need to do tonight,

00:28:27.020 | non-professional things that I need to do tonight

00:28:29.000 | that I see in my calendar, my weekly plan,

00:28:31.280 | I've written them down, so I can see them right there.

00:28:34.360 | There is no open loop, there's nothing I am forgetting.

00:28:36.700 | I've taken notes on the conversations,

00:28:38.920 | I've sent the follow-up emails.

00:28:40.740 | Now I say a phrase that is unique,

00:28:43.760 | like schedule shutdown confirm,

00:28:45.160 | or if you use a time block planner,

00:28:46.500 | I'm gonna cross out the shutdown complete checkbox.

00:28:49.960 | That's the mechanical thing you do.

00:28:51.720 | You have to couple that with the psychological addendum,

00:28:57.140 | and this was what made the shutdown ritual

00:29:00.080 | really work for me as a grad student,

00:29:01.560 | is that after you do that shutdown,

00:29:03.420 | when your mind then wants to keep thinking about work,

00:29:09.120 | which, Steven, I'm telling you,

00:29:10.800 | until you get really used to this, it 100% will.

00:29:13.140 | That's what you're experiencing.

00:29:14.380 | When your mind says, forget that,

00:29:16.380 | I wanna think about the email we just sent to Joshua

00:29:19.540 | about why doesn't Cal have more overhead shots of his notes

00:29:24.860 | and maybe I need to send a different email

00:29:27.620 | or word that differently,

00:29:28.460 | or I need to talk to my boss tomorrow,

00:29:30.780 | let's think that through,

00:29:31.880 | your mind's like, we gotta keep thinking about work.

00:29:34.800 | And you can't blame it.

00:29:35.640 | You just spent eight hours with work-related circuits

00:29:38.940 | firing left and right.

00:29:40.260 | And so, yeah, that's active in your brain.

00:29:45.420 | That's what's popping up.

00:29:46.400 | What you do, this is the key psychological addendum

00:29:48.580 | to the mechanical shutdown,

00:29:49.940 | is you say, I hear it,

00:29:53.420 | but I'm not gonna get into the details, mind,

00:29:55.820 | of what you want me to get into.

00:29:57.740 | I'm not gonna get into the details of the email to Steven.

00:30:00.620 | I'm not gonna get into the details

00:30:01.700 | about the meeting with the boss tomorrow.

00:30:02.780 | Instead, what I'm gonna say is, we did the shutdown.

00:30:07.120 | I said the phrase, or I checked that box.

00:30:10.300 | I would not have said that phrase

00:30:11.640 | and I would not have checked that box

00:30:12.760 | if I had not gone through everything on our plate

00:30:14.840 | and closed down all the open loops

00:30:16.100 | and made sure that we had a plan I trusted for tomorrow.

00:30:18.680 | So no, I'm not gonna get into it,

00:30:21.760 | psychologically, ruminatively speaking.

00:30:23.720 | And you do that again and again and again.

00:30:27.180 | The progress is made every single time

00:30:30.260 | that your mind wants you to get into a specifics about work

00:30:33.000 | and you say instead, I did the shutdown routine,

00:30:36.060 | so we don't need to get into that.

00:30:37.300 | I did the shutdown routine,

00:30:38.380 | so we don't need to get into it.

00:30:39.620 | I like to use the metaphor

00:30:40.740 | when I think about my own crazy mind of grooves that get,

00:30:43.900 | you get these grooves that your thoughts want to fall into

00:30:47.060 | and you're filling in the grooves,

00:30:49.300 | each rejection at a time.

00:30:50.520 | Each time you say, no, I did the routine, I did the routine.

00:30:52.200 | You're filling in the groove, filling in the groove

00:30:54.340 | until it's shallow enough that your thoughts

00:30:57.020 | don't get stuck in it and they move on to something else.

00:31:00.280 | So how long does this take?

00:31:01.380 | I don't know, two to three weeks, maybe.

00:31:03.140 | Give it a month to be safe.

00:31:04.740 | But if you're rigorous about this,

00:31:06.140 | this is the miracle of the shutdown routine.

00:31:08.980 | The thoughts slow down and you become much better

00:31:12.760 | at not thinking completely about work after work.

00:31:16.480 | And it is a huge positive difference.

00:31:18.340 | The only other thing I would add is have a capture notebook,

00:31:22.100 | right, accessible in your house

00:31:23.860 | and really have a serious routine

00:31:28.340 | of the first thing you do in the morning

00:31:29.680 | when you look and make your daily time block plans.

00:31:32.180 | You look at that notebook

00:31:33.140 | and anything you wrote down in that notebook,

00:31:35.660 | you process and look at.

00:31:37.700 | You gotta really be very diligent about that.

00:31:40.340 | If you do that, if a new thing pops to mind

00:31:44.180 | during the evening after a shutdown routine,

00:31:46.900 | you write in the notebook.

00:31:48.620 | So you don't have to open up your computer,

00:31:49.940 | you don't have to go into your email,

00:31:51.420 | you don't have to write a note to yourself

00:31:52.740 | and put it by your bathroom mirror so you don't forget it.

00:31:54.380 | You just write in the notebook.

00:31:56.200 | And if your mind trusts,

00:31:57.040 | like that's part of my time block planning

00:31:58.620 | is I look at that capture and process it.

00:32:01.020 | That will prevent that when that happens,

00:32:03.300 | when something legitimately new comes to mind,

00:32:05.020 | oh man, I forgot to send a message

00:32:09.140 | about Cal using overhead camera.

