Full Length Episode | #171 | February 7, 2022

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 171.

00:00:05.000 | So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, rainy cold day.

00:00:14.760 | So it's one of those rare days I'm actually happy

00:00:16.760 | to be in a windowless room.

00:00:18.640 | Joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:22.760 | So Jesse, we're what, two weeks now

00:00:24.960 | into having the YouTube channel up

00:00:27.620 | that features video of every single question

00:00:30.920 | that we answer on this podcast,

00:00:32.400 | as well as video of every deep dive,

00:00:34.500 | as well as video of all full episodes.

00:00:36.800 | We're two weeks into it.

00:00:37.800 | What's our report?

00:00:38.640 | How are things going?

00:00:40.260 | Things are going pretty good.

00:00:41.220 | I think the process is getting honed in

00:00:43.260 | and people are watching the videos.

00:00:45.860 | You're getting a bunch of subscribers.

00:00:47.180 | So keep on putting out more videos

00:00:49.400 | and getting the bumpers and beginnings a little bit tighter.

00:00:53.280 | So all in all, the progress is going pretty good.

00:00:56.160 | - Good, yeah, and what Jesse was hinting at there

00:00:59.040 | is we have a nice visual makeover coming.

00:01:02.040 | So the briefly, the design firm that is working

00:01:06.520 | on the portal in which you're gonna be able

00:01:08.900 | to find all these videos and Netflix style carousels

00:01:11.800 | without having to go to YouTube,

00:01:14.860 | they are helping us just overhaul the look

00:01:17.080 | of the YouTube page so it'll be consistent

00:01:19.460 | with the new portal.

00:01:20.300 | So we have nice new looking graphics and logos and bumpers,

00:01:23.520 | all that's coming, but Jesse and I got impatient.

00:01:25.820 | We didn't wanna wait for all of that to be done

00:01:28.240 | before we got these videos up here.

00:01:29.620 | So we just went ahead.

00:01:31.320 | So you'll notice over time,

00:01:33.680 | things get better and better looking.

00:01:35.760 | So we'll make the bumpers better looking.

00:01:37.200 | We'll have the logos look better.

00:01:40.420 | Eventually we'll use deep fake technology

00:01:42.860 | to have a more attractive man.

00:01:44.740 | You'll hear my voice,

00:01:46.600 | but coming from like a much more attractive man,

00:01:48.680 | we're thinking like a young Harrison Ford

00:01:50.980 | or something like this.

00:01:51.820 | So all of that is coming for those of you

00:01:54.100 | who care about the aesthetics.

00:01:56.320 | All right, so here's our plan for today.

00:01:59.740 | I wanna continue with these core idea deep dive segments

00:02:04.740 | we've been doing.

00:02:06.700 | And again, the concept here is I wanna go back

00:02:09.420 | to a lot of the big ideas that I referenced frequently

00:02:12.680 | on this show and do a deep dive dedicated

00:02:15.540 | to each of these ideas.

00:02:17.380 | 'Cause now that we have video,

00:02:18.780 | that means there will be a video

00:02:20.940 | of each of these core idea discussions

00:02:22.780 | so that if you wanna go back and reference,

00:02:25.280 | oh yeah, what does Cal think about follow your passion?

00:02:27.780 | What does Cal think about slow productivity?

00:02:29.900 | What does Cal think about deep work?

00:02:31.040 | This comes up a lot.

00:02:32.140 | You can go back and actually find the core idea video.

00:02:34.700 | It'll also be a quick introduction

00:02:36.260 | to the various philosophies we explore here

00:02:39.100 | for people who are new to the channel.

00:02:41.020 | We've been getting some good feedback.

00:02:42.140 | So I wanted to keep that going.

00:02:43.820 | And that's what we're gonna do now.

00:02:47.220 | The core idea I wanna talk about today

00:02:50.260 | is the following question.

00:02:52.140 | Is slow productivity the solution to burnout?

00:02:57.960 | So slow productivity is a emerging topic of thought

00:03:03.040 | we've been talking about more and more frequently.

00:03:05.700 | And I wanna get into it with this core idea.

00:03:08.200 | All right, let's give some background

00:03:11.860 | to where the concept of slow productivity came from,

00:03:14.880 | what motivated it.

