Why You're Stuck: The Hidden Trap Keeping You Overwhelmed & Unproductive

00:00:00.000 | One of the major themes I talk about here is how to tame overload in your life and work,

00:00:05.200 | the type that can be supercharged by modern technology to the place where you really have

00:00:11.580 | no space left in your life to cultivate more depth.

00:00:14.840 | So how do we tame that overload is a question I care about.

00:00:17.280 | Today I want to talk about a way of thinking about this problem that I have found useful

00:00:22.220 | in my own life.

00:00:24.200 | It describes a trap that I, myself, have fallen into and gives some glimpse of a way out.

00:00:32.400 | What's interesting is I was thinking about this concept and around that same time I noticed

00:00:38.840 | that Tim Ferriss was working on a new book, and I think he's calling it The No Book, and

00:00:46.320 | he had, and I have it on the screen here for people who are watching, he's still writing

00:00:49.440 | it, but he posted the introduction on his website and when I was reading the introduction

00:00:52.680 | of his book, I said, "Oh, wait a second.

00:00:54.900 | What Tim is thinking and writing about in this book really overlaps this idea that I've

00:00:58.360 | been toying with."

00:00:59.360 | So what I really want to do here is I'm going to read you an excerpt from the introduction

00:01:04.840 | to Tim Ferriss's pending next book, The No Book, and then I am going to introduce my

00:01:13.160 | concept of a metaphor for it and we'll keep returning to Tim's story to try to help tease

00:01:18.880 | out what I mean by that metaphor and what the ideas are I'm dealing with, right?

00:01:23.040 | So we've got a little bit of a complex web here of ideas, but I think it'll make it interesting.

00:01:26.120 | All right, so I have Tim's introduction draft up here on the screen.

00:01:31.340 | I am going to just read an excerpt from it.

00:01:33.600 | All right, this is from Tim's introduction.

00:01:36.800 | I first realized I had a problem when everything was going right for me.

00:01:40.920 | The day was May 2, 2007, just after 5.30 p.m. in New York when I received a phone call I'll

00:01:45.880 | never forget.

00:01:46.880 | My editor at Random House wanted to inform me that my debut book, The 4-Hour Workweek,

00:01:51.320 | had hit the New York Times bestseller list.

00:01:54.080 | As her words sunk in, I staggered backwards and collapsed against a wall in shock, gratitude,

00:01:58.520 | and relief.

00:01:59.520 | Overnight, I was transformed from a guy begging people to answer his emails to someone on

00:02:04.280 | the other side.

00:02:05.280 | All kinds of requests and offers poured in, speaking gigs, interviews, consulting partnerships,

00:02:09.840 | brand deals.

00:02:10.840 | It was a tsunami.

00:02:11.840 | Flattered, unprepared, and afraid this might be my only 15 minutes of fame, I said yes

00:02:16.800 | to nearly everything, especially anything six, nine, or 12 months off in the distance.

00:02:21.680 | My calendar seemed like pristine water, clear as crystal for a brief lull, but then I had

00:02:27.200 | to pay the piper.

00:02:28.200 | All right, so I want to offer a metaphor for understanding sort of what's happening there,

00:02:33.240 | a common problem, and how we can get out of it.

00:02:35.240 | I will say, by the way, Jesse, though, Ferris is underselling how successful his book was.

00:02:41.800 | I've had many books hit the New York Times bestseller list.

00:02:44.080 | That by itself doesn't create the tsunami.

00:02:46.160 | It's like the right book and the right book at the right time.

00:02:49.840 | The list is not the impressive part.

00:02:51.160 | I think it was like that book was really successful, especially in Silicon Valley.

00:02:57.520 | So I think people overvalue the New York Times bestseller list, but this book was very successful.

00:03:02.280 | All right, so to make sense of the deeper lessons in Ferris' story, I'm going to introduce

00:03:07.260 | a metaphor here that we're going to follow through.

00:03:09.240 | All right, so here's the metaphor.

00:03:11.760 | Imagine a traveler, he's on an ocean liner, and the ocean liner sinks.

00:03:17.040 | So before he dives into the water, the traveler instinctively grabs from his cabin all the

00:03:22.060 | things that seem important.

00:03:23.060 | So like, hey, here's a tool I use for my work, or here's a gift that a friend gave me, or

00:03:27.840 | an instrument I play for entertainment, it's something that's important to me, and here's

00:03:32.360 | a book of poetry I'm trying to learn and better myself with this.

00:03:35.320 | All this stuff that's important, he grabs it from his cabin before the ship sinks.

00:03:39.980 | The problem is he has so much stuff that when he hits the water, he starts to flail.

00:03:43.340 | He's taken in water.

00:03:44.340 | His thrashing is only making things worse.

00:03:46.220 | It's clear to him that he is drowning.

00:03:51.240 | So if we connect this back to the Ferris story, this basically describes how Ferris is talking

00:03:55.520 | about that first year after the four-hour work week took off.

00:03:58.620 | He had so many commitments that they were weighing him down.

00:04:02.060 | He couldn't keep his head above water.

00:04:03.700 | It was that sense of, I am drowning in things to do.

00:04:08.500 | Okay, so then where things get interesting to me is the possible responses to this situation.

00:04:16.140 | So if we return to the metaphor, here's one possible response.

00:04:21.760 | Maybe our traveler is a high-achieving type A type, so before heading out on his ocean

00:04:26.820 | voyage, he was saying, "Look, I'm afraid about ship sinking, so I'm going to train to be

00:04:32.280 | comfortable in the water, and I'm going to train how to tread water, like what's the

00:04:37.080 | right stroke to use, and I'm going to exercise and get my legs strong, and I'm going to get

00:04:42.200 | my lungs strong, and I'm going to master how not to panic, and I can be in the water like

00:04:46.300 | a rescue swimmer would learn, like how to be comfortable in the water and staying afloat."

00:04:51.940 | So maybe our traveler does all that work.

00:04:54.060 | So now when the ship sinks, he jumps in the water with these things that are important

00:04:58.580 | to him.

00:04:59.580 | He's not flailing and drowning.

00:05:01.540 | He's sort of calmly and strongly doing the efficient stroke, keeping his head above water.

00:05:07.060 | But here's the creeping realization.

00:05:11.340 | It's taking all of his energy just to stay in that spot.

00:05:14.100 | He's not drowning right away, but he's also not getting anywhere.

00:05:18.060 | He's just stuck right there where the ship sunk, and eventually, much more slowly than

00:05:24.420 | if he was not prepared at all, but eventually his strength will begin to ebb, and he knows

00:05:29.620 | eventually he can't stay here forever.

00:05:31.920 | He will slip back below the water.

00:05:34.380 | All right, if we connect back to the world of Ferris and productivity, to me, preparing

00:05:39.740 | and learning to tread water, to be good and comfortable in the water in our metaphor is

00:05:43.140 | like in Ferris' world, having good productivity and time management systems.

00:05:48.360 | You're prepared to deal with lots of things.

00:05:53.140 | You keep track of obligations, like I talk about.

00:05:56.460 | You manage what you're going to do with your time.

00:05:59.620 | I sometimes talk about this as having a how-and-when system or what-and-when system, rather.

00:06:07.500 | You have a system to keep track of what you need to do and some way of figuring out when

00:06:10.980 | you're going to do things.

00:06:13.600 | This sort of happened.

00:06:14.600 | Now I'm extrapolating beyond Ferris' excerpt to just things we know about him more generally.

00:06:20.860 | I would say this is probably more or less what happened to Ferris a little bit longer

00:06:24.940 | in the years immediately following the Four-Hour Workweek coming out, is he is really good

00:06:30.220 | at systems.

00:06:31.420 | I know from that period, and he's talked about in his books, his systems for helping to deal

00:06:37.360 | with all the things he had to do and manage his time got very sophisticated.

00:06:41.540 | He had teams and people who would answer things and keep track of and had rules for when we're

00:06:46.700 | going to do this or that and what's going on with his calendar.

00:06:49.460 | I don't want to have the book travel.

00:06:50.700 | I'll have someone who'd do that for me.

00:06:53.100 | That's got really good at the treading water.

00:06:56.900 | A lot of people in our audience also gets very good at that as well.

00:07:01.040 | You have good systems in place so that you're not going to panic if you have a huge amount

00:07:07.240 | of stuff on your plate.

00:07:08.900 | You'll be able to look at where things are, make sure this is on a waiting-to-hear-from

00:07:12.660 | list.

00:07:13.660 | I've time-blocked this.

00:07:14.660 | I'm getting back at this.

00:07:15.660 | You're keeping your head above water and you're staying calm, but you're not getting anywhere.

00:07:20.420 | If we return to our metaphor, what's the final thing our traveler could do?

00:07:26.620 | Ultimately, the only answer that remains is that if he lets go of some of these things

00:07:33.740 | he's holding, these important things he brought in from the ship before it sunk, he'll be

00:07:38.860 | able to start swimming and now he can actually aim to where he wants to go, like the shore,

00:07:45.780 | and make progress towards there.

00:07:49.300 | What he needs, ultimately, to get out of this situation is going to have to let some of

00:07:54.140 | those things go.

00:07:55.140 | If we go back to Ferris's world, this is where he eventually evolved to.

00:08:00.060 | Ferris eventually evolved to a place where he was much more comfortable having less proverbial

00:08:06.400 | important things on his body in the water.

00:08:09.460 | He got good at saying no to obligations or commitments, some that were important to him,

00:08:15.880 | some that were coming from friends, some that were very entertaining to him.

00:08:18.940 | He got really good at that, which is why he's writing this whole book about saying no.

00:08:23.020 | To give you one example, there's another excerpt from the book that's written by Neil Strauss,

00:08:28.220 | who I think is actually co-writing this book with Ferris.

00:08:30.700 | But Strauss has this memory of more recently trying to context him, who he knows, with

00:08:37.820 | a text message.

00:08:38.820 | When he texted him, he got the following response.

00:08:42.040 | This is like an automated reply.

00:08:43.940 | I'm traveling overseas until November 7th.

00:08:46.500 | If your text is urgent, please reach out to someone on my team.

00:08:49.700 | Otherwise, please resend your text after November 7th if it still applies.

00:08:53.640 | Since catching up would be impossible, I'll be deleting all messages upon my return and

00:08:57.020 | starting from scratch.

00:08:58.260 | Thank you.

00:08:59.260 | As Strauss then says, this is a boss-level no.

00:09:03.880 | So ultimately where Tim got was recognizing that the systems alone wouldn't save him.

00:09:10.080 | He had to just have less things going on in his life.

00:09:14.340 | So I like that metaphor because not only does it have the obvious message of eventually

00:09:21.140 | you have to say no to things if you're going to get where you're going to go, but there's

00:09:25.020 | a subtler message in there that Ferris' example emphasizes.

00:09:30.700 | My own life emphasizes and struggles with this as well.

00:09:33.820 | There's this subtle message in there, which I think is very important for us to understand

00:09:38.740 | overload in our current moment.

00:09:42.080 | The traveler still had to learn to be comfortable in the water and didn't let go of things as

00:09:48.620 | well.

00:09:50.020 | So if the traveler had skipped the getting comfortable in the water step, he wasn't going

00:09:54.800 | to make it to the shore even if he dropped all of his things.

00:09:58.460 | And I think this is what's often missed when we're trying to understand or make sense of

00:10:02.980 | a critique productivity or time management organization.

00:10:07.540 | It's not that these skills aren't important, but it's realizing, I think it's a frustration

00:10:12.340 | that a lot of type A people like myself have, is the skills by themselves cannot make every

00:10:18.060 | situation tractable.

00:10:20.000 | You can be a really good swimmer, but if you have a bunch of stuff in your arms, you're

00:10:26.020 | eventually going to sink.

00:10:28.140 | Same thing.

00:10:29.140 | You can be super organized, but if you're trying to do too much, that overhead to actual

00:10:32.140 | execution ratio is going to get so high enough that nothing's going to get done.

00:10:35.340 | It's going to be very frustrating.

00:10:36.880 | You can keep your head above water for a while.

00:10:39.560 | You can keep people from getting upset.

