Ep. 258: Godel’s Deep Life Stack

00:00:00.000 | Is the genius of Kurt Gerdl like the genius of a lot of great thinkers who have made a big impact throughout history?

00:00:06.240 | required structure and

00:00:09.520 | Intentional thinking about how do I approach my life?

00:00:12.800 | I'm Cal Newport and this is deep questions the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world

00:00:26.520 | So I'm up here in the deep work HQ North in Hanover, New Hampshire

00:00:32.760 | joined in the

00:00:35.040 | deep work HQ South by my producer

00:00:39.080 | Jesse

00:00:40.880 | Jesse how's it going down there? What is the weather I am missing in Washington DC right now?

00:00:45.500 | Yesterday it was 90 degrees and with high high humidity

00:00:53.800 | Well, I'm not gonna say I missed that too much. I think the high tomorrow is 78

00:00:58.320 | We did have some humidity up here with this unstable system of rain, but that's past and I forgot what low humidity

00:01:05.280 | New England summer is like spoiler alert. It is very good. So I thought I would just check in briefly

00:01:12.360 | Okay, what have I learned so far?

00:01:14.360 | Living up here in New England in this very scenic college town of Hanover where Dartmouth College is living right off

00:01:22.360 | Campus on Ockham pond and this cool house. They put us up in where I am right now looking

00:01:27.320 | Past the camera and out a large arched window

00:01:30.920 | onto a pond with with

00:01:33.760 | Pine trees beyond it. So the question is this is a question I had coming into this experience

00:01:39.720 | How much is location going to make a difference?

00:01:42.160 | Will I really feel when in the day, you know, the actual work is work

00:01:46.240 | Writing is on the same computer screen as it is in DC

00:01:49.920 | I'm in a classroom just like I would be you know in DC

00:01:52.980 | I'm in an office sometimes just like would be in DC does the location around where the work happening being different?

00:01:58.160 | Am I finding that that actually makes a difference and I think my report is yes, I

00:02:02.680 | Think it has made a notable difference. There's a few attributes. I was taking notes on this earlier today

00:02:09.720 | There's a few attributes about this new location that I think has been

00:02:12.600 | demonstrably impactful on the mindset when it comes to me doing work, I think a the

00:02:20.280 | The calmness and by calmness. I just mean lack of people

00:02:23.220 | DC is a big city. There's a lot of people in DC if you go anywhere

00:02:27.160 | There's going to be a lot of people you're driving through if the place is worth going to the parking lot is going to

00:02:31.320 | Be full if you have to get on the beltway, it doesn't matter if it's 3 a.m. On Christmas for some reason

00:02:35.840 | There's a lot of people

00:02:37.600 | Driving on that road, which is fine because you do appreciate that energy, but I am noticing this escape from that actually is

00:02:43.960 | Having an impact on my mood. So there's a certain

00:02:48.040 | Calmness I'm noticing that the mind has when it's not constantly seeing other people around or constantly feeling crowded

00:02:54.600 | And there's a lot more nature up here and this too seems to be having a positive

00:02:59.440 | impact on my professional mindset this house where they put us up in here on the pond is

00:03:05.920 | Right down the road from what used to be the golf course, which they they closed down

00:03:10.760 | So that's now a park surrounded by woods and you can walk or trail run through these woods

00:03:15.920 | It's two minutes down the road. So every day you can be in the woods or walking across

00:03:20.480 | Rolling fields, you know how it goes Jesse when these golf courses they stop keeping them

00:03:25.600 | Like a golf course really tightly mowed they begin to look like st. Andrews

00:03:29.800 | they begin to look like those old Scottish style courses with the

00:03:32.540 | Yeah, a lot of cool fescue a lot of cool fescue is exactly

00:03:36.820 | I hear that word so often as I'm walking around people just saying like look at this fescue this very Scottish

00:03:44.080 | Very Scottish fescue. So it's what a well fescue park. Anyways, that seems to also be having a

00:03:49.840 | calming and focusing mindset as well, so I think it's a successful this part of my experiment of

00:03:57.040 | Bringing the family up to New England seeing what it's like to be there for an extended period of time during the summer

00:04:02.600 | I would say so far that experiment is successful if I was to try to now

00:04:08.960 | Imagine my ideal summer setup. So take the best of what I'm seeing here and combine it with other things. I'm missing I

00:04:16.440 | think probably what I would do in a world where just

00:04:20.640 | Money was accessible and not a problem and anything is possible

00:04:25.000 | I think probably what I would do from just what would be the best working environment status would be probably have a house

00:04:30.720 | I like this general latitude is fine

00:04:35.360 | Probably a little bit more remote. I think the house itself being remote could be a really interesting final twist

00:04:42.000 | I really love the town here

00:04:44.000 | But I live in a really cool small town already

00:04:46.360 | So it's not that different

00:04:47.600 | So I already can just walk into a really cool small town and know the people at the coffee shop and and so I love that

00:04:52.800 | But I don't necessarily need to simulate that if I'm away for the summer

00:04:55.520 | So I was thinking if I was really creating my ideal summer situation this type of region

00:05:00.160 | But maybe up in the hills or the mountains a little bit more a property that was just big enough

00:05:04.400 | You could have a trail so you have a trail you could walk on with your coffee just to get the thinking going but not

00:05:09.800 | Being too far from civilization one month the six weeks starting in July put those together. I think it would be an ideal

00:05:16.880 | deep work

00:05:19.480 | Accelerator, so if you have a really cool property that you've been thinking I would really like to just get rid of this really cheap

00:05:25.960 | I

00:05:26.880 | Don't like money

00:05:28.000 | So I just wanted to sell this much cheaper than it's worth and it's up here and it's in the hills and it has its

00:05:32.400 | Own trail on it or something. Let me know because I do think

00:05:35.660 | There's a reason why so many writers who have this type of flexibility in their schedule do retreat to other locations in the summer

00:05:42.800 | It's a nice reset. It's been a nice cognitive reset. So I would say

00:05:46.080 | Jesse so far so good when we build our compound up here, though. We're gonna have a high-end podcasting studio

00:05:52.520 | Because that's how good that's the one that's the one thing I miss is I don't have my high-end podcasting studio

00:05:57.880 | Actually, it's two things I miss. There's not a high high

00:06:01.720 | capacity podcasting studio and to

00:06:03.720 | the nearest IMAX size movie screen is

00:06:07.720 | A hour and a half away from here. Oh

00:06:10.320 | Really and we have Oppenheimer comes out today Chris Nolan. I want to see that

00:06:17.280 | Barbie came out today, but I'm thinking a particular Oppenheimer, you know, he filmed that thing on a combination of 65 and 70 millimeter

00:06:24.180 | I'm probably end up seeing this at the Nugget Theatre, which is fine. I remember it fondly. It's down I can walk to it

00:06:31.220 | I remember going there fondly as a college student, but let's just say the screens of the Nugget Theatre are not exactly

00:06:35.720 | Like the AFI theater where they'll actually have a 70 millimeter projector, you know near my house in Silver Spring

00:06:43.120 | So that's the one issue you do not come up here to be a cinephile not a lot of good

00:06:46.780 | Movie opportunities nearby, but I think we could put up with that

00:06:50.360 | We could put up with one of the requests is I think you should put a putting green in the backyard of the podcasting studio

00:06:57.200 | With this request this request is coming from a Jay Miller. Just anonymously

00:07:02.360 | Jay Miller, you know work on my golf. You know work on my three-footers

00:07:06.480 | Yeah, a little chip little chip and putt the backyard of the studio. Yeah, that's the key

00:07:11.840 | What I learned is that means though by the way the studio

00:07:13.840 | This property would have to be in Vermont because Vermont has way more fiber

00:07:17.860 | High-speed fiber than New Hampshire, New Hampshire is way behind Vermont on high-speed Internet

00:07:23.420 | So I'm enjoying being in Hampshire now, no offense, New Hampshire rights, but just for the sake of our

00:07:28.380 | podcast studio slash putting green

00:07:31.700 | Slash deep work north. We're gonna have to probably do that in Vermont

00:07:36.920 | So anyways, I want to talk a little bit about the today's show

00:07:43.700 | So so for the deep dive

00:07:45.900 | I'm gonna go into something that a

00:07:47.860 | Listener sent me that I thought was so cool that I thought we have to discuss this on the show

00:07:52.180 | So we'll get into that in a second

00:07:54.180 | We'll do some questions after that that are vaguely related just as a spoiler alert for later in the show

00:07:59.620 | I have heard your request and I will

00:08:03.460 | check in later in the show on

00:08:06.060 | My remarkable to tablet and I will give you an update on how things are going

00:08:10.820 | With my remarkable to what my review is so far. So we have all that going in the show

00:08:15.860 | So let's let's start with the deep dive. What I want to do is actually highlight

00:08:20.740 | Some scans that were sent to me from a lister named Alexander from Serbia

00:08:26.340 | And these scans came from a book that I am going to actually I'm gonna bring on the screen for those who are watching

00:08:32.260 | at youtube.com slash Cal Newport media, this is episode

00:08:36.940 | 258 so if you're watching you can look there go to the deep life comm and look for episode

00:08:42.480 | 258 I'm gonna bring up on the screen for those who are watching a book that these scans I want to discuss are from

00:08:50.620 | All right, so this book is I'll read in the English is the philosophical notebooks of

00:08:55.940 | the famous logician and mathematician Kurt Gerdl

00:09:00.420 | so this was translated into English by

00:09:03.660 | Merlin Carl so you can it's his girdles notebooks his personal notebooks

00:09:09.700 | They've been translated

00:09:12.140 | Multi-volume and you can actually go through and see the type of things that Kurt Gerdl was writing

00:09:19.020 | This listener Alexander sent me some really interesting pages

00:09:23.260 | excerpted from these notebooks that all focus on we can think of as the

00:09:29.280 | Deep life time management life management

00:09:34.220 | These the thoughts girdle was having about how to structure his life make best use of his time push his life

00:09:39.600 | Push his life in the right direction. So that's really cool to see a true genius. We have a snapshot on how he was thinking about

00:09:48.580 | Structuring his life to make it as deep as effective as possible. Now if you don't know who Kurt girdle is

00:09:53.540 | What you need to know is he's a 20th century

00:09:56.460 | logician and

00:09:58.740 | Mathematician did a lot of his work when he was young in the this would been like the 1930s died in the 1970s

00:10:04.940 | He's probably best known for his incompleteness theorems

00:10:09.360 | These were considered very important

00:10:12.620 | I had John von Neumann called this at some point like one of the most important things that was ever done in logic

00:10:17.500 | He's been compared to

00:10:19.420 | Aristotle in terms of other comparable figures in terms of their impact on the study of logic and the incompleteness theorems

00:10:25.900 | are are beautiful and

00:10:28.460 | Mathematically insightful and basically what they show and I won't I won't get into too much nerdy detail here

00:10:34.580 | But basically what he proved was any sufficiently

00:10:38.220 | complicated system of logics of axioms and inferences is

00:10:43.020 | Going to have statements

00:10:46.260 | That you can express that are true

00:10:48.940 | But cannot be proved true using that system

00:10:53.220 | So this was the notion of incompleteness theorems is that there was no this is a big deal because at the time