00:03:16.580 | We are in a moment right now

00:03:19.460 | in which there is a popular and visible pushback

00:03:24.020 | against the general notion of productivity.

00:03:27.900 | And by productivity, I mean just the general drive

00:03:30.100 | to try to get more things done.

00:03:33.080 | Now, I think the coronavirus pandemic helped amplify this,

00:03:36.260 | but this movement predates the coronavirus pandemic.

00:03:39.660 | If we're gonna use books as a rough proxy

00:03:42.780 | for cultural thinking on this topic,

00:03:44.520 | we can really look to 2019, February of 2019,

00:03:47.940 | when Ginny O'Dell published "How to Do Nothing."

00:03:50.980 | This book probably helped spark more than anything else

00:03:53.740 | this modern moment of anti-productivity thinking.

00:03:58.020 | It was a popular book, a New York Times bestseller.

00:04:00.700 | Barack Obama selected it

00:04:02.180 | as one of his best books of the year.

00:04:04.580 | It opened the floodgates to multiple other books

00:04:07.580 | along these same lines.

00:04:10.000 | So we got Celeste Headley's "Do Nothing"

00:04:12.180 | that came out soon after.

00:04:13.980 | I actually interviewed Celeste

00:04:15.140 | for a New Yorker piece this fall.

00:04:17.540 | We got a little bit deeper into this.

00:04:18.900 | We also got Devin Price had a book called

00:04:22.860 | "Laziness Does Not Exist."

00:04:24.380 | I blurbed that book.

00:04:25.340 | It was a good book.

00:04:26.540 | Helen Ann Peterson had "Can't Even,"

00:04:29.780 | the book-length treatment of her viral BuzzFeed article

00:04:33.620 | about millennial burnout.

00:04:36.380 | More recently, we have Oliver Berkman had "4,000 Weeks,"

00:04:38.940 | which I blurbed that book as well.

00:04:40.740 | It was fantastic.

00:04:41.580 | That book's really been killing it.

00:04:42.540 | So there's been this long string of books since 2019

00:04:45.220 | that are all basically making the same point.

00:04:47.740 | We're burnt out.

00:04:48.580 | We're doing too much.

00:04:49.700 | We're tired of doing too much.

00:04:52.780 | I saw this anti-productivity movement

00:04:54.580 | even among you, my listeners and readers, in 2020.

00:04:57.740 | I wrote an essay for my newsletter about this

00:04:59.900 | asking, is the term productivity over?

00:05:04.820 | Do we need something new?

00:05:06.620 | And it led to a really heated discussion

00:05:08.580 | and two subsequent follow-up posts.

00:05:10.660 | So we had a lot of back and forth discussion on this

00:05:12.700 | in the spring of 2020 that made it clear

00:05:15.200 | that there are a lot of you out there

00:05:17.340 | that are just exhausted,

00:05:19.020 | exhausted with activity and work,

00:05:22.820 | your life outside of work,

00:05:24.580 | and need something more than just falling back on

00:05:27.540 | how do I get more done?

00:05:28.780 | All right, so that is the modern anti-productivity movement.

00:05:32.940 | Here's the issue.

00:05:34.880 | The question left unanswered in a lot of this work

00:05:39.980 | is what should we do about it?

00:05:43.780 | We all agree, and these books are doing well,

00:05:46.320 | because we all feel exhausted,

00:05:48.760 | but the question is what should we do about it?

00:05:51.080 | And my opinion here is that we haven't had

00:05:54.120 | a lot of fully featured answers.

00:05:56.680 | The typical response that we will get

00:05:58.960 | to what we should do about it is basically just

00:06:01.400 | do less and be okay about that,

00:06:03.440 | which is perfectly fine advice,

00:06:06.400 | but is not in itself, I think,

00:06:07.880 | a fully fledged solution to this issue of burnout.

00:06:10.760 | Now, we get this advice from many different angles.

00:06:12.960 | Some of those books I talked about before

00:06:14.480 | come at this from an economic materialist standpoint.

00:06:17.520 | They say, well, you're doing a lot of things

00:06:18.840 | because essentially you're being exploited

00:06:20.480 | by the capitalist superstructure,

00:06:23.120 | and so it's an act of political resistance

00:06:26.640 | to not do something,

00:06:27.600 | do nothing as an act of political resistance.