00:32:10.460 | You can jot that down and your mind's like,

00:32:11.860 | okay, I'm okay with it.

00:32:13.260 | All right, so you do those two things,

00:32:14.260 | you're gonna be able to have a lot more presence

00:32:16.040 | with your brain after work.

00:32:18.220 | All right, this is where if we, again,

00:32:20.140 | if we had the overhead cam, you would see coming in,

00:32:23.260 | whoo, crossed off a name.

00:32:25.660 | I can see it, it's very compelling to see.

00:32:27.740 | All right, let's move on here.

00:32:31.040 | Check out our timestamp.

00:32:32.600 | It's one of the things we miss about Jesse being here

00:32:35.240 | is I have to mind my own time here.

00:32:37.480 | Okay, let's keep moving here.

00:32:39.560 | Our question number three is from TooMuchRest.

00:32:43.040 | He asked, how do I come back to work

00:32:46.560 | after taking a lunch break?

00:32:49.420 | Yeah, it's hard.

00:32:50.600 | It's easy to fall down distractive rabbit holes

00:32:53.180 | after lunch breaks.

00:32:54.020 | I suffer from this too.

00:32:55.880 | Three things I'd recommend,

00:32:57.480 | and I would combine all three of these things.

00:32:59.200 | Number one, ritual, have a post-lunch ritual

00:33:03.560 | that you always do to prepare you

00:33:04.680 | to get back into work mode.

00:33:06.200 | A walk works really good here.

00:33:07.760 | I'm talking like five to 10 minutes,

00:33:09.840 | but you do a certain walk or whatever

00:33:12.800 | so that you are teaching your mind

00:33:15.520 | that this means we're shifting out

00:33:16.760 | of the much more wandering mindset that we're in

00:33:20.400 | when we're at lunch and just thinking about things

00:33:22.120 | and reading things and watching things

00:33:23.360 | back into a work mindset.

00:33:25.720 | Two, no email right after lunch, no Slack either.

00:33:29.800 | That just has to be a hard and fast rule.

00:33:31.160 | Do not start your first session after lunch

00:33:34.920 | going down a context switching rabbit hole.

00:33:37.080 | Like, let me see what's going on in my inbox

00:33:38.440 | or what's going on with Slack

00:33:40.000 | because your mind will never,

00:33:42.080 | well, get back to work mode,

00:33:43.040 | but you're gonna really slow it down.

00:33:44.360 | And you've just added 45 minutes of wandering

00:33:46.360 | if you do that.

00:33:47.200 | So never, ever, ever start your first moments

00:33:50.660 | after a lunch break with email or Slack.

00:33:52.300 | And then three, and this is critical,

00:33:55.780 | before lunch, figure out and set up

00:33:59.300 | what you're gonna work on right after lunch.

00:34:01.500 | And again, it shouldn't be email, it shouldn't be Slack.

00:34:04.300 | So do email and Slack right before lunch.

00:34:06.220 | So like, okay, I'm not missing something urgent.

00:34:07.980 | And then set up, I'm gonna work on this report

00:34:10.380 | right after lunch, get it loaded up,

00:34:13.020 | get it in Word, get the documents

00:34:15.820 | that you need to draw from, get that all loaded up.

00:34:18.020 | Take a look at it, kind of, all right, I get it.

00:34:20.520 | I see what's going on.

00:34:21.360 | I've sort of swapped it in.

00:34:22.180 | I think I'm ready to go.

00:34:23.140 | Good, let me go eat lunch.

00:34:25.180 | When I come back, it's all there, it's all got prepped

00:34:27.380 | and you can get right into work.

00:34:28.380 | Those three things, I think, do those three things

00:34:30.680 | and you can tame lunch breaks.

00:34:32.220 | My lunch break recommendation, by the way,

00:34:34.720 | is read during your lunch breaks if you can.

00:34:36.380 | It's great for your brain.

00:34:37.780 | It's a great time to get some reading in.

00:34:39.620 | And it has a much more minimal impact

00:34:43.100 | on your cognitive energy for the remainder of the day

00:34:45.740 | as compared to what most people do,

00:34:47.860 | which is they open up the internet and their phones

00:34:50.900 | and are basically saying, "Put it in my veins,"

00:34:54.860 | and just go frenetic crazy.

00:34:56.820 | And then they're like, "Okay, time to go work

00:34:58.420 | on something deep."

00:34:59.260 | Yeah, good luck.

00:35:00.080 | Crossing off.

00:35:02.400 | Let's see here.

00:35:05.180 | Oh, here's another, let's do this question here.

00:35:06.180 | This one comes from Aaron.

00:35:09.180 | Aaron says, "Why don't you do Zettelkasten?"

00:35:11.620 | So I talked about Zettelkasten last week's episode.

00:35:16.260 | Got a lot of feedback from listeners from it.

00:35:19.260 | Aaron's asking about it.

00:35:20.180 | So I thought I'd put in another Zettelkasten question here

00:35:23.620 | because it seems to be a topic

00:35:24.860 | that people are interested in.

00:35:27.180 | Let me just really briefly give a slightly better description

00:35:30.680 | of how this system works.

00:35:33.620 | So with the kind of pure Zettelkasten system,

00:35:36.740 | and I'm talking about the how to take smart notes system.

00:35:39.540 | This is the Nicholas Luhmann system explained in the book,

00:35:43.460 | How to Take Smart Notes.

00:35:44.700 | The way it works is, just to be a little bit more precise,

00:35:48.140 | is that instead of trying to have a hierarchical note setup

00:35:52.780 | where it's, you know, here's the top level

00:35:55.460 | and there's folders under there,

00:35:56.580 | and then there's subfolders and those subfolders,

00:35:58.100 | it's more loose and it allows for more connections.

