Why Solitude Promotes Greatness - The Power Of Being Alone

00:00:00.000 | So, one of the tricky aspects of new technologies is that they can sometimes destabilize parts

00:00:06.840 | of our lives that we didn't even know exist and didn't even know were important.

00:00:12.280 | We get this vague feeling of unease, but we don't really know where it's coming from.

00:00:18.960 | We saw this, for example, in the world of digital knowledge work.

00:00:23.440 | When personal computers and email and then mobile computing came along, it really changed

00:00:28.320 | the character of this type of work.

00:00:30.960 | We became more busy and more frantic than ever before.

00:00:33.800 | So we were assuming, given how much effort we were putting out, that we must somehow

00:00:37.960 | be more productive than we were before.

00:00:41.400 | And yet, during that revolution, people had a sinking suspicion that something was wrong.

00:00:47.120 | We couldn't necessarily point to all the new important things that we were accomplishing.

00:00:50.760 | We were busier, but we didn't necessarily feel more productive.

00:00:54.920 | So this was a case where it turned out that the real issue is there was two different

00:00:58.720 | types of work and we didn't know it.

00:01:00.680 | We didn't have this vocabulary before.

00:01:02.400 | But there was deep work, and then there was shallow work.

00:01:06.420 | And all of the new digital productivity tools that came in the 20th century, 21st century

00:01:11.680 | office were increasing the speed and quantity of shallow work, but were actually decreasing

00:01:17.040 | the amount of deep work.

00:01:18.120 | And that is why we felt more busy than ever before, but weren't actually producing more.

00:01:26.320 | So we didn't realize there was a difference between deep and shallow work.

00:01:29.720 | And we didn't realize, therefore, that technology was subtly destabilizing this and making our

00:01:33.320 | lives worse because of it.

00:01:35.080 | So today I want to talk about a similar problem in our personal lives.

00:01:39.680 | As we begin to spend more and more time interacting with our phones, something that really picked

00:01:45.040 | up right around 2008, 2009, really hit its stride in 2012, it's easy to look at the positives,

00:01:50.400 | right?

00:01:51.400 | We have more information, more connection, more distraction, more entertainment.

00:01:54.440 | And all of this delivered in times that we would otherwise just be bored.

00:01:58.840 | There's concerns, of course, about the specific things we were looking at on our phones.

00:02:03.960 | But the idea was, look, if you can stay away from the toxic stuff, if you can stay away

00:02:07.360 | from the toxic social media threads, this was a net positive.

00:02:13.720 | Life has just become more interesting than it was before.

00:02:16.620 | And yet, just like with digital knowledge work, we once again have this sinking feeling

00:02:22.280 | that something is off, that our lives are somehow not quite right in a world in which

00:02:28.000 | we're looking at our phones so much.

00:02:29.200 | We can't say exactly why it's a problem, but people just feel uneasy when they survey the

00:02:35.000 | crowds around them and see everyone's face looking down.

00:02:38.920 | So I want to get into that today, because I'm going to identify first what it is that

00:02:44.400 | we are losing in this current state of constant phone usage, the sort of hidden thing that

00:02:49.880 | was important to our lives that we didn't even realize that's being destabilized.

00:02:54.920 | And once we realize what it is that we are losing, I'm going to give you concrete advice

00:02:59.520 | for how to regain it, and how to by doing so, regain the depth in your life.

00:03:05.800 | All right, so let's get specific here.

00:03:08.760 | What is it that we have to worry about when we look at our phones so much?

00:03:13.160 | Well, it's a specific cognitive state that I think most of us don't realize is important,

00:03:17.320 | and I'm going to call it the quiet brain.

00:03:21.520 | This is the cognitive state when you are alone with your own thoughts and your observations

00:03:26.280 | of the world around you.

00:03:28.040 | So when you're truly in a quiet brain state, it sort of feels like this.

00:03:32.160 | The cacophonous chatter in your head has settled into a singular internal discussion or conversation.

00:03:38.720 | Or exploration.

00:03:39.720 | So you sort of have a single discussion happening in your brain.

00:03:43.440 | What do I think about this?

00:03:44.840 | Or what happened there?

00:03:47.000 | What might be exciting to do next?

00:03:49.000 | And this conversation in your brain will go quiet sometimes, and it'll just be you observing

00:03:53.360 | the world around you, seeing something around you, just fully observing, and then the conversation

00:03:57.160 | will come back again.

00:03:58.440 | It's slow.

00:03:59.440 | It's solemn.

00:04:00.440 | Then it kind of dies off again as you notice something else.

00:04:02.680 | So it's you, the world around you, and a sort of calm internal dialogue.

00:04:08.160 | That's the quiet brain state.

00:04:10.080 | Now here's the thing.

00:04:11.080 | This is basically the default state for the human brain ever since we got to the stage

00:04:16.120 | of verbal language.

00:04:17.720 | I think for most of our history, most of the time during the day, we were in a quiet brain

00:04:23.400 | state.

00:04:24.400 | We were sort of looking around as we were doing our daily labors, our daily journeys.

00:04:28.200 | We were seeing things.

00:04:29.200 | We were noticing things.

00:04:30.200 | And then having these conversations internally come up, stick around for a while, then sort

00:04:35.620 | of die down again.

00:04:37.000 | Not unlike being on the porch with an old friend in the rocking chairs, and as the evening

00:04:44.680 | wears on, you have conversation that drifts in and out, and sometimes you're just watching

00:04:49.040 | the wind blow.

00:04:50.040 | That was our default state.

00:04:52.820 | Why is this quiet brain state important to humans?

00:04:56.000 | Well there's three things I want to mention.

00:04:59.040 | First it's calming.

00:05:01.040 | If you've had this state, you go for a long hike, and you don't have anything in your

00:05:04.280 | ears, and you see what's around you, and you'll think about something for a while, then back

00:05:09.080 | to observing what's around you, we feel restored.

00:05:12.000 | To use a computer metaphor, it allows our brain to defragment, to sort of clean up what's

00:05:16.160 | going on inside.

00:05:17.600 | I'm sure from a neurophysiological perspective, there's something to be said about chemicals

00:05:22.580 | being reset and rebalanced within our brains.

00:05:25.480 | In my book, Digital Minimalism, I talked about the huge neural load required to do social

00:05:32.880 | interaction or to simulate other people's brains, and so to have relief from that, to

00:05:36.760 | just be alone with you and your own thoughts, this lets your brain actually catch a breather.

00:05:41.680 | The second thing that happens during the quiet brain state is that you're able to make sense

00:05:45.120 | of yourselves and the world around you.

00:05:49.000 | It is extended periods alone with your own thought where you process the information

00:05:53.580 | that you've taken in and make sense of it, that you integrate it into the multiple internal

00:05:58.480 | schemas stored inside your brain that you use to make sense of yourself and the world.

00:06:03.520 | Maybe you had an experience recently that elicited pride or shame.

00:06:06.680 | This lets you process that.

00:06:09.200 | What does that mean?

00:06:10.200 | Why did that happen?

00:06:11.200 | What do I want to learn from this?

00:06:12.280 | What do I want to change going forward?

00:06:14.220 | It helps you better understand other people because you can sit there and really think

00:06:17.400 | about what's going on with this person?

00:06:19.180 | Why do they actually feel this way?

00:06:21.040 | What are the people that I'm leading or involved in a community with?

00:06:24.560 | What is it that they really need or what they're struggling with?

00:06:27.360 | It also helps you understand the world of ideas.

00:06:30.440 | A complicated idea that you may be encountered in a podcast or a book isn't going to be accessibly

00:06:37.580 | integrated into your brain, something you can build on or apply to other things later

00:06:41.080 | in life until you give yourself time to actually let it bounce around, to think about it, to

00:06:45.960 | explore the different hard edges of this new complex shape and to integrate it into the

00:06:50.240 | folds of your brain.

00:06:52.200 | So it's literally where you become smarter as well.

00:06:54.920 | Finally, the quiet brain state is where you figure out what matters to you.

00:07:00.000 | What's important to you?

00:07:01.000 | What's not?

00:07:02.000 | What do you want in your life?

00:07:03.000 | What do you want to avoid?

00:07:04.800 | This requires discernment, by which I mean it requires you to actually pick up and notice

00:07:11.680 | these subtle feelings of resonance.

00:07:15.040 | Something about what I'm seeing in this documentary right now just speaks to me.

00:07:18.560 | There's something in there that's important.

00:07:20.360 | Something about this experience over here is really turning me off.

00:07:23.840 | I think there's something in this that I really don't like.

00:07:26.400 | To really pull apart those threads and isolate them in a way that's usable, you need quiet

00:07:32.060 | time alone with your own thoughts.

00:07:34.560 | I hear this a lot from people who are trying to follow my ideas and advice about cultivating

00:07:39.980 | a deeper life.

00:07:41.560 | They'll realize, "I don't know what to aim for.

00:07:45.640 | I don't know what it is I'm trying to get more of in my life and what it is I'm trying

00:07:48.640 | to reduce," and that's because they don't have enough quiet brain time to actually figure

00:07:51.820 | that out.

00:07:52.820 | The quieter your brain can get, the more sophisticated your understanding can become of what's important

00:07:58.360 | to you and what's not.

00:08:00.240 | There's huge benefits to the quiet brain.

00:08:04.280 | What is our current problem?

00:08:05.280 | Our current problem is this is exactly what is being subtly and quietly eliminated by

00:08:11.200 | this behavior of constantly looking at our phones.

00:08:14.200 | It's something we didn't realize was being destabilized, but it's a big source of that

00:08:17.800 | disquiet we feel about the constant companion model of looking at our phones every time

00:08:23.160 | we have some down time.

00:08:26.540 | Because we have mobile computing and high-speed ubiquitous wireless internet, for the first

00:08:30.040 | time in human history, we really can banish every moment in which we would have fallen

00:08:33.980 | into the quiet brain state, every moment of boredom, every moment of not having something

00:08:38.800 | to do.

00:08:39.800 | We can listen to something or read something.

00:08:41.380 | We can have high-tech algorithms using lots of data on ourselves and our preferences show

00:08:47.380 | us like exactly what's going to be entertaining in the moment.

00:08:52.140 | It's like going from like a state of starvation to having an advanced snack machine that follows

00:08:56.340 | you around that gives you your very favorite junk food whenever you're hungry.

00:09:00.860 | So this is the thing that we're quietly losing without realizing it by looking at our phones

00:09:06.140 | all the time.

00:09:07.140 | This quiet brain state that we used to spend so much time in is being eliminated.

00:09:12.620 | We don't notice it.

00:09:13.620 | We don't have the terminology for it.

00:09:15.700 | But it comes out when we just look around and say, "This doesn't feel right that we're

00:09:19.700 | all looking at our phones all the time."

00:09:21.900 | And it's not because what's really happening here is that we are quite literally not fully

00:09:27.220 | being human.

00:09:28.860 | This quiet brain state, which is so core to the human experience, we're just getting rid

00:09:33.420 | of it without realizing it.