00:06:29.960 | Some of these books are more cultural.

00:06:31.480 | Just we have a culture of overproduction.

00:06:35.480 | Maybe it goes back to the Protestant work ethic or whatever,

00:06:40.120 | and we just need to defy that culture.

00:06:41.960 | It's an arbitrary culture.

00:06:42.840 | We should just do less things.

00:06:45.000 | Nothing wrong with that advice.

00:06:46.220 | I just don't think it's enough by itself

00:06:47.640 | to actually cure what ails us

00:06:50.360 | because we do like to do things.

00:06:52.000 | There's nothing that makes us more consistently miserable

00:06:55.880 | as a species than actually doing nothing

00:06:59.140 | for any extended period of time.

00:07:00.760 | That makes us very uncomfortable.

00:07:02.120 | It makes us feel non-efficacious.

00:07:04.000 | It makes us feel rootless and bored and anxious.

00:07:06.840 | We'd like to do things.

00:07:07.840 | The problem is not activity.

00:07:09.200 | The problem is too much activity.

00:07:10.700 | So we need a more sophisticated solution

00:07:15.080 | than simply saying it's okay to not do as many things,

00:07:18.480 | just do less.

00:07:19.320 | That maybe is a step in the right direction,

00:07:23.080 | but we need to take many steps more.

00:07:25.240 | This is what brings me to my recent thinking

00:07:27.500 | on this emerging concept of slow productivity.

00:07:30.880 | Slow productivity is meant as a response to this question

00:07:33.760 | of what should we do in the face of being exhausted

00:07:37.120 | by all that we have to do.

00:07:39.780 | So to look into this topic of slow productivity,

00:07:41.600 | I started by trying to understand

00:07:43.880 | what was productivity for our ancient ancestors?

00:07:49.740 | In other words, as human beings,

00:07:53.640 | what is natural when it comes to activity?

00:07:57.520 | It is a basic question,

00:07:58.520 | but we need an answer to this question of what is natural

00:08:00.780 | if we're gonna try to get back to something

00:08:02.040 | that's more attuned to the human condition.

00:08:04.520 | And so I went back and did some work

00:08:06.360 | trying to understand the rhythms of activity

00:08:09.540 | of our Paleolithic ancestors.

00:08:12.320 | We obviously don't have direct observations about this,

00:08:14.800 | but I ended up talking to a quantitative anthropologist

00:08:17.920 | from Oxford University who is one of the world's experts

00:08:21.220 | at studying extant hunter-gatherer tribes in the Philippines

00:08:24.160 | and using robust methods to try to measure

00:08:27.800 | what their activity levels are like

00:08:29.880 | and very carefully try to make some extrapolations

00:08:32.500 | from this to our hunter-gatherer past.

00:08:34.920 | That's an extrapolation you have to do carefully,

00:08:36.800 | but he's sensitive and careful about that.

00:08:39.500 | And here's basically what you see.

00:08:40.820 | Our best guess at what activity was like

00:08:44.940 | for the bulk of our species' existence

00:08:48.180 | is you would be doing skilled and important work

00:08:52.180 | basically every day,

00:08:54.180 | mainly focused on food acquisition and preparation

00:08:57.620 | as well as child-rearing,

00:08:59.940 | but you would be,

00:09:01.060 | these extant tribes they studied,

00:09:04.580 | if you were gathering herbs,

00:09:06.700 | you had a huge expert understanding of the various plants

00:09:09.580 | and their various uses.

00:09:10.620 | It's very expert work.

00:09:11.460 | Or if you're hunting, hunting was a very skilled activity

00:09:13.540 | when you don't have very sophisticated weapons like rifles.

00:09:17.740 | So you're doing skilled but important work

00:09:20.420 | at a natural pace.

00:09:22.000 | This is definitely what they found in their work

00:09:25.180 | on these tribes is there's lots of breaks.

00:09:28.040 | You might be spending all day on a hunt,

00:09:30.580 | but there's gonna be a two-hour part in the middle of the day

00:09:32.820 | where you're just resting and maybe you take,

00:09:34.820 | there's a nap over here.

00:09:35.860 | It's a natural pace with ups and downs of intensity

00:09:38.940 | and never too many things at the same time.