00:36:02.220 | And the way it works is you take notes on a slip,

00:36:04.820 | piece of paper, an X card or whatever.

00:36:07.180 | You take all your notes on there.

00:36:09.340 | And so if you're reading a book,

00:36:10.300 | you'll generate a lot of these notes,

00:36:11.700 | like for every independent idea in the book

00:36:14.220 | you wanna keep track of or think of.

00:36:16.620 | And then what you do is you go through the box,

00:36:18.900 | it's called a slip box in the traditional system.

00:36:21.020 | You go through the box and find an existing note

00:36:26.020 | that is relevant to it and you put it behind it.

00:36:29.740 | That physical proximity implies a connection

00:36:33.380 | in classic Zettelkasten, in physical analog Zettelkasten.

00:36:37.260 | So I'm reading this book and I took some notes

00:36:39.260 | on Concord, Massachusetts in the early industrial period.

00:36:44.660 | And so maybe I put it, I have like some notes over here

00:36:48.300 | about colonial New England or something.

00:36:50.900 | And I'm gonna put it back there, like this is connected.

00:36:54.020 | The physical proximity is a connection.

00:36:56.740 | The other thing you can do,

00:36:57.740 | if there's other notes you wanna connect it to,

00:37:01.300 | in analog Zettelkasten, there's a numbering system.

00:37:03.820 | Every card is uniquely numbered.

00:37:05.700 | You can actually just jot down on their links,

00:37:07.800 | just the numbers of other cards that this relates to.

00:37:10.780 | So maybe you have another thing about industrialization.

00:37:14.660 | Maybe you have another thing about new social history,

00:37:18.700 | case studies or something.

00:37:19.780 | And like, you just write those numbers.

00:37:21.280 | So now if you're reading that sequence of notes

00:37:25.260 | that this thing falls into,

00:37:26.420 | you'll come across that information,

00:37:27.620 | but it also will link the other things.

00:37:29.580 | And there's other details here.

00:37:30.460 | You can also take other notes and add links to those back

00:37:32.660 | to this new thing you added.

00:37:34.160 | So you have notes kind of show up in a physical proximity,

00:37:37.560 | like in the Dewey decimal system, but much more ad hoc.

00:37:40.260 | Near other notes that are similar,

00:37:41.580 | but then you also have these links between notes.

00:37:44.140 | This goes to this note, this note goes back to here,

00:37:46.040 | this goes over here.

00:37:46.880 | So you begin to get this rich connection

00:37:49.380 | of lateral links between notes.

00:37:51.540 | And a lot of the magic of Zettelkasten is in those links.

00:37:55.460 | Now, of course, the worry is what if you forget

00:37:58.180 | where something is?

00:37:59.140 | Well, the other piece you have in Zettelkasten is an index.

00:38:02.100 | And the idea is you should be able to get to any card

00:38:06.340 | starting from the index.

00:38:07.660 | Not meaning that every card is listed in that index,

00:38:10.100 | because that would be too long.

00:38:12.300 | Upon his death in the late 1990s,

00:38:14.740 | the sociologist Nicholas Luhmann,

00:38:16.260 | who helped really work out the details

00:38:19.300 | of the Zettelkasten system,

00:38:20.260 | he had 90,000 index cards in his boxes.

00:38:24.760 | So no, you don't have a 90,000 item index,

00:38:27.980 | but you should be able to get to any card in your system,

00:38:30.640 | either by directly seeing it in the index,

00:38:34.220 | or by going from the index to a related topic,

00:38:39.420 | and then flipping through all the cards

00:38:42.500 | that are next to each other related to that topic,

00:38:44.300 | finding it in there.

00:38:45.380 | And this is how you can also figure out where to put it.

00:38:48.780 | You can look at your index and say,

00:38:50.460 | oh, it's related to this topic.

00:38:52.460 | So I'll go look up where that card is

00:38:54.260 | and put it behind that stack of cards.

00:38:56.620 | But I also see these other related topics on the index,

00:38:58.820 | so maybe I'll put those links down.

00:39:00.780 | It's something like that.

00:39:01.740 | Now, Zettelkasten hardcore people are gonna yell at me

00:39:03.780 | because I'm not getting this quite right,

00:39:05.180 | but that's the system.

00:39:06.280 | All right, and then we talked about it last week.

00:39:09.100 | So I don't wanna dwell on the details of my assessment,

00:39:13.220 | but basically, one of the claims of Zettelkasten,

00:39:17.940 | like I mentioned last week,

00:39:18.820 | is that it can essentially automate writing.

00:39:20.660 | That once you have all these rich lateral connections

00:39:22.960 | between ideas, you can just surf these connections

00:39:25.100 | and you'll just come across ideas you stitch together,

00:39:28.620 | and that will give you an article,

00:39:30.100 | that will give you a book.

00:39:30.980 | As I said last week, I don't buy that.

00:39:33.900 | I think it's incredibly narrow writing context

00:39:36.900 | in which that would work.

00:39:38.180 | I do not think that matches with my understanding

00:39:40.620 | of the writing process as someone

00:39:42.540 | who's been a professional writer my entire adult life.

00:39:44.340 | So I don't buy that.

00:39:45.340 | But I do wanna emphasize what I do like about Zettelkasten,

00:39:48.860 | maybe a little bit more clearly,

00:39:52.180 | which is if you're in my line of work,

00:39:55.740 | I come across and deal with a lot of ideas,

00:39:59.380 | and I don't really have a great way

00:40:01.000 | of keeping track of them.