00:10:59.580 | Motivated by the challenge set forth by the German mathematician David Hilbert

00:11:04.900 | There is this idea that we can just create we can reduce all of mathematical

00:11:09.180 | knowledge everything is true or not true to a

00:11:12.980 | Finite system of axioms and inferences from which everything true can be generated and girdle came in and said no

00:11:19.060 | Every every sufficiently complicated system be it math or any type of logical system. It's going to be incomplete

00:11:26.260 | It can't fully describe everything about itself

00:11:29.020 | That's true, and he did it in a really cool way, and I don't want to get too much into the nerd weeds here

00:11:33.060 | I teach this sometimes in my graduate class, but but basically what he did was he

00:11:38.260 | he embedded

00:11:41.180 | He embedded whatever system you give him that sufficiently complex

00:11:44.340 | He showed how to embed certain logical statements into that system, and I'm really bastardizing this a little bit, but in essence

00:11:50.620 | he showed you give me a

00:11:52.460 | sufficiently complex system I can basically embed a statement that says something like

00:11:57.460 | This statement is false now. I'm not exactly that of course, but one of these sort of self a recursive self-referential

00:12:04.900 | statement that was

00:12:08.620 | Possible to prove one way or the other as it is a big simplification, but it was a really cool feat of logic and

00:12:14.740 | it showed this whole program of

00:12:17.780 | Unifying all logical truths with one system was never going to happen if you were into that at the time

00:12:23.500 | If you were Bertrand Russell in the 1920s or 30s this was like a bomb going off

00:12:29.100 | And then he came to the US. He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He had some issues later in life

00:12:34.740 | Interesting guy Turing met him he was there at the same time as Einstein and von Neumann so anyways this is all to say

00:12:39.940 | Kurt Gödel is a very smart guy and we have in his notebooks

00:12:45.100 | How he was thinking about structuring his life and work, so I'm gonna load up

00:12:50.480 | I'm gonna load up some of these pages, and I'll read them out loud and put them on the screen

00:12:55.380 | And we can react to them all right, so here's the

00:12:58.760 | The first page I want to load here from his notebook

00:13:03.260 | Let's see

00:13:05.260 | No interesting one second here by the way people are watching

00:13:11.260 | Interesting okay if people are watching here, they're seeing

00:13:16.460 | Me try to learn how the screen sharing works, so I let me share a different screen here. This is fascinating audio

00:13:24.580 | I'm sure for everyone who's listening

00:13:27.980 | Let's see here there we go

00:13:29.980 | All right, so I want to start there we go. This is what I want to start with all right

00:13:33.880 | I'm learning how this works Jesse. This is not our normal setup some

00:13:36.560 | What people don't know is in our normal setup usually?

00:13:39.600 | Jesse can manipulate what's on the screen or not using a switcher and and in our deep work HQ North. I'm doing this

00:13:47.060 | Manually okay, so here's what I have on the screen now

00:13:49.900 | This is a table of contents for the notebook from which we're we're pulling more of these notes

00:13:55.580 | So we get a sense of the type of things girdle cared about

00:13:58.740 | So the content of this notebook he labeled this notebook as you'll see on the screen time

00:14:03.460 | Management and then under time management here are these scales he has

00:14:08.500 | for each day separately

00:14:11.340 | for each week precisely

00:14:13.380 | Roughly for several months

00:14:16.300 | Now let's stop right there because what we immediately see and I didn't know this

00:14:20.500 | This is the first time this week that I've seen these notebooks from girdle

00:14:24.500 | He was exactly thinking about what we call multi-scale productivity on this podcast

00:14:29.860 | He was exactly thinking about okay

00:14:32.260 | You need to manage your time on the day on the week and on the several month or what we would call a semester or quarterly

00:14:37.100 | Scale so Kurt girdle back a hundred years ago was actually thinking this exact same way now

00:14:41.920 | He adds a little bit more if we look at this outline. He says also

00:14:44.500 | Time management should also be thought about for the next year

00:14:48.060 | The highest objectives to be reached so he has daily weekly monthly

00:14:53.500 | Annually, and then his final

00:14:55.500 | Subsection for this notebook is labeled. What should I do? And how should I do it?

00:15:00.400 | That is how should I behave with regard to certain matters and situations parentheses maxims?

00:15:05.320 | So we can think of that as discipline. So this is the structure of the way

00:15:08.960 | He's thinking about managing himself in his time

00:15:11.120 | Multi-scale planning from day week the month to year which again is very congruent with what we talked about

00:15:17.060 | You know

00:15:18.780 | I talked about once a year at your birthday sort of working out your vision for the year and that he moves down the time

00:15:23.060 | Scales and then he has something like daily disciplines

00:15:25.060 | So that's what he has here

00:15:27.740 | That's what he has here

00:15:30.460 | Says contents, let's look at some of the actual content now. Let's look at once he looks at these questions

00:15:36.220 | What are some of the things he comes up with?

00:15:38.220 | So I'm going to load first

00:15:40.980 | I'm looking through a couple options here. These are out of order. So this is interesting

00:15:47.340 | All right, here we go

00:15:52.020 | All right, so here is a

00:15:54.020 | random page from this time management notebook and he says general principle better to plan less and

00:16:01.900 | Actually carry it out

00:16:04.740 | So don't try to schedule too much. It's better to have a realistic schedule

00:16:09.500 | He then sketches in words if you're looking this on the screen a particular time block plan

00:16:15.300 | I'm gonna skip from the time block plan that he is describing in words here

00:16:19.820 | I'm gonna skip to one that he actually drew a diagram from so let's see what one of these time block plans

00:16:24.500 | Actually looks like so I'll put this up on the screen here. We've seen he has blocked off various times. So before noon

00:16:32.580 | He has

00:16:36.060 | Continuum lectures Princeton comma Notre Dame. So this is nine to I see nine to one o'clock

00:16:42.580 | Working on these lectures for Princeton and Notre Dame one to two o'clock lunch

00:16:46.540 | two to three or four o'clock mail

00:16:49.420 | budget life plan

00:16:52.140 | four to five o'clock stroll and

00:16:54.940 | Then he has for Monday and Wednesdays two o'clock errands

00:16:58.860 | Below that he says in spare time theology read mathematical papers continue own work resume time management on a small scale

00:17:06.300 | So what we're seeing here, which is pretty cool. Is that girdles coming up with a time block?

00:17:11.180 | Template he's saying roughly this is what I should be doing. I think this was a plan for a particular week

00:17:16.500 | He's like most days

00:17:17.300 | I should be working in the morning on this until I get the lunch then do tasks in the afternoon have an evening stroll on

00:17:24.340 | Two days out of the week. There's instead I'll do errands starting at two o'clock and that might take longer

00:17:31.020 | So what I love about this is that this is so

00:17:34.580 | Contemporary. I mean, this is the way we talk about it that controlling your time

00:17:39.300 | Figuring out when do I want to do work looking at the whole plan?

00:17:42.500 | Oh, I'm gonna do errands on these two days. Let me get my hard work done in the mornings

00:17:46.500 | What am I working on hard this week while I'm working on?

00:17:48.800 | These lectures in that particular case. No, see as general heuristics. Okay, what should I do if I have free time outside of this?

00:17:55.500 | well, here's the things for my attention should be

00:17:57.700 | shared so what we're seeing there is a

00:18:00.500 | Real intentionality and how he's thinking about his schedule, right? Here's another one. I wanted to show you here another notebook page

00:18:09.420 | So here okay, this is labeled program it says and he's instructing himself here. It's from 1937

00:18:16.060 | Draw up a preliminary program for next week

00:18:19.900 | Once or twice per week in particular how much time is to be spent on various disciplines?

00:18:26.100 | I'm gonna focus in on that one part there because here we have him

00:18:29.020 | Clearly talking about his weekly planning discipline

00:18:32.400 | Once or twice a week figure out your plan for the week

00:18:35.440 | So why is he saying twice a week because he's saying fix it so you make a plan for your week

00:18:39.540 | Maybe by Wednesday you're off your plan. So update that plan

00:18:42.660 | so we see here a real commitment to

00:18:45.860 | Weekly planning in addition to what we're seeing before with some more daily time block planning. I mean, this is stuff that

00:18:53.740 | Productivity nerds like us can really geek out on

00:18:57.260 | We get a couple more

00:18:59.980 | General things as well, which I find interesting some remarks and some plans about

00:19:04.400 | Directing his life more generally. So consider for example this page. I'm putting up there. He labels this remark and here's what he says

00:19:10.920 | The microstructure of my mental state is that I do not properly focus my attention on anything

00:19:17.340 | But rather already looked the next thing while dealing with another one of the reasons I am slow by nature

00:19:23.040 | But do not carry out my mental work with natural slowness

00:19:26.760 | Why?

00:19:29.360 | So here we have Kurt Gerdl certified genius

00:19:32.260 | Complaining about the same sort of things that most of us who have an intellectual job do I can't keep my focus. I

00:19:38.440 | Wander on to think about something else. I need to be working slowly

00:19:42.360 | But my mental work is jumping around too fast. My mind is quickly moving

00:19:47.100 | This is him writing in the 1930s

00:19:50.540 | So could you imagine if he had email and Twitter to actually look at as well?

00:19:54.640 | But I just think it's so interesting to see these great minds are struggling with the same issues

00:19:58.640 | And again, this is something we've talked about

00:20:00.640 | to focus intensely on something abstract

00:20:03.960 | Like logic or writing or strategy is not a natural behavior for the human brain

00:20:09.460 | It is something that we have to really deploy quite a bit of artifice

00:20:13.920 | To do successfully and here we're seeing this so take out of the equation even modern distractions

00:20:19.980 | There's great mind working at the peak of his powers is

00:20:23.080 | Struggling to corral his brain. How do I keep focused on the thing?

00:20:27.740 | I'm doing it. I need to work slowly this stuff is hard, but my brain wants to move ahead fastly

00:20:32.840 | It's always as he says here

00:20:34.840 | Looking ahead to the next thing while dealing with

00:20:38.040 | another

00:20:40.840 | So these issues are timeless and these issues around

00:20:44.000 | Distraction are not something that is just new to our era. All right. Here's another

00:20:49.760 | Cool general life insight he has

00:20:52.680 | He labels this Maxim

00:20:55.720 | more haste less speed

00:20:57.720 | One should take one's time with everything

00:21:01.460 | Do everything at one's own pace if a decision is to be announced in a letter better to give a preliminary answer to be polite

00:21:07.760 | deciding and acting are

00:21:09.920 | two different things

00:21:11.960 | All right, so there's a couple interesting things going on here

00:21:15.200 | One is a seems to me a slow productivity commitment

00:21:19.680 | more haste less speed

00:21:22.620 | so

00:21:23.960 | don't

00:21:25.320 | Procrastinate this is what I'm reading this more haste don't procrastinate don't put things off

00:21:29.160 | But don't actually rush the thing you're doing so give things the time it requires one should take one's time with everything

00:21:36.200 | but

00:21:38.560 | Do the things that need to happen? Maybe this is how I'm reading this maximum

00:21:42.000 | I think it's a maximum that puts a lot into it now

00:21:43.600 | Now his second example here if a decision is to be announced in a letter

00:21:46.440 | Better to give a preliminary answer deciding and acting are two very different things. So again what I interpret there. This is very practical

00:21:55.360 | We're getting very practical here. He's saying if there's something you need to do that's really

00:22:00.440 | complicated or time-consuming

00:22:03.680 | You want to take your time to do it? You want to give it the time it requires?