00:09:41.700 | There's no notion of I have 18 things

00:09:43.620 | I'm trying to get done as a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer

00:09:47.580 | and I'm trying to go through this list.

00:09:49.500 | It's like we're doing this today and then that.

00:09:51.740 | That's basically what we did throughout most of our history.

00:09:54.940 | Now compare that to where we are today.

00:09:58.440 | Where we are today,

00:10:00.500 | and let's focus mainly on the world of work

00:10:02.380 | just to keep this more precise.

00:10:05.060 | Where we are today is maintaining list of things

00:10:10.060 | that we need to do, obligations and commitments,

00:10:12.560 | some of them explicit, some of them implicit,

00:10:14.340 | that are massive.

00:10:16.140 | Massive list of obligations and commitments.

00:10:20.580 | In the world of work,

00:10:21.420 | these just come flying at us through emails.

00:10:23.580 | They come flying at us through quick requests

00:10:26.140 | during Zoom meetings.

00:10:27.140 | Hey, Cal, can you take care of this

00:10:28.420 | or can you jump on this?

00:10:29.700 | Flying at us in informal conversations in the hallway

00:10:33.220 | where a boss grabs you and says,

00:10:35.060 | look into this, can you get this done for me?

00:10:38.180 | And we have these very large list of things

00:10:41.020 | that are on our plate.

00:10:42.460 | I call this state chronic overload

00:10:44.620 | because we have more things on our plate

00:10:46.100 | than we can easily imagine how we're gonna get them done

00:10:48.460 | and this is a state that is persistent.

00:10:50.060 | We constantly have this overloaded list of things

00:10:53.380 | that we have to do.

00:10:55.180 | This causes three problems,

00:10:56.780 | three problems that were not faced

00:10:57.980 | by our Paleolithic ancestors.

00:10:59.900 | One is just the simple short-circuiting

00:11:02.300 | of the center of our brain

00:11:03.660 | that is dedicated to making long-term plans

00:11:06.100 | for goal completion.

00:11:09.100 | Humans have a center in their brain

00:11:10.660 | that does this very well.

00:11:12.100 | Even our close primate relatives

00:11:13.700 | do not have anything that's quite as powerful

00:11:15.940 | as our ability to plan and go after goals.

00:11:18.100 | This is tapped into our motivational systems.

00:11:21.060 | We feel good when we make a plan,

00:11:22.540 | we feel even better when we execute the plan,

00:11:24.820 | we feel bad if we don't.

00:11:27.140 | This system gets completely overloaded

00:11:29.580 | when you have 700 unread messages in your inbox

00:11:33.260 | and 75 different projects, tasks,

00:11:36.140 | and ongoing commitments that you're trying to juggle.

00:11:38.580 | It is too many things for that part of your brain

00:11:40.580 | to imagine how it's going to accomplish

00:11:43.500 | and it short-circuits that planning center of our brain

00:11:46.380 | that makes us anxious, that makes us miserable.

00:11:48.700 | Again, our Paleolithic ancestors

00:11:51.020 | never had 700 unread emails,

00:11:52.900 | each of which representing a commitment

00:11:55.540 | that we can't wrap our mind around

00:11:56.900 | how are we ever gonna satisfy all these commitments.

00:11:59.260 | Two, when you have way more things on your plate

00:12:02.180 | than you can easily imagine handling,

00:12:03.580 | you suffer from what I think is one of the more

00:12:06.580 | insidious tortures of modern office work,

00:12:09.060 | which is the overhead spiral.

00:12:11.320 | So if you give me something to do,

00:12:14.020 | here's a project, I want you to work with these two people

00:12:17.780 | and get it done.

00:12:19.180 | There is a fixed amount of overhead

00:12:21.660 | that comes with this project

00:12:24.700 | because we have to kind of coordinate.

00:12:26.220 | So there's gonna be, I don't know,

00:12:27.980 | some notion of number of meetings we have to do

00:12:30.140 | to talk things through and make a plan.

00:12:32.100 | There'll be some non-trivial number of emails

00:12:34.020 | we have to send back and forth to get questions answered

00:12:36.760 | or to move the project forward.

00:12:39.020 | In isolation, that's all fine.

00:12:40.580 | If I'm working on something, yeah,

00:12:41.860 | let's meet about it once a week

00:12:43.160 | and send some emails in between.