00:09:34.820 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:09:35.820 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:09:40.340 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:09:47.800 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:09:53.220 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:09:58.580 | I know you're going to like it.

00:10:00.400 | Check it out.

00:10:01.400 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:10:02.400 | All right.

00:10:03.400 | So we want to do something about this.

00:10:06.260 | We want to reclaim more quiet brain time in our lives.

00:10:11.020 | Now, this is going to require not just making time for this, but becoming once again more

00:10:15.820 | comfortable with it.

00:10:17.500 | This can be an uncomfortable state if you haven't been in there in a while.

00:10:20.340 | We're not used to our own brain.

00:10:21.620 | We can get bored or antsy or afraid pretty easily.

00:10:24.480 | So we have to reclaim our comfort with the quiet brain.

00:10:27.340 | We have to carve out more time to actually have this cognitive state.

00:10:33.060 | So I want to give you some concrete advice here.

00:10:35.540 | I have four ideas, four concrete ideas, all of them built towards the same goal, the same

00:10:43.740 | goal of eliminating this constant companion relationship with your phone, where it's something

00:10:49.840 | that's always with you, that can deliver you incredibly appealing information distraction,

00:10:55.760 | and that you're in the habit of doing at even the slightest hint of not having directed

00:11:00.220 | work to do.

00:11:01.220 | All right.

00:11:02.220 | So we're going to break this constant companion model with your phone.

00:11:05.100 | We're going to do so with four pieces of advice.

00:11:07.020 | All right, piece of advice number one, make your phone more boring.

00:11:13.340 | So I want you to take off your phone any app where someone makes more money the more time

00:11:18.340 | you use that app.

00:11:19.940 | So this is a course including essentially every social media app.

00:11:23.200 | It's also including, for example, addictive games, games you download for free.

00:11:29.540 | But the more you play it, the better it is for the company.

00:11:33.300 | This is also going to involve probably if you're using the YouTube app on your phone

00:11:36.780 | a lot too, and just sort of jumping around the recommendations on there when you're bored.

00:11:42.340 | So what does this make your phone if you don't have those apps on it?

00:11:45.140 | It makes your phone exactly what it was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone, when

00:11:48.540 | he first introduced the modern smartphone in his famous keynote in 2007.

00:11:53.180 | What did Jobs outline in that original introduction of the iPhone?

00:11:56.700 | What did he outline as the phone's main uses?

00:11:59.460 | Communication, it's a really good interface for communicating with people, be it calls

00:12:03.940 | or text messages.

00:12:05.620 | Audio, he really was pushing music, but of course now this is audio books and podcasts.

00:12:10.300 | It's a fantastic audio player navigation, right?

00:12:12.940 | You have this fantastic map, so you never have to get lost again.

00:12:15.940 | And looking up information relevant to what you're doing in the moment.

00:12:19.380 | Where is the address of this restaurant we're looking for?

00:12:22.200 | What is the hours of this museum?

00:12:23.640 | Is it still open?

00:12:24.640 | We want to figure out so we can decide whether we want to go there or not, right?

00:12:29.440 | Those were the original visions for the phone.

00:12:31.540 | It's a fantastic vision.

00:12:32.780 | It makes it an incredibly useful part of your life, but it doesn't make it something that

00:12:37.420 | you would pull out at a moment's notice when distracted.

00:12:40.660 | So make your phone more boring.

00:12:43.000 | Number two, practice the phone foyer method.

00:12:47.420 | I recommend this all the time.

00:12:49.620 | People do not want to do this.

00:12:51.180 | This is probably the scariest suggestion that I will make here, but I have to tell you it

00:12:55.820 | works.

00:12:57.460 | It really will change your relationship with your phone.

00:12:59.780 | I know it sounds scary, but it really will.

00:13:01.540 | All right, for people who don't know it, here is how it works.

00:13:05.620 | When at home, you keep your phone plugged in in a set location, not in your pocket with

00:13:09.320 | you.

00:13:10.800 | So I call it the phone foyer method because if you have a house, maybe you have a foyer

00:13:14.840 | near the front door where you put your keys, it's a great place to plug it in.

00:13:18.620 | If you don't have a foyer, it could be, for example, in your kitchen or in your home office.

00:13:22.160 | You keep it plugged in when you're at home.

00:13:24.660 | If you need to look something up, you go to where your phone is plugged in, you look it

00:13:27.820 | up.

00:13:28.820 | If you need to text someone, you go to your phone and you text them there.

00:13:32.820 | If you need to call someone, you go to the phone and you call them there.

00:13:37.160 | If you need to have a back and forth conversation with someone, you know, you're going to have

00:13:39.860 | to sit there and do it where the phone is plugged in.

00:13:42.420 | So you're not eliminating any use of the phone, but you are eliminating the immediate access.

00:13:47.820 | So this means when you're at the table, when you're eating breakfast, when you're watching

00:13:52.660 | TV or a movie with your family, the phone is not there to alleviate any boredom.

00:13:57.020 | It's in the other room, it's plugged in.

00:13:59.180 | And so you have to just stay with whatever you're doing.

00:14:01.780 | You sit down to read a book, you can't look at your phone real quick when you have those

00:14:04.460 | little moments of boredom.

00:14:05.460 | Your phone is plugged in, in the other room.

00:14:09.140 | Now what about audio when you're doing chores around the house?

00:14:11.380 | Well, you use, you know, wireless earbuds, it's fine.

00:14:15.860 | Someone once said, "Well, wait a second, my house is kind of large and if my phone is

00:14:19.380 | plugged in over here and I'm doing the dishes over here, my earbuds don't reach."

00:14:25.380 | Okay, fine.

00:14:26.380 | Change where you plug it in if you need to, to do a chore in another part of your house.

00:14:30.100 | The key thing is not to have it on your person.

00:14:33.120 | This is really effective because it gets to the core of the constant companion model,

00:14:38.500 | which is the default knee jerk reaction of bored, pull it out, bored, pull it out.

00:14:42.940 | You eliminate that ability, your brain pretty quickly learns to make that association less

00:14:47.580 | strong and that urge, that dopamine-driven urge of, "I'm going to feel good in a second

00:14:53.060 | here when I look at this distraction," that will begin to dissipate.

00:14:55.980 | So you really have to practice the phone for your method, even though I know you don't

00:14:59.980 | want to.

00:15:00.980 | All right, my third piece of advice, this is kind of controversial as well, stop reading

00:15:06.180 | so much stuff on your phone.

00:15:07.700 | All right, I love written material, but I don't want you to think of your phone as a

00:15:13.020 | place that always has interesting things you can scroll through and read when you're bored.

00:15:17.740 | So there's a couple of things you can do to actually implement this advice.

00:15:20.860 | First of all, I love email newsletters.

00:15:22.900 | You should have those all filtered, if you're using something like Gmail, filtered to a

00:15:26.820 | particular label.

00:15:27.820 | And then what you can do is every once in a while, go through those newsletters.

00:15:32.020 | And these can include, by the way, newsletters, daily news roundups from the major news sources

00:15:37.060 | you follow.

00:15:38.060 | So we're talking not just independent information, but major news as well.

00:15:43.180 | Send the interesting articles either to a reading app, or there's a cool app someone

00:15:48.700 | was showing me the other day that can send articles to your Kindle.

00:15:51.900 | Send to Kindle.

00:15:53.660 | So either clip it in a reading app, or maybe send it directly to a Kindle.

00:15:58.580 | Then to read these articles, you can, if you send them to your Kindle, you can read them

00:16:02.140 | right there on your Kindle where you have no other distractions.

00:16:04.540 | If you sent them to a reader app like Pocket, you could use like an iPad that has that app,

00:16:10.580 | it syncs up with it.

00:16:11.580 | And that's like what you use to read the articles you sent over there, right?

00:16:15.860 | So you're not, it's not on your phone, it's on a separate device.

00:16:19.300 | And now you can read these interesting articles that you got digitally delivered in times

00:16:24.780 | in place that you've set aside for this.

00:16:26.300 | Like I've talked about the Sunday morning ritual of going to a coffee shop with your

00:16:29.460 | Kindle or iPad to catch up on articles.

00:16:32.180 | Or it could be something you do right before dinner, or you do at night in your study,

00:16:36.140 | but you're not giving up on this miraculous element of the internet, which is there's

00:16:41.340 | more information for more interesting people that's more accessible, but you're taking

00:16:46.020 | it off of your phone.

00:16:47.020 | Because again, this is all about making your phone no longer this totemic source of distraction

00:16:51.820 | that like everything is on here, if I pick it up, that's going to make my life less

00:16:55.260 | boring.

00:16:56.420 | Finally, you have to actually just practice this boredom.

00:17:00.660 | And by boredom, I mean, being alone with your own thoughts, you have to get used to that.

00:17:05.220 | This will take some time, but you have to get used to that.

00:17:06.900 | Now I recommend often on the show, a pretty specific rhythm for this, a small session

00:17:11.860 | every day where you go and do something with nothing in your ear and nothing in your hand,

00:17:15.620 | we're talking about you run into run an errand, or you go to buy some coffee, and you don't

00:17:21.460 | bring your phone with you.

00:17:22.460 | Or if you do have your phone with you, it's in your bag and it's turned off.

00:17:24.900 | It's just every day, you get a little bit more comfort with just my brain is all I have

00:17:29.700 | to entertain me.

00:17:31.100 | Once a week, then I want you to do a longer session, like a long walk or a hike, or you

00:17:35.500 | mow your whole yard or something, a longer session alone with your own thoughts.

00:17:38.740 | For now, you can really get used to that sort of, I bring up a conversation, I can get bored

00:17:43.940 | with it, it's just looking around for a while, another conversation comes up that sort of

00:17:47.740 | we're on the porch, and there's just some moments of silence type calm and peace.

00:17:52.500 | So a short session every day of boredom, a long session every week.

00:17:56.380 | All right, so this is my four pieces of advice to summarize, make your phone more boring,

00:18:01.740 | practice the phone for your method, stop reading on your phone, practice boredom.

00:18:08.060 | You do these things and you can reclaim the quiet mind as a state that you not only go

00:18:13.280 | into more frequently, but that you're much more comfortable being in.

00:18:17.220 | It will take about four to six weeks of practicing this advice before this becomes natural, before

00:18:23.740 | you really begin to reap the benefits and not just feel the difficulties of it.

00:18:27.940 | But those benefits are worth it.

00:18:31.140 | It really is like your life has been turned from black and white to technicolor.

00:18:36.980 | It's just it's slower and more vivid and more rich and more intellectually interesting.

00:18:41.700 | Your sense of yourself as a person and what's happening in the world around you and what's

00:18:45.080 | important to you, all of this will become sharper.

00:18:48.420 | You will quite literally feel more human.

00:18:51.380 | So this advice is hard, but I think it's worth giving a try because the quiet brain is not

00:18:56.580 | a state that we should be comfortable fully abandoning from the human experience.

00:19:01.940 | All right, so there we go, Jesse, quiet brain.

