Does My Family Need More Money To Live Deep?

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, let's do some deep life related questions.

00:00:03.740 | Who do we have first today?

00:00:05.020 | - All right, first question's from Mark,

00:00:06.740 | a 38 year old sales director.

00:00:09.220 | I spend many hours a week taking care of my kids,

00:00:11.500 | cooking, cleaning, gardening, doing chores,

00:00:13.860 | fixing up my house and so on.

00:00:15.740 | Between this and my work, I have little to no free time.

00:00:18.820 | The same applies to my wife.

00:00:20.760 | When we do have free time, we are generally tired.

00:00:23.300 | The idea that we could each find energy and time

00:00:25.660 | to consistently take long walks, work out,

00:00:27.980 | or read for hours seems fantastical.

00:00:31.220 | Do we need to be able to afford to outsource mundane tasks

00:00:34.500 | to cultivate a deep life?

00:00:37.580 | - Well, Mark, we could reword this question to say,

00:00:41.180 | is it possible for a family with,

00:00:45.500 | and he gave a little more details about his work,

00:00:47.260 | but a family with lower, upper middle class jobs

00:00:51.480 | to take walks or exercise or read?

00:00:53.800 | I don't think that's a fantastical goal.

00:00:57.820 | I think there's a lot of families

00:01:00.300 | in similar professional situations

00:01:03.500 | where people still take walks,

00:01:05.380 | still exercise, and still read.

00:01:08.060 | I think that is definitely possible,

00:01:09.660 | but what I also recognize that right now in your life,

00:01:11.980 | it doesn't.

00:01:13.500 | I think that's important.

00:01:15.060 | And this is where I think the fuller deep life stack

00:01:19.140 | we introduced earlier is much more helpful

00:01:22.500 | than the way we used to talk about the deep life

00:01:24.280 | where we would just focus on the final changes

00:01:26.460 | because what's happening here,

00:01:27.520 | and I'm very empathetic to this.

00:01:28.660 | I've been in this situation before.

00:01:32.160 | Many of our listeners are in the same situation

00:01:34.760 | where your time just feels completely out of your control.

00:01:37.900 | And it puts you in a defensive mood.

00:01:39.260 | It puts you in a mood where you're just sort of down

00:01:41.800 | on the prospects for doing anything with any control.

00:01:45.540 | We're exhausted all the time.

00:01:46.560 | We're working all the time.

00:01:47.540 | When are things gonna happen?

00:01:49.140 | How could I possibly think about carefully overhauling

00:01:52.180 | other parts of my life?

00:01:53.020 | So let's go back to the deep life stack.

00:01:54.600 | What I'm gonna suggest here

00:01:55.980 | is actually working the deep life stack.

00:01:57.820 | Even though this might seem like I'm giving you more work,

00:01:59.740 | it's going to help.

00:02:00.700 | So I'm gonna think about the stack.

00:02:02.780 | I have it here in front of me.

00:02:03.860 | Jesse, may let's load this back up on the screen.

00:02:06.020 | - Okay.

00:02:06.860 | - All right, let's think this through.

00:02:07.700 | All right, Mark.

00:02:08.540 | So what would this mean for you?

00:02:09.360 | Well, one, discipline.

00:02:10.860 | Well, the key thing here is really gonna be,

00:02:13.180 | here's my place, my drawer, my folder.

00:02:15.060 | We're gonna keep track of everything we're about to do.

00:02:17.180 | That doesn't take time.

00:02:18.940 | Here's a folder, here's a desk drawer, that's fine.

00:02:21.580 | And we're gonna throw something into our life here.

00:02:24.980 | Not super time consuming, but kind of hard.

00:02:27.860 | And maybe you're gonna have to stretch a little bit.

00:02:30.380 | Okay, I can do this during my lunch hour every day,

00:02:32.580 | or before I go to work,

00:02:33.700 | it's gonna be maybe a fitness thing or something else,

00:02:36.020 | but just something.

00:02:37.220 | Something that is optional, but meaningful to you,

00:02:40.740 | that you're just gonna commit to,

00:02:41.940 | whatever it takes, I'm gonna find time to do this.

00:02:44.100 | I think that's worth doing.

00:02:46.660 | 'Cause we're gonna start changing that mindset.

00:02:49.460 | And once that succeeds, you're gonna say,

00:02:50.860 | okay, at least it's possible.

00:02:52.120 | I am the type of person that's possible

00:02:53.500 | that I can find time to make something happen

00:02:56.060 | that's important to me, even though my life is busy.

00:02:58.140 | Then we get up to values.

00:02:59.060 | You're clarifying what's important to you and your wife,

00:03:01.020 | and you should do this together.

00:03:02.020 | And we'll talk more about that in a later question.

00:03:04.740 | What's our code?

00:03:05.620 | What are the rituals?

00:03:06.740 | What are the routines?

00:03:07.580 | Keep the rituals and routines very simple right now

00:03:09.420 | because you're feeling overwhelmed.

00:03:11.340 | But they can still be in there.

00:03:13.340 | There can still be that moment of prayer every day.

00:03:16.420 | If you're religious, there can still be that

00:03:18.820 | meditative moment, the gratitude journaling routines.