00:22:06.840 | So so maybe just answer someone say hey, I will do this. Don't worry

00:22:09.760 | I will do this so that they're you're being polite but take your time to actually do it

00:22:13.320 | More haste less speed. So you don't want to procrastinate

00:22:15.960 | You you don't want to put things off needlessly tell some if you're gonna do something commit to doing it

00:22:22.600 | But when it comes time to actually executing take the time it requires

00:22:25.240 | Slow and steady. So a lot being packed into some of these some of these maxims here. All right. Let's see. I think I have one more

00:22:32.360 | That I thought was interesting

00:22:35.480 | Alright another maxim

00:22:37.600 | Again, all from Kurt Gerdl's

00:22:39.640 | Notebooks. All right. Here's what he writes here

00:22:41.800 | to achieve certain abstract

00:22:44.720 | parentheses mental spiritual

00:22:47.000 | Things one needs to adhere to a certain purely external parentheses physical rules

00:22:52.920 | For example get up at a certain time

00:22:55.320 | Sit down at your desk to do work. Do not lie down

00:22:58.160 | Have a notebook and scratch paper and pencils in front of you come up with time management

00:23:02.440 | Every evening take along a note when going out and take it out and look at it after any errand spend a certain amount of

00:23:08.720 | Time on something even when and he goes on from there

00:23:11.880 | so what he's saying here, which again is a point we've stumbled across ourselves on this show more than once is

00:23:18.440 | disciplines

00:23:21.480 | To make practice on these sort of abstract goals have daily disciplines that you just do that move you towards those abstract goals

00:23:29.320 | Have the physical to support the mental and the spiritual don't just think about how I want to be a great thinker

00:23:36.000 | Have a discipline of when I get up when I go to my desk. What is on my desk?

00:23:40.040 | All the materials is right there

00:23:42.040 | Have a plan make a plan for what exactly you're gonna do with your time each evening for the day that follows next

00:23:48.280 | So he has this very again

00:23:50.280 | Rich philosophically rich idea being packed into a small amount of text here

00:23:56.040 | The structured physical unlocks the less structured more impressive mental and spiritual

00:24:01.800 | The other thing I want to point out about this is the way that time management as a term. This is a very early a

00:24:07.600 | Very early occurrence of the term time management. This is very interesting. I mean I have in my personal library collections

00:24:13.960 | One of the earliest business books to actually talk about time management

00:24:18.080 | I have a first edition of it on a display case up in my library and

00:24:21.720 | It's from the 1950s and this has been written in the 1930s, but notice back then I don't know if this is just standard or

00:24:28.360 | Just the way he's using here, but notice time management is being used differently here

00:24:36.440 | So it's being used almost like a noun come up with time management every evening. So the term there is being used like a scheduler plan

00:24:43.620 | Come up with the time management like a time schedule

00:24:46.720 | Whereas it became a verb so by the 1950s time management is something you do I practice time management

00:24:54.680 | It could also become an adjective. I have a time management system, but it's interesting just to see this here as

00:24:59.440 | Now come up with the time management not practice time management, so anyways

00:25:06.220 | These are just some random excerpts that Alexander pulled out from those notebooks and

00:25:11.100 | the summarize what I'm taking away from this is

00:25:13.980 | The genius of Kurt Gerdl like the genius of a lot of great thinkers who have made a big impact throughout history

00:25:21.180 | required structure and

00:25:24.460 | Intentional thinking about how do I approach my life? How do I make use of my time?

00:25:30.140 | How do I make sure my activities are actually supporting what matters and he had a lot of ideas and a lot of those ideas

00:25:36.380 | Correspond with what we talked about on this show. He was a believer. It's clear here in multi-scale planning

00:25:42.380 | He planned his time on many different levels. He was a believer in

00:25:45.220 | Disciplines having these regular disciplines that you do automatically but help you make progress

00:25:50.540 | Over time on the bigger less more abstract things that are important in your life, but broader than any of those specifics or the particular

00:25:57.540 | Congruence behind between his ideas and what we talked about on the show is just the grappling with it

00:26:01.900 | we have all this energy that's being expended out into the

00:26:06.420 | Entropic universe and the key is how do we how do we aim that?

00:26:11.380 | How do we harness that and aim that and the people who end up really doing?

00:26:14.300 | interesting things with this potential tend to be people who do grapple quite a bit with

00:26:18.020 | How best do I make use of this energy and it's a complicated question?

00:26:22.220 | Gertl is a smart guy and he's wrangling with it and making notes to himself and expressing frustrations

00:26:27.500 | Coming up with plans probably changing these plans, you know

00:26:30.860 | It's easy to look at those type of activities and say why are you fiddling with all this productivity?

00:26:34.780 | You have such an optimization mindset or whatever it is

00:26:37.900 | whatever the critiques are but ultimately some degree of this wrangling is necessary if you actually want to

00:26:43.300 | Create value out of what's going on

00:26:46.700 | Between your ears to take thought matter and make it into something interesting

00:26:50.840 | So so for that, I think this was a great example that yeah

00:26:53.660 | Even the great thinkers we think about is just wandering and being brilliant and it just comes to them

00:26:58.620 | Automatically, they're wrangling with the same stuff. The rest of us are wrangling with

00:27:02.180 | So Alexander from Serbia. Thank you for passing along that particular notebook

00:27:09.020 | I'll probably have to buy a copy of those English translations of those notebooks

00:27:12.100 | That might be cool to have in the HQ or my library at home. But that was yeah a lot of fun to see that

00:27:19.380 | Was the time management every evening is that equivalent of your shutdown essentially I

00:27:23.920 | Might be an interesting way of thinking about it. Yeah sit down to make a plan for

00:27:28.820 | the next day

00:27:31.700 | Could be the his shutdown routine. There's some other I didn't put him in here

00:27:34.480 | there's some other time block plans in here where he talks about the evenings and he definitely had a

00:27:38.780 | System for his evenings like when he I mean his evenings were all spent

00:27:43.600 | You know, I should have made put one of those in a lot of his evening plans were focused on

00:27:49.200 | Adele

00:27:50.680 | This person named Adele who I'm assuming is his wife. I should probably go look that up

00:27:54.580 | So that's what he was talking about. He was talking about time management for what he does in the evening not the next day

00:28:00.100 | Well, no

00:28:01.280 | No

00:28:01.400 | I think what he was saying there was make a plan for the next day in the evening so that you can hit the ground

00:28:04.920 | Okay, but he does have elsewhere in the notebooks a lot of thought about spending time with his

00:28:09.280 | His wife and going for a walk and doing this and what time is gonna go to sleep?

00:28:14.040 | And so I think he did think a lot about

00:28:16.400 | That time outside. So it did I mean those those plans did seem to have an implicit transition

00:28:21.320 | If you look in the notebook of you know

00:28:23.640 | My work is done by 5 and then I'm really thinking about what I want to do with my time and my family else after

00:28:28.680 | Work is over. So he clearly gave that gave that a lot of thought as well

00:28:32.080 | This is why maybe I should be I should be keeping all my notebooks because maybe one day we can have

00:28:38.560 | The trans the cows collection cows philosophical notebooks. I think it'd be less interesting

00:28:44.320 | but maybe one day people could look at my time management strategies and

00:28:47.400 | wonder

00:28:49.640 | Anyway, so I want to go and do some questions that are

00:28:52.400 | Vaguely related just in general the questions I pulled out for today are vaguely related to just

00:28:59.360 | Systematically planning how you manage your time in your life

00:29:02.460 | So just sort of in this general sense of what girdle was trying to do

00:29:05.560 | Before I get to that though. I want to mention some of the sponsors to make this show

00:29:10.720 | Possible in particular this show is sponsored by

00:29:14.200 | better help

00:29:16.800 | now I think Kurt girdle was a

00:29:18.800 | An interesting example to use before we got to this ad because sort of famously later in life girdle

00:29:26.640 | struggled

00:29:28.720 | with mental health

00:29:30.720 | What girdle did not have access to which we have access to today in our modern worlds is professionals who can actually help us?

00:29:38.560 | With our mental health when there is patterns in our thinking that I've moved to a direction that is

00:29:44.480 | Adding more hardship than good to our life. There are experts who can help you figure out what's going on and come up with strategies

00:29:51.080 | to gain back control of the cognitive aspect of your life and to help keep you on track for really aiming your life in the

00:29:58.400 | Direction that you want it to go. There are probably no bigger obstacles to the the dream of

00:30:05.360 | Making your life deep than really struggling with what's going on

00:30:08.160 | between your ears

00:30:10.640 | Now this is where better help enters the scene because if you're thinking about starting therapy

00:30:15.920 | Better help is a great way to do this. Here's why it's entirely online

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00:30:36.120 | So if there's some struggle that's going on in your life right now, that's really being

00:30:40.480 | Causing some issues really holding you back

00:30:43.120 | Talk to a therapist and use better help to get into this because it's it's the easiest most convenient flexible way

00:30:50.840 | I think to actually enter into

00:30:52.840 | Getting some professional assistance on getting this part of your life

00:30:57.360 | Working properly. So let therapy be your map with better help

00:31:01.680 | visit better help.com

00:31:05.120 | Deep questions

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00:31:23.140 | Deep questions

00:31:28.000 | By talking about deep questions, I also want to talk about our friends at

00:31:32.320 | 80,000 hours

00:31:36.240 | So 80,000 hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with their career

00:31:42.280 | So look we've been talking about in this show

00:31:43.960 | How do you structure your life in a way that is intentional and deep and one of the things you might care about?

00:31:47.880 | is taking the thing you probably spend the most of your waking hours doing which is your job and

00:31:54.200 | Aiming that to have as much positive impact as possible. This is what 80,000 hours helps people do now

00:32:00.480 | This number is not arbitrary. Where does 80,000 hours come from?

00:32:03.700 | You work 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for 40 years that multiplies out to 80,000 hours

00:32:09.400 | So the whole point is how do you take those 80,000 hours effort and make sure that you are getting?