00:12:44.500 | That's fine, that's just the overhead cost

00:12:46.500 | of working with people to accomplish something, no problem.

00:12:49.260 | The issue is what if we have 25 of these

00:12:51.740 | ongoing at the same time?

00:12:53.500 | Each of them has the same fixed amount of overhead.

00:12:56.460 | Each one needs that weekly meeting.

00:12:58.020 | Each one needs a couple dozen emails sent each week.

00:13:00.660 | And it adds and adds and adds

00:13:02.700 | until your schedule becomes overloaded

00:13:05.820 | with this fixed overhead.

00:13:09.380 | And now you are spending almost all of your time

00:13:12.100 | talking about the work you need to do

00:13:14.560 | with no time left to actually execute the work.

00:13:18.140 | Again, I think this is the knowledge worker equivalent

00:13:21.980 | of Chinese water torture.

00:13:23.500 | It is maddening, it is deranging.

00:13:26.660 | We saw this really clearly amplified

00:13:29.820 | during the first half year of the coronavirus pandemic

00:13:32.420 | where office workers had to suddenly work remote.

00:13:34.920 | Shifting operations remote meant

00:13:37.660 | that there was a lot of new work that got generated, right?

00:13:40.180 | Because we have to figure out

00:13:41.940 | how do we do our work if we're remote?

00:13:43.860 | So suddenly everyone's obligation list got bigger.

00:13:46.840 | Each of these things brought with it

00:13:48.360 | a meeting and some emails.

00:13:49.540 | What happened?

00:13:50.960 | I heard report after report from knowledge workers

00:13:53.420 | saying I am spending eight straight hours per day in Zoom.

00:13:58.380 | I would get complaints from people that said

00:14:01.580 | my biggest issue is I don't know

00:14:04.380 | when to use the bathroom during the day.

00:14:06.340 | I'm on Zoom that often, in Zoom,

00:14:08.860 | doing email while in Zoom the entire day.

00:14:11.420 | This is a parody of work life

00:14:14.860 | where all you're doing is talking about work.

00:14:16.500 | Not just I have too many meetings,

00:14:17.840 | all you were doing was meetings.

00:14:19.460 | That's overhead spiral personified right there.

00:14:22.980 | So again, you have too many things on your plate

00:14:24.500 | that you've committed to,

00:14:25.500 | the overhead itself takes over your whole schedule.

00:14:27.700 | And finally, the last issue with chronic overload

00:14:30.260 | is it's relentless in its pace.

00:14:33.300 | There is never any time where you get to relax.

00:14:35.980 | There's never any time you get to downshift.

00:14:38.740 | Remember our Paleolithic ancestors,

00:14:40.540 | if they were doing an all day hunt,

00:14:42.780 | might have hours in there where they're just sitting around.

00:14:45.700 | Yeah, it's the heat of the day.

00:14:47.300 | Let's sit in the shade of a tree and just like nap and chat.

00:14:51.000 | Or we hunted the last two days,

00:14:52.360 | it's kind of rainy today, not great conditions.

00:14:54.100 | We're not gonna hunt today at all.

00:14:56.580 | In a system of modern work with chronic overload

00:14:59.820 | where you always have way more on your plate

00:15:01.380 | than you ever can get around the handling,

00:15:03.100 | there is a constant pressure on execution.

00:15:07.180 | 'Cause there's always things that need to get done

00:15:08.740 | and you're always behind.

00:15:10.620 | So every day you fill it, relentless.

00:15:13.460 | Work every minute you have available.

00:15:15.660 | Probably have to do some evenings,

00:15:16.880 | probably have to do some weekends as well

00:15:18.700 | to get around the overhead spirals.

00:15:21.060 | We're not wired for this relentless pace of work

00:15:23.900 | where you never have any relief.

00:15:25.700 | And it's pegged at this 10 on the scale of one to 10

00:15:29.820 | of how hard you're working day after day after day after day.

00:15:32.820 | This I think is the more detailed

00:15:38.060 | socio physiological explanation

00:15:40.380 | for what all of those anti productivity books

00:15:42.380 | were commenting on.

00:15:43.460 | This is why we're so miserable.

00:15:44.940 | Chronic overload creates those three problems,

00:15:47.260 | those three problems alienate us

00:15:49.060 | from the rhythms of work for which we're wired as people.