00:40:01.940 | And I've tried to do this hierarchically

00:40:03.780 | before in Evernote, but it gets pretty much out of control.

00:40:07.780 | I like the flexibility and low friction nature

00:40:10.300 | of Zettelkasten, this idea that I can,

00:40:12.340 | especially using a digital tool,

00:40:14.060 | quickly make a note, write through all of my ideas on it,

00:40:16.740 | and link it to a category, link to a few other categories,

00:40:21.460 | drop something in an index, and just know it's in there.

00:40:23.420 | It's not gonna be forgotten.

00:40:24.580 | And that some interesting connections to it

00:40:26.220 | might build up over time that might spark some ideas.

00:40:29.240 | It's not going to automate writing,

00:40:32.240 | but things aren't gonna get lost.

00:40:33.940 | You can find things, you can store things.

00:40:36.160 | I do like that aspects of it.

00:40:37.420 | So anyways, I'm working on it.

00:40:39.940 | I mean, I'm using Rome, as I mentioned.

00:40:42.660 | I have a lightweight implementation

00:40:44.100 | of Zettelkasten going on,

00:40:45.100 | and I'm trying to make it more heavyweight.

00:40:47.920 | I'm also thinking about moving some more academic work

00:40:50.620 | into Zettelkasten, so proofs and theorems and citations.

00:40:53.900 | Some of you have sent me some useful information

00:40:56.300 | about how to do that with Rome.

00:40:57.640 | So I'm Zettelkasten-curious, ZC.

00:41:01.440 | And not that I think it's gonna automate my writing,

00:41:05.580 | but I do think it might actually be a better way

00:41:07.380 | to store information.

00:41:08.980 | So there we go.

00:41:09.820 | This has now become like our weekly Zettelkasten update.

00:41:14.720 | All right, let's do one more question about Deep Work here.

00:41:18.420 | This last one comes from Noah.

00:41:21.320 | Noah says, "How do I limit activities that aren't important

00:41:24.940 | "for the long-term at a new job?"

00:41:26.740 | So he goes on to explain about how in his past job,

00:41:30.280 | he was a chemical testing engineer

00:41:33.940 | at a pharmaceutical company.

00:41:35.940 | They're very a world without email style

00:41:39.740 | in their approach to work.

00:41:40.940 | They had unified task boards to see who was working on what,

00:41:43.860 | do you have a free slot for this?

00:41:45.540 | They prioritize the primary value producing activity,

00:41:48.060 | which for them was actually performing lab tests

00:41:50.000 | on chemicals as this is all that matters.

00:41:51.660 | You gotta make sure you're doing that.

00:41:53.020 | Everything else is about what you do

00:41:54.180 | at the time that remains.

00:41:55.140 | Pull things off this task board as you have free time.

00:41:57.460 | Fantastic setup.

00:41:59.020 | He says now he's a grad student in chemistry

00:42:02.060 | and it's not so organized.

00:42:05.120 | And in particular, he's working on doing,

00:42:07.180 | he's a teaching assistant.

00:42:08.140 | It says things just get thrown at him

00:42:10.140 | and he feels like he can't ignore them

00:42:13.100 | because it's part of his job,

00:42:14.340 | but it's haphazard and out of control

00:42:17.560 | and it's getting in his way of doing the main work.

00:42:20.340 | So what should he do about it?

00:42:21.840 | Well, who is this, Noah?

00:42:24.780 | Noah, yes, professor types are in general,

00:42:28.140 | quite disorganized.

00:42:29.500 | They will just throw stuff at you

00:42:30.740 | because their whole life is chaotic

00:42:32.180 | and they just need to get it out of their brain

00:42:33.520 | because their brain is exploding

00:42:35.280 | with all these different demands they're placing on it

00:42:37.880 | and you can't just ignore it.

00:42:39.660 | But what you can do in most cases as a teaching assistant

00:42:43.600 | is take control of the processes.

00:42:45.600 | Professor doesn't care.

00:42:48.740 | They just don't wanna have to worry about these things.

00:42:50.780 | So if you say, here's how I'm working with the students.

00:42:53.900 | Here's how I think we should work with this.

00:42:55.400 | Here's the different processes to get the problem sets in,

00:42:58.700 | to get them graded, to get notes back, to get whatever.

00:43:01.340 | Come up with processes that are much more structured,

00:43:03.460 | much less haphazard and just implement them on your own

00:43:07.700 | and talk them through with your professor

00:43:09.420 | and say, here's some ideas I have.

00:43:10.560 | I think we should run it this way.

00:43:11.480 | It's gonna keep it simpler for you

00:43:12.740 | and it's gonna be more controlled.

00:43:14.540 | Nine out of 10 professors are like, whatever.

00:43:16.860 | That one sentence you just told me

00:43:18.100 | is already taking up more time than I have available.

00:43:19.700 | Just whatever, whatever we need to do.

00:43:21.060 | They don't care.

00:43:21.900 | So leverage the fact they're too busy and hairy

00:43:23.780 | to now to control the care to shape the job.

00:43:26.700 | That's my main advice for teaching assistants

00:43:28.680 | is that you have more control here than you think

00:43:32.020 | about how you want your job to unfold.

00:43:33.720 | The professors don't care.

00:43:34.720 | They're happy for you to take the reins

00:43:36.220 | and then make this more structured.

00:43:37.620 | They're not gonna do it

00:43:38.660 | because they're terrible at this stuff.