00:32:14.280 | the most impact out of them

00:32:18.680 | 80,000 hours will help you do that. They've spent the last 10 years conducting research alongside

00:32:23.320 | academics at Oxford University to figure out how to

00:32:26.680 | Do this I have known these guys at 80,000 hours since the early days of this nonprofit getting started

00:32:33.200 | This is back when I was writing about career satisfaction was so good

00:32:36.880 | They can't ignore you and we had huge overlap in the ways we were thinking about things. So I've known the 80,000 hour people

00:32:42.300 | For probably a decade now so I can tell you from a personal perspective

00:32:47.280 | They really align with the way I think about jobs

00:32:49.680 | They push really away from this mindset of just there's one job. You're meant to do and follow your passion and have this much more

00:32:56.560 | instrumental Cal Newport style vision for

00:33:00.240 | deploying your job

00:33:01.840 | Towards certain ends tweaking the attributes of your jobs being more systematic when you think about how your job fits into your bigger goal

00:33:08.000 | So there really are on board with the type of things I think about so if you go to 80,000 hours org

00:33:14.080 | You will find all of their research. You will find all of their guides

00:33:17.160 | About forming a high-impact career

00:33:21.080 | They also have a podcast where they host unusually in-depth conversations with experts on the world's most pressing

00:33:27.340 | Problems, they really get some smart people on there. Check out the David Chalmers interview on

00:33:33.660 | Artificial consciousness if you're interested in AI you have to listen to that one and they have a job board

00:33:40.240 | But they have a curated and constantly updated list of hundreds of active job openings

00:33:44.760 | That they think might have a particularly big impact

00:33:50.000 | so 80,000 hours

00:33:52.680 | We are on the the same wavelength here

00:33:55.720 | When it comes to how to think about jobs and the way we actually think about things

00:34:00.280 | So I'm going to suggest you go over to 80,000 hours org add a slash deep to the end of that

00:34:06.480 | Go to 80,000 hours org slash deep

00:34:09.880 | That way they'll know you came from me

00:34:12.800 | Everything there is free

00:34:15.720 | It's a nonprofit. They only want to aim to help you out. So go check it out at 80,000 hours org slash deep

00:34:23.220 | If you're there join their newsletter, you might as well because they will send you a free copy of their in-depth research led career guide

00:34:29.200 | That's 80,000 hours the number

00:34:31.200 | dot org slash deep

00:34:33.240 | All right, Jesse. Let's go deep now on some

00:34:37.720 | questions we will now put on our Kurt Gerdl hat and try to figure out how we two can

00:34:42.440 | Systematically structure our life to if not solve the incompleteness theorems at least do something worthwhile. Who's our first question today?

00:34:48.960 | All right first questions from Rito

00:34:51.920 | Rito says outside of work. I keep jumping from one thing to another without gaining much progress

00:34:57.320 | I start with a lot of excitement and when the rubber hits the road after a short while I lose interest and jump to another

00:35:03.840 | Thing because that's exciting. How do I keep doing what I start?

00:35:07.920 | Well, Rita, this is a very common issue. So I'm glad you brought it up. There's nothing unusual that you're struggling with this

00:35:14.000 | the fact that we're talking about

00:35:16.840 | Projects outside of work makes this problem even more acute because when you're working on a project a course for your job

00:35:23.980 | There's a real natural incentive to keep going which is my boss wants me to do this

00:35:29.200 | And if I don't do this, it's going to be a problem and I don't want it to be a problem because they give me

00:35:34.520 | Money for this job. I need the money to live in work motivation can be much easier

00:35:38.280 | For projects outside of work the type of things we talked about in so many of the deep life buckets. We tackle on this show

00:35:44.960 | Motivation gets harder. So I have a couple things to suggest for you here first. I'm gonna say let's get smarter about how you choose

00:35:52.560 | These non-professional projects, especially if you are having trouble right now

00:35:58.600 | Following through I'm gonna suggest you move to smaller projects

00:36:02.280 | that are more tractable you understand how to accomplish them and

00:36:07.360 | What it means to finish them and it's not that far away three weeks. I could be done two weeks. I could do this

00:36:13.920 | This is something I'm going to do this weekend and you want to focus on projects early on that having a tangible

00:36:18.680 | Immediate benefit it's gonna take me a week when I'm done. I will have built this thing. I will have

00:36:25.360 | Finished this running route. I will have

00:36:27.760 | Started this new workout routine, whatever it is. It's it's a very tangible. I've done it. Here's the benefit

00:36:34.160 | Because what I'm gonna suggest here is that at first you want to stack these smaller more self-contained

00:36:39.840 | projects on top of each other to make progress in a direction you care about as opposed to as an alternative trying to come up

00:36:46.240 | with just one massive project

00:36:48.240 | So if there's an area of your life you say

00:36:51.940 | You know, I want to get really into making DIY making with printers and laser cutters or this or that you could set some big project

00:36:59.060 | Of okay. I'm gonna go rent the space and build a big lab

00:37:02.300 | I get really good at making things and be like Adam Savage in his cave

00:37:05.580 | But that's a huge project and if you're already struggling with non-professional motivation, that's gonna Peter out. It seems endless

00:37:13.140 | It's difficult to get stuck. So what you want to do instead is stack smaller projects

00:37:17.780 | I want to buy these two very specific pieces of supplies and buy it and build this thing and it's gonna take me a week

00:37:24.020 | All right. Now this weekend I'm going to go to the garage and I want to clear out a corner

00:37:29.160 | I'm gonna set up this desk and buy a task light and make a sort of small little space in there. Okay, that's tractable

00:37:35.380 | That's done. All right. Now I'm gonna build this more elaborate project. It's gonna take me another week, right?

00:37:39.900 | So you're doing these

00:37:41.180 | Smaller self-contained projects that you can push through and finish pretty quickly and they're stacking up to push you

00:37:46.700 | Continually in the direction of what you more broadly want to accomplish like in this example to be

00:37:50.800 | Someone who has DIY making as a bigger part of their life. So you're stacking smaller tractable

00:37:55.680 | Projects not trying to take on giant projects. You could see the same thing when fitness

00:38:01.800 | You could say okay. I want to I want to look like Chris Pratt in Jurassic World

00:38:08.380 | My boys and I watched that last night. That's a huge goal

00:38:13.380 | Right, right. That's like very difficult to do and it's three hours a day of training and you know

00:38:18.460 | And you're not you're probably not gonna get there and you lose interest in it. That's too broad

00:38:22.540 | But what you could do is take the first step towards getting into better shape

00:38:26.060 | okay, like so this is what I want to do is I don't know I want to have a

00:38:30.220 | cardiovascular habit

00:38:32.420 | so I'm gonna like research and buy the right shoes and get a route and

00:38:35.460 | get some baseline time for that route and have a

00:38:38.900 | Thing up on the wall where I keep track of what my times are and like you do that after a week

00:38:43.820 | You're like, okay

00:38:44.300 | I've done that thing and now I I know how to run of the ability to run I can keep track of my route times

00:38:48.660 | That's just like a step in the right

00:38:50.660 | Direction or it's okay. I'm going to buy this particular

00:38:53.140 | Type of fitness equipment and see if I can do like one week of this program

00:38:57.400 | So like I have a routine for that. So these are smaller things that again can stack and move you

00:39:01.500 | Move you in the right right direction

00:39:03.700 | Okay

00:39:04.100 | Now once you have these smaller projects you're stacking smaller projects deploy pre-scheduled time and daily disciplines to help make it automatic

00:39:10.780 | If you fall back on am I in the mood to run today?

00:39:13.780 | Am I in the mood to work on my DIY project today too often?

00:39:17.260 | The answer is going to be no so you want that time when you're doing your weekly plan to be pre-scheduled

00:39:22.020 | Put it on your calendar. This is when I do it if possible make something special around it. I'm coming home from work early

00:39:28.860 | I'm taking an extended lunch hour

00:39:30.380 | I'm going into work late this day so that I can get this run in or work on this project, right?

00:39:34.940 | So you're especially protecting the time not putting into the whatever dregs happen to be available

00:39:39.820 | Daily disciplines are great. If it's like this is just what I do. I exercise I go for a run right after work every day

00:39:45.940 | I

00:39:46.900 | Come in the door change do that and then that's really when my day is over and I'm back home for my family

00:39:52.100 | So daily disciplines plus pre-scheduled time don't leave it up to your own

00:39:55.420 | motivation in the moment

00:39:58.740 | Now here's the thing Rito if you do this for a while

00:40:01.100 | As we talked about I think two episodes ago, or maybe this was even last episode

00:40:06.460 | Your sense of yourself will change in particular your sense of yourself as a disciplined person who can

00:40:14.100 | Make consistent project progress on a hard project that sense of yourself will develop

00:40:20.020 | Discipline is not we've talked about this before on the show

00:40:23.940 | discipline is not a

00:40:27.260 | Approach you can decide to take it's not an attribute you can turn off and on. Oh, I think I should be more disciplined

00:40:33.580 | It's an identity

00:40:35.180 | It's something you feel about yourself

00:40:37.000 | I'm a disciplined person or I'm not and the only way to develop that identity is to actually make progress on completing things you make

00:40:43.420 | things that you contractively complete

00:40:45.420 | You schedule that time on your calendar you do daily disciplines do this for six months

00:40:49.500 | You're gonna find yourself in the future saying you know what? I don't need to break it up so much. I

00:40:54.020 | See myself as someone who can take on and follow through on big projects. So that will get easier anyways

00:40:58.660 | Great great question though Rito. I do appreciate that

00:41:02.980 | I will say Jesse Chris Pratt was muscular in that movie. That was my main takeaway

00:41:07.260 | Yeah, were you following his work hours? That's somebody else

00:41:11.380 | That was someone else though I was doing

00:41:15.540 | That was Thor right Thor Chris Hemsworth. I did his program

00:41:22.100 | I got his app sinner and I did go through its it was three or four months

00:41:28.380 | And he had a program for you could do with dumbbells only so I like to home gym

00:41:33.940 | And I finished it up here because I have membership of the gym. So I did I did go through that program. I

00:41:37.540 | Liked it nice. Here's the thing. It's not what he's doing

00:41:40.980 | The other thing I found out about the you know doing the weird stuff for the movies is

00:41:49.020 | So much of that is diet too. It's

00:41:51.420 | Thor Hemsworth talked about this the amount of food it

00:41:55.660 | They're adding 40 pounds of muscle. It's like a huge amount of food

00:41:59.820 | They have to eat at the same time that they're doing super intense working out the developed muscle

00:42:05.300 | But they have to eat a huge amount of food to actually just literally

00:42:08.460 | Have the mass that they put in there at the same time. They're also cutting and sure so they're they're cutting body fat

00:42:15.140 | Well consuming just huge amounts of boring food

00:42:18.260 | It doesn't sound fun

00:42:20.060 | I'm sure those guys that have to do those roles are like, oh my god

00:42:22.820 | six months and six months of this

00:42:25.820 | All right, but I digress I'll do another question what we got

00:42:30.060 | All right. Next question is from Lily. I

00:42:33.180 | noticed Cal bringing more focus on the issue of setting up one's environment and was wondering if he thinks that

00:42:39.100 | Environment is something we should think of as a bucket like craft or contemplation or is it more like a major project?