00:15:52.300 | And that is why we're not happy.

00:15:54.620 | That is then what we need to solve.

00:15:57.100 | How do we get rid of chronic overload?

00:15:59.500 | How do we get rid of those issues

00:16:01.700 | that come from chronic overload?

00:16:03.300 | Just saying I'm gonna do less isn't gonna cut it.

00:16:07.320 | Hey boss, I've decided I don't wanna be a part

00:16:10.820 | of the exploitative capitalist engine.

00:16:14.580 | So I'm not gonna work today.

00:16:16.580 | Good luck, not gonna solve it.

00:16:18.300 | We need a more detailed, sophisticated solution here.

00:16:21.940 | It's not gonna work to say, hey client,

00:16:24.060 | I do not wanna be a stooge

00:16:27.380 | in a Protestant work ethic culture established

00:16:31.300 | during the pre-colonial period

00:16:33.940 | in the early days of migration to the United States.

00:16:36.740 | So I'm not gonna answer your email.

00:16:39.740 | That's not a solution.

00:16:41.100 | We need something more sophisticated.

00:16:42.700 | All right, slow productivity is that answer.

00:16:45.700 | Slow productivity is that answer.

00:16:48.300 | Let me give you three quick ideas

00:16:49.860 | for what slow productivity might mean.

00:16:51.580 | Three elements to it.

00:16:52.540 | This is going to evolve,

00:16:53.580 | but let's try to get something pinned down here.

00:16:55.380 | So to me, there's three big things I care about

00:16:57.660 | with a slow productivity philosophy.

00:16:59.820 | Doing fewer things, doing those things at a natural pace,

00:17:05.500 | obsessing over the quality of the things you do.

00:17:09.260 | That definition of productivity,

00:17:13.100 | a productivity that prioritizes those three things,

00:17:15.900 | I think can get us back towards

00:17:19.540 | the rhythms of work for which we are wired

00:17:22.260 | while also fulfilling us, doing interesting work,

00:17:25.740 | letting our companies grow,

00:17:27.220 | helping our team succeed, getting promotion still,

00:17:32.140 | getting the autonomy that comes from getting good

00:17:33.940 | at things that are rare and valuable,

00:17:34.860 | that is compatible with that.

00:17:37.020 | So let me just touch on those three things real quickly.

00:17:40.140 | Do fewer things.

00:17:41.860 | I think your workload in an ideal world

00:17:43.940 | would be below that level of chronic overload.

00:17:47.300 | You have few enough things that you are committed

00:17:49.220 | to doing on your plate that you are not suffering

00:17:51.140 | from the short circuiting of your planning circuit.

00:17:52.980 | You're not suffering from overhead spirals,

00:17:55.100 | and you do not feel like you have no option

00:17:58.700 | but to have a relentless pace

00:17:59.740 | where you're feeling every minute of your day.

00:18:01.340 | We need to do many fewer things.

00:18:03.660 | And if you work for yourself, if you're a freelancer,

00:18:05.500 | run your own company, aggressively titrate

00:18:08.580 | how many things you take on at the same time.

00:18:11.660 | You are not a computer processor

00:18:13.180 | where you want your pipeline of instructions

00:18:17.060 | to execute to be full,

00:18:18.100 | so you never miss a particular tick.

00:18:19.660 | You're a human.

00:18:21.380 | You're not wired to do that.

00:18:22.660 | We need to do many fewer things.

00:18:24.340 | What if you work for someone else?

00:18:26.620 | Well, I think we need to completely rethink

00:18:28.700 | how work is assigned in the workplace.

00:18:31.180 | This should be transparent.

00:18:32.740 | How much work is this person doing?

00:18:35.180 | What's on their plate?

00:18:36.820 | So that we can all see it.

00:18:38.380 | And then we can have very clear understandings

00:18:40.780 | of what is reasonable.

00:18:42.780 | And if I see, you know,

00:18:43.900 | Jesse has a fair number of things on his plate,

00:18:47.300 | I can't put something else on it.

00:18:49.020 | It's on me to figure out.

00:18:50.220 | Something pops up, it needs to get done at some point.

00:18:52.060 | I can't just say, Jesse handled this.

00:18:53.940 | I have to figure out where does this go

00:18:57.020 | until someone has room for it.