00:10:41.300 | The most important things get done or deferred, and you sort of figure out how to make the

00:10:44.220 | whole puzzle work, but you're not making your way to shore.

00:10:46.860 | What I think people miss is they want one without the other.

00:10:50.460 | So the common mistake, the mistake that most people are coming to realize is like, okay,

00:10:54.660 | you can't just be really well organized if you're doing too much.

00:10:57.320 | But the other mistake is made as well, where people are saying, the problem here is just

00:11:01.980 | the doing too much.

00:11:04.980 | And that you shouldn't learn, if we go back to the metaphor, don't learn to swim because

00:11:10.900 | that might maybe encourage you to bring too many things with you.

00:11:14.020 | It's better not to even bother with that swimming culture because we don't want people to think

00:11:22.260 | that they can swim their way out of overload.

00:11:24.940 | But the problem is if you don't bother with that swimming culture, you can be as in as

00:11:28.320 | you want.

00:11:29.320 | I'm not bringing anything with me.

00:11:30.320 | It doesn't matter.

00:11:31.320 | I say no to everything, you're still going to drown.

00:11:32.480 | So it's that you need both.

00:11:34.700 | The traveler who survived was a traveler who both trained but also was willing to let go

00:11:38.460 | of things that were important.

00:11:41.060 | And so I think that's often missed in the anti-productivity discussion.

00:11:43.860 | It's the hardest part, I think, of the productivity discussion.

00:11:48.180 | No organization is bad.

00:11:50.780 | Only trusting organization is bad.

00:11:52.500 | You need some organization, but you need all this other stuff as well.

00:11:55.620 | And the other stuff is psychological.

00:11:58.460 | Or if we read like Oliver Berkman stuff, philosophical.

00:12:02.160 | There's all of these other layers to it.

00:12:03.700 | But the layers have to add up on top of each other.

00:12:07.060 | They're not alternatives.

00:12:08.060 | Like I care about productivity or I care about like being present and not doing too much.

00:12:13.700 | You need both of these things have to work together.

00:12:15.580 | So that metaphor or the difference between drowning, treading and swimming, I think it's

00:12:20.940 | helpful for me.

00:12:21.940 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:12:22.940 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:12:27.660 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:12:35.120 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:12:40.540 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:12:45.900 | I know you're going to like it.

00:12:47.720 | Check it out.

00:12:48.720 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:12:49.720 | So anyways, I'm looking forward to Tim's book because he really, really is good at saying

00:12:53.860 | no.

00:12:54.860 | Because anyone who's communicated with him knows he's good at that.

00:12:59.500 | And I think that is probably the hardest lesson or the most underserved lesson in these discussions

00:13:05.300 | of productivity.

00:13:06.300 | I can teach you how to swim.

00:13:07.300 | I'm good at that.

00:13:09.060 | But even I need more help figuring out how to drop some of the stuff I'm carrying.

00:13:14.180 | So I'm looking for that book.

00:13:15.180 | And hopefully that metaphor proves as useful to you as it's starting to prove useful for

00:13:18.700 | me as well.

00:13:19.700 | Maybe it's a little overwrought, Jesse, but I like that idea.

00:13:24.260 | Yeah.

00:13:25.260 | Treading, swimming.

00:13:26.260 | There's a lot of pieces in there.

00:13:27.900 | I've listened to all of his podcasts for like over 10 years.

00:13:31.980 | Do you think he has it all figured out?

00:13:33.500 | I think he's still trying to figure it out.

00:13:35.420 | I think he has the not getting overloaded thing figured out.

00:13:39.180 | Yeah, I don't know that he has life figured out, who among us does.

00:13:44.140 | But his combination of systems plus he more so than anyone I know really does seem to

00:13:52.180 | follow these rules.

00:13:53.180 | Like I don't want to extra stuff in my life, right?

00:13:55.860 | And like a clear example of that is the fact that his podcast is really not, it's remote

00:14:00.900 | and not video forward.

00:14:02.740 | And he's just, you know, I think we talked about this when I went on his show last.

00:14:05.660 | He's like, I know that's the trend.

00:14:08.840 | I should build a studio and have people come to me and then we can film with like really

00:14:13.440 | good 4K cameras and have a really good video presence.

00:14:17.020 | But he says, that's going to put too big of a footprint on my schedule.

00:14:20.260 | I have to be where my studio is.

00:14:22.140 | I have to fly people out to the studio.

00:14:25.420 | I can't travel.

00:14:26.700 | I can't go spend six weeks, you know, in Europe or whatever because I have to be at the studio.

00:14:31.780 | We have to be recording it.

00:14:32.780 | He says, I'm not going to do that.

00:14:34.100 | I'm going to record using a headset that I can just pack in a bag and from like any room

00:14:38.500 | I am anywhere in the world, I can just put that on and record it, right?

00:14:41.700 | Like that's an example of someone following this.

00:14:44.000 | It's an opportunity here.

00:14:45.520 | Like no, I want to have like a Rogan style studio.

00:14:47.720 | Everyone's doing these studios.

00:14:48.720 | It might make my audience bigger.

00:14:50.940 | But his take was, I don't want the extra commitment.

00:14:53.880 | It's not worth it for me.

00:14:54.880 | The podcast is successful enough.

00:14:57.040 | I enjoy it.

00:14:58.120 | I don't want to make it more of a burden.

00:15:01.280 | So I think with things like that, I think that's someone actually walking the walk at

00:15:07.200 | least when it comes to not doing too much.

00:15:08.360 | So I think he really got, that book, it's, it was a successful book.

00:15:13.880 | Other people whose books were that successful, I don't think got the same degree of overload

00:15:17.160 | that he experienced in like 2007, 2008 because of who that book was successful with.

00:15:22.840 | So that book was successful with this sort of younger Silicon Valley crowd who really

00:15:29.680 | kind of like obsessively latched on.

00:15:31.200 | So I'm sure that was not easy, you know, like Deep Work was very successful, but I don't,

00:15:36.440 | I did not have nearly that level.

00:15:39.640 | I mean, I have a lot of things in my life that I have to say no to, and I have all these

00:15:42.800 | teams now, et cetera, et cetera.

00:15:45.680 | But I didn't have that same sort of like obsessive focus that I think for whatever reasons Tim's

00:15:50.000 | book generated.

00:15:51.240 | I wonder if he'll keep his podcast going because he kind of alluded to the fact that he doesn't

00:15:55.200 | know what he's going to do.

00:15:56.200 | He's been down for a while, right?

00:15:57.720 | Yeah.

00:15:58.720 | He had like the 10 year anniversary or something.

00:16:00.080 | Yeah.

00:16:01.080 | That's right.

00:16:02.080 | Yeah.

00:16:03.080 | We all wrote something for him.

00:16:04.080 | Good question.

00:16:05.080 | Good question.

00:16:06.080 | Yeah.

00:16:07.080 | All right.

00:16:08.080 | Anyways, look forward to that book.

00:16:09.080 | We got questions to handle here.

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00:20:05.160 | Look, it's a icon.

00:20:07.800 | I like that about it.

00:20:08.800 | It's an iconic vehicle that's been re-imagined through thoroughly modern design, so you still

00:20:14.960 | have that iconic look, you have those legendary capabilities off-road and on, but also all

00:20:20.720 | the modern tech you would want in a modern state-of-the-art vehicle, like their 3D surround

00:20:27.640 | cameras, their ClearSight rear view gives you a rear view you can see even if you have like

00:20:34.080 | a bunch of podcasting equipment in the back of your car and you can't actually see out

00:20:37.720 | the window.

00:20:38.720 | Their PVPro infotainment system is excellent.

00:20:40.840 | Anyways, it's a cool car.

00:20:42.360 | It's a classic car, or I should say vehicle, it's not a car, it's a SUV maybe, iconic,

00:20:50.880 | but also quite luxurious, right?

00:20:53.000 | So Jesse, beware because when Brad and I are going to travel the country podcasting, you're

00:20:57.880 | going to be sitting in the middle seat moving the video switcher.

00:21:01.640 | I was going to say I won't be able to keep up with my truck.

00:21:05.240 | The one that Brad sent me a picture of had a nice, because it was tricked out, they had

00:21:09.080 | a nice roof rack on there.

00:21:10.240 | So you're going to be on the roof, we'll strap you down, it'll be okay, but you'll be up

00:21:14.200 | on the roof doing the video switcher as we go down the highway recording our Defender

00:21:19.640 | podcast.

00:21:20.640 | You can design your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com, go to LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about

00:21:27.000 | the Defender.

00:21:28.000 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:21:31.760 | First question's from Antonio.

00:21:33.680 | You discussed that a major impact of AI is that non-experts will be able to use tools

00:21:37.640 | at expert level without the training and this leads to productivity gains.

00:21:42.640 | Don't you think this can also lead to quality productivity loss?

00:21:45.840 | If a user is relying heavily on AI for analysis, the work can have fundamental flaws that the

00:21:50.120 | non-expert won't be able to fix?

00:21:52.400 | I mean, maybe, but I think there's a bit of a difference in the model that we're thinking

00:21:59.160 | about about how one would interact with AI in this scenario.

00:22:03.960 | I think the last few years we've been attuned to this chatbot model where the AI is this

00:22:11.600 | sort of singular self-contained intelligence that you're asking to do things on your behalf.

00:22:15.960 | So I think that's what you have in mind, like I'm asking the AI, "Analyze this data and

00:22:20.880 | tell me what you see," and then you don't really know what results it's going to produce.

00:22:24.320 | No, I see it actually much more instrumental than that.

00:22:28.080 | It's allowing you to do something in a piece of software that you know what it is, you

00:22:33.120 | just don't know what is the right way to click on things or select things to actually make

00:22:36.760 | this happen.

00:22:38.480 | This is where I think the first impact is going to be.

00:22:40.600 | So you're going to be in Microsoft Excel and you have all these columns of data, and you

00:22:46.080 | know what you want to do.

00:22:47.080 | Maybe what you want to do is like, "Okay, can we take out every row where the amount

00:22:51.920 | in column C, which is dollar amounts, is below $100, erase all those rows, and then I want

00:22:58.120 | to sort all the rows that remain based on their column F, which is like the location."

00:23:06.960 | And you're like, "I don't really know exactly how to, or that's going to take me a second

00:23:10.280 | to do, or I don't know how to sort, but I know what I want it to do.

00:23:13.200 | I could just sort of say that and then some sort of copilot type plugin will do that work

00:23:18.720 | for me."

00:23:20.600 | Or you're in Word and you want to say something like, "I don't really know how this feature

00:23:25.400 | works, but can we go through and get rid of the, turn off the initial paragraph indents?

00:23:33.720 | Like when you start a new paragraph in a dense, I actually don't like that.

00:23:36.460 | Can you turn off those indents?

00:23:38.440 | And then can we make the block quotes where I have a quote, can we make the vertical spacing?

00:23:44.040 | It's like double space.

00:23:45.040 | Can we make that single space?"

00:23:46.040 | Again, you know what you want to do, it's just like, "I haven't learned, where do I

00:23:49.800 | find these formatting things?

00:23:51.300 | Where do I go to change it?"

00:23:52.980 | It's going to be things like that.

00:23:54.280 | You sort of know what you want to do, but you don't know how to do it.

00:23:57.520 | You haven't had that training.

00:23:59.040 | And so it's like someone sitting with you, like used to be your nephew would sit with

00:24:03.520 | you when you're using your computer and they would, "Okay, I know how to do that, grandad.

00:24:08.040 | Here's how it goes."

00:24:09.040 | Right?

00:24:10.040 | That's what I'm imagining the initial productivity gains are going to be.

00:24:12.980 | Not as the paradigm we've been trained in the last couple of years to get used to, which

00:24:17.120 | is more, "Hey, you singular intelligent entity, I'm going to give you something and you're

00:24:23.720 | going to go off and think and come back and bring me something."

00:24:26.920 | I actually used AI semi-successfully, Jesse, on the deep dive.

00:24:32.840 | I had written it, the metaphor in the deep dive, using the second person, you.

00:24:38.560 | And I was like, "I think this would be better as a traveler, like a third person."

00:24:43.120 | So I asked ChatGPT, I was like, "Can you rewrite it that way?"