00:43:41.140 | If they weren't terrible at this stuff,

00:43:42.680 | they probably would have left academia

00:43:43.900 | and made a lot of money anyway.

00:43:44.740 | So, okay.

00:43:46.620 | I'm gonna get yelled at now by professors

00:43:49.140 | and Zettelkasten people.

00:43:50.940 | Great.

00:43:52.380 | But this is what I would say.

00:43:53.460 | I remember, I vividly remember having this revelation

00:43:56.980 | as a graduate student.

00:43:58.540 | I was TAing, I did a ton of TAing at MIT.

00:44:03.020 | I TAed a few courses,

00:44:04.300 | distributed algorithms with my advisor.

00:44:06.860 | I also TAed security course with Ron Rivest,

00:44:09.820 | who is the R in RSA.

00:44:12.060 | He invented RSA public key encryption.

00:44:14.980 | That was interesting.

00:44:16.540 | And I remember at some point in one of these TAing,

00:44:19.100 | I think that when I was TAing first for my advisor,

00:44:21.500 | just having this insight of like,

00:44:23.300 | this is kind of haphazard how we're doing this.

00:44:27.780 | And there's a lot of structure we could bring to this

00:44:29.660 | that would have basically zero impact

00:44:31.780 | on the students or the advisor.

00:44:33.180 | It's not gonna make their life harder.

00:44:34.260 | They don't care, the professor doesn't care,

00:44:36.100 | but it's gonna make my life significantly easier.

00:44:38.380 | Like, oh, if I do it this way,

00:44:40.920 | it's gonna make life much easier.

00:44:42.500 | Just no one's thinking about it because no one cares

00:44:44.860 | because it doesn't directly affect them.

00:44:46.300 | And I remember I really began to structure,

00:44:48.380 | here's our systems for how you hand in problem sets

00:44:50.860 | and how we grade them and how we hand things back.

00:44:53.580 | And it made a big difference.

00:44:57.660 | I don't remember all the details here,

00:44:58.940 | but I vaguely remember that it was just like a casual idea

00:45:03.020 | my advisor had, which made sense on paper,

00:45:06.380 | which was we should Xerox copy the problem set submissions.

00:45:11.380 | So that if we lose one, we have a copy.

00:45:16.140 | And because I guess it happened like once,

00:45:20.140 | like we lost the problem set, like, ah, we can't grade it,

00:45:22.220 | but if we have a copy backup, that would help.

00:45:25.540 | Sounds good on paper.

00:45:27.260 | It's impossibly time-consuming

00:45:29.500 | because these are all coming in in different types of papers.

00:45:32.180 | They're mainly stapled.

00:45:34.380 | They're mainly stapled.

00:45:35.460 | So like, it's impossible to, you have to like,

00:45:37.340 | take staples out.

00:45:38.380 | And it was like hours just Xeroxing these things.

00:45:40.820 | I think at some point, and again,

00:45:42.100 | I don't remember the exact details,

00:45:43.260 | but I just remember thinking,

00:45:44.740 | how often does this happen?

00:45:48.260 | Like it happened once four years ago.

00:45:50.940 | Let's just, we'll give you all the points if we lose it.

00:45:55.420 | And we're going to save ourselves all this time.

00:45:57.460 | Like, and it costs like no time.

00:45:58.860 | Like I made that case.

00:45:59.700 | She was like, fine, that sounds fine.

00:46:01.820 | But I was just thinking through like, what can we do here?

00:46:03.780 | I also remember, and again,

00:46:04.940 | I don't have the details here, Noah,

00:46:06.300 | so I'm sorry I don't have more specifics,

00:46:08.260 | but I also remember realizing at some point

00:46:10.380 | the big class and lots of problem sets

00:46:12.180 | when we had graders and everything,

00:46:14.300 | having the students alphabetize when they hand it in

00:46:19.300 | like made a big difference.

00:46:20.500 | So like, okay, here's the stack.

00:46:22.180 | When you come up to hand your problem set,

00:46:24.180 | find where your name actually is in alphabetical order

00:46:26.620 | and put it there.

00:46:27.700 | 10 extra seconds when you submit it,

00:46:29.740 | saves a huge amount of time for us on the backend.

00:46:31.780 | It made it much easier for us to split it up.

00:46:33.660 | Other things I remember figuring out

00:46:35.060 | is like dealing with the undergraduate graders

00:46:36.980 | is just automating some of the process.

00:46:39.460 | These come to me already in alphabetical order.

00:46:42.300 | I just put them in a mail sorter outside of my office.

00:46:44.820 | I split them in half in the middle of the names or whatever,

00:46:47.380 | and you come and grab them.

00:46:48.620 | And there's stuff I told the students about format,

00:46:51.020 | like make sure that they're in this format,

00:46:52.620 | which again had very little impact on the students.

00:46:54.700 | It was very easier than the change to format.

00:46:56.220 | Just like, what do you want me to do? Fine.

00:46:57.580 | But it made like a huge difference

00:46:58.700 | in how we could consistently grade it.

00:47:00.020 | So these types of things made a big difference.

00:47:01.540 | So know how to do that.

00:47:02.820 | Put in place your own processes

00:47:06.380 | and people will be fine with it.

00:47:07.820 | And more generally, even if you're not a teaching assistant,

00:47:11.540 | there's a teachable moment here, which is add processes.

00:47:16.540 | Even if the work is coming from someone else,

00:47:19.740 | people often don't care.

00:47:20.860 | They're too busy.

00:47:22.700 | All right.

00:47:23.540 | So that's it for questions about deep work.