00:18:59.580 | It can't just go on their plate.

00:19:01.060 | The answer here is probably gonna be external systems.

00:19:04.340 | Things that need to get done go into external systems

00:19:07.860 | where they bring with them the information

00:19:09.380 | they need to be accomplished

00:19:10.420 | and have clear statuses and priorities.

00:19:12.220 | And then individuals pull work out of the system

00:19:15.580 | as new slots open.

00:19:16.940 | This might sound like it's a pain.

00:19:20.100 | I don't care if it's a pain.

00:19:21.820 | It's what we're wired to do.

00:19:23.060 | Keep my load reasonable.

00:19:24.980 | And I'll pull in new stuff

00:19:27.020 | when I'm done with what's on my plate.

00:19:28.340 | Don't just give it all to me and say, figure it out.

00:19:29.980 | You're gonna short circuit my brain.

00:19:31.060 | You're gonna make me miserable.

00:19:32.700 | All right, second piece of slow productivity,

00:19:34.220 | work at a natural pace.

00:19:36.380 | We cannot just peg our efforts at a 10

00:19:40.860 | for eight to nine hours a day,

00:19:43.300 | day after day, week after week, week after week.

00:19:46.460 | This is not natural for humans.

00:19:48.220 | We need seasonality in our work, first of all.

00:19:52.220 | Seasonality meaning hard times balanced by easier times.

00:19:55.380 | And I think we should have this at all scales.

00:19:58.760 | So this week, some days are harder than others.

00:20:02.300 | I'm gonna pull back on Friday

00:20:04.980 | and come into the weekend maybe a little bit more relaxed,

00:20:07.140 | but Monday I'm pegging it.

00:20:09.560 | We should have certain months, perhaps,

00:20:13.360 | that are more intense than others.

00:20:16.200 | This is an intense month.

00:20:17.360 | We're kind of getting after it, but you know what?

00:20:18.840 | In June, things really get quiet around here

00:20:21.320 | and I'm pulling back

00:20:22.280 | and I'm gonna have very light days, right?

00:20:23.960 | So seasonality at different levels,

00:20:26.160 | maybe even seasons like professors do.

00:20:28.580 | Winter, I'm getting after it.

00:20:30.880 | Summer, I'm pulled back far.

00:20:32.820 | Rest, recovery, up, down, up, down at all scales.

00:20:36.340 | I think we absolutely need this.

00:20:37.640 | The other thing we have to do to get a more natural pace

00:20:40.300 | to our work is adjust the time scale

00:20:42.540 | at which we care about accomplishment.

00:20:44.440 | Instead of caring about how much do I get done

00:20:47.220 | on the scale of days and weeks,

00:20:50.520 | you say, "I worry about what I get done

00:20:52.280 | "on the scale of months and years."

00:20:54.880 | Completely changes your relationship to the current moment.

00:20:57.400 | When you wanna produce a good number

00:20:59.020 | of very high quality thing over the next three years,

00:21:01.740 | it really changes how you feel about Tuesday.

00:21:06.160 | Now it's not so important that every minute of Tuesday

00:21:08.460 | you're getting after it.

00:21:09.500 | In fact, you might say,

00:21:10.340 | "I need to take a couple of weeks off here

00:21:11.540 | "so that I can really have a high quality push

00:21:13.940 | "for the weeks that follow."

00:21:14.900 | It completely changes your relationship to work

00:21:16.880 | when you say, "I don't care about how many things

00:21:19.220 | "I check off a list this week.

00:21:20.380 | "What I care about is what is on my CV

00:21:22.780 | "that I produced over the last five years."

00:21:25.260 | That's much more compatible with seasonality ups and downs.

00:21:28.500 | The final point here,

00:21:29.500 | the final part of slow productivity I mentioned

00:21:31.360 | was obsess about quality.

00:21:33.620 | If you're gonna do less,

00:21:34.880 | you need to pair that with doing what you do better.

00:21:38.440 | This will make the work more fulfilling

00:21:41.160 | because you're building and applying craft.

00:21:43.400 | Remember our example of our Paleolithic ancestors,

00:21:47.080 | skilled, important activity.

00:21:49.600 | We get motivation for that.