00:03:22.700 | There can still be something you do,

00:03:24.500 | even if it's just, look, it's Saturday morning.

00:03:26.800 | There's a one-hour volunteer thing or a charitable thing.

00:03:31.020 | You just have set up, I give money to this cause,

00:03:33.260 | not a lot of money, but I do it.

00:03:34.580 | And every month we do it.

00:03:35.820 | And it's not very time-consuming, but it's concrete,

00:03:38.860 | and it's driven by your code.

00:03:39.940 | And you get that in place.

00:03:40.760 | We're not adding a lot of things in your schedule yet.

00:03:43.460 | Now you're ready for the thing

00:03:44.380 | I think is gonna help you most,

00:03:45.580 | which is the calm layer of the stack.

00:03:50.140 | So now, buoyed by your discipline,

00:03:53.660 | so the idea that you can make changes

00:03:55.300 | and have control over things even when it's difficult,

00:03:57.400 | buoyed by your values that are really pushing you

00:03:59.700 | towards what matters and what's not,

00:04:01.240 | so you have a compass that gives you

00:04:02.500 | a very strong north reading,

00:04:04.300 | you can start to put in place some organizational system.

00:04:07.020 | What's on our plate?

00:04:07.860 | How do we manage our time?

00:04:09.260 | What is this load?

00:04:10.740 | And then more crucially,

00:04:12.500 | where should we start pruning or simplifying?

00:04:14.940 | Driven by your values, driven by your discipline,

00:04:17.380 | you piece by piece try to take what sounds

00:04:19.580 | like a whirlwind in your life right now

00:04:21.540 | and make it into a much more orderly flow.

00:04:24.000 | We do this on these days, not this.

00:04:27.480 | We finish here, we do this in advance.

00:04:30.060 | We get all the paperwork for the kids done

00:04:31.780 | in a, you know, over lunch on Thursday.

00:04:34.380 | You would be surprised, Mark,

00:04:35.540 | when you're driven by a sense of self-efficacy,

00:04:40.000 | when you're driven by values you trust,

00:04:41.540 | by how much control and breathing room

00:04:43.860 | even a standard busy middle class

00:04:46.720 | or upper middle class life can seem,

00:04:48.500 | how much room you can find,

00:04:50.660 | how much breathing room you can find.

00:04:52.620 | And I don't want you to go right to this.

00:04:53.740 | I mean, I want you to follow the stack.

00:04:55.160 | I think there's a, the discipline stack is key

00:04:57.460 | because you have to have the sense of,

00:04:59.300 | I'm able to do things that are hard

00:05:00.820 | and I have a place I keep track of them

00:05:02.020 | and I follow what I write down.

00:05:03.020 | You need the value stack because it's hard to prune.

00:05:05.520 | It's hard to take things back

00:05:07.540 | when you don't have the bigger values driving you.

00:05:09.980 | But once this column is in place,

00:05:11.220 | then and only then do I think you're ready

00:05:12.980 | to think about the planning step.

00:05:14.300 | And I think by the time you get to the planning step,

00:05:16.020 | you're now gonna have the control

00:05:17.440 | and breathing room necessary

00:05:18.940 | to make the changes that right now seem impossible.

00:05:21.140 | And they might not be major,

00:05:22.800 | but it might be some sort of routine.

00:05:26.020 | You're walking, you're exercising, you're reading more.

00:05:27.820 | I think that's gonna be completely on the table.

00:05:29.900 | More importantly, you're also now well set up.

00:05:31.700 | If you discover what's really holding us back here

00:05:34.260 | is maybe the nature of our jobs.

00:05:36.060 | Maybe the demands of this jobs,

00:05:37.860 | maybe that's making things impossible

00:05:40.020 | to really overhaul the other areas of my life

00:05:42.740 | the way I want.

00:05:43.560 | Or maybe it's to have these jobs, we have to live here.

00:05:45.740 | The schools here aren't good.

00:05:46.660 | So our kids have to go over to this private school.

00:05:48.460 | The private school means we have to work more

00:05:49.960 | and the private school is really difficult to get to

00:05:51.500 | and we're driving back and forth.

00:05:52.620 | And that's what's stopping us from overhauling

00:05:54.700 | these other parts of our life.

00:05:55.900 | Oh, this is all really clear now.

00:05:57.180 | And we're driven by our values

00:05:58.400 | and our sense of self-efficacy

00:05:59.780 | and our control over what's going on.

00:06:01.260 | So we really can understand what's causing our time famine,

00:06:04.380 | what's causing our issues with our schedule.

00:06:06.180 | With all of this in place,

00:06:07.460 | you might get clarity that you wouldn't have right now.

00:06:10.860 | We should move and take a different job.

00:06:13.280 | Oh, we need to leave the city.

00:06:14.660 | Let's go here.

00:06:16.100 | They could go to this public school.

00:06:17.580 | They could walk to the middle school

00:06:19.720 | and the cost of living here is cheaper.

00:06:21.860 | And actually I could go down the halftime

00:06:23.580 | and do my old job remote while my wife still did full-time.

00:06:26.340 | But now we have a lot more.