00:19:05.100 | You know where this came from actually was working on my deep life book.

00:19:08.380 | Oh, really?

00:19:09.380 | Up here.

00:19:10.380 | Yeah.

00:19:11.380 | Up here on vacation is where it kind of became, I began thinking more and more about the importance

00:19:14.540 | of the quiet brain and to discern like what you want to do with your deep life.

00:19:19.260 | And so I've been kind of been grappling it up here in this quiet, this quiet undisclosed

00:19:24.020 | location.

00:19:25.020 | So I thought I would, I would try out some of the ideas.

00:19:27.420 | I have two questions for the no reading on your phone.

00:19:30.300 | Is that due to the temptation to look at other things?

00:19:33.740 | Yeah.

00:19:34.740 | Yeah.

00:19:35.740 | And also just, uh, I want your phone to seem like the Steve jobs, 2007 device, very utilitarian.

00:19:41.880 | So the more you have sort of just like generic button pressing, nice distraction on the phone,

00:19:48.420 | the more you're going to be tempted to just, this is what I do when I'm bored.

00:19:52.480 | Um, so, so a lot of people will maybe get off to like I'm on Instagram or Tik TOK on

00:19:57.400 | the phone, but in this have so many like news feeds and recommended articles, uh, and it

00:20:01.880 | can, it can take them down that same pathway of just quick distraction.

00:20:06.760 | Yeah.

00:20:07.760 | Yeah.

00:20:08.760 | So you're going to read, read.

00:20:09.760 | Um, the other thing I would add, you know, I, I had this

00:20:11.760 | note.

00:20:12.760 | I'll add, I'll add one more note to the stop reading on your phone.

00:20:14.440 | I'll add a little addendum, read more physical stuff too.

00:20:17.400 | And we might call this the Rory Gilmore method is a Gilmore girls reference.

00:20:21.720 | She always had books with her.

00:20:23.720 | So consider always having a physical book with you as well.

00:20:27.360 | So in moments of boredom, it is a physical book and not your phone that you turn to.

00:20:31.960 | I think that's also a fantastic, a fantastic way to disassociate again, your phone as like

00:20:36.680 | a distraction machine.

00:20:38.560 | Um, and then in terms of the larger session every week, I guess golfing will count, right?

00:20:46.560 | If you didn't have your phone, you're like carrying your bag and walking.

00:20:49.280 | Yeah.

00:20:50.280 | I think it'd be great.

00:20:51.280 | Yeah.

00:20:52.280 | You're golfing.

00:20:53.280 | Uh, you know, you're there with your buddy, you're talking, you're listening, you're thinking

00:20:56.040 | about what you're doing.

00:20:57.040 | You're, I think there's a reason why, uh, people today really like golf.

00:21:03.240 | Like one of the benefits they get from it is like, it's some of their only quiet brain

00:21:06.320 | time.

00:21:07.320 | So yeah, you're justified, Jesse, with your, your, uh, outrageous amount of time you spend

00:21:14.200 | playing golf.

00:21:15.200 | Yeah.

00:21:16.200 | Think about my swing and cry.

00:21:17.200 | Exactly.

00:21:18.200 | Just want you to sit there and just contemplate what's wrong with your swing.

00:21:21.560 | All right, well, we've got a great group of questions here, uh, dealing with this and

00:21:27.960 | quiet and solitude and distraction work, all sorts of cool stuff.

00:21:30.560 | But before we get there, let's, uh, quickly hear from one of the sponsors.

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00:22:49.600 | If you need to hire, don't let this become what I call a task engine.

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00:23:34.400 | indeed.

00:23:35.400 | I also want to talk about our friends at notion.

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00:23:47.200 | It's a workspace design, not just for making progress, but getting inspired.

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00:23:58.680 | business or to run your life.

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00:24:04.240 | One of the ways we used to use notion, for example, was to keep track of our ad reads

00:24:08.400 | like I'm doing right now.

00:24:09.760 | Our ad agency actually built out a really cool notion workspace where we could see the

00:24:15.480 | information, all the information relevant to these ads in many different forms.

00:24:19.240 | We could look at a calendar, for example, a calendar view and say, okay, what are the

00:24:23.640 | ads for this particular episode?

00:24:26.000 | But then we could click on one of those ads and say, why don't you show me all of the

00:24:29.400 | ads that we've done for that particular advertiser?

00:24:32.840 | There is the system that they set up with notion made it easy for us to enter an information.

00:24:37.400 | Oh, here's the link to the episode.

00:24:39.200 | Here's the timestamps.

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00:24:45.580 | than trying to just throw shared documents back around and send emails.

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00:25:38.800 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:25:44.280 | Sounds good.

00:25:45.280 | First questions from triple a is walking meditation an important skill or is it used as a tool

00:25:50.440 | to learn to focus?

00:25:51.880 | Oh, it's a good question.

00:25:54.260 | Triple a because people ask about this a lot using traditional meditation techniques to

00:26:01.560 | help improve their ability to focus.

00:26:04.720 | So walking meditation is a traditional technique.

00:26:07.840 | It comes, for example, out of mindfulness meditation.

00:26:10.540 | So one of the ways to do mindfulness meditation is to go on a walk so that your body's in

00:26:15.180 | physical motion.

00:26:17.180 | And then during traditional walking meditation, you just try to keep your attention just on

00:26:22.140 | your thoughts without engaging them, just like you do when you're sitting doing mindfulness

00:26:26.160 | meditation.

00:26:27.160 | But some people, myself included, find it easier to be moving.

00:26:31.160 | It also just gives you sort of more to look at, makes it sort of easier to get that distance

00:26:36.520 | from your inner dialogue.

00:26:37.720 | So walking meditation is great for the benefits you get from traditional mindfulness meditation.

00:26:44.760 | However, if you want to learn to focus better, my advice is always practice directly focusing

00:26:50.920 | better.

00:26:52.560 | Don't look for a transference of ability from related tasks.

00:26:57.000 | It's usually better just to practice directly the thing you want to be better at.

00:27:01.860 | So if you want to be better at focusing on your work, let's devise routines to practice

00:27:06.840 | focusing better on your work.

00:27:08.460 | Let's directly practice what we want to do.

00:27:11.040 | There's two things I usually recommend here, two practice regimes I usually recommend for

00:27:14.940 | getting better at focusing on your work.

00:27:17.200 | One is interval training.

00:27:19.420 | So use an actual timer.

00:27:22.180 | You can start at 20 minutes if you're new to this.

00:27:25.000 | And start the timer and focus on what you're doing really, really intensely.

00:27:28.960 | If your attention wanders, bring it back to the work you're doing and try to focus really

00:27:33.800 | intensely.

00:27:34.800 | Remember, you only have to do this for the time or duration, so it doesn't seem open-ended

00:27:38.280 | and impossible.

00:27:39.680 | Also, that voice that says like, "Well, why don't we take a break now?" is much more easy

00:27:45.240 | to diffuse when you're doing interval training because you can say, "No, the break is going

00:27:49.000 | to come when this timer's over."

00:27:51.240 | So we don't have to have a negotiation about whether or not to take a break now.

00:27:55.720 | It's in 10 minutes.

00:27:57.080 | We can wait 10 minutes.

00:27:58.400 | Now, the key to interval training is if you actually go and look at something else, you

00:28:03.760 | look at the web, you look at your phone, you have to restart the timer, so there's some

00:28:08.440 | stakes there as well.

00:28:10.360 | And what you do is you start with a time that's a little bit of a stretch, and then after

00:28:14.320 | you get more comfortable with that time, you increase it by 10 minutes.

00:28:17.760 | So 20 minutes, let's just go all in, focus.

00:28:21.080 | It's really hard, but I can do 20 minutes because I'm going to be embarrassed if I can't.

00:28:25.480 | Once it's no longer so hard, I make that 30 minutes, so maybe that's like a week later.

00:28:28.720 | Now I'm doing these like 30-minute chunks until that's pretty comfortable, then I make

00:28:31.640 | it 40-minute chunks.

00:28:32.640 | And if you can get to about 90 minutes to two hours of being able to really focus hard,

00:28:37.440 | there you go.

00:28:39.160 | You've got a sort of A+ focus ability.

00:28:41.020 | So interval training directly increases your ability to focus on the type of stuff you

00:28:45.440 | need to focus on.

00:28:47.120 | The other thing I recommend, and this might be where your connection or mix-up around

00:28:51.440 | walking meditation and focus might have come from, is what I call productive meditation.

00:28:57.240 | This does involve walking, but it's not walking meditation.

00:29:02.240 | So what you do with productive meditation is you go for a long walk and try to make

00:29:06.640 | progress on a single professional problem, the type of thing you want to get better at.

00:29:11.640 | Make progress on a single professional problem only in your head.

00:29:16.000 | And when your attention wanders from that problem, which it will do, you just bring

00:29:20.120 | your attention back to that problem and keep trying to make progress.

00:29:23.400 | Do this with your phone not with you or turned off in your bag so it's just you alone with

00:29:27.320 | your own thoughts trying to make progress on a professional problem.

00:29:31.440 | This will be hard at first.

00:29:33.760 | Your mind will wander a lot.

00:29:35.080 | In fact, I can guarantee one thing your mind, if you're new to this, will almost certainly

00:29:38.600 | do is try to write emails.

00:29:42.320 | I don't know why this is the case, but knowledge worker after knowledge worker reports this

00:29:46.080 | to me.

00:29:47.080 | When they first try productive meditation, the first thing their mind tries to do is

00:29:50.480 | wander from the problem at hand and think about emails it needs to write and it starts

00:29:54.240 | writing the text in your brain.

00:29:55.920 | That's fine.

00:29:56.920 | Just notice it and bring your attention back to the problem.

00:29:59.760 | Eventually you'll get better at this.

00:30:01.600 | You'll be able to keep your mind's eye more stable and you'll be able to better take advantage

00:30:06.840 | of your working memory resources, meaning you'll have more things you can keep held

00:30:11.240 | in your mind's eye to reference while you're trying to make mental progress on your problem.

00:30:16.480 | Productive meditation is hard, but it makes you really good at focus.

00:30:20.120 | I spent my two years as a postdoc at MIT doing a large quantity of productive meditation

00:30:25.360 | and it really made a big difference on my ability to actually grapple with problems.

00:30:28.640 | So if you're going to become better at focusing, practice getting better at focusing.

00:30:33.920 | If you want the benefits of mindfulness meditation, practice mindfulness meditation.

00:30:39.400 | But I wouldn't depend too much on transference from one to the other.

00:30:43.920 | All right, what do we got next?

00:30:47.180 | Next question's from Tired New Dad.

00:30:49.400 | I'm a new dad, however I want to change my job and this will require that I get new certifications.

00:30:55.000 | But this all takes time outside of work, which I feel like I have none.

00:30:58.520 | How can I advance my career in this new period of my life?

00:31:03.080 | Don't advance your career in this particular period of your life, right?

00:31:07.380 | It's possible, Tired New Dad, that you're having a bit of a panic reaction.