00:47:27.300 | We're running a little long here,

00:47:28.140 | but let's put in a few questions here

00:47:29.540 | as always about the deep life.

00:47:31.540 | Oh man, look at this one.

00:47:36.540 | All right, question number one.

00:47:38.100 | Here's a dangerous one from Duck and Cover,

00:47:41.820 | appropriate name.

00:47:42.900 | Duck and Cover asks,

00:47:45.060 | how do you stay focused and productive on campus

00:47:49.460 | when there is so much attention paid on wokeness?

00:47:54.220 | Jesse, that's where we put in the dun dun dun,

00:47:59.220 | like a musical cue.

00:48:01.100 | Then he or she goes on,

00:48:02.060 | I wanna focus on writing papers and teaching,

00:48:06.620 | but everyone's so focused on gender and race issues

00:48:09.860 | and how do we navigate all this exaggerated wokeness,

00:48:12.900 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:48:13.940 | So I'm gonna punt a little bit on this question,

00:48:16.780 | Duck and Cover.

00:48:17.740 | And focus on just one aspect of it right now.

00:48:22.580 | I've talked about other aspects of this in other episodes,

00:48:24.900 | which is probably one of the best things you can do

00:48:28.660 | to stay productive on campus is in a climate

00:48:32.900 | of so much wokeness is stopping on the internet so much.

00:48:36.300 | There is obviously a hermeneutic impact of the internet

00:48:44.460 | in other words, to use,

00:48:49.460 | let me avoid using purposely obfuscated philosophical terms.

00:48:55.780 | The internet, what you're experiencing on the internet

00:48:57.660 | has a real phenomenological impact

00:49:00.380 | on how you actually perceive and understand the world.

00:49:03.300 | So I use phenomenological to try to avoid

00:49:06.180 | using philosophically complex terms.

00:49:07.980 | Let me try this again.

00:49:10.980 | What you see online shapes how you understand

00:49:12.860 | the world around you.

00:49:14.660 | So if you are taking in news that is specifically looking

00:49:19.580 | at finding and isolating and promoting and amplifying

00:49:24.260 | sort of outrageous instances of wokeness

00:49:27.940 | or political correctness or what have you,

00:49:29.620 | pretty soon it will seem like this is what

00:49:32.340 | the whole world is like.

00:49:33.420 | This is all that's going on is the biggest issue.

00:49:35.460 | I don't even see how we can go on and do research anymore.

00:49:37.740 | I talk about this somewhat in deep work,

00:49:40.900 | not in the context of this particular topic,

00:49:42.620 | but I quote the science writer, Winifred Gallagher

00:49:46.540 | from her book "Wrapped" about attention in the brain

00:49:49.140 | where she says, basically, let me just still

00:49:52.140 | a bunch of neuroscience, a bunch of psychology.

00:49:54.860 | Your world is what you pay attention to.

00:49:57.740 | And we think about it,

00:50:00.420 | oh no, there's like this objective world out there.

00:50:03.300 | And like, I see some of it, I don't see other,

00:50:04.900 | but I'm seeing the objective world,

00:50:05.900 | but no, the way we experienced the world

00:50:07.060 | is very shaped by what we experience online.

00:50:09.860 | So this is a good case study of that.

00:50:12.580 | If this is mainly what you're experiencing online,

00:50:15.380 | then it's gonna seem like this particular issue

00:50:17.820 | is intolerable and pervasive everywhere

00:50:20.700 | and it's difficult to go on.

00:50:22.700 | Compare that to someone like myself

00:50:24.180 | who doesn't use social media, who's not online,

00:50:26.780 | who doesn't watch cable news.

00:50:28.420 | And this is not at all my experience,

00:50:31.300 | at least at Georgetown University.

00:50:33.980 | I rarely feel like I am faced contentious issues

00:50:40.100 | surrounding wokeness in my day-to-day life as a professor.

00:50:44.820 | I think if I was on Twitter all the time,

00:50:46.100 | it would feel like different.

00:50:47.540 | None of this is to minimize

00:50:50.140 | that there's not real debates to be had here.

00:50:51.980 | There's not real discussions to be had here.

00:50:54.820 | There's not real concerns on either side of these issues.

00:50:57.300 | Of course there are.

00:50:58.500 | All I'm saying is you're gonna amplify,

00:51:02.260 | you're gonna amplify the role of these issues

00:51:05.900 | in your perception of the world

00:51:07.140 | if you are bathed in these issues.

00:51:08.540 | And so that's why I say the number one thing

00:51:09.860 | you can do is just stop using Twitter and Facebook.

00:51:14.020 | Stop looking at comments, stop looking at tweets,

00:51:18.180 | stop looking at campus outrage report.gov.

00:51:22.780 | I don't know, I don't know websites.

00:51:26.260 | Just take a break from all that.

00:51:29.220 | And what should you do instead?

00:51:30.940 | Deal with real people.

00:51:32.740 | Let me talk to real people.

00:51:34.100 | I'm gonna meet and hang out with my colleagues

00:51:37.460 | and real people.

00:51:38.300 | People have all sorts of different views

00:51:39.500 | and it's a college campus.

00:51:41.260 | So some people will be real extreme over here

00:51:42.820 | and some people might be real extreme over there

00:51:44.260 | and just have empathy and talk to people and know people

00:51:46.420 | and exist in the real world for a while.

00:51:48.300 | And I think you're gonna feel calmer

00:51:51.100 | and things aren't gonna feel so bad.

00:51:53.820 | I know this is a talking point sometimes

00:51:57.460 | of the sort of like elite discourses.