00:24:45.680 | And it did.

00:24:46.680 | And I had to adjust some things.

00:24:48.480 | I don't know that it really saved me that much time.

00:24:50.980 | But it's an example, I knew what I wanted it to do and it saved me a little bit of time

00:24:54.120 | with me trying to do it.

00:24:55.680 | I mentioned this to you before, but I was listening to the Ferris Seth Godin one and

00:24:59.840 | they were talking about perplexity and Claude, which I never used.

00:25:03.560 | But then I started using them and it's pretty awesome.

00:25:06.600 | Yeah.

00:25:07.600 | I like perplexity.

00:25:08.600 | I use perplexity sometimes too.

00:25:09.600 | It's good for-

00:25:10.600 | So you pay for it?

00:25:11.920 | I just use it free, I guess.

00:25:14.480 | I could only add the option to pay for it, but I paid for it for the year, it was like

00:25:17.720 | $200.

00:25:18.720 | Maybe I'm paying for it.

00:25:20.240 | It's useful.

00:25:21.680 | It's still only marginally useful over Google.

00:25:24.960 | And that's because we forget how much artificial intelligence is already in Google.

00:25:30.000 | Google's pretty good at, "Hey, I need an example of this," or "What's this?"

00:25:34.200 | It'll just kind of find you those pages or give you short answers to things, which works

00:25:37.960 | pretty well.

00:25:39.720 | Perplexity will summarize it in its own words and give you the links to follow.

00:25:42.760 | I find it to be marginally better than Google for certain things.

00:25:47.120 | Also, it makes things up a lot that does get in the way.

00:25:52.800 | If you ask it for examples, it'll find you this perfect example that's not right.

00:25:58.640 | It's changed it to be exactly what you're looking for, and then you follow the source

00:26:02.980 | and it's not at all what it's saying.

00:26:05.880 | The example was the other day, I was looking for one of my New Yorker pieces from last

00:26:10.320 | month.

00:26:11.320 | I was looking for an example of a parent, I forgot the exact details, but a parent testifying

00:26:16.500 | in Congress about the negative impacts of social media on their kids, some testimony.

00:26:23.920 | I asked Perplexity about it, and it was like, "Yep, there's a famous case.

00:26:28.320 | It's a tragic case of this young girl who I think committed suicide, and there's a lawsuit

00:26:34.520 | after that."

00:26:35.520 | They sued Meta, and Perplexity's like, "Yeah, the mom, and here's her name, came before

00:26:40.720 | the such and such committee in Congress.

00:26:43.760 | Here's some quotes from her testimony," and I was like, "Oh, that's just perfect.

00:26:46.680 | Let me just, you know, it's a New Yorker, I need a fact check.

00:26:49.280 | Let me find the actual source to make sure I'm quoting this right."

00:26:51.920 | Never happened.

00:26:52.920 | Never happened.

00:26:53.920 | Really?

00:26:54.920 | She never testified.

00:26:55.920 | Yeah.

00:26:56.920 | And I asked Perplexity about this, and then finally it was like, "Yeah, I might have made

00:26:59.280 | that up basically."

00:27:00.280 | You're right, I can't actually find a real source that confirms that.

00:27:03.400 | So it fed me exactly what I needed, but it didn't exist, which is interesting.

00:27:08.960 | That's incredible.

00:27:09.960 | Yeah.

00:27:10.960 | I mean, the name of the committee, well, it turns out it was just, because I know all

00:27:15.400 | this stuff about this particular topic, it was mixing sources about Frances Hogan, the

00:27:20.680 | Facebook whistleblower, her testimony in Congress with this parent of the kid who was suing

00:27:28.000 | Meta, and it mixed those two things together and made like the parent testifying in front

00:27:33.320 | of Congress.

00:27:34.320 | It was interesting.

00:27:35.320 | All that got cut anyways.

00:27:36.320 | All right.

00:27:37.320 | What do we got next?

00:27:39.700 | Interesting questions from Natasha.

00:27:41.560 | What counts as non-optimal technology for the digital declutter?

00:27:46.480 | You gave an example on a participant only listening to podcasts during his commute.

00:27:50.520 | I feel like I spend too long listening to podcasts throughout the day, so I'm considering

00:27:54.200 | completely banning them for the 30-day duration to explore other hobbies and reassess things.

00:28:00.080 | So the digital declutter, which is from my book, Digital Minimalism, it has you go 30

00:28:05.760 | days without using what's called optional digital technologies.

00:28:09.840 | So I threw optional in there to make it clear this is not you getting out of like answering

00:28:13.680 | your work emails.

00:28:15.760 | If your kid uses text message to tell you when they're ready to be picked up from practice,

00:28:21.200 | you need to still use text messages, right?

00:28:23.160 | But the stuff that feels optional, you take it out of your life for 30 days, you aggressively

00:28:29.400 | work on reflection and experimentation to figure out what really matters, and then in

00:28:32.600 | the end, you figure out what you want to let back.

00:28:34.000 | So Natasha's question is like, how do we draw this line about what is an optional technology

00:28:37.520 | or not?

00:28:38.960 | And I basically say, trust your gut, right?

00:28:42.440 | So she's pointing out, I gave the example in the book, of maybe you listen to podcasts

00:28:48.520 | still during your digital declutter, but you don't do social media.

00:28:52.880 | And she's saying, well, what if I don't want to do podcasts?

00:28:54.480 | And I would say, yeah, then don't do them.

00:28:55.480 | But you're kind of trusting your gut here.

00:28:58.400 | What you're looking for is information, information both about what really matters, and you will

00:29:03.920 | get that if and when you've taken a lot of things out of your life and you're more aggressively

00:29:09.840 | reflecting and experimenting with other analog activities, and information about what you

00:29:16.120 | really miss or not.

00:29:17.440 | And so taking a lot of things out of your life will help you get that information.

00:29:20.200 | So it's not so important to me that you get the exact list, but that you're being honest

00:29:25.100 | about it.

00:29:26.360 | The stuff that troubles you, you're moving out.

00:29:30.760 | The other option you have, and I talk about this in the book, is you could leave some

00:29:34.200 | things that you need to use to some degree and put fences around it to reduce it.

00:29:38.080 | And I think that's probably how I was talking about podcasts.

00:29:41.200 | I think I was probably saying, maybe you put fences around it.

00:29:44.760 | So you're like, well, I'll still listen to the podcast on my commute.

00:29:47.360 | That's what I do in my commutes, but I'm not going to listen to them otherwise.

00:29:51.480 | I have this with streaming video, right?

00:29:53.480 | A lot of people, when I did this experiment with a lot of people doing a digital declutter,

00:29:57.680 | multiple people said, oh, here was my fence around Netflix-style streaming services.

00:30:03.560 | I'm allowed to watch during the declutter if there's someone else with me.

00:30:07.640 | So I could still do social watching.

00:30:09.400 | Me and my roommate are going to watch a movie because that seems not like a problem, but

00:30:13.240 | I can't do binging.

00:30:14.240 | I want to try to take a break from binging.

00:30:16.820 | So you can either take things out or you can put fences around them.

00:30:20.560 | There is no hard and fast line about what has to be there, what doesn't have to be there.

00:30:25.360 | But you got to trust your gut.

00:30:26.680 | I mean, if something is worrying you how much you're using it, then take it out for the

00:30:32.440 | digital declutter or have fences around it.

00:30:35.320 | But the key thing about the declutter, it's like the key point of that book.

00:30:39.400 | You have to spend the time, when you're taking the break, you have to spend that time aggressively

00:30:45.600 | pursuing alternative activities that are valuable to you.

00:30:49.440 | That is where the value is.

00:30:50.440 | If you just try to white knuckle the digital declutter, if you try to say, I'm just going

00:30:54.700 | to stop using all this stuff on my phone because I don't like it, I'm just going to do that

00:30:58.200 | for 30 days, you're not going to make it.

00:31:00.360 | You're going to be staring into the void and it's going to drive you insane.

00:31:04.320 | You have to be aggressively pursuing the alternatives to fill the time.

00:31:09.440 | That's what makes something like the digital declutter actually work.

00:31:12.360 | And it's why I call it a declutter and not a detox, because the detox terminology in

00:31:17.480 | the context of digital technology is too much use as this idea of taking a break.

00:31:22.460 | If you could just get away from things, you can clarify yourself and then go back to using

00:31:25.800 | your stuff just the way you were before.

00:31:27.600 | I don't like that detox mindset in the realm of digital.

00:31:30.840 | I prefer the declutter because the goal of this process is at the end to only add back

00:31:35.080 | to stuff that matters.

00:31:36.360 | Your goal with this process is to have a different declutter digital life on the other side,

00:31:41.000 | not just taking a break from your digital life and then returning to it unchanged on

00:31:45.920 | the other side.

00:31:48.160 | That detox thing is good to me.

00:31:49.160 | I mean, it's also not the right use of the word detox.

00:31:52.800 | I mean, in substance abuse treatment, detox, yes, you're kind of getting something out

00:31:59.560 | of your system, but you don't go back to it.

00:32:01.960 | You don't detox from alcohol and then go back to drinking.

00:32:05.020 | It's the first step towards sobriety.

00:32:06.800 | So it's weird the way the digital world has, digital wellness has taken detox to now just

00:32:11.640 | mean like a temporary break.

00:32:13.320 | Like if I could just get some breathing room from social media, that'll be helpful.

00:32:19.080 | And then I'll just go back to using social media again on the other end.

00:32:21.520 | Never made sense to me.

00:32:22.640 | On the new White Lotus on Macs, they call it a detox when they go to Thailand and they're

00:32:26.560 | like introducing the guests and stuff.

00:32:28.000 | I need your phones.

00:32:29.000 | I watched it.

00:32:30.000 | Yeah.

00:32:31.000 | And that is using detox in like the digital wellness way, which is like take a break while

00:32:33.800 | you're in Thailand for a week.

00:32:35.320 | I just saw it last night.

00:32:36.320 | I was thinking of this.

00:32:37.320 | Yeah.

00:32:38.320 | I know.

00:32:39.320 | We watched it too.

00:32:40.320 | You watched it too.

00:32:41.320 | All right.

00:32:42.320 | All right.

00:32:43.320 | Next question's from Ethan.

00:32:44.320 | "Can you be in a state of deep work even if your cognitive capabilities aren't being pushed

00:32:47.960 | to the limit and not improving a skill?

00:32:50.000 | For example, reading a book?"

00:32:51.640 | Well, I mean, deep work is a term that was introduced in the context of professional

00:32:56.320 | activities.

00:32:57.320 | So it was very specifically talking about professional activities where you're doing

00:33:01.840 | something hard, like something you'd been trained for, and you're doing it with your

00:33:04.880 | full focus.

00:33:06.200 | And the whole point of identifying that professional activity in that book was to say, don't forget

00:33:12.280 | this is really the thing that most moves the needle in most organizations.

00:33:16.600 | This is the thing that ultimately produces the valuable things that lets you keep your

00:33:19.620 | lights on.

00:33:21.680 | So don't be seduced into having everyone's day be spent doing the shallow instead, just

00:33:28.600 | on email, just in movies.

00:33:30.040 | Don't let that meetings, don't let that busyness somehow in your mind make you feel like you're

00:33:38.320 | hustling or running a sharp organization.

00:33:41.160 | It's the focus stuff on things that's not easy to do that ultimately produces the value.

00:33:45.720 | That's the hard to replicate stuff.

00:33:47.200 | So we shouldn't forget that being important.

00:33:49.000 | So it's really talking about professional activities.

00:33:52.880 | I think the notion of deep work for a lot of people has taken on this sort of moral

00:33:56.640 | valence.

00:33:57.640 | It's like good activities versus bad activities, which I don't think is right.

00:34:01.120 | I mean, even in the work context, it's not like the non-deep activities are bad.

00:34:06.360 | I mean, the non-deep work activities include sending the invoices that is going to get

00:34:12.240 | you the money for the thing that you created.

00:34:15.520 | I mean, it's going to be booking the travel that allows you to go present the lecture

00:34:22.780 | that's based off of a lot of deep thinking.

00:34:24.920 | It's not bad.