00:31:13.360 | This big disruptive thing has happened.

00:31:15.980 | It's scary and disoriented.

00:31:17.180 | There's a baby in the house and it's like everything feels out of control and you're

00:31:22.180 | fighting with your wife about who's doing what and it all seems kind of weird and scary

00:31:27.600 | and you're worried.

00:31:29.600 | A big change can feel like this is going to make me feel better.

00:31:33.680 | Changes we think make us feel better.

00:31:35.320 | There's an excitement in doing something new.

00:31:37.060 | We want to change something up.

00:31:38.280 | It's a way to regain autonomy and a way to seek the chemical soothing of positive change.

00:31:48.080 | However, this is not the time to do that.

00:31:51.120 | This is the time to make your side hustle, your side project, where you're putting your

00:31:56.220 | extra energy.

00:31:57.220 | All of that should be focused on your new kid and your wife.

00:32:01.060 | How do we get through this?

00:32:02.060 | How do we make this as reasonable as possible?

00:32:04.320 | How do I prevent my partner from going insane?

00:32:06.560 | How can I be as useful as possible?

00:32:09.260 | This is what you should be focused on at least in this period where you're tired because

00:32:12.960 | you have a very new baby.

00:32:14.440 | That's what I'm going to suggest.

00:32:18.040 | Now this idea of changing your job, when do you get back to this?

00:32:20.720 | You get back to this after what I call the new baby stabilization point.

00:32:23.960 | I've been through this three times and so I learned through experience that in that

00:32:29.280 | early period of everything is up in the air because we have an infinite home, the thing

00:32:33.160 | I would look forward to to calm myself is knowing you're going to get to what I call

00:32:38.800 | the new baby stabilization point, which is when you first get into a sustainable, stable,

00:32:46.720 | ongoing routine with the child, which usually means maternity and paternity leaves are over.

00:32:53.760 | The childcare situation is figured out.

00:32:56.920 | Like, okay, here's the daycare, here's the nanny, whatever it is, and it's like, great,

00:33:01.780 | we have the sustainable setup.

00:33:04.600 | We dropped the kid off here at this time, we pick them up here, here's what we do with

00:33:07.600 | our schedules to make this work.

00:33:09.000 | So you're no longer in a period of temporarily facing a disruption, but you've come back

00:33:14.760 | to like, okay, this is what we're going to do for the next year or two.

00:33:17.880 | That's when you can start thinking again about side projects, right?

00:33:20.520 | Because now you're no longer all hands on deck, you're back to like, okay, here's our

00:33:23.440 | new stable configuration.

00:33:25.760 | We have a new stable configuration for our family.

00:33:27.760 | Now I can actually step back and say, what changes do I want to make?

00:33:31.480 | All right.

00:33:32.480 | So that's the way I would think about this is until you're at the new baby stabilization

00:33:35.920 | point and just focus on the new baby and your wife right now, like that's where you want

00:33:42.100 | to be.

00:33:43.100 | That's where you want to be focusing.

00:33:44.360 | The other recommendation I'm going to give here is, you know, if this is your first kid,

00:33:49.560 | now you have a family that's different than let's say, even just being married, you have

00:33:52.640 | a family, which means your lifestyle centric planning from which any decision like to change

00:33:58.880 | your job should be, uh, stemming from, it should be working backwards from a lifestyle

00:34:03.240 | vision, not working forward towards a singular goal.

00:34:06.120 | This lifestyle vision needs to now be fully shared.

00:34:08.800 | You and your wife need to sit down and really think through what do we want our lifestyle

00:34:12.520 | to be like the next few years, five years from now, 10 years from now, you have to be

00:34:16.280 | on the same page.

00:34:17.400 | All these decisions need to be decisions made to help the family's vision.

00:34:22.840 | Very important that you do not fall into, uh, I, me, the sort of singular, what do I

00:34:28.960 | want in my job?

00:34:31.060 | Uh, I want to react to this part of my life being harder by being able to do this other

00:34:35.080 | part of my life more.

00:34:36.480 | It's my turn to make this more what I want to be.

00:34:38.960 | Everything now needs to be family focused as the family lifestyle that you're working

00:34:42.280 | backwards from, not just what you think might be interesting or what might be best for your

00:34:46.440 | career.

00:34:47.440 | So there's a, there's a real change that happens in the air when you go from a couple to a

00:34:50.480 | family.

00:34:51.480 | All right.

00:34:53.600 | I really do remember that after the first kid, Jesse, I got really good at it.

00:34:58.040 | It really was call me being like, yeah, it's going to be six months from now.

00:35:02.160 | We will have it.

00:35:03.160 | We'll be in the stable routine.

00:35:05.680 | And once we're in a sustainable, stable routine, everything's possible again.

00:35:08.760 | And so don't worry about the moment being really chaotic.

00:35:13.160 | It was always knowing like that's not that far in the future.

00:35:16.520 | I remember that very clearly.

00:35:17.840 | All right.

00:35:18.840 | Who do we got next?

00:35:19.840 | All right.

00:35:20.840 | Next question is from Thomas.

00:35:21.840 | In a few months, I'm taking on the role of our customer support manager as she goes on

00:35:25.600 | maternity leave for at least six months.

00:35:28.240 | This will add a lot more admin work.

00:35:30.520 | Normally I can work in solitude on one to two tasks per day.

00:35:34.280 | Should I treat this period as an intense season from which I will cool off significantly afterwards

00:35:39.040 | as in your soul productivity book, or should I be more focusing on your work management

00:35:43.880 | suggested suggestions from a world without email?

00:35:46.840 | I'm going to suggest both.

00:35:49.160 | Right.

00:35:50.160 | So you should do you should do both of these things.

00:35:52.600 | One.

00:35:53.600 | Yes.

00:35:54.600 | This is a temporary season that's more intense because you're taking on this extra role,

00:35:59.200 | but then that role is going to go away.

00:36:01.320 | So it is helpful psychologically to say my expectations for the bigger, deeper projects

00:36:08.520 | that I execute in isolation and solitude, that my expectations are reduced for this

00:36:13.720 | period.

00:36:14.720 | I'm going to reduce my load of big projects.

00:36:17.520 | I'm going to dedicate more time to accommodate this new administrative role.

00:36:23.160 | And I know this will end.

00:36:24.160 | And when it ends, I'll sort of take a breather and then go back to the way I was working

00:36:27.560 | before, which was which was slower and more individualistic.

00:36:29.800 | So, yes, I think you should do that.

00:36:32.140 | At the same time, I think you should also be applying the type of thinking that's in

00:36:37.880 | my book A World Without Email about structuring this new administrative work with systems

00:36:42.440 | and processes to to minimize the negative impact it has on your life.

00:36:46.600 | You want to do both.

00:36:48.280 | I want to build systems around it and I want to adjust my expectations for this period.

00:36:52.520 | You want to do both at the same time.

00:36:54.760 | Now the cool thing about this being a temporary assignment, you are doing like a favor for

00:37:02.080 | your company by doing this, right?

00:37:03.680 | You're helping them out by taking on this extra role.

00:37:05.760 | I bet they're not paying you more.

00:37:07.680 | So they're really grateful that you're doing this.

00:37:10.320 | This means because it's not your full time job, you can get away with being more more

00:37:15.560 | annoying about how you structure this work.

00:37:18.180 | You can get away with having pretty extremes like, look, here's like the systems and processes

00:37:22.360 | I'm going to need if I'm going to do this and I'm going to still be able to do my other

00:37:25.440 | job.

00:37:26.440 | I'm going to have to really structure the hell out of this.

00:37:28.720 | You get away with a lot more than if they like hired you just to do this job and like,

00:37:32.080 | you know, chill out with all this Cal Newport stuff.

00:37:33.840 | You can you can get away with some bigger, more intense system.

00:37:37.200 | So like, let me suggest a few things you might think about here.

00:37:40.760 | Colleague office hours.

00:37:42.920 | Every day or every other day, here's an hour in which my door is open and I have a virtual

00:37:46.480 | meeting room turned on and a phone on and you defer as many back and forth interactions

00:37:52.040 | with your colleagues as possible to the office hours like, yeah, that's a great point.

00:37:55.160 | Grab me at my next office hours.

00:37:56.160 | We'll get into it, right?

00:37:58.080 | Make those demands.

00:37:59.080 | That's going to cut a lot of the back and forth communication down.

00:38:02.040 | Ticketing systems.

00:38:03.040 | You're in customer support.

00:38:04.240 | Use ticketing systems or simulated ticketing systems that I talked about in a world without

00:38:08.400 | email for non-customer facing things as well.

00:38:11.200 | All right.

00:38:12.200 | Yeah, you did make this request to me.

00:38:13.520 | You can see it status.

00:38:14.640 | Here it is.

00:38:15.640 | It's in a Trello board or in a free ticketing system somewhere.

00:38:18.920 | I'll update you when I get to this.

00:38:20.760 | I'm going to pull tickets off of here.

00:38:22.480 | So you're structuring information.

00:38:24.840 | You're making status of information transparent.

00:38:28.720 | All this again reduces unscheduled back and forth communication.

00:38:32.160 | If you have a team, use docket clearing meetings to take care of lots of little things so it

00:38:35.480 | doesn't just unfold on Slack channels.

00:38:37.080 | In fact, you should even demand.

00:38:39.320 | We don't use Slack.

00:38:41.280 | Or if we use it, it's when we're having a meeting on Slack at a certain time, but it's

00:38:46.040 | not something that otherwise I'm going to monitor.

00:38:49.520 | Definitely structure the time you use for working on this particular job.

00:38:52.680 | You say, look, I have two jobs.

00:38:54.080 | Here are the hours I work on this one.

00:38:56.500 | So like the first three hours of every day is working on my other job.

00:38:59.980 | The next three hours is like for meetings and everything else for this other job.

00:39:03.320 | And so when you're scheduling meetings for the new temporary job, you say, yeah, I spend

00:39:07.320 | half the day on this job, the second half of the day.

00:39:09.560 | So no morning is available.

00:39:10.960 | Again, you can get away with this stuff because you have agreed to take on these extra obligations

00:39:16.680 | for your company.

00:39:17.680 | So you have more wiggle room here to structure your time.

00:39:20.720 | And finally have communication protocols for things that have to happen again and again.

00:39:24.520 | Again, you have to read a world without email to get the details on that.

00:39:28.480 | But for types of work that happen again and again, figure out this is how we talk about

00:39:33.220 | it.

00:39:34.220 | This is how requests come in.

00:39:35.220 | This is how we keep track of requests.

00:39:36.220 | Here's how we update the status of things.

00:39:39.020 | Take the time to build protocols around these.

00:39:41.680 | Do not just let things come with haphazard unscheduled messaging back and forth.

00:39:46.360 | All right.

00:39:47.360 | So lower your expectations, put a temporary hold on almost everything else you're working

00:39:50.860 | on.

00:39:51.860 | Make this reasonable.

00:39:53.520 | But then it's structured the hell out of the work anyways.