00:42:46.700 | Well, you know clearly I have been thinking about environment being up here in the deep work HQ North as we talked about the opening

00:42:52.900 | Of the show I have been finding

00:42:54.900 | Being in this different quieter more natural location. That's different than my normal routines as

00:43:01.020 | I predict is making a big impact. I I do think it does support clearer thinking I do think it does

00:43:07.020 | Support more insight. I do think it does support sense of cognitive recharge. So yes, I'm as Lily's pointing out a

00:43:15.660 | Big believer in environment. I don't think we don't think enough about it. So where does this fit into our

00:43:19.740 | Contemplation of the deep life. Well, I think it fits more neatly when we switch to the deep life stack

00:43:26.100 | So we've been shifting from this conception of the deep life on the show as

00:43:31.500 | Just being made made up of buckets that you address and we've instead

00:43:35.220 | changed to this notion of the deep life as being a stack with different layers that build on each other and you work your way

00:43:41.040 | Through and establish each layer till you get to the top and you can iterate and go back through again and again

00:43:45.560 | And that's the iterative process of forming the deep life now in our deep life stack. What's the topmost layer?

00:43:50.820 | It's the vision layer

00:43:53.740 | It's the layer in which you plan for the remarkable

00:43:58.300 | So below this you have all the other things that help you get there and also just give you a strong foundation in your life

00:44:03.320 | Remember you start with discipline re-establishing discipline then you move on the values

00:44:08.920 | Here is my code and here is the for how I live my life at good times and bad and here's the rituals that I

00:44:14.800 | Have in my life to help keep me constantly

00:44:16.800 | Reconnected to the core elements of that code. It just helps me live and understand that

00:44:22.440 | Then on top of that depending on which version of the stack we have you either go right to calm

00:44:27.880 | Where you control your your time and obligations for calm or you can add in which I've been doing more recently my thinking a service

00:44:34.580 | layer serving people around you so you want to make sure that you're

00:44:38.040 | connecting to other people and leading other people and serving other people because that's at the core of our species then you get the

00:44:43.800 | Calm layer we are finding calm by controlling your time and obligations. So now you have the breathing room to actually do things

00:44:50.120 | you have the breathing room to actually have insight and on top of all of that is planned for the remarkable the vision layer and

00:44:55.880 | In that layer is where you take a particular

00:44:58.880 | Target and say I want to push this part of my life to something more remarkable and building off all these other layers below

00:45:04.240 | I'm much more well suited to do that. I'm much more well suited to understand what's important to me and I'm much more

00:45:09.040 | Well suited to succeed

00:45:11.040 | With the goal of pushing a part of my life to be more remarkable

00:45:14.560 | Overhauling parts of your environment would be one of these types of projects you would do at that top layer

00:45:20.920 | So at this time you're constantly coming back to this top layer and as you iterate and say what's another part of my life?

00:45:26.920 | I want to push towards being remarkable. That's where I think that happens

00:45:30.880 | And so it might mean okay as I'm working on my top layer

00:45:34.240 | I'm going to take a

00:45:35.440 | portion of my house and I'm going to completely change it to be

00:45:38.400 | Much more dramatic as a place for doing work or it could be something much broader like I want a deep deep work HQ North

00:45:45.760 | I want property that I go to for six six weeks a year and how am I gonna make that happen?

00:45:49.920 | I have to start thinking through it would be really remarkable. But how am I gonna make that happen?

00:45:53.280 | So I think with the deep life stack these type of things make more sense

00:45:58.920 | The place you're gonna spend your most time once you've really got these other layers locked in

00:46:03.320 | Is gonna be that top layer where you're just systematically taking parts of your life that are important to you and making it more remarkable

00:46:10.240 | things about your job things about your

00:46:13.720 | fitness things about

00:46:16.960 | Intense leisure very serious leisure habits you have and things like the spaces you're in

00:46:22.040 | So I'll say Jesse for example, I'm I've been motivated. I think this academic year

00:46:28.240 | I

00:46:29.400 | Have a couple spaces in mind back

00:46:31.400 | Back in DC where I want to start doing some work and I think one of them is I want to do another

00:46:36.280 | Update to the HQ. Let's keep pushing this thing

00:46:40.580 | I think the office the office of the HQ let's I think we could make that cooler

00:46:44.760 | Like I'm thinking about I think the desks we have in there

00:46:48.440 | Are a little rickety

00:46:51.040 | Like let's get how really don't you think what if we got some?

00:46:54.720 | Really solid maybe just custom-built wood all the way around the room that you could just thump down on that thing

00:47:00.960 | And and it's not you know, this shaky thing. I want to there's nothing on the walls there

00:47:06.720 | I want to cover the whole yeah, we should hang that we should hang that one picture

00:47:09.760 | Yeah, we have this great piece of artwork that the grandkids of the art is as an artist whose whose work hangs in MoMA

00:47:16.280 | With this great piece of artwork

00:47:19.200 | That is she was taking a circuit schematics in the 1950s and 60s and building abstract artworks out of them

00:47:25.120 | We have a great frame piece of artwork her grandkids sent us and we just have to hang it

00:47:27.840 | I want to put a whole pegboard on the wall

00:47:31.080 | across from the 3d printer

00:47:34.080 | Like in a workshop from which we can hang tools and all the all the different stuff that's being used in the the the maker

00:47:40.480 | portion

00:47:41.600 | Of the office so we have like tools and things hanging off of the hanging off the wall there

00:47:47.600 | That'll I'm gonna be cool. Yeah, I think it'll be cool. Yes. I mean

00:47:51.600 | Yeah, the desk idea is good, too

00:47:54.200 | Yeah, I get real all the way around the room

00:47:57.240 | Kind of really cool custom. So it's really solid so you could just have one chair and just be rolling like here's the here's the

00:48:03.880 | Monitor you can go over to the printers or stuff and go over to the the workbench side and have like task lights

00:48:08.320 | It was I want to make that room really cool

00:48:10.120 | So I've that I have that type of thought in mind

00:48:13.360 | Continuing to work on some of the spaces and in my house. So I'm thinking about it

00:48:17.800 | I think spaces is cool. And I want to I want to when I'm planning for the remarkable I want to have more of

00:48:22.440 | More focus more focus on spaces

00:48:25.120 | You know what? I want. I think would be cool. I think we need an on-air light outside our studio

00:48:29.280 | It's a small thing. I think that'd be cool

00:48:31.840 | Yeah, that would be cool. Just uh, yeah, just just turn that turn that thing on. All right, let's uh, let's keep rolling

00:48:39.400 | What do we got?

00:48:40.640 | All right next questions from anal in the show

00:48:44.560 | You talk about lifestyle centric career planning and this fully resonates with my way of thinking about life

00:48:49.720 | And I see it as the best way to building a life you want to have but how do I find?

00:48:53.800 | examples of the lifestyles I desire

00:48:56.440 | Another good question obviously with lifestyle centric career planning

00:49:01.560 | What we're talking about with that is that you begin by fixing?

00:49:06.240 | The vision of your ideal lifestyle and then you work backwards to figure out practically speaking

00:49:10.880 | How do I get as close as possible to that lifestyle image?

00:49:13.820 | The key thing in this planning is the lifestyles not just career

00:49:17.360 | It's it's all aspects of your life. What type of place do you live?

00:49:21.400 | I mean, it's it are you on a mountain? Are you in a small town?

00:49:24.640 | are you in a high rise in the city and going to

00:49:27.040 | Coffee shops where there's a vibrant discussion or is it more you're going for walks in the woods?

00:49:33.360 | Is it you're near family and they're all coming over and it's like in the opening of that old NBC show

00:49:39.160 | Parenthood with sort of lights cafe lights hanging in this yard and people are sitting around picnic tables. Like what are you imagining?

00:49:45.880 | What is resonating you you're surfing out in the waves each morning or it's more of a Masters of the Universe type

00:49:52.640 | I'm controlling these businesses or making moves and breaking things and I have all these people who are working under me

00:49:58.720 | all these type of visions

00:50:02.040 | So you're making this this concrete tactile vision of a lifestyle that really resonates and then you figure out

00:50:07.120 | Okay, how do I get there and a big part of that answer is going to be the job portion

00:50:11.640 | Well, okay. How am I gonna for this location? What type of job would have there? What flexibility do I need?

00:50:17.280 | What level do I need to be at so really helps you make career decisions pragmatically, but other things as well

00:50:22.100 | What am I doing with the rest of my time? How am I structuring my life? Where am I living location decision?

00:50:28.340 | So that's lifestyle centric

00:50:30.760 | Planning and of course the hard part is how do you figure out that lifestyle?

00:50:33.800 | And I think the issue here is it sounds like you're looking for perhaps an individual

00:50:39.160 | To be the exemplar of everything you're looking for

00:50:42.520 | This guy I want to be

00:50:45.840 | Kurt Gerdl, you know, and so let me just try to

00:50:48.800 | mimic

00:50:51.440 | Mimic everything he has in his lifestyle that sometimes works and it's great

00:50:55.320 | If it does what I think is more common is that you're going to pick and choose

00:50:59.000 | Aspects of lifestyles from different people that you're going to then put together into your own image

00:51:05.520 | So what you're really looking for is you want to encounter real-life case studies of real people and it could be people

00:51:10.840 | You know

00:51:11.180 | or they could be famous people or people you see on YouTube where you watch a documentary about or read about in books and

00:51:16.280 | You've listened for this sense of resonance

00:51:19.600 | It's a really clear feeling where there's something about this person. You're seeing in a video

00:51:25.040 | Or in a book that just feels right

00:51:27.240 | And what you want to figure out is what exactly about?

00:51:30.840 | What I'm looking at here is

00:51:33.560 | Causing that sense of resonance and I would suggest you have a place to write this down

00:51:37.480 | Everyone should have a notebook that's dedicated to just

00:51:41.160 | their life

00:51:43.120 | The quest for a deeper life. This was you know for me famously my moleskins

00:51:47.240 | I'm now doing this in my remarkable which we'll talk about later

00:51:49.520 | But you should have a notebook dedicated to this where you can keep track of these notes and over time

00:51:54.640 | You'll see certain things will come up again and again this book this documentary this person

00:51:59.240 | I met in all cases that resonated with me because of this one aspect of their lives

00:52:03.320 | You'll see that thing show up again and again. So you say great. This should be a part of my ideal lifestyle

00:52:07.160 | and you have to keep in mind sometimes these examples will be unusual right that the

00:52:13.480 | Broader details of these examples that are spurring residents might be completely foreign to anything you might want to do

00:52:19.960 | Like let me just give you a very concrete example. A lot of my listeners

00:52:23.040 | Have sent me

00:52:25.560 | Links to the documentary Jiro dreams of sushi

00:52:28.800 | It's a great documentary about this. I think he's a three-star Michelin

00:52:35.120 | Chef it's a sushi master and his restaurant is in a subway station in Tokyo

00:52:42.160 | There's nothing fancy, but his entire life is just obsessively mastering the art of

00:52:47.520 | Doing sushi at the highest possible level and people travel from all around the world to try to come to this small

00:52:54.640 | Restaurant and sit at the counter

00:52:57.240 | Inside a subway station now that resonated for example with a lot of my listeners not because they want to be sushi chefs

00:53:03.400 | Not because they want to work long hours in a subway station. What was resonating?