00:34:25.920 | My point is, though, work can't just be that.

00:34:28.880 | You can't let it crowd out the thing that's actually producing the value.

00:34:31.720 | But anyways, there's this moral valence people take to it.

00:34:34.320 | And then this sort of makes people upset because then they feel like they're being accused,

00:34:38.800 | that if they're not doing enough of this, that it's somehow bad.

00:34:42.080 | And then it captures, once you have a moral valence, you begin to use this term to talk

00:34:45.280 | about non-professional activities, like in your life outside of work, and deep means

00:34:49.480 | good and shallow means bad.

00:34:51.760 | And you're like, well, reading a book seems like it's a good activity, so can't I call

00:34:54.760 | that deep work?

00:34:55.760 | And I'm saying, no, no.

00:34:56.760 | This is a narrow concept.

00:34:57.760 | It has to do with professional activities in professional settings, in particular, knowledge

00:35:01.280 | work settings.

00:35:02.840 | Reading a book is what I would call a focused activity, right?

00:35:06.520 | It has that element that is a part of deep work in which you're giving something your

00:35:10.840 | full attention.

00:35:12.120 | I do think focused activities are useful.

00:35:16.440 | Your life should have them.

00:35:18.580 | Our mind expects them.

00:35:20.880 | It can be very stressful and ultimately sort of deranging to have no focused activities

00:35:26.740 | in your life.

00:35:27.740 | I mean, if you're constantly on a phone and your mind can never just do one thing, that

00:35:32.600 | is a problem.

00:35:33.760 | You're going to exhaust your mind.

00:35:34.760 | I talk about this in digital minimalism.

00:35:37.720 | Your mind needs what I call solitude, but freedom from input for other minds, and focused

00:35:41.640 | activities like reading a book give you that.

00:35:42.760 | So is working on like a woodworking project.

00:35:45.680 | It might not be in the moment what you're doing, which might be like sanding, is not

00:35:50.760 | cognitively demanding, but it's a focused activity.

00:35:52.520 | It's getting your full attention or you're knitting.

00:35:55.240 | It's not a hard stitch, but it's taking your full attention.

00:35:58.260 | Focused activities are great, but I would use that terminology different than deep work.

00:36:02.160 | Deep work is a very specific, knowledge work specific, professional pursuit activity.

00:36:08.760 | Focused work is more broad.

00:36:10.380 | You do need focused activities.

00:36:11.600 | Reading a book is a great focused activity for a lot of reasons, but I wouldn't mix that

00:36:16.920 | up with the terminology for deep work because deep work is trying to do something very specific,

00:36:21.080 | which has to be how do we design and think about running knowledge work organizations

00:36:25.760 | and how are we messing that up in the digital age.

00:36:28.800 | It's that moral issue, Jesse, that's what I get surprised or I would get surprised when

00:36:33.640 | people would get upset about deep work, but they get upset almost always as a consequence

00:36:38.720 | of first interpreting deep work with this moral valence, and then as soon as you start

00:36:43.640 | thinking like deep work is good, other work is bad, and whoever does more deep work is

00:36:48.700 | better than someone who does less, then people start to get upset because they say, "Well,

00:36:53.340 | wait a second.

00:36:54.340 | There's different jobs and different people have more opportunities to do deep work than

00:36:56.920 | other people and why are people judging me," and it opens up this whole can of worms.

00:37:00.840 | I just see it as a specific activity, among others, that's done in a knowledge work organization

00:37:07.000 | that has been receiving, it's been forgotten or it was being forgotten because high-tech

00:37:12.320 | tools were crowding out the attention space and it was just pointing out, "Don't forget

00:37:16.760 | that."

00:37:17.760 | That's actually the thing that keeps the lights on.

00:37:19.680 | We might have to go out of our way to protect it these days because of the velocity of distraction

00:37:24.120 | coming from things like digital tools.

00:37:26.200 | So I like that distinction.

00:37:27.560 | Focused activities is a broad category.

00:37:30.960 | Reading books is in there, knitting's in there, sanding wood is in there.

00:37:35.380 | Deep work is under that umbrella, along with other things, like sports or flow activities

00:37:42.300 | can be under that umbrella, too, but they're all under that umbrella.

00:37:45.440 | So I think that's a useful distinction.

00:37:47.080 | All right, who do we got?

00:37:50.560 | Jeff, what are Cal's thoughts regarding content aggregator services such as InnoReader, which

00:37:56.800 | allow you to subscribe to and view content such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and social

00:38:00.920 | media channels outside the original platforms?

00:38:03.880 | Is this a good way to be more intentional about content consumption, or is it just another

00:38:08.280 | distraction?

00:38:09.280 | Well, I'm a huge booster of aggregators as a way of reclaiming some of the value proposition

00:38:17.440 | of the original internet.

00:38:18.440 | I don't really get the point of aggregators that are aimed at algorithmic platforms, however.

00:38:25.080 | The whole point of an algorithmic platform, like a social media platform, their whole

00:38:30.560 | point was to push back against the aggregation model.

00:38:34.640 | When I first got started in new media, I got started with a blog.

00:38:37.760 | This would have been back in 2007.

00:38:40.120 | I loved that time period because it was individuals producing their own content on their own servers,

00:38:46.640 | and what people would do is have a RSS reader, so a reader that could read the automated

00:38:51.280 | feeds that would describe when you had new blog posts.

00:38:54.480 | You would have an RSS reader that would go around and check for all the blogs you subscribe

00:39:00.380 | to, and subscribing was just like you telling the reader, "This is a blog I want to follow,"

00:39:04.760 | and it would just check, "Hey, is there a new post on this blog?

00:39:07.800 | If so, I'll pull it into the reader so you can read it right there next to any other

00:39:12.800 | blog post."

00:39:13.800 | And your reader would just have, like, "Here's the newest articles from around the blogs

00:39:16.600 | you follow," and you had one tool you would read.

00:39:19.480 | I still have memories of—I don't know what tool it was.

00:39:23.680 | Google had a good reader.

00:39:24.680 | Maybe it was Google's.

00:39:25.680 | But being in a classroom—this might have been distributed algorithms I was TAing—and

00:39:30.160 | I remember reading Leo Babouda's Zen Habits post in my RSS reader in 2007 or 2006 or something

00:39:40.520 | like this.

00:39:41.600 | That was a great technology.

00:39:43.640 | They got rid of it.

00:39:44.640 | Google stopped supporting that, and other companies that were trying to do this went

00:39:48.480 | out of business.

00:39:49.480 | Why?

00:39:50.480 | Because this was a bad model for trying to create a giant company.

00:39:54.980 | It was a great model for consumers.

00:39:57.680 | I could subscribe to these different sources of information I like, and they'll all show

00:40:03.200 | up in one app, so I just have to open up this one app or website—it was websites mainly

00:40:07.260 | back then—and it'll just tell me if there's a new thing over on Cal's blog.

00:40:10.760 | It'll just show up, and I can just read it.

00:40:12.120 | It's like my own personal newspaper.

00:40:13.480 | That was fantastic.

00:40:14.720 | But you can't make money on that if you're the company, because their content is being

00:40:19.840 | pulled from people's individual sites, and they're being brought to an individual to

00:40:23.120 | read.

00:40:24.120 | So the social companies were like, "No, no, no.

00:40:25.440 | We need you to live on our walled garden platform.

00:40:29.680 | We own all the content, and we'll use algorithms to give you a feed of things to read, and

00:40:37.000 | then we control all the content you see.

00:40:39.060 | We can monitor all the behavior you do, and we can sell you targeted advertisements."

00:40:43.380 | So RSS went out of fashion, because they said, "You don't want an RSS feed.

00:40:48.000 | You want a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed or an Instagram feed that's much more profitable

00:40:51.680 | for the small number of investors who are early in those companies."

00:40:55.740 | There's a return to the aggregator model, notably podcast listeners, podcast apps.

00:41:05.080 | Podcast apps are basically blog RSS readers, right?

00:41:09.840 | If you go to Apple Podcasts, this is not like an Apple app, and all this data is in Apple's

00:41:16.760 | world.

00:41:17.760 | It's not like going on to Instagram.

00:41:19.440 | All a podcast listening app does is you say, "I want to subscribe to Deep Questions."

00:41:25.400 | Just like in the days of blogs, it just goes and notes to itself, "Keep an eye on the RSS

00:41:33.360 | feed for Cal's podcast."

00:41:35.360 | Our podcast is just on a server somewhere.

00:41:37.440 | It's nothing fancy.

00:41:38.440 | It's not owned by some platform.

00:41:40.240 | Just like a blog, it has an RSS feed that updates every time there's a new episode,

00:41:44.080 | and it has all the information, the metadata for the information, and a pointer to where

00:41:47.200 | the MP3 file is on the server.

00:41:49.760 | Your podcast listener, once you say, "I care about Deep Questions," it just kind of pulls

00:41:53.280 | that a bunch.

00:41:54.280 | "Hey, is there anything new?

00:41:55.280 | Is there anything new?"

00:41:56.280 | If it sees something new, it downloads that file off of the server that we just happened

00:41:59.120 | to store our podcast on, and you can access it from your listener.

00:42:04.320 | Podcasting actually is a return to blog RSS readers, and I think it's fantastic.

00:42:09.800 | The content's independent.

00:42:12.720 | We own our own content.

00:42:13.720 | It's on our own servers, and anyone with any type of podcast app can subscribe and listen

00:42:20.080 | to our content, or you can even go to the deeplife.com/listen and just listen to it

00:42:23.480 | right there.

00:42:24.480 | I think that's really cool.

00:42:26.520 | I would like to see a return for it.

00:42:28.220 | What I think that the technology is interesting to me now is aggregators for email newsletters.

00:42:32.800 | I think that's going to be the blog reader of 2026.

00:42:37.160 | It's going to be like what blog readers were in 2006.

00:42:41.120 | That's what I'm looking for, because email inboxes are crowded.

00:42:45.600 | You have personal stuff.

00:42:46.800 | You have work stuff.

00:42:47.800 | You have urgent stuff.

00:42:48.800 | The context shifting is immense.

00:42:49.920 | You have spam.

00:42:50.920 | You have promotional stuff.

00:42:52.560 | It's a very crowded attention arena.

00:42:56.800 | I know some of these tools exist, and listeners, feel free to write to jesse@calnewport.com

00:43:01.000 | if you have good ones to point out to me, but I think these tools are going to evolve

00:43:04.160 | to be really important.

00:43:05.160 | Substack is trying to do this just for Substack blogs, but I want there to be independent

00:43:08.520 | apps where you just tell it, and I know there's a couple like this where they actually give

00:43:12.760 | you an email address you use to subscribe to the newsletter, so it comes straight to

00:43:17.640 | it.

00:43:18.640 | I want there to be a way that all my email newsletters, I just have one app or website

00:43:21.680 | I go to, and it's just like a newspaper except for what you're seeing is what's coming from

00:43:25.480 | these email newsletters.

00:43:26.480 | I don't want it to be Substack's app because that has lots of other stuff going on.

00:43:29.200 | I don't want it following me and giving me algorithmic recommendations and trying to

00:43:32.960 | keep me in there.

00:43:33.960 | I just want it to be the things I subscribe to, it's showing it to me, and I can read

00:43:38.080 | them all there, and I don't have to go into my inbox that has other distracting things

00:43:41.840 | to read them.

00:43:42.840 | I think that's going to be, this decade, what blogs were.

00:43:47.200 | It's going to be a way that you can have this content experience that's non-algorithmic

00:43:50.520 | and independent.

00:43:51.520 | I'm a big believer in aggregators.

00:43:54.000 | I don't believe in aggregators for giant social media platforms because their whole point

00:43:59.840 | was to try to destroy aggregators in the first place.

00:44:02.280 | So then those emails would get deleted from your email account, right?

00:44:04.880 | They would just go right to the whatever the solution is.

00:44:06.840 | Yeah, so I would be happy with that.

00:44:08.960 | Just have like a-

00:44:09.960 | So then you would never see them.

00:44:10.960 | That would be pretty sweet.

00:44:11.960 | Yeah, just have an app, right?