00:39:55.440 | Those two together I think will make this completely survivable.

00:39:58.400 | All right, what do we got next?

00:40:02.140 | Next question's from Scott.

00:40:04.000 | My son is two years away from university.

00:40:07.120 | He's also a highly competitive judo athlete.

00:40:09.980 | Can he start to implement some of your strategies such as weekly planning, multi-scale planning

00:40:14.040 | to help him manage his time more effectively and balance the priorities of school and judo?

00:40:19.960 | Yeah, students can definitely gain massive advantages by being more aware about how they

00:40:27.520 | schedule their time and activities.

00:40:30.040 | It can almost be because there's so little of this happening among young people, so like

00:40:34.400 | at the high school level or the college level.

00:40:36.600 | It's almost like a superpower.

00:40:38.880 | If you have even rudimentary control over your time and schedule, it prevents deadline

00:40:43.880 | pile-ups, it prevents you having to work late at night, it gives you a realistic assessment

00:40:48.440 | of your actual workload so you can make reductions or figure out what's really messing up with

00:40:52.880 | your time.

00:40:54.360 | It's a fantastic, I very much suggest it.

00:40:56.680 | I have two different books that give advice specifically on students doing this.

00:41:01.640 | First is How to Become a High School Superstar.

00:41:04.120 | The part one playbook in that book specifically gets into how a high school-age student could

00:41:10.200 | manage their time and schedule.

00:41:13.320 | The second book is How to Become a Straight-A Student.

00:41:16.640 | That book gives advice for university students on how they should manage their time and obligations.

00:41:22.920 | How to Become a High School Superstar sort of simplifies the straight-A student advice

00:41:27.040 | a little bit to make it more appropriate for a younger student.

00:41:30.520 | However, if you have an advanced student with a complicated schedule, either of those books

00:41:35.200 | I think you'll find the student-focused time management advice really useful.

00:41:40.120 | So yes, students should care about this.

00:41:43.280 | It is going to look different than what I would do as a middle-aged professional with

00:41:46.800 | five jobs, but scheduling makes a difference.

00:41:51.520 | Speaking of which, I had a little note about this.

00:41:53.400 | How to Win at College, Jesse.

00:41:54.400 | My very first book from 2005 was featured on the Fox News website the other day.

00:42:00.640 | Oh, really?

00:42:01.640 | Yeah.

00:42:02.640 | It's interesting.

00:42:03.640 | A, blast of a past and not the place you think about when you think about college advice

00:42:06.680 | books.

00:42:07.680 | But I guess they had a roundup of books to get for students, and it was one of the books.

00:42:13.240 | So hey, it's good to see my very first book has made a reappearance.

00:42:19.360 | That's good.

00:42:20.360 | A lot of fondness.

00:42:21.360 | A lot of fondness for that book.

00:42:22.880 | How to Win at College.

00:42:23.880 | All right.

00:42:24.880 | Oh, we've got a Slow Productivity Corner coming up.

00:42:27.360 | Is that right?

00:42:28.360 | Yes, we do.

00:42:29.360 | All right.

00:42:30.360 | I may be separated by many miles from the HQ right now, but I think I can still rock

00:42:35.600 | out to the Slow Productivity Corner theme music.

00:42:39.080 | Let's hear that musical interlude.

00:42:48.600 | So if you're new to the show, the Slow Productivity Corner is where we do a question each week

00:42:52.420 | that's relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity and the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without

00:42:58.500 | Burnout.

00:42:59.500 | If you have not yet checked out Slow Productivity, but you do like the type of advice you hear

00:43:04.280 | on the show, you've got to read the book.

00:43:06.440 | You can find it anywhere books are sold or find out more at calnewport.com/slow.

00:43:09.360 | All right, Jesse, what is our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week?

00:43:16.520 | It comes from Star to Slacker.

00:43:19.500 | My colleagues are great at pseudo productivity and get praised for busyness, whereas I'm

00:43:23.540 | taking my time doing less and trying to be Newportonian and seem to be viewed as a slacker

00:43:29.280 | rather than a star.

00:43:30.640 | I try to focus on three big projects over a quarter semester while my colleagues did

00:43:34.880 | 10 to 15 smaller ones, and the perception is that the people who do more are inherently

00:43:41.740 | more valuable and get raises, promotions, and more prestige.

00:43:45.980 | How can I do less when my colleagues are getting ahead for doing more?

00:43:49.320 | All right, well, there's two approaches here, right?

00:43:55.160 | One is just to recalibrate what you think the right size is for a project, okay?

00:44:00.760 | Because the advice from Slow Productivity is actually agnostic to some degree about

00:44:07.560 | the size of projects you're working on.

00:44:10.680 | The advice says don't do too many projects at the same time because this creates too

00:44:16.240 | much administrative overhead.

00:44:17.860 | It adds up to be too much, and then you can't get anything done, so you want to not have

00:44:21.340 | too many concurrent projects, regardless of how big they are.

00:44:24.720 | Two, it says to take your time, right?

00:44:27.280 | So this might be the place where you're thinking about.

00:44:29.600 | So give projects the time required to do them well, but also have more cycles throughout

00:44:35.000 | the year.

00:44:36.000 | Have busy periods and less busy periods, and then three is like obsess over quality.

00:44:40.160 | Do things really well.

00:44:42.360 | You want to increasingly sort of become better at what you do.

00:44:45.840 | All right.

00:44:46.960 | These are somewhat agnostic to project size, so it's possible, this is option one, it's

00:44:51.740 | possible that in your particular workplace, the appropriate size of project they want

00:44:57.120 | people working on is relatively small.

00:45:00.240 | If that's the case, work on smaller projects, but still use the rules of slow productivity.

00:45:04.960 | Only do a couple at a time.

00:45:07.360 | Make sure you have variability, like you have more intense periods and less intense periods,

00:45:10.920 | and really focus on doing each of them well.

00:45:12.720 | Like try to get better at them so you're doing them at a higher level of quality.

00:45:15.680 | So you could just work on smaller projects, but by applying the rules of slow productivity,

00:45:21.080 | not get overloaded doing it, and really begin to do really well on them.

00:45:25.140 | Your other option, if you say, "No, no, no, what I want to do is work on a smaller

00:45:28.720 | number of projects that have way more impact," you got to roll the dice on that.

00:45:35.040 | You would have to roll the dice on that.

00:45:36.500 | What I mean by that is if you're in an organization where people are doing lots of little things,

00:45:41.600 | pseudo productivity, and it's not really that valuable, but it's safe, and it's attention

00:45:47.240 | catching that you're just like, "No, I'm working on these really big initiatives,"

00:45:50.740 | you have to actually put the chips down on the table.

00:45:52.600 | This is what I mean by roll the dice, and make it clear, "I am doing less things right

00:45:57.520 | now, but the thing I'm working on is really important.

00:46:00.880 | Hold me to that.

00:46:03.080 | My claim I'm making is the small number of things I'm doing really well is going to make

00:46:08.800 | a huge difference.

00:46:10.600 | So let's check back in in three months, and I'll prove that to you."

00:46:14.280 | So that's where this is the gamble, because it actually has to make a difference.

00:46:17.520 | If you want to say, "No, I'm saying no to more of these smaller things.

00:46:21.240 | I am stepping out of the pseudo productivity buzz to focus on a smaller number of things,"

00:46:29.600 | there's a necessary element of accountability.

00:46:31.480 | In the book, I talk about this as the trade-off.

00:46:33.560 | You're trading the sort of accessibility.

00:46:35.800 | Just give me any work, I'll get it done for accountability.

00:46:39.760 | I'm not going to do that, but you have to hold me accountable, and if the stuff I produce

00:46:42.600 | is not great, if the stuff I produce really doesn't move the needle, then it's going to

00:46:46.740 | be unavoidable, and I'm going to have to go back to working the other way, or maybe even

00:46:50.760 | lose my job.

00:46:52.640 | So you have these two options.

00:46:54.040 | You either recalibrate your project size, like, "Great, I'm working on smaller projects,

00:46:57.480 | but in a slowly productive way," or you roll the dice and say, "I'm pitching to you, my

00:47:03.960 | company, to be different than other people here, and the only way to succeed with that

00:47:09.320 | is to really lean into the obsession over quality aspect of slow productivity and deliver

00:47:14.940 | the hell out of what you're doing."

00:47:17.080 | And it's so valuable what you're doing, and so skilled, they're like, "We need this."

00:47:21.160 | So fine, you're different.

00:47:23.120 | You're not the person we're going to think of when we have these small, little, stupid

00:47:25.840 | crises, and we're not going to invite you to every meeting.

00:47:28.360 | So those are your two options.

00:47:29.560 | Go smaller, or put the chips down and say, "Hold me accountable," and then actually deliver.

00:47:35.960 | All right, do we have a call this week?

00:47:41.120 | We do have a call.

00:47:42.120 | Oh, excellent.

00:47:43.120 | All right, let's hear it.

00:47:44.120 | Okay.

00:47:45.120 | Hi, Cal.

00:47:46.120 | My name is Kevin, and I'm an attorney, and I had a question about two of the ideas you

00:47:50.720 | propose in slow productivity.

00:47:52.720 | First, you advocate for pre-scheduling time to complete your projects when something new

00:47:56.560 | is assigned to you.

00:47:57.560 | I love this idea, and I found it to be very helpful in managing my workload, giving me

00:48:02.000 | the ability to give an informed answer when someone actually asks me if I can take on

00:48:05.160 | something new, rather than just guessing.

00:48:07.480 | However, I'm having some trouble using pre-scheduling with another technique from the book, the

00:48:12.360 | poll system.

00:48:13.360 | I like the idea of a poll system and only working on one thing at a time, but my pre-scheduled

00:48:18.600 | calendar is now effectively pushing projects forward before I'm ready to work on them.

00:48:22.520 | Like, I'll be working on project A, but then my calendar tells me it's time to work on

00:48:26.560 | project B, so either I have to stop project A to shift my focus or rework my entire pre-scheduled

00:48:31.280 | calendar to accommodate.

00:48:32.280 | Now, there is an element of poor planning here.

00:48:34.680 | I'm not good at estimating the time it will take me to finish things, but it's also because

00:48:37.920 | I'm juggling important projects that don't have a deadline with urgent deadline-driven

00:48:41.600 | projects.

00:48:42.600 | Do you have any tips for managing the two systems, or more broadly, can a poll system

00:48:46.800 | survive in a deadline-driven work environment?

00:48:48.800 | Thanks so much for your time and your excellent work.

00:48:53.240 | This is a great question.

00:48:56.240 | This is a great question, because these are two different suggestions that I give in the

00:49:02.600 | Slow Productivity, in my book, Slow Productivity, during the chapter on doing fewer things.

00:49:07.760 | I'm giving very practical advice about how to actually get away from this, and there

00:49:11.040 | is a tension between these two pieces of advice that's partially fundamental, but there is

00:49:15.880 | a way for them to work together.

00:49:17.840 | So let's get into, let me highlight this tension a little better for the audience, right?