00:53:08.320 | craft

00:53:10.480 | They were they were sensing look this person is really focused on mastering a craft and out of that is getting significant

00:53:17.920 | personal satisfaction

00:53:18.960 | That is an element you can pull out of that example that you can then apply to your lifestyle vision that you okay

00:53:24.520 | I want to be working on something be really good at something and have a craft that can really take some pride in

00:53:29.760 | That's a really good insight and it came from an unlikely place

00:53:34.160 | It's like I for whatever reason find various residences when I watch things about the big wave surfer

00:53:40.000 | Laird Hamilton, I have no interest in being a big wave surfer. I don't trust going into the ocean

00:53:46.360 | I don't trust making myself in the shark food. I don't even like going in boats, but there's just aspects about the

00:53:53.320 | The intentionality especially where he lives on the old pineapple plantation in Maui or Kauai

00:54:01.420 | I'm not sure exactly where it is. There's just aspects of his life that resonated about a sort of intentionality and

00:54:08.360 | location really mattering and he also has a sort of dedication to

00:54:11.920 | his work as being a source of

00:54:14.560 | interestingness and

00:54:16.520 | Challenge and not just as trying to climb some type of ladder

00:54:19.400 | He did not go the professional surfing route and did this own thing. There's real lessons in there that resonate with me even though I

00:54:25.000 | Don't wear board shorts. I don't live in Hawaii and I you know, I hate I'm terrified of the ocean essentially

00:54:32.720 | so what I'm trying to say here is

00:54:35.520 | You're deconstructing things to cause sense of resonance to figure out what the small elements are and you write this all down and you do

00:54:42.280 | That long enough a pretty clear image will arise of these are the things that matter to me and then the fun part comes

00:54:47.720 | The planning for the remarkable part where you begin shaping your life towards those things now you have some actual now you have some actual direction

00:54:56.440 | Laird Hamilton, so, you know him at all. Have you seen any of his stuff Jesse?

00:55:03.520 | Yeah, I um, he's been on Ferris a couple times. So I listen to those I've listened to

00:55:08.640 | Some of the episodes with his wife. I have this coffee creamer that I occasionally use. I like that creamer

00:55:15.760 | Yeah, yeah, I like it at times

00:55:18.600 | Yeah times did I had the turmeric one?

00:55:22.800 | For a while. I talked about branding. That's entirely something. Why did I buy that brand that it just layered?

00:55:30.400 | Yeah, imagine him

00:55:33.160 | With his like, you know in Maui

00:55:35.680 | With a tree trunk legs like we're gonna go like invent some new thing to surf some cool wave

00:55:41.120 | You're like I just want in what are you selling? Yeah, that's great. You know, that's like pure

00:55:46.440 | That's pure sort of the Olympic athlete on the Wheaties box marketing and I love it. I'm here. I'm here for that

00:55:52.560 | You know, that was definitely I still have it. I gotta use it again. I haven't yeah, I haven't used in a while

00:55:57.400 | Yeah, he's interesting guy. He lives he lives full speed, you know, which which I he does a lot

00:56:03.040 | Workouts in the pool with like dumbbells like at the bottom. Yeah, he invented that

00:56:07.320 | I've seen it for sure. I forgot what it's called. But yeah, he invented a whole new way of working out

00:56:12.200 | Yeah, just terrible but awesome. Yeah, well you work out underwater

00:56:16.720 | Which is such a dumb thing to do. Yeah, but have you heard there's there's actually

00:56:21.240 | Some NBA players got into it, right because they could you could really practice

00:56:28.400 | Like vertical leap and jumping and stuff like this with no impact on your legs

00:56:31.720 | And so coming off of injury you could actually do a lot of training, but he's basically a crazy person. He's just

00:56:37.540 | What Jesse is describing here is what you would think he is in the bottom of a swimming pool in Malibu

00:56:42.660 | with like heavyweights exercising

00:56:45.240 | underwater

00:56:47.080 | Because there's no resistance so like you can do I don't know. He also has brought he got really into

00:56:53.560 | Saunas and ice baths, right? Yeah, I seem to be right now. And so he brought

00:56:58.000 | This terrible piece of exercise equipment. So people are saying look I'm gonna sit in the sauna for 20 minutes and this is so hard

00:57:04.920 | So he wanted to one-up everyone so he brought in one of these attack bike things. Have you seen these it's like

00:57:11.120 | Oh, yeah, so bikes assault. Yeah. Yeah, which is a very hard cardio workout, right? It's like impossible

00:57:16.400 | It's your arms your legs. So he brought an assault bike into the sauna. So he said I'm not just gonna sit in the sauna

00:57:22.280 | I'm gonna do the hardest possible like cardio exercise in the sauna

00:57:26.600 | He wears oven mitts because the the the handlebars are too hot. They could burn his hands. So he's wearing oven mitts

00:57:33.060 | Oven mitts in a sauna doing the hardest possible exercise before getting into an ice bath bath afterwards. He's a crazy man

00:57:41.160 | He's a crazy man

00:57:41.960 | and what I've learned about all that stuff and the saunas and the ice baths and all the craziness is you know

00:57:46.100 | It's not so much about like what exactly can we measure some particular?

00:57:51.360 | physiological effect I just think for these

00:57:53.480 | elite level

00:57:56.480 | Athletes and training they just they need the they need discipline and challenge

00:58:01.000 | I think this is partially why really extreme sauna ice bath challenge have worked our ways in the routine

00:58:07.000 | It's a lot of these people are just looking for

00:58:09.000 | Discipline and challenges and moving their body through more. I think it's as much psychological as probably it is physiological

00:58:15.200 | Yeah

00:58:17.640 | Yeah, but maybe we'll need to get so I'm adding this to the list for our property for the HQ North so we have

00:58:24.280 | professional assault like or a sauna

00:58:27.000 | Sauna ice bath. No, no assault bike

00:58:29.960 | Maybe no, you can't have a swimming pool up here

00:58:32.640 | So we're not gonna do underwater weightlifting and then we have your putting green. So we're making

00:58:37.120 | The list is growing I would love that

00:58:41.080 | That's what Hamilton had by the way speaking of deep work HQ North is he has this

00:58:45.280 | I don't know if you still have it probably does he bought this cool property near

00:58:48.760 | That wave he made famous jaws

00:58:51.920 | Piappi or whatever. It's called. He bought this old pineapple plantation

00:58:56.640 | Near where this giant wave was that he sort of helped innovate

00:59:00.320 | big wave riding on and he just does all these projects in the offseason he has all this equipment and

00:59:06.120 | You know back hose and ATVs and because he gets bored. They're all there's it's this huge property with all these vehicles

00:59:13.800 | They're always like kind of doing cool stuff while they're waiting for the waves to come

00:59:16.440 | Yeah, the deeper case you north is gonna be like a a much less physically fit

00:59:22.600 | Version of that so instead of like a TV to dig a trench will be you know

00:59:28.400 | Strolling to read a book by like a bench, but whatever a lot of a lot of things going on

00:59:33.480 | All right enough this nonsense. Let's keep rolling. What do we got next?

00:59:35.640 | All right next questions from Anna. I

00:59:38.880 | Have worked very hard to get my current job by ruining to get to my current job by

00:59:44.000 | Removing distractions and focusing on rare and valuable skills because I'm good at time management

00:59:49.640 | I can now realistically work about 20 hours a week and do more than enough to keep my boss happy

00:59:54.840 | Recently, I've been presented with the chance to move to a late-stage startup where I'd be more stimulated in terms of role

01:00:01.680 | But would need to work a lot more hours

01:00:04.040 | I'm sort of bored of my current job, but I have a lot of free time. I could spend on other things

01:00:09.480 | Should I switch jobs?

01:00:11.560 | Well, first of all, there's a case study aspect to this embedded which is for those who who look at the type of

01:00:20.280 | Time and task management strategies we talked about sometimes on this show and see them as somehow

01:00:27.160 | ways to do more work who will cast

01:00:31.400 | multi-scale planning and task capture these type of things we talked about for the the calm layer of the deep life stack and say well

01:00:38.760 | that's just about optimization and you're just turning yourself into a

01:00:41.560 | Machine of profits to do ever more work. This shows you the counterpoint

01:00:46.000 | Because this is the other thing you can do when you can control what's on your plate

01:00:50.320 | You can decide what you want to do with that

01:00:52.680 | And yes

01:00:53.080 | It is possible to say like I do sometimes to my regret and say great now I can fit four jobs into nine to five

01:00:59.560 | Instead of one that's one thing you can do and I've done that at times

01:01:02.440 | But you can also do what Anna did is say great

01:01:04.720 | I work takes about 20 hours a week and everyone thinks I'm a superstar

01:01:08.160 | that's the flip side of

01:01:10.840 | Controlling your time and obligations as you actually get control over

01:01:15.240 | The workload you have knobs you can turn now. Let's get that Anna's particular point. She's so good at this that she's bored

01:01:21.160 | Right. She's working 20 hours doesn't really have anything else going on and saying should I go to another job?

01:01:27.280 | There's gonna be much more time. It's gonna be much more intensive. It's gonna take much more hours

01:01:31.600 | She elaborated we didn't we didn't put it all in here

01:01:34.280 | But she elaborated more about what that new job would be like

01:01:36.920 | There'd be new skills to pick up and she was saying she would have to prove herself. So, you know late-stage startups

01:01:41.600 | It's definitely a place where you just need to demonstrate

01:01:44.440 | Energy and value no 20 hours. That's gonna be not no 20 hour weeks there. It's gonna be 60 hour weeks

01:01:50.800 | So should she switch jobs?

01:01:53.120 | Well, Anna the issue what that's gonna come down to is your lifestyle vision

01:01:57.200 | This is we're having clarity on this is what I want my lifestyle to be like all aspects work and non work is going to be

01:02:03.920 | really important

01:02:05.920 | Because getting that straight is going to give you clarity about okay, what role does my career play here?