00:44:12.960 | Like here's the latest from like the different things you subscribe to.

00:44:15.760 | Oh, hey, can I see like the archive of this one?

00:44:19.040 | Here's the older articles, right?

00:44:20.040 | I mean, I think it'd be cool.

00:44:21.040 | Yeah.

00:44:22.040 | Like a podcast app, I mean, why don't we just integrate these two things?

00:44:29.840 | That'd be a cool app.

00:44:31.360 | It's like, oh, I like this person I subscribe.

00:44:33.160 | It's like, oh, here's something to read.

00:44:34.640 | Here's something to listen to.

00:44:35.800 | The whole thing could look like the New York Times app or something like that.

00:44:39.440 | Like people who have newsletters or podcasts, you can just have them.

00:44:43.920 | Here's the newest stuff and you just listen to it and you have like a nice app and it

00:44:46.480 | keeps track of where you are.

00:44:47.480 | To be quite honest, I like the Washington Post app a lot better than the New York Times

00:44:51.380 | because you can still see the physical paper in the post.

00:44:55.000 | I haven't tried that app.

00:44:56.960 | I subscribe, but okay, I should try it.

00:44:58.680 | Check it out.

00:45:00.120 | Yeah.

00:45:01.120 | The Times app is pretty good.

00:45:02.240 | I don't like it because you can't see the paper.

00:45:04.200 | So what do you mean?

00:45:05.200 | Like it won't show you like what the actual paper looks like?

00:45:07.400 | Yeah.

00:45:08.400 | At least in the post, you have two options.

00:45:09.400 | You can see the feed like it is in New York Times, but you can also go to the print edition

00:45:12.320 | and you can see.

00:45:13.320 | Oh, that's nice.

00:45:14.320 | Yeah.

00:45:15.320 | Yeah.

00:45:16.320 | I like that.

00:45:17.320 | You can do that with the Boston Globe too, but for some reason you can't do it with the

00:45:19.960 | Times.

00:45:20.960 | Yeah.

00:45:21.960 | Yeah.

00:45:22.960 | Even at the same company.

00:45:23.960 | All right.

00:45:24.960 | What do we got next?

00:45:25.960 | We have our Slow Productivity Corner.

00:45:27.080 | Ooh, this is where we have a question each week that relates to my book, Slow Productivity,

00:45:31.400 | The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:45:34.320 | It's also our excuse to play the Slow Productivity Corner theme music, which we'll hear right

00:45:38.240 | now.

00:45:39.240 | All right.

00:45:40.240 | What do we got, Jesse?

00:45:47.720 | It's from Jacob.

00:45:48.720 | "I'm a senior executive looking after sales and marketing teams for a medium to large

00:45:53.080 | size business in New Zealand.

00:45:55.320 | With a large team and ever-changing demands in a competitive retail environment, is it

00:45:59.240 | possible to avoid pseudo productivity and busyness?

00:46:02.560 | Time blocking is very difficult with constant disruptions, both in person and via other

00:46:06.620 | channels."

00:46:07.620 | Well, I see sort of two unrelated issues here.

00:46:13.300 | Can you avoid pseudo productivity and business and busyness in a competitive retail environment?

00:46:18.440 | And then second, can time blocking somehow by itself help you accomplish this goal?

00:46:24.680 | Answer the first part, yes.

00:46:25.680 | I mean, think about it.

00:46:26.800 | What is pseudo productivity?

00:46:27.940 | This is the core definition of my book, Slow Productivity.

00:46:31.200 | It's the thing that slow productivity is trying to solve.

00:46:35.340 | Pseudo productivity is the belief that visible activity is a reasonable proxy for useful

00:46:40.520 | effort.

00:46:41.520 | So busyness is the point.

00:46:43.680 | If you're busy, that's good.

00:46:44.680 | If you're less busy, you're not.

00:46:46.000 | The embrace of pseudo productivity as your primary metric for actually doing things useful

00:46:50.640 | is what leads to these sort of hyper-distractive environments where we're all hustling and

00:46:54.440 | getting after it and jumping off and on in calls and slack.

00:46:56.920 | And we figure if we're really, really busy, we must be doing something right.

00:47:02.000 | But it's also self-evident after just a little bit of reflection that pseudo productivity

00:47:05.460 | doesn't translate or correlate well with actual value produced.

00:47:09.680 | If anything, it can make it worse.

00:47:12.160 | If all you're doing is trying to be busy, where is it that you're actually allowing

00:47:15.960 | your mind to fix on a single cognitive context and apply your hard-won skills to produce

00:47:19.880 | some sort of new value, some new information that has value?

00:47:22.840 | Where are you doing the actual work of producing value in knowledge work?

00:47:26.580 | It's like running a car factory where you're constantly running around and having meetings

00:47:29.980 | about the quality management and the best way to produce cars, and you're constantly

00:47:34.360 | going around and making sure that the machines are oiled and putting in place new techniques

00:47:38.340 | to oil the machines and making sure that everything is working right and talking to people, "Hey,

00:47:42.880 | what about this?

00:47:43.880 | What's going through your machine?"

00:47:44.880 | But no one's actually building the cars.

00:47:45.880 | You're all very busy, but eventually that plant's going to go out of business.

00:47:49.260 | So no, pseudo productivity self-evidently is something you can get away from.

00:47:53.200 | How you do it is hard.

00:47:54.200 | That's why I wrote a whole book about it.

00:47:57.360 | Time blocking, that's like an individual time management strategy.

00:48:02.280 | I don't see how that's going to break a culture of pseudo productivity among an entire team.

00:48:08.520 | So what sort of things do matter?

00:48:10.760 | Here's some greatest hits from the book.

00:48:12.920 | First of all, make the work that needs to be done transparent and external.

00:48:18.040 | Do not just have tasks exist implicitly on people's plates that are being just passed

00:48:21.560 | around through emails and requests.

00:48:23.600 | Have a Kanban-style board somewhere the whole team can see.

00:48:27.040 | Here's things we need to do.

00:48:28.560 | Here's things that are being done now and who is working on them.

00:48:31.240 | So you can see, like immediately, this person's already working on three things.

00:48:35.240 | I'm not going to give them a fourth.

00:48:37.520 | Have some sort of systematic collaborative way of deciding how to update these assignments.

00:48:41.480 | All right, what should we be working on next?

00:48:43.280 | Who has capacity?

00:48:44.280 | Okay, you have capacity.

00:48:45.600 | I'm going to move this card virtually or physically onto your column.

00:48:50.040 | What do you need from other people to get this done?

00:48:52.360 | Let's just talk about this now while we're all here.

00:48:55.400 | And so now you're keeping track of workload, you're preventing people from having too much

00:48:58.440 | on their plate at the same time, and you're getting much more efficient collaboration

00:49:02.040 | because you can front-load the decisions about who needs what from whom as opposed to having

00:49:06.480 | that sort of be dragged out in a distributed fashion with just emails that are being sent

00:49:09.880 | back and forth.

00:49:12.800 | Work with things, alternatives to ad hoc messaging.

00:49:18.760 | So maybe you have office hours for individuals.

00:49:21.600 | If I have a question for you that you can't answer with a single message, I will go to

00:49:25.240 | your office hours and we'll have a five-minute discussion.

00:49:28.480 | Me talking with five people during a one-hour office hours can prevent 50 messages that

00:49:33.400 | I have to receive and respond to throughout the rest of the day, which is a much bigger

00:49:37.520 | burden.

00:49:38.520 | Your team, in addition to keeping track of your external tasks, consider having things

00:49:41.900 | like docket-clearing meetings twice a week.

00:49:46.000 | We get together.

00:49:47.000 | This could be in smaller units.

00:49:48.760 | We have a shared document where up to that point, if anything came up that we need to

00:49:52.800 | figure out as a team or someone needs to tackle or have a question about, I add it to that

00:49:56.360 | shared document called a docket, and in the docket-clearing meeting, we go down that list

00:50:01.080 | one after another.

00:50:02.080 | All right.

00:50:03.080 | Do we really need to do this?

00:50:04.080 | Who's going to do this?

00:50:05.080 | What do you need?

00:50:06.080 | What about this?

00:50:07.080 | Maybe we'll move this onto our list.

00:50:08.080 | We're going to wait to do this.

00:50:09.080 | What about this issue here?

00:50:10.080 | Who has the answer for it?

00:50:11.080 | So you're consolidating when things get done, and you're using the docket to ensure that

00:50:13.560 | things will be remembered without doing what most people do to try to remember something

00:50:17.640 | that occurs to them is they send off an email, and it gets sent out there to start bouncing

00:50:21.600 | back and forth between people doing obligation, hot potato.

00:50:25.000 | So have office hours, have docket-clearing meetings, be super clear about the metrics

00:50:30.640 | that matter.

00:50:31.640 | Here's the things we produce.

00:50:32.640 | How much are we producing?

00:50:33.640 | How good is it?

00:50:34.640 | What did you contribute to it?

00:50:35.640 | The clearer you are in actual value, the less entranced you'll be by the simulated value

00:50:41.120 | of pseudo productivity, so that's going to matter as well.

00:50:44.120 | An idea from my book, A World Without Email, when it comes to external communication, people

00:50:48.520 | talking to your team from the outside, clients or other units within your organization, have

00:50:53.480 | communication protocols.

00:50:56.480 | You want to talk to us about this?

00:50:58.040 | Here's how and when you do it.

00:50:59.040 | It's not just you have someone's email address individually.

00:51:01.720 | In fact, have communication channels that are disconnected from individuals.

00:51:05.480 | That itself is a problematic paradigm, that all communication goes between handles that

00:51:10.600 | are associated with individuals.

00:51:12.000 | No, I have an email address for client questions.

00:51:17.600 | Now that changes the whole dynamic if you're a client, because when I'm sending this to

00:51:22.040 | Jesse, I'm just imagining there's another person in the office next door who I'm asking

00:51:28.200 | something and it's rude if they don't get back to me.

00:51:30.120 | Why can't they just talk to me?

00:51:31.240 | I'm really mad at Jesse now because he didn't respond to me right away, but if I'm sending

00:51:34.320 | that question to clientquestions@company.com, I have a completely different set of expectations.

00:51:40.680 | Like, oh, this is going into an information tracking system and I will get a response.

00:51:44.440 | In fact, maybe there's some nice guidelines about, hey, here's how this works.

00:51:48.280 | Send this to us.

00:51:50.080 | This is emptied out and assigned to people to look at, like, once a day, you'll hear

00:51:53.460 | back within 48 hours.

00:51:55.760 | And if it's not a person, that's reasonable.

00:51:58.360 | Process is a process.

00:51:59.360 | If it's a person, we're like, why haven't I heard back in 20 minutes?

00:52:01.680 | So there's a lot of things you can do to begin reengineering a team away from pseudo productivity,

00:52:06.920 | but it's not going to be like one simple hack or habit.

00:52:11.320 | It's going to be a whole different way of keeping track of information, keeping track

00:52:14.680 | of tasks, communicating internally and communicating with the outside world.

00:52:18.600 | So read Slow Productivity in its entirety.

00:52:20.600 | There's a lot of concrete advice in there.

00:52:22.800 | Read A World Without Email, a lot of concrete advice in there about just the communication

00:52:26.440 | piece.

00:52:27.440 | This is possible, but it is really hard.

00:52:29.640 | All right, let's, uh, what we got next, we have a call?

00:52:34.200 | We do.

00:52:35.200 | All right, let's see what we have today.

00:52:36.200 | Hi, Cal.

00:52:37.200 | I have a bit of a silly and relatively simple, but not unimportant, I think, question.

00:52:43.640 | I'm like many of us addicted to do scrolling.

00:52:47.800 | I've gotten off Instagram for probably over a year, maybe closer to two years now.

00:52:52.880 | But then YouTube brought out YouTube shorts, and then I would just infinitely scroll through

00:52:57.480 | those.

00:52:58.480 | And I realized that the solution to that was just taking it off my phone.

00:53:01.680 | But I just feel like I always need to go to something that allows me to just scroll through

00:53:07.520 | my phone and turn off my brain for a few minutes at a time.

00:53:11.080 | And the issue now is that I end up going on LinkedIn on my browser.