00:49:21.840 | So the pre-scheduling method says, okay, if someone asks you to do some work, go find

00:49:26.420 | the time for it ahead of time, put that on your calendar.

00:49:30.600 | So you have to deal with, realistically, how much time you actually have available, right?

00:49:37.840 | So what happens when you have to schedule your time on the calendar?

00:49:40.000 | A, you might not be able to find it, at least in a reasonable window around the current

00:49:45.800 | moment, in which case, you have just gotten clear feedback, I'm too busy to do this.

00:49:50.040 | And it's not arbitrary, I just feel busy, which people don't react well to.

00:49:53.840 | It's concrete and evidence-based.

00:49:56.160 | I went to schedule the time to do this, I pre-scheduled time for all my projects, I

00:49:59.360 | couldn't find it in the next six weeks, so I must be too busy to do this.

00:50:02.420 | It's hard for people to push back on that, because they either have to claim you're lying,

00:50:06.640 | or they have to insist that, like, I guess you work outside of work hours, right?

00:50:10.240 | They can't just let that implicitly happen, they have to insist on it, and they don't

00:50:13.500 | want to, all right?

00:50:14.500 | Another thing that might happen is you find the time for it, but it's, you know, three

00:50:18.480 | weeks from now.

00:50:19.720 | Now you can be super clear, this is when I'm going to get to this.

00:50:23.440 | And then as long as you deliver, that's probably okay, right?

00:50:26.620 | But it gets you out of the situation where you just agree to things, and then people

00:50:29.000 | are just constantly bothering you, when am I going to get this, and you don't actually

00:50:31.880 | have time to get it done.

00:50:32.880 | So pre-scheduling can be very powerful.

00:50:35.320 | The pull system is different.

00:50:37.320 | The pull system, the goal of the pull system is to make sure you don't work on too many

00:50:41.760 | things at the same time, all right?

00:50:44.200 | And the way it solves that problem, instead of having you just schedule your calendar,

00:50:47.880 | so like you're not putting too many things into the same amount of time, the pull system

00:50:51.800 | says I only have two or three active projects at a time, when I finish an active project,

00:50:56.240 | then I pull something new from the list of things I'm working on.

00:50:59.640 | So it's impossible for me to be working on too many things, because I have a, what in

00:51:02.960 | Kanban they call a WIP, or works in progress limit, I have a limit on how many things I

00:51:07.260 | work on at the same time, here they are.

00:51:09.400 | If it's three, I'm never working on more than three things.

00:51:11.200 | And if someone gives me something to do, I can say yes, I will do it, and here's its

00:51:15.800 | status.

00:51:17.120 | It's on the waiting list, it's in position three, and I'll let you know when I pull it

00:51:20.120 | in.

00:51:21.120 | All right?

00:51:23.000 | So two different strategies to get you to the same place, which is not working on too

00:51:28.600 | many things at the same time.

00:51:31.080 | They do, they are intention for exactly the reason the caller talks about, if you try

00:51:35.960 | to do two at the same time, your pulled projects are stepping on the same time that you have

00:51:43.640 | pre-scheduled, right?

00:51:46.640 | So how can these two things work together?

00:51:49.560 | They can only work together if you are sort of dividing your work between these two systems

00:51:54.200 | in a very intentional way.

00:51:56.720 | So maybe you have a certain type of work that's very deadline-driven and needs specific times

00:52:02.080 | and other types of work that's more on you to figure out when it gets done, right?

00:52:06.220 | And so what you could do, for example, is schedule, pre-schedule regular time on your

00:52:11.720 | calendar for the non-deadline-driven work coming out of your pull system, and with the

00:52:16.720 | remaining time on your calendar, it's when you pre-schedule the deadline-driven stuff.

00:52:21.600 | So now when I have a new deadline-driven thing that I'm pre-scheduling, part of the time

00:52:26.400 | that's off the table here is the time on my calendar I've already put aside for my pull

00:52:30.920 | system work.

00:52:31.920 | So I have to work with whatever time remains.

00:52:35.240 | Then when I get to the time on my calendar that's for the pull system stuff, I work on

00:52:38.320 | whatever is active, and when I finish something, I pull something new in.

00:52:41.080 | So you could have these two things work together, but you have to schedule time for the pull

00:52:45.880 | system work in general.

00:52:48.880 | Typically I would say what the people I know who actually use these systems, they tend

00:52:51.640 | to do one or the other.

00:52:53.420 | So the pre-scheduling, for example, and I talk about it this way in the book, it's not

00:52:57.940 | something that people tend to use for a long time.

00:53:02.020 | It's often something that people will use for like six months, and what they learn when

00:53:07.180 | they do this is they get a much more realistic understanding of how long things take, what

00:53:13.340 | busy really means, like what workload actually is unsustainably busy, and it structures their

00:53:19.500 | time more.

00:53:20.500 | So it's a learning tool, and they come out of their pre-scheduling experience having

00:53:24.500 | recalibrated for their new job.

00:53:27.160 | And now they don't need to do this so much, it's because they just have this intuition

00:53:31.000 | now that's born through evidence-based experience of like, "No, no, no, I'm too busy right now,"

00:53:36.560 | because you've had to grapple with this time and know how long things take.

00:53:40.000 | So often, that's what I see with pre-scheduling.

00:53:42.220 | People do it for a while, get better at understanding their workloads, and then stop using it.

00:53:47.560 | The pull-based system, by contrast, is meant to be sustainable.

00:53:50.480 | It's just like, "This is how I organize my work.

00:53:52.640 | Here's my waiting list.

00:53:53.640 | Here's my active list.

00:53:54.640 | You can look on the waiting list to see exactly where your work is.

00:53:56.800 | You can watch it mark forward.

00:53:58.480 | If you want me to reprioritize it, you tell me what you want to swap for.

00:54:01.280 | You can help me make priority decisions."

00:54:03.000 | That's meant to be a long-term sustainable system.

00:54:05.860 | I love the pull system because it prevents overload.

00:54:10.320 | I love the pre-scheduling exercise because it forces you to learn how long things really

00:54:15.360 | take.

00:54:17.040 | You can put them together in the way I suggested if your job requires that.

00:54:20.600 | It's a little bit more complicated.

00:54:21.600 | You're starting to get a little fiddly here, but it is possible, but that's going to take

00:54:24.740 | some more care.

00:54:25.740 | That's a good call.

00:54:27.560 | I think we have a case study here.

00:54:30.920 | Case studies, if you're new, this is where people write in to talk about putting the

00:54:34.660 | type of advice we talk about this show into action in their own lives.

00:54:39.600 | So today's case study is a short one.

00:54:41.080 | It comes from Beth.

00:54:43.600 | Beth says, "I'm a tenured professor whose main job is doing research.

00:54:48.880 | I do a lot of collaboration with co-authors and recently stumbled upon something that

00:54:53.360 | works great for focused work and minimizing administrative overhead.

00:54:58.880 | In the past, my co-authors and I would work independently for a week or two, then have

00:55:02.880 | an hour-long meeting to discuss and repeat and repeat.

00:55:06.200 | I recently tried to have day-long sessions devoted exclusively to a single academic project

00:55:12.040 | with a co-author or team of co-authors.

00:55:14.660 | We get so much more done when we work together for a half day or whole day than if we string

00:55:21.000 | things out over many, many weeks.

00:55:22.640 | I'm sure this builds on many of Cal's concepts, but I'll leave it to him to say which ones

00:55:26.360 | exactly."

00:55:27.360 | Well, Beth, I've had the same experience in my own career as a professor, research-oriented

00:55:35.840 | professor, especially early in a project when you're trying to make progress.

00:55:42.080 | If you're just doing this with, "Let's check in once a week," what do people do?

00:55:47.640 | They do either nothing or the bare minimum to have something to talk about at the next

00:55:51.560 | meeting, right?

00:55:52.560 | It's just not urgent to them, like, "Oh, we have a standing meeting to talk about this

00:55:56.920 | research paper," and you spend a half hour kind of reminding everyone where you are and

00:56:00.960 | maybe someone thought a little bit about something, and you're right, months can go by and not

00:56:04.540 | much gets done.

00:56:06.160 | On the other hand, if you all get together for a day and you load up this problem collectively

00:56:11.240 | in your heads and you put all of your attention on it, leveraging what I call the whiteboard

00:56:15.520 | effect where everyone's working on the same deep project at the same time, so it eggs

00:56:18.840 | each other on to be even more focused, you can crack problems.

00:56:23.880 | You can figure out the major results.

00:56:25.760 | You can make a ton of progress.

00:56:28.820 | This was at the core when I was at the height of my CS paper production.

00:56:32.600 | These long annual in-person sessions, this is where a lot of the work got done.

00:56:36.840 | We had certain times of the year where we'd get together and we'd call it "cracking problems."

00:56:40.880 | I would travel all the time, go to Europe, I'd go to Iceland.

00:56:44.720 | You'd go wherever you needed to sit down with professors you worked with, spend three days.

00:56:48.920 | That's when papers got cracked.

00:56:50.740 | Now once they're cracked, you have the main results.

00:56:53.520 | Now you can be distributed, but now when you're being distributed, it's not just, "Think about

00:56:57.720 | this paper and make progress," you're assigning tasks.

00:57:00.520 | You write a draft of this intro, we'll check back.

00:57:03.280 | You'll write up this proof, I'll write up this proof, and then we'll check them.

00:57:06.360 | Once you have specific work to do, then it's fine to be virtual.

00:57:11.240 | I think this rhythm of, "Get together until you crack the heart of what you're working

00:57:15.040 | on," and now just the workman-like effort of putting together the paper, now we don't

00:57:20.160 | have to do this together.

00:57:21.160 | We can spread this out.

00:57:22.160 | I think that's a really good way to do this.

00:57:24.800 | The more general lesson here, I think, in general for knowledge work, is that spending

00:57:29.360 | a significant amount of time on a problem with other people is like a super brain tackling

00:57:34.920 | the problem.

00:57:35.920 | It really is effective.

00:57:38.440 | The trap here that, in general, knowledge workers should be careful to avoid is the

00:57:44.160 | weekly meeting trap.

00:57:45.600 | When you have a hard thing you're trying to solve, a new business strategy, a new program,

00:57:50.600 | a new business, a result you're trying to crack mathematically, or a new idea to publish

00:57:56.500 | in a paper, this illusion of, "If we just put a standing meeting on our calendar for

00:58:01.960 | us to talk about this every week, we'll make progress," is just that.

00:58:06.480 | It's an illusion.

00:58:08.080 | Like Beth experienced or I experienced, this will just seem like an obligation on people's

00:58:12.420 | calendars where they'll either do nothing, so you just spin your wheels each week, or

00:58:17.040 | they do the bare minimum, so it's not socially embarrassing when they show up on the call.

00:58:21.840 | But the total amount of work that each person is doing when you just have a weekly meeting,

00:58:25.880 | it's like 10 minutes of productive thought.

00:58:28.520 | The other hand, if we're like, "We're here for five hours.