01:02:11.960 | So if you go through this vision and you're saying okay where I want to be in this vision and I could be here in

01:02:15.760 | Three years is one where you know, maybe it involves your you're starting a family or you're writing novels or you want to

01:02:24.120 | Live in nature and be able to like spend long times

01:02:27.320 | Hiking or like surfing or something like this then you would say great

01:02:31.360 | I'm bored right now at this 20 hour a week job

01:02:33.360 | But this is the right foundation for this lifestyle image that I'm trying to get towards

01:02:37.920 | Let me keep that and I'll be

01:02:39.640 | Systematic right now in the other parts of my life moving me towards that setting me up for the move setting me up for learning

01:02:44.400 | This skill changing from you know in person to remote you have work to do now. This is the right engine

01:02:51.800 | Professionally, let me work towards getting towards this lifestyle image on the other hand

01:02:55.160 | maybe when you do this lifestyle centric career planning your thing like I'm bored and

01:02:58.720 | the image I have in mind of where I'd like my lifestyle to be is one where I'm more in the thick of things and

01:03:05.080 | I'm plugged into I've seen

01:03:08.280 | Her current job. She didn't we cut this out for for length, but she's working as a chief of staff for a

01:03:13.960 | Sort of a more well-known figure. So maybe she's thinking that well-known figure

01:03:17.920 | That life is what I'm looking for

01:03:21.120 | You know, like you've had a successful company and that was really hard

01:03:23.840 | but now you're doing some investing and maybe you're also you have a vision of I'm oscillating back and forth between

01:03:28.400 | just sitting back and investing and then building up companies from scratch to make an impact and I want to live in the thick of

01:03:34.520 | things and

01:03:35.520 | Be on stage with a thousand people as I give a talk about what I've learned like maybe that's the image that resonates

01:03:40.760 | It's really clear. Yeah, I got to leave this 20 hour a week job and go to the late-stage start up and crush it over

01:03:45.020 | There I got to figure out how to really make myself known orient my whole life there about using all of my

01:03:51.400 | time management skills to just be a superstar and

01:03:54.120 | I have that I can put up with that for two years be really hard because I think I'm gonna be able to jump from

01:03:58.640 | There to doing my own startup and you could have a whole different vision

01:04:00.800 | Your lifestyle is what matters here. The lifestyle vision you're aiming towards is what allows you to make all of these

01:04:07.160 | Decisions in the absence of that bigger picture vision that really resonates the decisions become

01:04:13.800 | arbitrary

01:04:15.800 | You'll focus in on one thing. I don't know. I'm bored right now

01:04:18.600 | I don't want to be bored and then six months later. You're stressed out of your mind

01:04:21.860 | Working till 11 every night because people wonder why the lights off if you're not there and think why did I do this?

01:04:28.480 | Like I solved the boredom problem and created a whole nother problem, you know other parts of my life are falling apart, right?

01:04:33.360 | So we don't want to be making knee-jerk or arbitrary decisions

01:04:36.520 | And again having that ideal lifestyle that you're looking towards is really helpful

01:04:41.000 | Now if you're struggling to do that, there's a couple things you can do

01:04:45.360 | There's the advice we just gave before of in a previous question

01:04:49.020 | Look for things to resonate figure out what parts of the resonate write that all down and see what emerges

01:04:54.560 | This is also we're working through the full deep life stack matters

01:04:58.860 | So part of the value of moving through the deep life stack before you get to this final layer where you make these big changes

01:05:05.680 | Where you change your career where you pursue big projects

01:05:08.600 | So one of the reasons why you go through all these layers is that it prepares you

01:05:14.240 | for better identifying these visions that matter when you become a

01:05:18.160 | establish your discipline when you figure out what your values your code and you have rituals that connect you deeply and

01:05:26.160 | intuitively to the things that really matter that you build your life on top of when you're serving other people on a

01:05:31.800 | Regular basis when you have control, which you probably already have of your time and obligations

01:05:36.160 | It's much easier than to say with confidence. This matters. This doesn't this is important to me

01:05:41.160 | There's a core calmness and clarity that comes from that

01:05:44.260 | So get that lifestyle image really clear

01:05:46.440 | move through all the deep life stack layers and start keeping a notebook of what resonates if you don't have that lifestyle image and then use

01:05:53.020 | That to make your decisions do not allow this to be a knee-jerk decision

01:05:57.140 | All right, so what I want to do now is

01:06:01.740 | I'm gonna jump forward to

01:06:04.300 | Talk about my own experience

01:06:07.100 | With my newest gadget to juror, which is my remarkable to tablet

01:06:12.900 | Before we get there. I just want to mention another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible

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01:07:08.460 | Even if you're a keto or low car or paleo or just don't want all of the weirdness that's in typical other sports drinks

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01:07:18.140 | Put element in my water afterwards because I sweat a lot because it's a roughly and I'm again

01:07:23.900 | I'm looking at the National Weather Service here a billion percent humidity and terribly hot. That is the forecast in DC

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01:07:34.300 | September stupidly hot and humid I think is the official term if I go hiking for a long walk

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01:07:44.020 | I probably just didn't drink enough last night put element in the water

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01:07:59.940 | But maybe it's just a morning and I'm just feeling a little

01:08:03.260 | Dried out. I might put half a packet into the water. So I'll sort of titrate with the packets

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01:08:53.740 | Jesse when I ran out of the element I brought with me up here. I

01:08:59.060 | Bought and I regret this

01:09:02.100 | I bought this at a supermarket. It's like, oh, here's an electrolyte thing. It was like tablets. I was like, I could put this in my water

01:09:07.820 | It's the worst thing because you put that you put it in your water bottle, right?

01:09:12.620 | And the idea is this competitor I won't say its name and you're like great that'll give me electrolytes

01:09:18.100 | It takes like 10 minutes for this thing to dissolve like Alka-Seltzer

01:09:22.780 | It just sits there in your water bottle so you can't drink your water

01:09:26.100 | So you finish your workout you're super sweaty and you put one of these tablets in the water

01:09:30.460 | Like I guess I'm just gonna stare at my ice water for 10 minutes before like the electrolytes are like who invented this thing

01:09:35.540 | Anyways, the point is I really missed my element. I was like, okay, I gotta get back to my element

01:09:40.620 | I need to just throw in that packet and get the job done

01:09:44.100 | All right. I also want to talk about our our good friends at Henson

01:09:49.180 | shaving

01:09:51.100 | this is the razor that

01:09:53.100 | This is the the razor that I use. Okay. So what's going on with?

01:09:59.220 | Henson, this is a family-owned

01:10:01.340 | Aerospace parts manufacturer. This is someone who was making precision parts

01:10:06.620 | For the International Space Station for the Mars Rover who brought their experience with doing incredibly precise engineering

01:10:13.900 | to the problem of getting a good shave

01:10:17.220 | so a Henson razor is this beautifully milled piece of aluminum into which you just put a

01:10:24.180 | standard 10 cent safety razor blade and you screw it on and it's precisely milled so that you have just

01:10:31.460 | 0.0013 inches of blade extending past either side of the razor

01:10:35.980 | What this means is when you shave you're not going to get the diving board effect

01:10:39.660 | Where the blade goes up and down that's what caused nicks

01:10:42.580 | That's what caused clogs you instead get this

01:10:45.260 | Really clean shave and you get it without having to have 15 different razors in some plastic

01:10:51.540 | monstrosity that you bought at the drugstore because if you have one really well manufactured if you're if your razor is really well manufactured you

01:10:58.180 | Just need one blade to get a good shave

01:11:00.300 | So this actually makes this an affordable way to get a good shave because yeah you pay more up front for the razor

01:11:06.380 | But then you're just using these super cheap to buy blades so it doesn't take long

01:11:10.860 | before the upkeep of your Henson is

01:11:15.080 | Significantly cheaper than if you're using a subscription service and significantly cheaper than if you're trying to buy

01:11:20.620 | The big plastic packed blades at the drugstore. It is what I use. I love the shave

01:11:26.860 | I also love how this thing works and as someone who cares about technology

01:11:30.060 | I'd love nothing more than just a really well-built thing that solves a problem well and does so

01:11:36.340 | efficiently

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01:11:45.780 | Depict a razor for you and use code Cal and you will get two years worth of blades free

01:11:50.700 | So the way you do this is just to add the two year supply of blades to your cart

01:11:55.220 | And then when you type in Cal as your promo code the price of those blades will drop to zero

01:12:00.940 | That's 100 free blades when you head to H en

01:12:04.340 | SON

01:12:06.740 | sh av ing

01:12:08.740 | Comm slash Cal and use that code

01:12:11.900 | Cal

01:12:14.060 | All right, Jesse the the fans have been asking. I'm gonna load up the website here. They've been asking about my experience with my remarkable 2

01:12:21.420 | tablet

01:12:23.740 | I'm gonna load it up. They have

01:12:25.740 | Now let's see here. I'm loading up the website here so for those who are watching again. This is Cal new

01:12:32.020 | Youtube.com slash Cal Newport media. This is episode 258 or at the deep life comm episode 258

01:12:40.020 | Let's load up this home page for those who are watching so we can remember all right meet remarkable the paper

01:12:47.380 | tablet

01:12:49.580 | All right, and as we watch this video before we see a very well-dressed contemplative

01:12:54.900 | Woman holding her remarkable. Here's some pictures of it as close to paper as it gets

01:13:01.420 | so as you can see in this image here the the remarkable for those who don't know is a

01:13:09.900 | Electronic notebook

01:13:11.900 | So you have it's a one page that you can write on it's a Kindle style e-ink

01:13:18.460 | So you write on this page and you see what you're writing like handwriting

01:13:22.740 | I'm showing some of this on the screen right now and

01:13:25.420 | You can have endless pages essentially and endless notebooks all in this one thing you hold all of it being backed up

01:13:32.980 | To the cloud as well

01:13:36.100 | All right, so what is my experience been with the remarkable the headline is I really like it

01:13:41.420 | I'm really liking my remarkable - and here is why I

01:13:47.420 | Had a lot of notebooks in my life because I have so many different things

01:13:53.260 | I do these each had their own notebook

01:13:56.220 | So I had a notebook for example for my moleskin for keeping track of just my general

01:14:01.900 | Life thoughts the pursuit to have a deeper life, right? I would have notebooks for

01:14:07.820 | Theory I'm working on computer science papers. I need notebooks to work on

01:14:12.660 | Ideas mathematical equations this or that I would have multiple notebooks like this. I would have notebooks for

01:14:18.740 | Planning around the business the the media company we run here. So thinking through how what's our strategy? What's happening?

01:14:26.460 | What's our vision for the future? I have notebooks to keep track of like my specific

01:14:31.660 | What is my what's the specific plan strategic plan?

01:14:36.060 | I'm working on for you know a particular part of my life and I want to keep notes on it

01:14:40.220 | I'll have a notebook for that as well

01:14:42.860 | I'd have notebooks for book ideas and then a notebook for each particular book

01:14:47.000 | I was working on and then just a scratch notebooks because I need to just keep track of ideas. I'm at a meeting

01:14:52.180 | I'm sketching out a plan a lot of different notebooks were in my life and I was constantly grabbing different notebooks and

01:14:59.540 | Using some for other purposes the remarkable solve that problem. I

01:15:02.980 | Just have a lot of notebooks. I counted there's nine. I've started so far. They're all on the same device

01:15:08.900 | So I can use the stylus go over select any notebook. I want start taking notes

01:15:14.200 | And it's just there and then if I want to do something else I can switch over to that notebook and it's right there

01:15:19.180 | So I've really been I've really been enjoying that it really has been solving the problem. I mean basically the only

01:15:24.820 | the only paper notebook that this has not replaced is

01:15:29.740 | Time block planning and

01:15:31.740 | I tried this I was like, I wonder if I could just like build time block plans or mark

01:15:35.740 | Well, I didn't like it right so that was the one place where I wanted

01:15:38.320 | spiral binding

01:15:40.420 | like the new time block planner has I

01:15:42.420 | Wanted something tactile that I could I could write in and see next to me and lie flat next to me

01:15:47.020 | And work on throughout the day as I was working on other things

01:15:50.260 | That's the only real paper notebook that's left in my life right now is my time block planner

01:15:54.580 | I really do need that to be analog and with me in all places

01:15:58.260 | But I've had no problem moving my work notebooks by planning notebooks, even my moleskin notebooks all that's worked

01:16:03.740 | Well moving to the remarkable now. I talk a little bit about

01:16:07.100 | How I function with it

01:16:10.220 | The writing I think is great. It took me a little while to get used to it. Like what's the right pressure?