00:53:15.440 | And the advantage of being wanting to do scroll on LinkedIn is that the content is quite boring

00:53:20.320 | and seeing a two week old post from someone with a cringy insight into life quickly makes

00:53:28.640 | you go off of it, but I still find myself going on it quite a few times each day.

00:53:33.400 | Do you have any tips about how to get rid of this do scrolling reflex?

00:53:37.640 | I figure it's kind of like a smoker that just wants to fiddle with their hands or something.

00:53:42.880 | Thanks.

00:53:43.880 | Well, let's use the smoker analogy here for a second longer, right?

00:53:48.940 | So when a smoker who has just quit is trying to be successful, what is one of the key things

00:53:54.180 | you have to do?

00:53:56.040 | You have to get alternative activities, right?

00:53:58.600 | This is the key thing you have to teach a smoker.

00:54:00.160 | Oh, this is a situation where you would normally smoke.

00:54:03.000 | So what you need to do instead is like eat carrot sticks or you drink coffee, right?

00:54:09.160 | I mean, it's like the coffee at the AA meetings or whatever, right?

00:54:12.360 | You have to have alternative activities that fill the role, the thing that you are quitting

00:54:18.920 | used to play.

00:54:20.320 | If you just white knuckle it, it's hard.

00:54:23.040 | Like I'm used to smoking here and I just don't want to do it and I'm just going to hold my

00:54:26.600 | hand tight till my knuckles turn white.

00:54:29.240 | You don't last very long that way.

00:54:30.600 | You got to get the alternative activities.

00:54:32.340 | The same holds, I think, for these information ecosystems.

00:54:35.360 | Your problem is you need to train yourself to appreciate alternative types of stuff to

00:54:41.840 | do when you're bored that you like even better than the stale LinkedIn post, right?

00:54:48.480 | You're looking at the stale LinkedIn post like you must have nothing else pulling for

00:54:52.240 | your attention.

00:54:53.240 | So find other types of information and this is, it takes, you know, I talk about this

00:54:57.720 | in the digital declutter, it's experimentation and reflection.

00:55:00.720 | So you try to figure out like what else is interesting to me and you put healthier habits

00:55:04.900 | in place and that sounds really simple, but it actually is what works.

00:55:08.840 | It's simple because it's what works, it's what we do for all other sorts of addictions,

00:55:12.000 | it's what you need to do here as well.

00:55:14.000 | There's a lot of things this could mean.

00:55:15.200 | This could be analog, by the way, like retrain yourself to read fun books, right?

00:55:22.600 | Like if you're into thrillers, go get, now I'm going to do this, by the way, Jesse, go

00:55:28.360 | on to like a books and like, I'm going to get mass market paperbacks, you know, not

00:55:36.120 | first edition, so nothing expensive, of like thrillers from a given era.

00:55:39.800 | Like I'm going to get the James Bond thrillers from like the original sort of whatever editions

00:55:44.200 | those were.

00:55:45.200 | They used to buy in the drugstore and they're sort of like portable paperbacks from the

00:55:49.160 | age where like there was no other distractions, I'm going to bring one of those with me and

00:55:52.040 | that's what I'm going to read when I'm bored and it's going to be stuff that's just super

00:55:54.840 | fun and I like it.

00:55:56.320 | Or have sources of information online that is affirming and interesting and doesn't bring

00:56:02.480 | you into a bad place.

00:56:04.520 | Like this time of year, especially like this year, like things are very grim where we live

00:56:10.120 | in Washington, D.C. because of all the disruptions to the federal workforce.

00:56:14.520 | So like there's a lot of distraction and grimness.

00:56:16.800 | What I like to, what I look at right now, what's helping me, baseball spring training.

00:56:21.960 | Like I feel good.

00:56:23.360 | I know so much.

00:56:24.840 | I mean, I just know day to day like what is happening at West Palm Beach with the Nationals,

00:56:30.600 | like what exercise they did and how much do we really care about the quadricep tendonitis

00:56:35.560 | and James Wood and is it really, when is he going to get back to throwing activities,

00:56:39.400 | but what's his hitting doing?

00:56:40.760 | You know, I mean, how are, what is the workload for our new pitcher that we just brought in

00:56:44.720 | from the Japanese league who he's used to pitching seven days a week versus the five

00:56:49.360 | day a week rhythm that we have in the U.S.

00:56:51.440 | And you know, Travis Soroka's changeup is looking really good.

00:56:55.480 | To me, that's like really, I like that distraction, right?

00:57:00.080 | I like that distraction.

00:57:02.800 | I read a lot.

00:57:04.800 | And I enjoy it.

00:57:05.800 | I read and take notes on like idea books and I get really used to that.

00:57:08.840 | It's like an alternative.

00:57:10.840 | Maybe there's like podcasts.

00:57:11.880 | I think podcasts can be super positive.

00:57:14.120 | Like it's interesting, a formative podcast or interview podcast, you can kind of get

00:57:17.640 | lost in that.

00:57:19.040 | Maybe it's some other sort of more hobby type activity.

00:57:22.440 | Some people I know are really good at rabbit holing random topics.

00:57:26.640 | I think that could be really interesting, right?

00:57:28.240 | Like I'm really in, I want to get really into vintage watches and they're like rabbit hole

00:57:34.920 | on a non-emotionally salient, non-algorithmically optimized content.

00:57:41.440 | Like I'm on watch forums and I just love just finding nuggets of information about this

00:57:46.400 | thing I'm rabbit holing on, or I'm just really into right now the sprinter vans that get

00:57:51.880 | converted into these cool adventure bands.

00:57:53.840 | I just want to like rabbit hole on that and read about it and be on email lists and stuff

00:57:57.960 | like that.

00:57:58.960 | Like that's fun.

00:57:59.960 | It's just about finding these alternative things you do that you get used to and they

00:58:03.480 | just don't feel as dragging.

00:58:04.960 | They don't feel like doom scrolling.

00:58:06.400 | They feel interesting.

00:58:07.400 | I'm learning something.

00:58:08.400 | I'm learning about baseball.

00:58:09.400 | I'm learning about watches.

00:58:10.400 | I'm reading these cool books and I really enjoy it.

00:58:13.840 | We put a guitar, I play, my son plays, my other son plays ukulele.

00:58:18.480 | My innovation was it needs to be right in the front foyer of the house so you can just

00:58:22.400 | grab it whenever and just like play a little guitar.

00:58:24.960 | It's next to our piano.

00:58:25.960 | And they do.

00:58:26.960 | They pick it up and they'll play a little bit.

00:58:27.960 | And I'm starting to do that a little bit more now.

00:58:29.360 | So you got to find, you got to aggressively invest in finding the alternative activities

00:58:33.880 | to scratch the same itch that the doom scroll is doing, but doing it in a way that's a scratch

00:58:37.960 | that's much more satisfying than what you're getting from these other content universes.

00:58:43.060 | As for my app idea would be good, Jesse, where it is email newsletters and podcasts and in

00:58:49.080 | like a really nice app.

00:58:50.080 | Like that would be a great thing to turn to like you're a little bit bored, you're a little

00:58:53.200 | bit tired.

00:58:54.200 | I'm like, yeah, I'm going to read like an interesting email newsletter.

00:58:56.680 | I'm not going to feel bad about it.

00:58:58.680 | There's no weird algorithmic hypnosis that you get when you're looking at social media

00:59:03.520 | and it's not going to make you feel bad.

00:59:05.440 | You're not going to read a Cal Newport email newsletter and just be like, oh my God, the

00:59:09.560 | world is, you know, it's going to be, focus is great and don't answer too many emails.

00:59:14.360 | It's going to be good.

00:59:15.360 | You feel good about it.

00:59:16.760 | What's the Vegas over under for Nat's wins this year?

00:59:19.480 | Which projection do you care about?

00:59:21.400 | There's two different projections.

00:59:23.580 | One of them is a little bit more optimistic and it's 72, 74.

00:59:29.080 | That would have been my guess.

00:59:31.240 | Yeah.

00:59:32.240 | There's a less optimistic one that's like 65.

00:59:34.120 | I think they'll do 75.

00:59:35.120 | You're going to bet on it?

00:59:36.120 | Yeah, I'll bet.

00:59:37.120 | Mad Dog always has the over-unders for like certain teams every year for football, baseball,

00:59:43.240 | hockey, basketball.

00:59:44.240 | I would take the over on even the more optimistic.

00:59:47.400 | They've done 72 the last two seasons in a row and they just have, their core is better.

00:59:53.340 | Tough division.

00:59:54.340 | It's a tough division, but it's not betting on them making the playoffs.

00:59:57.480 | It's just betting on them winning 74 games.

01:00:00.940 | And they have like eight available pitchers.

01:00:03.240 | That makes such a difference when you can react to pitcher injuries in July much more

01:00:09.940 | effectively.

01:00:10.940 | The wins you get, there's four wins right there, five wins right there, it's like, yeah,

01:00:14.440 | when we had two concurrent pitcher injuries, we're still able to get three victories instead

01:00:19.700 | of one out of like a five game stretch because we have like a deeper bench, like that sort

01:00:23.000 | of thing adds up.

01:00:24.760 | I was, who was I?

01:00:27.440 | I was messing around with Holiday, Ryan Holiday, I was texting him the other day because I

01:00:33.880 | was reading about, it wasn't a national, or maybe it was a national, ooh, maybe it was

01:00:39.080 | a Washington national.

01:00:40.640 | But anyways, it was about a baseball player and they're talking about in the off season,

01:00:45.840 | they have the training camp, had started a book club so that the days they're not training,

01:00:50.960 | instead of just being off days, they would read and like work on their mind.

01:00:53.840 | And the pitcher they were talking to was like, yeah, Ryan's book, Ego is the Enemy is my,

01:00:59.440 | that was my favorite or whatever.

01:01:00.440 | So I texted Ryan, I was like, look, if and when you get invited to speak to the Washington

01:01:04.480 | nationals, I'm coming with you.

01:01:06.840 | We'll figure out later like why it makes sense, but you are, if you get in with baseball players,

01:01:12.400 | like I'm coming with you, we'll figure out, I can just be your-

01:01:14.720 | What'd he say?

01:01:16.400 | No.

01:01:17.400 | I got the Tim Ferriss response.

01:01:21.680 | I'll be traveling until November 7th and we'll delete any messages, so you'll have to resend

01:01:25.760 | it then.

01:01:26.760 | I forgot.

01:01:27.760 | I think he said-

01:01:28.760 | And the nationals season will be over September 30th.

01:01:31.720 | Exactly.

01:01:32.720 | Exactly.

01:01:33.720 | No, he said, who dis?

01:01:36.680 | Who dis?

01:01:37.680 | Question mark.

01:01:38.680 | With a shrug emoji.

01:01:39.680 | Who dis?

01:01:40.680 | All right.

01:01:41.680 | We got a case study here.

01:01:42.680 | A case study is where people send in their accounts of putting the type of things we

01:01:45.320 | talk about on the show into practice in their own life so we can see what this actually

01:01:48.200 | looks like.

01:01:50.080 | Today's, I almost don't want to use his name.

01:01:53.200 | I guess he doesn't care about being anonymous, but like this is such a specific person, like

01:01:56.840 | I know who this is.

01:01:57.840 | I feel like if I gave their first name and tell this story, it's just 100% identifying

01:02:01.880 | him.

01:02:02.880 | So I won't give his first name.

01:02:03.880 | I still think it's going to 100% identify him, but I also don't think he cares.

01:02:06.560 | Right?

01:02:07.560 | I don't think he's trying to be anonymous.

01:02:09.520 | How many announcers are there?

01:02:11.280 | I don't know.

01:02:12.280 | Do you watch it a lot?

01:02:13.880 | No.

01:02:14.880 | But you still know who he is?

01:02:15.880 | No, I looked it up.

01:02:16.880 | It's not like Joe Buck.

01:02:17.880 | No, I didn't.

01:02:19.200 | I looked it up.

01:02:20.200 | I was like, "Oh, I've seen him before."

01:02:21.200 | Okay.

01:02:22.200 | Yeah.

01:02:23.200 | All right.