00:51:59.220 | There's a talking point of like all of this stuff

00:52:01.380 | is invented and it's just because of the internet.

00:52:03.060 | And no, I mean, obviously I think there's real issues here

00:52:06.540 | but you're gonna have a much better appreciation

00:52:09.620 | of what's really going on

00:52:12.140 | and what, if anything, you need to do about it

00:52:15.860 | or how you should engage these debates.

00:52:17.380 | If you come at it separate from the internet,

00:52:19.620 | you have to break the hermeneutics

00:52:25.060 | of the digital addiction stimulating panopticon.

00:52:30.060 | Trying to use as many trendy philosophical terms

00:52:33.260 | as I can right here.

00:52:34.700 | If you surface the underlying transnational tensions,

00:52:39.460 | if you see your online existence

00:52:42.940 | as the digitally mediated palimpsest that it is,

00:52:45.980 | if you don't know the word palimpsest

00:52:48.780 | then you're not in a modern humanities discipline,

00:52:50.740 | you haven't read a humanities paper in the last 10 years.

00:52:53.660 | If you do all of that, I think you just have,

00:52:57.020 | it's just like a calmer, more interesting, more engaged,

00:52:59.980 | more fluid, more nuanced understanding of the world.

00:53:03.060 | I gotta tell you, it's just a lot less stressful

00:53:05.460 | to not be filtering your world through the internet.

00:53:08.100 | So there you go, duck and cover.

00:53:09.580 | I ducked a little bit, I covered myself a little bit.

00:53:13.340 | I jumped over to an argument about internet in general,

00:53:18.340 | but that's where I land.

00:53:21.060 | Take a month away from all of that and then reassess.

00:53:23.660 | All right, another deep life question here.

00:53:27.020 | This one is from Penelope.

00:53:30.180 | Penelope asks, "What's it like to be a published author

00:53:33.420 | "and how do you keep sane amid all the competition

00:53:35.820 | "and obsession with book sales and contracts?"

00:53:39.320 | Penelope, you can't pay much attention to it.

00:53:44.840 | Writing is weird, especially if you're doing

00:53:50.900 | big scale professional nonfiction writing like I do.

00:53:54.580 | It's weird and stochastic.

00:53:56.660 | Some books blow up, some don't, it's complicated.

00:53:59.940 | No one can understand necessarily why.

00:54:02.740 | It's like a confusing world.

00:54:04.820 | Sometimes you come across a book, you're like,

00:54:06.620 | I get it, it's a really interesting story

00:54:10.940 | or it's really original or it's Danny Kahneman

00:54:14.020 | is writing "Thinking Fast or Slow" and it's his life's work

00:54:18.300 | and he's finally putting it into a book.

00:54:19.980 | I kinda get that.

00:54:21.340 | And then sometimes it's random.

00:54:23.440 | It's like, I don't know.

00:54:28.580 | Why does James Clear's book on habits,

00:54:31.020 | 5X outsell Charles Duhigg's book on habits?

00:54:33.880 | I don't know.

00:54:36.180 | Why is Mark Manson's first book,

00:54:39.220 | "The Subtle Art of Not Giving Enough Word,"

00:54:42.580 | why did that sell 12 million copies?

00:54:43.780 | It's a great book, but there's a lot of great books

00:54:45.740 | that don't, he doesn't know, I've asked him.

00:54:47.820 | It's like, I don't know.

00:54:48.980 | So you can't worry about it.

00:54:52.460 | So how do you not worry about it?

00:54:53.380 | Well, I'll tell you what I do is I never signed up

00:54:57.160 | for the author portals.

00:54:58.420 | I don't know how to look up sales numbers on my books.

00:55:02.620 | My agent will mention things to me.

00:55:04.380 | My editors will sometimes mention things to me.

00:55:06.020 | I'm like, that sounds great.

00:55:07.380 | But I mainly find out how well my books

00:55:09.160 | are doing twice a year when I get my royalty statements.

00:55:12.620 | I'm like, ah, that's great.

00:55:14.660 | And I think that has done really well.

00:55:16.660 | Contracts, don't worry about book contracts.

00:55:18.220 | That's such a small percentage of your time

00:55:19.620 | where that's relevant.

00:55:20.460 | Like, oh, I'm working on a book contract now, great.

00:55:22.460 | And then there'll be two years again

00:55:23.700 | until you're working on another book contract again.

00:55:25.460 | You're just sort of writing at that point.

00:55:26.700 | So I don't worry about that.

00:55:28.340 | But Penelope, that's my advice.

00:55:29.540 | It's not that you're gonna be able to do this perfectly,

00:55:30.780 | but you just can't compare.

00:55:31.980 | It's like a weird stochastic world.

00:55:33.900 | Why one book does well over here

00:55:36.500 | tells you nothing about how your book should do over here.

00:55:38.440 | Maybe this book should do really well and it doesn't,

00:55:41.180 | or it's going really slow

00:55:42.220 | and then it does really well later.

00:55:44.860 | What I always do is just focus on the next book.

00:55:46.980 | So like when I have a book out,

00:55:48.480 | I don't look up at sales numbers 'cause I don't know how.

00:55:51.580 | And I always just get to the mindset of like,

00:55:53.840 | well, forget that book.

00:55:56.220 | This new one, this is the one that's gonna be a home run.

00:55:59.580 | I was rushed for that one,

00:56:00.820 | but this one's gonna be the home run.

00:56:02.000 | I just get my attention towards

00:56:04.020 | what's happening in the future.