00:06:27.180 | Now there's someone here after school.

00:06:28.500 | Oh my God, all the pieces fit in the place.

00:06:31.300 | And I can overhaul these other parts of my life

00:06:33.420 | and everything is deeper.

00:06:34.620 | But you can't get to that type of clarity

00:06:36.140 | without the other pieces first.

00:06:37.640 | So I feel your pain, Mark.

00:06:40.860 | I also think that you can find more depth

00:06:44.780 | and by control and intention and satisfaction

00:06:47.860 | with your life, you can find it and you should.

00:06:50.660 | And I think work to full stack.

00:06:53.020 | My apologies for presenting this earlier in past episodes

00:06:56.220 | as just start overhauling your fitness routine.

00:06:58.700 | Work the whole stack and have confidence.

00:07:01.460 | More intentional, satisfying, meaningful life

00:07:03.300 | is absolutely available to you and in your situation.

00:07:06.220 | This is not something that's unovercomeable.

00:07:08.380 | You're not a refugee in a war torn nation.

00:07:11.500 | You're not scrambling for jobs

00:07:13.060 | just to try to keep the heat on.

00:07:14.140 | You actually have a foundation more leveraged

00:07:17.540 | than you think, but it's also much harder

00:07:19.860 | than we often let on to take advantage of that leverage.

00:07:22.220 | So hopefully the stack there is gonna help.

00:07:24.140 | By the way, send me a note.

00:07:26.660 | If you start making some changes,

00:07:27.780 | I wanna hear what's going on.

00:07:28.700 | You can send the note right over to

00:07:29.780 | interesting@calnewport.com, keep me posted.

00:07:32.900 | - In terms of the mundane tasks, like outsourcing those.

00:07:36.580 | - I mean, that's all gonna happen in calm.

00:07:39.860 | But I think his point is he's frustrated

00:07:42.580 | that I have no time, so I can't imagine

00:07:46.260 | anyone reading or exercising or doing anything else

00:07:48.860 | unless I suppose there's just someone I hired

00:07:50.740 | to do all these things.

00:07:51.780 | And my point is most people don't outsource all that stuff.

00:07:55.860 | And yet many, many people who don't have,

00:07:57.700 | I don't even know who you outsource most of this stuff to,

00:08:01.140 | they still exercise and walk.

00:08:03.460 | It could feel as if your obligations

00:08:08.460 | are leaving no time right now.

00:08:10.460 | And it could be the case that without having

00:08:12.260 | to majorly change your material situation,

00:08:14.860 | you could feel three times better

00:08:17.340 | by just how you control and track the situation

00:08:19.460 | and keep track of things with some strategic pruning.

00:08:22.340 | So I don't think, I mean, maybe in the calm step,

00:08:24.620 | they'll realize, because again,

00:08:26.220 | having this precision understanding of where your time goes

00:08:31.540 | and how different things interact with each other

00:08:33.220 | allows you so precisely to see where the pain points are.

00:08:36.260 | So if there is gonna be a little bit of outsourcing

00:08:38.100 | that happens, the calm layer is what's gonna give you

00:08:40.540 | that precision to say, the thing that's screwing this all up

00:08:43.860 | is driving back and forth to school across town.

00:08:46.700 | Or the thing that's making the schedule impossible

00:08:48.580 | is this terrible giant yard we have with all these beds

00:08:51.020 | and we're always out there.

00:08:52.420 | And if we stop doing this and use that money

00:08:55.580 | for a yard crew, everything else becomes possible.

00:08:58.140 | Or that's where you say, we need to move,

00:08:59.460 | we have to get a different job.

00:09:01.700 | It's again, an interesting point that doesn't come up

00:09:04.420 | as much in lifestyle design is organizing yourself,

00:09:09.100 | tracking your time, being intentional

00:09:10.620 | about the deployment of time.

00:09:12.100 | Getting that sophisticated awareness of your time

00:09:15.660 | is often critical for actually making decisions

00:09:18.700 | about what you wanna change in your life.

00:09:20.300 | People really don't realize, when you're chaotic,

00:09:21.980 | they don't really realize what actually

00:09:23.500 | is causing the trouble.

00:09:24.660 | And they might flail in different directions

00:09:26.580 | or think I have to have a nanny and a full-time whatever

00:09:28.580 | to ever get anything done.

00:09:29.620 | And they don't realize, no,

00:09:30.460 | the problem is actually the commute.

00:09:32.300 | The problem is actually you live in the wrong house.

00:09:34.780 | Why do you have two acres?

00:09:36.140 | And whatever it is, you don't live near your parents,

00:09:38.660 | you're always having to drive over there.

00:09:40.700 | We don't always know the problem

00:09:42.020 | until we actually get a good awareness

00:09:43.660 | of how our time's actually being spent.

00:09:45.620 | I mean, that's one of my insights is a book

00:09:49.580 | on the deep life actually has to talk a lot

00:09:51.220 | about time management, which for me

00:09:53.220 | was a bit of a breakthrough to think about.

00:09:55.260 | (upbeat music)

00:09:57.840 | (upbeat music)

Does My Family Need More Money To Live Deep?

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