01:02:24.200 | Well, anyways, we'll see if we can guess who this is.

01:02:26.440 | Joe Buck.

01:02:27.440 | "I'm a UFC announcer that has loved implementing slow productivity and a lot of other new Portonian

01:02:32.600 | ideas to make my life better, so thank you."

01:02:34.720 | This, by the way, is where I was like, "Is this Joe Rogan?"

01:02:39.560 | This would be great because, you're right, how many UFC announcers are there?

01:02:43.360 | So to get a note from a UFC announcer that says, "I've loved your book," I'm like, "Oh,

01:02:47.960 | this could be good."

01:02:49.720 | It's not Rogan though.

01:02:50.720 | No.

01:02:51.720 | He's not going to like you because you don't like Instagram.

01:02:52.720 | I know.

01:02:53.720 | Too mean to Elon.

01:02:54.720 | I know.

01:02:55.720 | I don't think you ... I think he literally would not like me.

01:02:59.640 | All right.

01:03:00.640 | Anyways, back to the question.

01:03:01.960 | "My job is different from office-based knowledge work, but finding your podcast in 2023 allowed

01:03:07.440 | me to find more efficient ways to execute work tasks and adjust to life with our one-year-old

01:03:12.000 | making us a family of four.

01:03:14.040 | In early 2024, I pondered taking a break from my podcast and social media to deal with the

01:03:18.120 | overload I was feeling.

01:03:20.280 | Putting that to the side allowed me to put more focus and effort on my family and the

01:03:23.440 | main part of my job, and I believe it made me so good to not be ignored for fun and unique

01:03:28.280 | opportunities with our partners at ESPN that better fit into my schedule."

01:03:32.120 | That's a confusing sentence.

01:03:33.280 | I think he's saying, "It made me so good I couldn't be ignored, and that led to lots

01:03:38.360 | of fun and unique opportunities from our partners at ESPN.

01:03:42.200 | In May, my wife wondered if living out of state for my company could be a possibility

01:03:45.640 | to be closer to family and provide a different lifestyle for our two young boys.

01:03:50.160 | I asked, and my career capital gave us a yes, so off we went.

01:03:54.200 | Since I never missed an episode of Deep Questions, living out of state didn't sound as crazy

01:03:57.440 | to me as it would have if I didn't know about lifestyle and career planning.

01:04:01.760 | We found a wonderful community where we've made great new friends and spend more time

01:04:05.480 | with family.

01:04:06.680 | Our elementary school-age son is thriving and loves his new environment, and I volunteer

01:04:10.200 | often at his school, which has fulfilled a yearn for being part of our community that

01:04:13.960 | we didn't have in our previous location.

01:04:16.620 | My job requires me to travel as a result, but it is very manageable, and since many

01:04:21.040 | of my colleagues that I work closest with live all over the country, it's great for

01:04:25.240 | bonding with dinners and a walk to get coffee or chats in the hotel lobby.

01:04:30.080 | For the local coworkers, I actually see them more now in social settings than I did when

01:04:33.760 | I lived in the same city because I'm not juggling family responsibilities when I'm there for

01:04:37.440 | the two or three days at a time.

01:04:39.720 | Can't say thank you enough for the constant flow of ideas and new perspectives with the

01:04:42.920 | podcast.

01:04:43.920 | I've read many of your books and can't wait for the next one.

01:04:46.480 | P.S.

01:04:47.480 | I remember loving Cal's description of what would happen if he played golf at the Masters.

01:04:51.680 | I'd love a similar description of Cal as a UFC fighter and how it would go.

01:04:55.640 | I don't remember my Masters.

01:04:56.640 | Was it like the club went flying and somehow like it injured someone?

01:05:03.640 | God, me as a UFC fighter, I think would go terrible.

01:05:10.440 | I'm trying to imagine the announcing, right?

01:05:12.240 | They'd be like, "All right, in the blue corner, we have 42-year-old Cal Newport wearing what

01:05:19.760 | appears to be a somewhat wrinkled blue button-down shirt."

01:05:25.640 | Not sure about this decision.

01:05:26.640 | Seems a little out of shape, but we'll see here.

01:05:29.320 | Okay.

01:05:30.320 | We're entering the arena from the other side.

01:05:32.720 | We have Francis Nagano here to defend his 10-times-whatever championship belt, and yep,

01:05:40.800 | Cal is tapping.

01:05:42.320 | Newport is tapping.

01:05:43.320 | Nagano is still 150 feet from the ring, but he is tapping, and that is a motorcycle.

01:05:49.240 | I believe that is producer Jesse driving it.

01:05:51.840 | Cal has jumped in a sidecar, and they have driven out of the arena.

01:05:54.840 | That's how that would go down.

01:05:56.760 | That is how that would go down.

01:05:58.320 | I would tap in the locker room.

01:06:01.120 | They'd be like, "At the weigh-in."

01:06:02.120 | They'd be like, "All right, we need to weigh you in."

01:06:04.000 | I'd be like, "I'm tapping.

01:06:05.520 | I'm out of here."

01:06:09.680 | I mean, UFC announcing, I assume the fights are in different locations, right?

01:06:15.920 | That's the one thing I was trying to figure out.

01:06:17.360 | He said, "I have to travel now."

01:06:18.360 | But I would assume, wouldn't you have to travel anyways, or are they mainly in Vegas?

01:06:23.600 | They're probably mainly in Vegas, but they are in different locations, too.

01:06:26.160 | It's funny, Coach K had a guest on, ESPN/NBA guy, a couple of weeks ago, and he was like,

01:06:31.960 | he moved to Omaha, because he goes, "Otherwise, you're just chasing the team."

01:06:36.320 | He goes, "That doesn't work."

01:06:37.320 | Yeah.

01:06:38.320 | I mean, this is like the people like Holladay who live in Austin, for example.

01:06:42.400 | One of the things they'll say about it is, "You're in the middle of the state, so you're

01:06:45.560 | minimizing your average."

01:06:47.840 | If you're doing U.S. travel, everything now is under three hours.

01:06:51.440 | All right.

01:06:52.440 | So that's it.

01:06:53.440 | Okay.

01:06:54.440 | So maybe, just so we understand the story, right?

01:06:55.440 | So he's in Vegas.

01:06:56.440 | Maybe the headquarters of UFC are there, so there's stuff to do in the headquarters, and

01:06:59.680 | 80% of your fights were there.

01:07:00.680 | Yeah.

01:07:01.680 | So now he has to travel more.

01:07:03.800 | I love this case, because I think it's a great example of lifestyle-centric planning.

01:07:09.920 | They're working backwards from what they want in their lifestyle, but in order to accomplish

01:07:16.200 | that lifestyle, they're working forwards with their career capital.

01:07:19.080 | So he's thinking very carefully, "What do I do that's really good?

01:07:22.520 | What do I do that's valuable to the marketplace?

01:07:24.280 | How good am I at that?

01:07:25.560 | To what degree can I use that as leverage to help get things I want in my lifestyle?"

01:07:30.900 | So the lifestyle plus career capital is that really powerful combination.

01:07:35.380 | Typically what someone would do in this situation, there's two big traps that people would fall

01:07:39.040 | into.

01:07:40.040 | So the first trap would be the grand goal thinking, that just pursuing the really exciting

01:07:47.400 | style goal will by itself solve all the problems, which he did.

01:07:51.640 | If you're really into sports, UFC is an exciting sport to be an announcer.

01:07:57.400 | You're hanging out at these fights with these fighters, and with Joe and Dana White.

01:08:03.880 | If you just focus on the big, exciting thing, all you'll be thinking is, "How do I do even

01:08:07.520 | more of this?"

01:08:08.800 | All that matters is, "How do I call more fights, or how do I make my podcast even bigger?"

01:08:14.480 | You don't think about the rest of your lifestyle.

01:08:16.520 | But look at all these other things that mattered for his happiness.

01:08:19.320 | Being involved in his kid's school, being closer to family, being in a community that

01:08:23.600 | had more of a community sense.

01:08:25.080 | I can imagine if you're in Vegas, it's a big city, right?

01:08:27.920 | Maybe they're in a place that is smaller.

01:08:30.340 | So he avoided the grand goal trap.

01:08:32.880 | He's doing something really cool, but he's still working backwards from a lifestyle vision,

01:08:36.600 | and not just thinking that one grand goal, if achieved, is going to make me happy.

01:08:39.920 | But he's also avoiding the other trap, which happens when people are younger, which is

01:08:44.320 | like, "I just want all these things in my lifestyle right away.

01:08:47.060 | Why won't people give them to me?

01:08:48.960 | Why can't I live here and just travel to go do things, and I want to live in a completely

01:08:52.480 | different place, but you have to pay for me to fly in?

01:08:57.760 | Why don't people understand this is what I want to do in my life, and why is this so

01:09:00.960 | hard?

01:09:01.960 | Just make me happy.

01:09:02.960 | Why would they not want to make me happy?"

01:09:03.960 | But you have no career capital to barter for it.

01:09:06.000 | So that's the other mistake.

01:09:07.240 | You want to immediately get your ideal lifestyle, but you have no bartering chips.

01:09:12.200 | Or you have all sorts of bartering chips, but you've just placed all of your emphasis

01:09:16.640 | on accomplishing this goal, hoping that'll solve everything.

01:09:20.080 | He has avoided both of those traps.

01:09:21.760 | He's gotten very good at something, and then has carefully invested that career capital

01:09:26.980 | to make their lifestyle closer to the things that him and his wife think are important.

01:09:31.320 | So I think it's a fantastic example.

01:09:35.360 | Let me know when you do your next UFC fight in D.C.

01:09:38.000 | They don't do them here.

01:09:39.000 | It'd be cool.

01:09:40.000 | I've never been to a UFC fight.

01:09:41.360 | But my son has started doing a little bit of jiu-jitsu.

01:09:44.920 | Yeah, you mentioned that.

01:09:45.920 | So at the Tacoma MMA.

01:09:48.420 | So it'd be great.

01:09:49.420 | I could maybe take him to a fight.

01:09:51.080 | And if, look, if I need to step in the ring, take care of business, I'll take care of business.

01:09:54.400 | Or if your son ever needs an announcer for one of his matches.

01:09:56.840 | Yeah.

01:09:57.840 | Now we're talking.

01:09:58.840 | A professional announcer for Tacoma MMA.

01:10:01.280 | All right.

01:10:02.280 | So thanks for that case study.

01:10:03.880 | We got a cool final segment coming up.

01:10:05.920 | I want to react to a meme related to our work.

01:10:08.160 | But first, let's talk about another one of our sponsors.

01:10:12.840 | So have you ever woken up with a funky symptom, like a swollen itchy eye or some sort of funny

01:10:19.160 | looking rash, and you're thinking, what do I do about this?

01:10:23.000 | Let me jump on TikTok and see if I can get some advice.

01:10:25.360 | But that doesn't work out well, because quickly you're getting TikTok videos where people

01:10:29.040 | say, like, yeah, my eye was itchy, and then the next day I lost my leg, and now I'm going

01:10:33.600 | to do a dance.

01:10:34.600 | You know, this is not helpful, right?

01:10:36.360 | What you realize is, ah, I need medical care, but how am I going to find a doctor?

01:10:41.620 | And that's where a lot of us say, I give up.

01:10:43.760 | It's too hard.

01:10:44.960 | How do I find out what doctors are around?

01:10:46.840 | And then how do I find out if they're taking patients, and if they are taking patients,

01:10:50.920 | like how do I know if they take my insurance, and how do I know if their patients actually

01:10:53.400 | like them?

01:10:54.400 | And then how do I know if they have an appointment anytime soon?

01:10:56.440 | This feels like 100 steps.

01:10:57.800 | It's going to take me forever.

01:10:59.080 | I guess my leg is going to just fall off, and I'm going to have to do dances on TikTok.

01:11:03.320 | This is where ZocDoc enters the scene.

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01:11:42.400 | Appointments made through ZocDoc happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking.

01:11:47.560 | You can even score some same-day appointments.

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01:11:59.160 | That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep.

01:12:07.480 | I would have to burn up my ZocDoc app if I was going to go do a UFC fight.