01:16:16.100 | I used to fine liner at narrow

01:16:18.100 | But once I got used to it, it really for me feels very much like a notebook writing on paper

01:16:23.820 | My handwriting is the same as writing on paper. It's it's really identical

01:16:28.100 | I really like that. I really like that experience. I've learned to use the highlighter a lot as well. So I'd like that

01:16:34.100 | I can highlight

01:16:35.340 | To emphasize things I can I can highlight text. So just from an operational point. That's been great

01:16:40.140 | It has endless scrolling so you can make your page you can scroll it down as long as you need

01:16:46.420 | And then you can add pages

01:16:48.780 | So you can scroll the particular page you want to put more on it

01:16:52.240 | You can just keep writing longer and longer and then it's very easy just to jump to a new page

01:16:57.340 | One thing I found myself doing is editing notebooks, which I can't do with paper notebooks, but I do like to do this here

01:17:02.580 | So for example, I have a notebook where I'm working on the deep life stack

01:17:07.540 | the ideas around the deep life stack and

01:17:10.660 | My particular iteration through the deep life stack right now

01:17:15.040 | and one of the things I did was

01:17:16.780 | You know

01:17:17.280 | I had an early version of it on a new page a better version of it than a couple pages with a lot of

01:17:21.120 | notes on it in that case I actually went back and

01:17:25.700 | Deleted some of the older pages and consolidated and rewrote like a okay. Here's the here's the right

01:17:30.840 | The right way to do the stack right now. I've tried a bunch of versions

01:17:34.420 | I don't want to keep trying I deleted those and added a page and rewrote it, right?

01:17:38.500 | so I find myself doing that sometimes with planning notebooks is

01:17:41.580 | Going back and deleting pages and re-summarizing them as I get better ideas around it. So that that's an interesting twist

01:17:49.660 | I didn't expect myself to do

01:17:51.460 | The backing up features work great. So the way it works is you have an app on your computer

01:17:56.980 | that if you open it it mimics exactly the navigation of your remarkable and

01:18:01.860 | If you go to any of the notebooks in that navigation all your page

01:18:05.980 | You can just read it all on your computer and you can export any of those pages to PDF

01:18:10.100 | I've done that sometimes to print some things

01:18:12.100 | So can you when you go on the desktop? Can you go in there and type in there? No, so all you can do is

01:18:19.580 | See backups and you can read what you wrote in the notebook

01:18:24.100 | So you can't type in remarkable either right or is it all just right?

01:18:28.340 | Well, I'll get to that in a second because you can and I'll tell you my experience with that

01:18:31.660 | But the way that app works the desktop app works

01:18:34.860 | It just shows you it's a backup of all of your notes

01:18:36.940 | And so the main useful thing for that is a if you lose your remarkable you have all your notes if you buy a new

01:18:42.680 | Remarkable, I'm sure you can transfer it over but you can print those things

01:18:47.580 | Now if there is something else you so I haven't used these features yet though though it's a

01:18:52.100 | It's activated. It does now have integration with Google Drive and with Dropbox

01:18:58.220 | Because you can bring files. I haven't done this yet, but I want to do more of this

01:19:01.980 | You can bring PDFs onto the remarkable

01:19:04.220 | read them on the remarkable mark them up on the remarkable and

01:19:08.020 | so this is a place where you can be more interactive as you can hook up a particular folder on the remarkable with let's say

01:19:15.020 | a Dropbox folder and

01:19:17.220 | Now if you just put a document like a PDF file into that Dropbox folder, it will automatically appear on

01:19:23.420 | your remarkable and if on your remarkable you you write it you annotate it an

01:19:28.900 | Annotated version of that document shows shows up in your Dropbox folder

01:19:33.700 | So that's kind of cool same with Google Drive as well

01:19:37.180 | So that's kind of cool

01:19:38.300 | If you're for example need to edit some papers or something you can just throw

01:19:42.020 | Throw papers or articles into a Dropbox and then you're on a train somewhere

01:19:45.940 | They've all synced up onto your remarkable so you can read them and mark them up and then you know later all that annotation is

01:19:51.540 | Resynchronized back up with your Dropbox so you know at home on your computer

01:19:56.140 | You can print things out with the marks and stuff like that. So I think that's

01:19:58.900 | That's that's a nice feature

01:20:01.820 | But really the thing is you can't so we're gonna talk about shortcomings

01:20:05.900 | three things to mention

01:20:08.820 | This really is about using the notebook so you can see the stuff you did on your computer

01:20:13.820 | But you can't you're not really supposed to be it doesn't go back and forth

01:20:18.060 | You can't update things on your computer and have that show up on your remarkable

01:20:21.220 | If you annotate a PDF file that syncs back to your Dropbox, it's going to be a new version of the file with the annotations

01:20:28.620 | Right because it's its own proprietary world of marking and drawing and stuff like that that the computer doesn't speak. I

01:20:35.180 | Got the fancy

01:20:38.220 | Folio that has a this really cool built-in keyboard

01:20:40.980 | So you can type on it, right?

01:20:43.340 | so it's actually the the case can become like a

01:20:48.140 | Surface thing where it a keyboard comes out and it's up like a screen you can type on it

01:20:53.980 | I I'm not been using it. I

01:20:55.980 | Used it a little bit

01:20:57.460 | But the typing experience is not great because you don't have a lot of control over where the text is going to go and you

01:21:01.740 | Can't do much with the text once it's on there

01:21:03.740 | And now at any time you want on a remarkable page you can put in a text cursor and type either on an on-screen keyboard

01:21:09.100 | Or with the built-in keyboard. I don't like doing it because I don't really know how I don't know how to move the text around

01:21:14.500 | There's weird things about deleting the text. I mean so I what I've been doing is

01:21:19.580 | Really dealing with just handwriting and just saying this is a this is my paper notebook

01:21:24.060 | I just have 20 paper notebooks in one form. That's how I've been personally using it

01:21:27.940 | I have not been using the typing because you know, it's not a word processor

01:21:31.300 | It's like the text is going right over here and you can't do anything with it

01:21:34.180 | Once you type it it kind of makes me nervous

01:21:35.700 | So I don't know if I would pay for the keyboard folio or if you do you would have to have a better use case

01:21:40.920 | For it. So that's the the second downside

01:21:42.920 | The third downside is it's just really expensive

01:21:45.380 | Once you buy the remarkable you buy the fancy folio you buy the nicer stylus for it I was in

01:21:53.460 | $500 plus

01:21:56.620 | Which is a lot of money now I could kind of justify it because well

01:21:59.940 | It's you know, I talked about on the show and it's you know

01:22:02.140 | It fits the type of things we do

01:22:05.060 | It is really expensive

01:22:07.380 | So that would be the other downside

01:22:09.580 | But in the end so far I've been doing this for a couple months now as a replacement for my stack of random notebooks

01:22:15.860 | It has been successful and I think I'm probably capturing more notes than I otherwise would

01:22:21.740 | And I love the experience of using it and as long as I think of it as just these are notebooks that I write in

01:22:26.280 | With a pen and that's it and I don't care too much about the computer integration and I don't try to do writing on it

01:22:31.220 | I just think of it as notebooks

01:22:32.940 | I've been very happy with the experience. I love single-purpose

01:22:35.580 | Purpose application gadgets things to do one thing and they do that one thing really well. There's no distraction when you're on there

01:22:41.860 | There's no internet when you're on there. There's just this is me

01:22:45.360 | Writing in a notebook and so I'll count myself as a as a remarkable to fan

01:22:52.180 | But with those caveats that it's it's just for writing and it's expensive. It's expensive as all get out

01:22:58.980 | Can you carry it around in your pocket?

01:23:01.820 | No, it's the size of like a normal eight eight and a half by eleven piece of paper

01:23:06.220 | So I guess my only question is before when you had kind of that life

01:23:09.760 | Notebook for the moleskins that you carry around your pocket. How do you capture those thoughts if you're I think but I want to care

01:23:16.500 | You could you could put a moleskin in your pocket, but I want it right because then you would have a big thing in your pocket

01:23:22.000 | So I was a bigger one for some reason. I thought I was a little one

01:23:25.080 | It was a little one, but I don't the little ones

01:23:27.280 | I don't like having in my pocket still like it fits in your pocket, but it's weird to have you know

01:23:32.300 | It's like having a big wallet in your pocket still, you know, I wouldn't walk around with that in my pocket

01:23:37.600 | I don't like having things in my pocket. So I my moleskin was small, but I kept it in my bag

01:23:41.640 | Okay, so it'd be in it would be in the front pocket of my backpack

01:23:45.480 | So nothing changed. Yeah, this is the size of like a composition notebook

01:23:50.440 | So it's a size of a normal piece of paper and maybe like a half-inch thick. It's heavy

01:23:54.120 | Which I actually kind of like about it. It's actually kind of heavy. It's very substantial

01:23:57.640 | But so that hasn't been a problem

01:24:01.200 | Because I I want it. I want it moleskin in my pocket. I would always moleskin in in my my bag anyway

01:24:06.600 | So now I just throw this thing

01:24:08.360 | Throw this thing to my bag. That's the other downside. These are small things the stylus like magnets onto the side, which is cool

01:24:16.260 | So it just sticks on to it, but you can't put in your bag that way because it'll get knocked off

01:24:20.420 | Maybe injured so like you keep the stylus separate like in my backpack. It'll be with my my pins and

01:24:27.980 | The thing will be in the back. These are these are minor points, but I'm a big fan

01:24:32.660 | I think it's a beautifully engineered product for notebook heads if you keep a lot of notebooks

01:24:37.460 | You know worth considering

01:24:41.340 | We messed up that we should have asked him to be a sponsor Jesse because I had to give it a really really good endorsement

01:24:46.460 | We should do more of that find things

01:24:49.060 | I love and then work backwards and ask the people to be like you really need a sponsor

01:24:53.060 | I've discovered a lot of things I love from sponsors approaches in us, but I thought that'd be cool

01:24:58.060 | I mean we should at least we should tell remarkable like look. I love your thing

01:25:01.340 | So you should be our sponsor and also we need 20 remarkables. I

01:25:04.880 | Want to give them out like candy oh

01:25:08.260 | well, all right well speaking of

01:25:11.900 | Remarkable so I should probably go take some notes, which is my way of saying we should probably wrap up this episode

01:25:16.020 | So thank you everyone for listening

01:25:18.780 | Remember if you like what you heard you will like what you can see you can watch these full episodes and clips at youtube.com

01:25:24.500 | Slash Cal Newport media will be back next work with another new episode filmed right up here in the deep work HQ north and until

01:25:31.820 | Then as always stay deep

01:25:33.820 | [MUSIC]

Ep. 258: Godel’s Deep Life Stack

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