00:56:05.580 | Interesting story.

00:56:07.780 | I mean, I've talked about this before.

00:56:08.700 | I've had a lot of books that seem slow

00:56:11.700 | and then sold a lot later.

00:56:12.980 | So, "So Good They Can't Ignore You."

00:56:15.460 | That came out in 2012.

00:56:16.300 | That was my first major hardcover release.

00:56:20.660 | I'd written those three student books.

00:56:21.740 | It was my first sort of major hardcover idea book,

00:56:23.980 | got a reasonable advance for it.

00:56:26.580 | A lot of energy behind it.

00:56:28.380 | And nothing really happened much when it came out.

00:56:32.280 | And so I think it was considered,

00:56:34.700 | I'm assuming it was considered a failure

00:56:36.700 | because a couple of years later when I sold "Deep Work,"

00:56:40.700 | they knocked $50,000 off the advance

00:56:43.240 | that I got for "So Good They Can't Ignore You."

00:56:45.140 | Like, yeah, I don't think this book worked, right?

00:56:47.100 | It's 2012.

00:56:48.660 | Fast forward to today,

00:56:49.500 | that book has sold 300 plus thousand copies.

00:56:52.340 | Like it's a very successful book,

00:56:53.840 | but you never would have known it.

00:56:54.820 | "Deep Work" has sold a million copies,

00:56:56.460 | but I was worried when "Deep Work" first came out,

00:56:59.300 | I was like on the phone frustrated with my agent.

00:57:02.340 | Like my friends can't even find this in Barnes & Noble.

00:57:04.900 | Like no one cares about this book.

00:57:06.020 | So, you know, sometimes it's random.

00:57:07.220 | You think something's not gonna do well

00:57:08.540 | and then it does really well later.

00:57:10.220 | Or you think something's gonna do really well

00:57:12.500 | and it never does.

00:57:13.480 | So write the next one.

00:57:16.380 | Don't look at sales numbers, write the next one.

00:57:19.300 | All right, we've got a question here from Taylor.

00:57:21.780 | Taylor says, "How do you count time

00:57:25.180 | that is in between "Deep Work" and "Deep Leisure?"

00:57:28.640 | Well, before I even get your elaboration,

00:57:31.540 | my quick answer is like, why are you counting time?

00:57:34.860 | Does it matter?

00:57:35.700 | Let's look at the elaboration,

00:57:37.420 | see if we get some more clarity here.

00:57:39.740 | "I have a practice of deeply reading

00:57:41.340 | and taking careful notes on books

00:57:42.700 | that have no immediate relevance to my scholarly research."

00:57:45.660 | He's a tenured professor.

00:57:46.900 | "Because I file my notes into a Zettelkasten system."

00:57:50.020 | Oh man, here we go.

00:57:50.840 | Zettelkasten corner, take two.

00:57:52.980 | "There is always a chance that my irrelevant notes

00:57:55.300 | may one day prove useful for my day job.

00:57:57.740 | Should I count this note-taking time as "Deep Work"

00:57:59.540 | or do you consider it "Deep Leisure?"

00:58:01.540 | "Wondering for the purpose of budgeting my time

00:58:03.500 | and meeting "Deep Work" quotas."

00:58:06.140 | I mean, I don't know.

00:58:07.180 | Taylor, I'd say don't care so much about that.

00:58:08.940 | I don't think you have to like precisely account

00:58:10.980 | for this time.

00:58:11.820 | You know, is this exactly work or is this exactly leisure?

00:58:17.460 | What does matter?

00:58:18.980 | That you are making regular progress

00:58:22.260 | on the things that really matter and obsessing over quality.

00:58:25.980 | We talked about this earlier in the show,

00:58:27.500 | like how you have a certain,

00:58:28.900 | a reasonable number of projects

00:58:30.200 | you're dealing with concurrently.

00:58:31.980 | You're giving those like good attention,

00:58:34.280 | working on each thing till a natural stopping point

00:58:36.260 | before switching on to the next.

00:58:37.380 | You feel like you're really exercising

00:58:39.220 | your intellectual muscles.

00:58:40.500 | You see the progress being made.

00:58:42.260 | You have the right amount of your time

00:58:43.540 | focused on the stuff that really matters.

00:58:44.980 | Do that and don't worry so much about like,

00:58:46.920 | should that 30 minutes of messing with my

00:58:49.500 | Zettelkasten slip box,

00:58:50.540 | does that count in some ledger book

00:58:51.920 | as deep work or deep leisure?

00:58:53.540 | Don't worry about that.

00:58:54.660 | When you work, when you work,

00:58:55.500 | when you're done, when you're done,

00:58:56.380 | where it overlaps, it overlaps.

00:58:57.940 | All right, so let's, I'm looking at the time here.

00:59:03.820 | Yeah, we're at an hour.

00:59:04.660 | So I think it's a good place to wrap it up.

00:59:06.580 | Thank you everyone for sending in these questions.

00:59:09.380 | And remember, videos are now available.

00:59:14.380 | Link in the show notes.

00:59:15.860 | I'll post a link on my blog

00:59:17.200 | and pretty soon we'll have a personalized URL you can use,

00:59:19.360 | but go check out those videos.

00:59:20.780 | We'll be putting up the videos

00:59:21.980 | of the questions you heard today.

00:59:23.000 | We'll trickle those out throughout the next week or two.

00:59:25.440 | And until next time, stay deep.

00:59:30.280 | (upbeat music)

00:59:32.860 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:59:36.220 | [MUSIC]

Full Length Episode | #167 | January 24, 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

Chapters