01:12:11.000 | I think I would do like seven doctors standing by.

01:12:15.920 | My life insurance premium, I think, would jump from $55 a month to $500,000 a month.

01:12:21.760 | Like, you just owe us a lot of money.

01:12:24.240 | All right, I also want to talk about our friends at Oracle.

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01:13:27.920 | See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com/deepquestions.

01:13:34.720 | That's oracle.com/deepquestions.

01:13:35.720 | All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment.

01:13:42.720 | I'm literally being called by Brad Stolberg.

01:13:48.520 | Once we figure out how to do the Bluetooth Rodecaster Pro 2, we can get him that ad.

01:13:53.480 | We're so close.

01:13:54.480 | Yeah.

01:13:55.480 | So our new software has the ability, you can Bluetooth to the mixing board and then bring

01:14:01.600 | in a call to the air.

01:14:02.600 | So Brad, you were just saved.

01:14:04.680 | I was going to put you on the air without you knowing.

01:14:06.780 | And then you could have talked about the fender.

01:14:10.000 | That's the thing.

01:14:11.000 | Every time I do that ad, Brad has to call in.

01:14:12.080 | That's the new way we're going to do this.

01:14:14.800 | All right, for our final segment, I have a little bit of fun.

01:14:18.800 | Someone sent me Clemons.

01:14:19.800 | I'll give him credit.

01:14:20.800 | Clemons, long-time listener to the show, sent me a meme I'll put on the screen here.

01:14:25.400 | I don't know if he made this or it's just one that exists out there.

01:14:28.080 | But it's a meme about my discussion of what really matters when it comes to productivity

01:14:32.160 | software.

01:14:33.160 | Jesse, can we do the thing where we make our YouTube guy mad and make it full screen?

01:14:37.760 | Ha.

01:14:38.760 | All right.

01:14:39.760 | All of our viewers are leaving.

01:14:41.400 | All right, I have it full screen on the screen right now.

01:14:44.240 | All right, so this is like one of these internet-y memes where they have those like drawings

01:14:48.800 | of the crying face or whatever.

01:14:50.080 | Do you know these meme style?

01:14:51.600 | Like I'm vaguely aware of it.

01:14:53.000 | No.

01:14:54.000 | I think it comes out of like 4chan culture or something.

01:14:57.120 | Anyways, and I'm sure this is probably inappropriate in all sorts of ways.

01:15:00.200 | There's a bell curve here of IQs.

01:15:03.120 | On the left-hand side where it's really low IQs, there's like a picture of a really dumb

01:15:09.480 | looking person, right?

01:15:11.340 | And the tool above him is Apple Notes.

01:15:14.440 | Then in the middle, like in the middle range of like normal IQs, there's a crying face

01:15:19.520 | meme, that sort of like angry crying face meme.

01:15:21.560 | And above him is all of these complicated "productivity applications" all pointing to each other.

01:15:27.680 | There's Anki and Quizlet and Adobe and Arrows connecting things to other things.

01:15:32.480 | And then you go to the right side to the very high IQ, the 0.1%, and you see the sort of

01:15:37.520 | meme drawing of like a Jedi, like the person with the hood.

01:15:40.080 | And what's above his head, it's Apple Notes again.

01:15:43.460 | So the idea is using just like a text file for your productivity is both like the dumb

01:15:49.360 | thing to do, but also like the thing that the real productivity masters do as well.

01:15:53.360 | And it's only the people in between to get lost in all those different types of apps.

01:15:57.320 | I almost agree with this, Clemens, except for one change.

01:16:00.720 | I would not use Apple Notes.

01:16:02.520 | I would use TextEdit.

01:16:04.840 | Apple Notes is no good.

01:16:05.840 | I don't like using Apple Notes.

01:16:07.240 | I just use unformatted TextEdit on all my computers.

01:16:12.080 | I have a file called WorkingMemory.txt.

01:16:14.320 | It's arguably one of the most important digital productivity tools I have because I just dump

01:16:19.520 | stuff in it.

01:16:20.520 | I kind of work out what's going on.

01:16:22.240 | I drop stuff that I copy in the emails.

01:16:23.920 | It literally is an extension of my brain and is the simplest possible technology you can

01:16:28.400 | run on a computer.

01:16:30.740 | So I love this bigger idea.

01:16:33.800 | I make this argument in my old student books, especially How to Become a Straight-A Student.

01:16:38.120 | And like one of the big observations, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but one

01:16:41.240 | of the big observations when I studied students who got really good grades but weren't grinds

01:16:47.240 | is they cared a lot about their systems, how they studied, how they took notes, how they

01:16:50.480 | wrote papers, how they prepared for problems, et cetera.

01:16:52.480 | They cared a lot about their systems, but they got rid of any friction they could get

01:16:56.360 | rid of.

01:16:57.520 | Friction is the killer of systems.

01:16:59.880 | So you might really like your AI-optimized, Zapier-connected, multi-tool, cloud-hosted

01:17:06.160 | idea, storage, generation, productivity tool, and it might be fun to build that in the same

01:17:10.960 | way that it's fun to build a cabinet if you're into woodworking.

01:17:13.560 | But the friction of using that thing is going to wear down.

01:17:17.160 | It's going to strip your momentum, and eventually you're going to stop using it.

01:17:20.180 | You want the easiest possible tool, the lowest friction possible tool that accomplishes the

01:17:25.280 | goal you want to accomplish.

01:17:26.760 | And they're never sexy, and they're often just using a shared document, a text file.

01:17:33.000 | The most complicated thing in my digital productivity universe is Trello.

01:17:37.800 | And if I didn't have Trello, I would just do this on Google Docs.

01:17:40.320 | I'm actually doing this right now for my administrative role.

01:17:45.320 | We've talked on the show before.

01:17:46.320 | It's my turn to be the director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department

01:17:49.680 | at Georgetown, and there's a lot of student issues I have to keep track of.

01:17:53.800 | I'm not even using-- I don't know why I got off of it.

01:17:56.580 | But for whatever reason now, I'm just using a Google Doc.

01:17:59.640 | And it's not just-- it's not even a dedicated Google Doc.

01:18:02.680 | It is the Google Doc I created to kind of keep notes on the different processes for

01:18:06.160 | this role.

01:18:07.160 | So as I learn how different processes work, like, oh, how do I approve a credit from an

01:18:12.040 | external university, I put notes in this document just so I have them.

01:18:16.880 | It's the top of that document.

01:18:19.240 | I just have a bold thing that says "open" and a bold thing that says "resolved."

01:18:23.700 | And I just am, like, taking notes, like, this student is working, you know, needs me to

01:18:28.040 | approve this.

01:18:29.040 | I'm waiting to hear back from this person.

01:18:30.040 | I haven't even had the time yet to-- I haven't even bothered moving it to Trello columns.

01:18:33.280 | It's just unformatted text in a Google Doc I'm using for something else.

01:18:37.760 | And it's fine, because I'm in that document a lot anyways, and I can just review it.

01:18:42.360 | Hey, what's going on?

01:18:43.360 | What's the status?

01:18:44.360 | It doesn't have to be in, like, some nice fields or formatted in, like, an air table.

01:18:47.960 | I know what I mean.

01:18:48.960 | I just type this bullet point list, and it's fine.

01:18:50.820 | I know what's going on.

01:18:51.820 | And when I resolve, I paste it below, and if someone asks me, like, hey, whatever happened

01:18:55.040 | with that student?

01:18:56.040 | I'm like, oh, I'm sure it's in here somewhere.

01:18:57.040 | Oh, here's what I did.

01:18:58.040 | So I love that idea.

01:18:59.640 | You know, sometimes-- not sometimes, most of the time-- the best productivity tool is

01:19:05.720 | the one that generates the least amount of friction while still accomplishing more or

01:19:10.000 | less what you needed to accomplish.

01:19:12.520 | And I don't know.

01:19:14.120 | You can't make a lot of money off those tools.

01:19:15.880 | They're often stuff you have anyways.

01:19:18.120 | But there you go.

01:19:19.120 | I do have a new tool, actually.

01:19:20.120 | Oh, I didn't bring it in here.

01:19:22.080 | I do have a new toy.

01:19:23.480 | What do we got?

01:19:26.120 | The good folks at Remarkable sent me their brand new state-of-the-art Remarkable.

01:19:32.480 | Yeah.

01:19:33.480 | We talked about it.

01:19:34.480 | You brought it to the show.

01:19:35.480 | Did we talk about it?

01:19:36.480 | Did I?

01:19:37.480 | Yeah.

01:19:38.480 | Oh.

01:19:39.480 | Should we edit this out so you don't sound like--

01:19:40.480 | Yeah.

01:19:41.480 | I'm sorry.

01:19:42.480 | I sound dotty.

01:19:43.480 | All right.

01:19:44.480 | Remember to edit that out.

01:19:45.480 | Let's get Brad on the phone here.

01:19:46.480 | Come on.

01:19:47.480 | Actually, you know what?

01:19:48.480 | Leave it in.

01:19:49.480 | Brad.

01:19:50.480 | Brad.

01:19:51.480 | Did I talk about the Remarkable already?

01:19:54.480 | Are you in your Defender?

01:19:56.600 | Well, I was talking to someone about it.

01:19:58.960 | Anyways, I really like it.

01:20:00.200 | There you go.

01:20:02.800 | This is a good one.

01:20:03.800 | But what did I find out?

01:20:06.500 | It has the number one-- OK.

01:20:08.600 | I'm going to add-- here's my Remarkable promotion.

01:20:12.800 | The thing they added-- there's a lot of things they added to this new thing.

01:20:16.760 | It's bigger.

01:20:17.760 | It's thinner.

01:20:18.760 | And it has a backlight or a light so I can use it in bed.

01:20:22.160 | But the number one thing they added, the innovation that has been most useful to me is the original

01:20:30.040 | Remarkable, like an iPad or whatever, you magnetically stick the stylus on the side.

01:20:36.500 | And this was a big problem with me with my original Remarkable, because if you put that

01:20:39.580 | in a backpack with other stuff, it just gets knocked off.

01:20:41.720 | Yeah.

01:20:42.720 | Yeah.

01:20:43.720 | And you lose it.

01:20:44.720 | So I would have to separate the two.

01:20:45.720 | If I had the stylus, I would have to put it in the pocket where you put your wallet.

01:20:49.640 | But then it wouldn't charge?

01:20:50.640 | Actually, I don't know if it uses a charge.

01:20:53.680 | Unlike the Apple Pencil, the Remarkable stylus is not charged.

01:20:56.880 | It just stores magnetically, I think.

01:20:58.320 | I don't know.

01:20:59.320 | But they would always get separated.

01:21:00.680 | They added to the new one, to the Folio, a little magnetic clasp strap that you just

01:21:07.160 | strap around.

01:21:08.160 | And it holds the pencil on, even if you put it in another bag.

01:21:10.600 | That's the type of stuff.

01:21:11.600 | That's low friction right there.

01:21:12.600 | That saves the friction of having to-- They probably got a lot of comments about

01:21:15.700 | the same problem that you were having.

01:21:17.080 | Yeah, probably.

01:21:18.080 | But anyways, I do like my Remarkable, and I will talk about that once a week.

01:21:23.200 | All right.

01:21:24.200 | Well, clearly, I need to go take a nap or something like that.

01:21:27.840 | So we should wrap up this episode now.

01:21:29.840 | Thank you, everyone who listened.

01:21:32.240 | We'll be back next week with another show, and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:21:38.280 | Hey, if you liked today's discussion about drowning, treading, and swimming, I think

01:21:42.440 | you'll also like episode 339, called "Let Brandon Cook," where I get into the details

01:21:48.600 | about how the author, Brandon Sanderson, avoids drowning or treading and makes sure that he

01:21:54.300 | can be swimming as well.

01:21:55.300 | It's a great complement to today's discussion.

01:21:56.880 | Check it out.

01:21:57.880 | I think you'll like it.

01:21:58.880 | It caught my attention because I think it actually says something profound about some

01:22:04.380 | of the deep problems in the way we organize work in our current moment.

Why You're Stuck: The Hidden Trap Keeping You Overwhelmed & Unproductive | Cal Newport

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