00:58:31.360 | Here's our whiteboard.

00:58:34.440 | Let's make progress," now you actually have a chance of getting the smartest possible

00:58:38.340 | thinking out of their brains.

00:58:40.600 | I've talked about this before on the show, but I experienced this during the first year

00:58:44.280 | of the pandemic.

00:58:45.280 | I was like, "Why are my CS papers not coming together the way they normally do?"

00:58:51.200 | I realized it was like, "Oh, because we're not getting together to do these full day

00:58:55.320 | sessions."

00:58:56.320 | We had standing meetings all throughout the early pandemic.

00:58:58.640 | Get on Zoom every week.

00:59:00.280 | Things weren't being cracked.

00:59:02.440 | There's one paper in particular we're working on all throughout the pandemic, and it was

00:59:05.320 | these standing meetings and nothing was happening.

00:59:07.440 | As soon as I could get away with it, I brought my two local collaborators, one from Georgetown,

00:59:13.400 | one from Hopkins, to the Deep Work HQ, have a whiteboard in there.

00:59:18.640 | Don't tell the COVID police, but let's come here, let's look at the whiteboard, let's

00:59:22.080 | spend the day, and we cracked a problem, and we published that paper, and it won the best

00:59:27.120 | paper award at our conference.

00:59:28.280 | It's like, "Oh, that's what we were missing."

00:59:30.800 | Until we sit together, there's no real mind work actually happening.

00:59:34.680 | I love this idea, groups of minds working together on the same problem for an extended

00:59:38.640 | period of time is very, very effective for making progress on something.

00:59:43.140 | Weekly meetings to check in on a project is often incredibly ineffective, unless, again,

00:59:47.680 | you have incredibly specific things people are working on with clear criteria of it being

00:59:51.080 | done.

00:59:52.080 | So, Beth, I appreciate the question.

00:59:56.160 | All right, we have a cool final segment coming up.

00:59:59.680 | It's the first podcast of July, so it's when I'm going to talk about the books I read in

01:00:04.680 | June.

01:00:06.460 | But first, let's talk about some of the sponsors that make this show possible.

01:00:10.480 | In particular, I want to talk about our friends at Shopify, selling a little or a lot, Shopify

01:00:19.120 | helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching.

01:00:22.480 | I'm sure you've heard about Shopify, it's the global commerce platform that helps you

01:00:27.000 | sell at every stage of your business.

01:00:28.840 | We're talking from the launcher online shop stage to the first real life store stage,

01:00:34.880 | all the way to the, "Did we just hit a million order stage?"

01:00:38.320 | Shopify is here to help you grow, whether you're selling things online or need a point

01:00:42.920 | of sale solution for your physical store.

01:00:46.080 | They really are the industry leader on the sales experience.

01:00:52.300 | When we start our long awaited deep question store, it is 100% Shopify that we will use

01:00:58.480 | to take care of the e-commerce.

01:00:59.800 | It's going to make it so easy.

01:01:01.200 | Jesse, I had another store idea, by the way.

01:01:03.640 | What do we got?

01:01:04.640 | Coming up here.

01:01:05.640 | Well, I needed a hat, right?

01:01:08.880 | Because I have my Nationals hat, but it's starting to fall apart and it's kind of hot.

01:01:12.660 | And so I had to search around and we looked at a bunch of stores just to buy a new hat.

01:01:16.120 | I remember thinking, "Man, I wish we had our own hat because I could just be wearing my

01:01:20.600 | own hat.

01:01:21.600 | I don't have to wear some, I have a Patagonia hat I bought.

01:01:23.160 | I want to wear my own hat."

01:01:25.800 | That made me think, "I wish we had our deep questions store."

01:01:29.720 | I'm thinking black and gray mesh, maybe trucker type hat, and I don't know, I want really

01:01:36.520 | small just the initials for values-based lifestyle-centric career planning, like just VBLCPP, just small

01:01:44.280 | letters right down here.

01:01:46.420 | If you know what it is, you know what it is.

01:01:47.920 | If you don't, you're like, "I know this is really specific and probably really cool."

01:01:51.040 | Anyways, when we get that hat shop together, Shopify, right?

01:01:56.200 | They already power 10% of all e-commerce in the US.

01:01:58.620 | They know what they're doing.

01:01:59.620 | That's going to make our tasteful and provocative VBLCPP hats really fly off that digital shelf.

01:02:07.740 | Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep.

01:02:12.560 | Type that in all lowercase, that's shopify.com/deep to grow your business no matter what stage

01:02:18.880 | you're in, shopify.com/deep.

01:02:20.880 | I also want to talk about our long-time friends at ExpressVPN.

01:02:29.120 | I really think about this more when I'm traveling, but going online without ExpressVPN is like

01:02:34.840 | not closing the door when you use the bathroom, right?

01:02:40.760 | Why give random creeps a chance to invade your privacy?

01:02:43.600 | Well, that's essentially what you're doing when you use the internet without a VPN.

01:02:47.960 | Why is this?

01:02:48.960 | Well, when you use the internet, your address and the destination of the sites or services

01:02:55.680 | you're accessing are out there in the open.

01:02:59.600 | It's called a packet header, right?

01:03:01.680 | So if you're on a wireless internet connection, anyone nearby can see what sites and services

01:03:04.880 | you're using.

01:03:05.880 | If you're using a private internet service provider at home, they see what sites and

01:03:10.040 | services you're using.

01:03:11.560 | A VPN hides all that.

01:03:13.520 | When you use a VPN, you instead encrypt an unbreakable code, here's the site and service

01:03:20.000 | I want to talk to.

01:03:21.300 | You then send this to a VPN server that then decrypts that code and talks to the site and

01:03:26.500 | service on your behalf, encrypts their answer and sends it back to you.

01:03:30.620 | So the person listening into your wireless connection, your internet service provider

01:03:34.380 | that you're directly connected to, all they learn about what you're doing is that you're

01:03:38.900 | accessing a VPN server, right?

01:03:41.320 | So it gives you actual privacy.

01:03:43.300 | It's the digital equivalent of closing that door when you go to the bathroom.

01:03:47.920 | Your IP address is hidden.

01:03:50.020 | It's easy to use.

01:03:51.460 | You just fire up the ExpressVPN app and use your apps and services like normal, it just

01:03:55.900 | happens automatically in the background.

01:03:58.020 | You can use ExpressVPN on all your devices, your phones, your laptops, your tablets, and

01:04:01.980 | more.

01:04:02.980 | It's rated number one by top reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

01:04:06.780 | I like it because of its ease of use and its speed.

01:04:11.060 | It's got servers everywhere.

01:04:12.060 | It's got high bandwidth.

01:04:13.060 | It just works well.

01:04:14.060 | You click a button, and you're protected.

01:04:16.740 | So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep.

01:04:21.700 | That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com/deep.

01:04:27.740 | You will get an extra three months free when you go to expressvpn.com/deep.

01:04:32.060 | All right, Jesse, time for our final segment.

01:04:37.980 | All right, as longtime listeners know, my target is to read five books per month.

01:04:44.500 | I'll tell you what, Jesse, the July list is going to be a little longer than that, because

01:04:47.700 | I'm on vacation.

01:04:48.700 | Yeah.

01:04:49.700 | So it's going to rock and roll.

01:04:52.060 | We'll have a little longer segment when we get to the next one.

01:04:55.660 | But I want to report now on what I read last month.

01:04:57.780 | So this is early July.

01:04:58.980 | So I will report on what I read in June 2024.

01:05:03.780 | All right.

01:05:07.300 | I'll start with, I'm going to reorder, let me reorder these a little bit.

01:05:10.060 | I'll start with, I wrote two movie related books.

01:05:13.300 | The first was called Hit, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick.

01:05:21.020 | So Ed Zwick is sort of a well-known director in Hollywood, directed a lot of well-known

01:05:26.700 | movies.

01:05:27.700 | Maybe he's best known for Glory.

01:05:30.740 | Denzel Washington won his first Oscar for that movie, and a lot of other movies as well.

01:05:36.040 | This is just a Hollywood memoir.

01:05:37.700 | And I, you know, I'm a sucker for these, Jesse, as I've said this before.

01:05:40.700 | I just think it's a cool, interesting industry.

01:05:43.660 | And I like hearing about how people break in and get started and then like what it's

01:05:47.140 | actually like working in the industry.

01:05:49.580 | Ed has an interesting story about breaking in.

01:05:52.980 | He kind of like stumbled into being a head writer on a TV show.

01:06:00.140 | They liked the script.

01:06:01.140 | They hired him.

01:06:02.140 | The head writer got fired.

01:06:03.140 | He got put into this position.

01:06:04.140 | So he was sort of in the industry, but he was in the television side of it.

01:06:08.020 | And the way that they made the move, Ed made the move from this sort of lucky position

01:06:14.140 | in TV to movies is that he pitched a TV movie, which now I want to track down and find.

01:06:20.980 | This is like a pretty innovative thing.

01:06:22.060 | I believe this was in the 1980s.

01:06:24.460 | He pitched a TV movie where the premise was there was some sort of disaster.

01:06:30.580 | I think it was nuclear war, but it might've been something else.

01:06:33.660 | I think it was like a nuclear attack.

01:06:35.780 | And the made for TV movie, they played it like a, they played it, I don't know the right

01:06:42.340 | word for this.

01:06:43.340 | It was like, it was really happening.

01:06:44.340 | It was like a war of the worlds type thing.

01:06:46.180 | So it was, you know, newscasters, it was like newscasters and news footage.

01:06:50.340 | So it's like you were watching a, a news program and getting like, okay, now we're on scene

01:06:57.020 | and the stuff is happening and, and they, they had real newscasters behind desks.

01:07:00.900 | So it was just sort of like really interesting war of the worlds type update, really kind

01:07:04.260 | of innovative and it won some Emmys.

01:07:05.740 | And that's like what let him then jump over to movies.

01:07:09.180 | It also makes it clear that the movies are a stressful business.

01:07:11.900 | So let's just make that clear.

01:07:14.060 | The other movie related book, I actually listened to this once that I read it was surely you

01:07:19.540 | can't be serious.

01:07:20.780 | It was written by the Zucker brothers and Jim, Jim Abrahams.

01:07:24.780 | This is a, an oral history essentially of the making of the greatest comedy movie of

01:07:29.800 | all time airplane.

01:07:32.740 | So surely you can't be serious.

01:07:33.740 | If you haven't seen the movie, I mean, come on, you should know this reference.

01:07:37.740 | This is one of the famous lines in the movie where Leslie Nielsen, who's playing the doctor

01:07:44.420 | on the plane.

01:07:45.420 | Someone says to him, surely you can't be serious.

01:07:47.060 | And he says, I am, and don't call me surely it's like a classic airplane, classic airplane

01:07:52.260 | line.

01:07:53.260 | Interesting book.

01:07:54.260 | I listened to it and like I said, just listen to it because it's, it's a oral history style.

01:08:01.220 | Like if you've read like a ringer oral history, it's various people talking about things,

01:08:07.420 | these different moments in the buildup and making of this film, the Zuckers and Jim,

01:08:13.380 | but then also like interludes from famous comedy personalities from today.

01:08:17.860 | It's like, it'll be like Bill Hader, Judd Apatow, right.

01:08:23.100 | We'll have comments on it and the influence of this movie.

01:08:25.700 | And so it goes back and forth.

01:08:27.220 | If you listen to it, it's the real people talking.

01:08:29.380 | So it's like different voices.

01:08:31.100 | So it's like, almost like a conversation.

01:08:33.660 | It's a little bit weird.

01:08:34.700 | Here's a couple of things that's weird about it.

01:08:37.420 | One, the, the conversation is clearly like a transcript.

01:08:42.980 | It reads a little weird in the audio book because it's not the original conversation.

01:08:46.940 | It's clearly them rereading the edited transcript for the audio book.

01:08:50.660 | So there's like a, sometimes there's a bit of a, it's false, not false, but like, this

01:08:55.060 | is someone reading something they said earlier, but without the same inflection.

01:08:58.100 | One of the Zucker brothers is older now too, and his voice is not very strong.

01:09:02.500 | So like, it's, it's a little bit weird.

01:09:05.900 | And the, the structuring is a little weird on this book too, because it's not, it's not

01:09:10.740 | just a straight chronological, like, let's just move forward starting from like how the

01:09:16.300 | Kentucky Fried Theater, the Zucker brothers theater got started in their first movie and

01:09:19.780 | how they got the airplane and the steps of airplane.

01:09:21.860 | It's almost that, except for early on, they pull some stuff from later on and move it

01:09:26.460 | earlier.

01:09:27.460 | So you kind of give up on that.

01:09:28.460 | Like, so early on, you're starting to get the stories of like how the comedy troupe

01:09:32.900 | came together, but then you'll also get stories about casting airplane and then it'll be back

01:09:37.980 | to like, okay, here's the first thing they did in LA.

01:09:40.380 | And then as you get later in the book, it's, it's strictly chronological again.

01:09:43.220 | So it was a little bit confusing.

01:09:46.380 | So maybe it'd be quicker to read and make more sense reading, but you got fantastic information

01:09:51.420 | there about like how these brothers got together, how they made this movie, why it worked.

01:09:56.500 | So I enjoyed it, especially if you are an airplane fan, right?

01:10:00.660 | Then I read, this is a random, uh, two ocean themed books.

01:10:05.700 | The first was, and you can tell by the way, just, this is a weird reading list.

01:10:08.540 | You know why?

01:10:09.540 | Because, uh, I was exhausted from my book tour.

01:10:12.140 | It's just, you'll see, you'll see in my next reading list, uh, cause I'm already well into

01:10:16.980 | it.

01:10:17.980 | The books are way more like interesting and complicated, but I was exhausted and you get

01:10:21.940 | this in this, this reading list.

01:10:23.180 | All right.

01:10:24.180 | The next book I read was in oceans deep by bill Strever, which I actually had in my library

01:10:29.140 | from a while ago.

01:10:30.180 | I'd bought it, but not read it.

01:10:31.460 | And I got around to reading it.

01:10:32.620 | It's like a history of underwater exploration and diving, you know, like early diving suits,

01:10:41.380 | submarines, submersibles, scuba, just like a history.

01:10:45.180 | Bill Strever is a former diver.

01:10:47.380 | So it was just like a straight history, uh, perfectly competently written about like the

01:10:52.700 | history of underwater exploration.

01:10:55.660 | Then I read, I had never read this before, jaws by Peter Benchley, like the original

01:11:01.820 | novel jaws that was made into the movie.

01:11:04.660 | Uh, as people who read slow productivity know, Peter Benchley wrote jaws essentially across

01:11:11.140 | the street from the house where I grew up.

01:11:13.620 | So in Pennington, New Jersey, uh, it's like two, two, uh, houses down was the house that

01:11:19.700 | he was renting in the seventies when he wrote jaws.

01:11:22.580 | So I always felt like a connection to that.

01:11:25.220 | Uh, jaws was great.

01:11:26.420 | I see why this book did well.

01:11:27.940 | I mean, it's, it's a cool, it's, it's a tight book.

01:11:31.380 | Uh, it's great.

01:11:32.740 | It's entertaining.

01:11:33.740 | It, it has an another storyline layer too.

01:11:37.460 | That's not in the movie.

01:11:38.460 | So Spielberg really rightly so simplified this thing down man versus beast, like this

01:11:46.300 | unlikely trio of guys are going after the shark, either the shark will win or they will

01:11:51.540 | win.

01:11:52.540 | And that was the right thing to do for the movie, for a book that might not be enough.

01:11:55.660 | So there's a, there's two other plot lines.

01:11:58.580 | There's like a mob plot line in this where like the reason the mayor is trying to keep

01:12:03.300 | the town open is because he's in hock to all these mobsters and they're sort of like threatening

01:12:07.260 | him and forcing him to do this.

01:12:08.900 | Um, and there's like a plot line where the wife of the police chief is like unhappy and

01:12:16.180 | has an affair with the Richard Dreyfuss character.

01:12:18.220 | And there's a whole like psychological backstory there where she used to be one of the rich

01:12:22.780 | people who would summer in this town.

01:12:26.460 | And then she married a local and now she's like a local, but the rich people still come

01:12:31.060 | there.

01:12:32.060 | So like in a good novel, uh, sort of a pre Crichton era novels, you have, you have to

01:12:36.420 | have the sort of psychological realism.

01:12:38.140 | So it has these other things going on that fill it in.

01:12:41.020 | Um, but the shark stuff is cool.

01:12:43.020 | Uh, clearly they don't know what they didn't know a ton about sharks back then.

01:12:47.140 | It's kind of funny the way Peter talks about jaws.

01:12:50.100 | It's like this mindless killing machine, um, that is just going to like eat you from the

01:12:55.860 | bottom up, bite after bite.

01:12:57.300 | Like, you know, they didn't know much about great white sharks.

01:13:00.380 | It's just like these things will, and they're like, they would just eat to figure out what

01:13:05.100 | things are and like complete like automatons.

01:13:07.660 | And it's, it's interesting.

01:13:08.660 | It's like they, they clearly, uh, we're trying to figure out what this thing is, but it was

01:13:12.860 | jaws was great.

01:13:13.860 | Uh, I enjoyed it.

01:13:14.860 | Great, great summer book.

01:13:15.860 | And then I finally got around, this is a book in sort of my orbit more.

01:13:20.340 | I finally got around to reading Michael Easter's book, the comfort crisis.

01:13:25.340 | So this is an idea book, Michael Easter.

01:13:29.300 | He runs the online community 2% and was a lecturer, I think at, uh, university of Nevada,

01:13:36.260 | Las Vegas, but recently left that to do writing full time.

01:13:39.740 | But he writes a lot about like fitness and health.

01:13:42.780 | Um, he's really good.

01:13:44.300 | I think getting into like the studies and what's going on to comfort crisis.

01:13:47.580 | This book was from, oh, 2019, maybe, you know, a little while ago, uh, and it was really

01:13:53.340 | good actually.

01:13:54.340 | It's very impressive.

01:13:55.340 | I think this book is doing well.

01:13:57.140 | It has legs that came out a while ago, but it's still selling really well.

01:14:00.900 | His basic idea is we are uncomfortable with being uncomfortable and that this is a problem

01:14:06.140 | and that we need to become more comfortable with discomfort.

01:14:09.900 | And it opens up also, not only is it more aligned with our sort of natural wiring, but

01:14:14.140 | it opens up all of this, like possibilities for like growth in your life.

01:14:17.780 | Uh, there's a cool set piece story in Easter's book that goes throughout the whole thing.

01:14:23.980 | So he keeps returning to this story of this sort of epic month long elk hunting, like

01:14:30.900 | really trying elk hunting trip in the Arctic and with as plenty of discomfort, like they're

01:14:37.540 | not starving, but they're hungry all the time and it's cold and it's hard.

01:14:41.780 | And so that's like a really great spine for the book.

01:14:43.980 | And um, you know, what makes these ideas books good is where there's a, like an overall idea.

01:14:49.060 | You're like, yeah, that makes sense.

01:14:50.060 | Like I should have more discomfort in my life.

01:14:51.680 | But then what really makes these things work is when there's like interesting ideas or

01:14:56.580 | people to meet who are putting that into action and you're like, Oh yeah, that, that I should

01:15:01.500 | do that.

01:15:02.500 | Or maybe that changes the way I think about things.

01:15:03.780 | So like in this book, he gets really in the rucking, which is like a big thing right now,

01:15:08.360 | but like in a very compelling way, like with the guy who started go rock.

01:15:12.020 | Um, and there's this other fitness nutritionist he talks to where he like really gets that

01:15:18.500 | being comfortable with the discomfort of feeling hungry is like a big part of like what's really

01:15:23.980 | involved in losing weight and like, that was a kind of a compelling story.

01:15:27.380 | And then Michael's own story is compelling.

01:15:29.780 | Him being in Alaska is compelling, uh, him kicking, go going sober is like another part

01:15:35.920 | of it.

01:15:36.920 | So all the pieces came together.

01:15:37.920 | Anyways.

01:15:38.920 | I really liked it.

01:15:39.920 | I thought as these sort of make your life better idea books go, and I'm reading more

01:15:43.020 | of these now because I'm thinking about the deep life, it's a good one.

01:15:46.180 | So I, so I enjoyed reading that and I, I should probably reach out to Michael.

01:15:48.660 | I think he'd be a cool guy to know.

01:15:50.780 | Um, you might like that one, Jesse.

01:15:52.740 | Yeah.

01:15:53.740 | Yeah.

01:15:54.740 | They talk about that in sports a lot, like coaching and stuff, like being uncomfortable

01:15:59.620 | and yeah, like athletes are used to it.

01:16:01.900 | Yeah.

01:16:02.900 | Yeah.

01:16:03.900 | All right.

01:16:04.900 | So anyways, those are the books I read in June.

01:16:06.500 | All right, Jesse.

01:16:07.500 | So I think that's all the time we have for today's episode, but we will be back next

01:16:12.980 | week with another episode again, probably recorded from my undisclosed location.

01:16:17.260 | Maybe we'll talk more next week about the writing shed on this property.

01:16:20.940 | That's something I could talk about for a while.

01:16:22.140 | There is an excellent writing shed on this property and I have some ideas about that

01:16:26.300 | to share.

01:16:27.300 | So remind me, Jesse, we'll talk about that next time, but until then, as always stay

01:16:32.340 | deep.

01:16:33.340 | Hey, so if you like today's discussion about getting away from technology to embrace the

01:16:38.580 | quiet brain, I think you'll also like episode 300 in which I talked about hidden technology

01:16:44.700 | traps.

01:16:46.060 | Check it out.

01:16:47.180 | How the U S is destroying young people's future.

Why Solitude Promotes Greatness - The Power Of Being Alone | Cal Newport

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