00:21:51.680 | We don't get motivation for adjusting the fonts

00:21:55.260 | in a PowerPoint deck,

00:21:57.120 | for fundraising for some company idea

00:22:00.120 | we probably shouldn't be doing in the first place

00:22:01.640 | just because we're bored.

00:22:03.560 | But crafting the computer program that's gonna run

00:22:06.920 | and do something really cool,

00:22:08.000 | and you can see it producing the book,

00:22:10.040 | the brilliant new marketing campaign.

00:22:12.560 | So we wanna focus on doing smaller number of things,

00:22:14.840 | but doing those things much better

00:22:16.300 | is gonna feel more fulfilling.

00:22:17.740 | It is also what is going to give you

00:22:19.860 | both the ability and the courage to say no to other things.

00:22:23.180 | When your main metric becomes,

00:22:26.680 | "How do I do what I do better?"

00:22:28.560 | Now it's easy to say,

00:22:30.500 | "I'm not gonna do this middling thing.

00:22:32.500 | "I'm not gonna do this distraction.

00:22:34.320 | "I'm not gonna jump on this call.

00:22:36.260 | "I'm not gonna learn this new plugin

00:22:37.820 | "that maybe will bring me some new email subscribers

00:22:40.580 | "for my news list."

00:22:41.760 | 'Cause that's not gonna help me get better

00:22:43.160 | at what I'm trying to do.

00:22:44.660 | It is much, much easier to be minimalist

00:22:46.720 | in your scheduling when you're focused relentlessly

00:22:49.120 | on a small number of things

00:22:50.260 | getting better and better at it.

00:22:51.600 | It also earns you the right to be more autonomous.

00:22:55.980 | The better you get at what you do best,

00:22:59.080 | the more leeway you have to say,

00:23:00.640 | "I'm not coming onto that committee.

00:23:02.980 | "I am not going to do this client contract.

00:23:07.260 | "It's barely overlaps.

00:23:08.940 | "What I like to do is gonna be incredibly time consuming.

00:23:12.460 | "I'm not gonna have to do 25 social media posts a day

00:23:15.940 | "in some quixotic quest

00:23:17.260 | "to build up an influencer audience."

00:23:19.220 | It gives you the autonomy you need

00:23:21.420 | to take control over what you spend your time on

00:23:24.460 | and what you don't.

00:23:25.420 | So that is my answer.

00:23:28.180 | That is my answer to the anti-productivity movement.

00:23:30.600 | Yes, we are overloaded.

00:23:32.060 | It's a problem.

00:23:33.180 | Why?

00:23:34.540 | Because of chronic overload.

00:23:35.860 | Causes all these issues

00:23:36.900 | that alienates us from our human wiring.

00:23:38.500 | What's the solution?

00:23:40.340 | Not that discard productivity and say, "Do less

00:23:44.780 | "and let's celebrate that."

00:23:46.560 | But to get more specific and say,

00:23:47.900 | "Let's redefine productivity."

00:23:50.600 | We'll call it slow productivity.

00:23:54.260 | And we're gonna build this very intentionally

00:23:56.220 | from the ground up to get our work lives

00:23:58.620 | back aligned with our ancient wiring.

00:24:02.480 | Do fewer things.

00:24:04.360 | Do this work at a natural pace.

00:24:06.680 | Obsess over quality.

00:24:08.680 | That I believe is the proper response

00:24:10.760 | to our current, rightly pointed out

00:24:13.520 | as problematic state of overload.

00:24:16.600 | That is how we take back control of activity in our life

00:24:20.400 | and keep it fulfilling, keep it meaningful,

00:24:22.840 | keep options open, but also get away

00:24:26.160 | from all of the issues we're currently facing

00:24:28.200 | in our world of chronic overload.

00:24:31.760 | All right, so that's what I have on slow productivity.

00:24:36.560 | This is a new thought guys.

00:24:37.480 | So I'm sure it's gonna evolve.

00:24:39.160 | Jesse, you've heard me talk about this a few times now.

00:24:43.240 | Would you say you're slow?

00:24:44.080 | - Yeah, I've heard you.

00:24:44.900 | I listened to you talk about it

00:24:45.920 | on the Ferris interview yesterday.

00:24:48.160 | - That's right, yeah.

00:24:49.000 | So the day before this came out

00:24:52.000 | or a couple of days before my interview

00:24:53.520 | with Tim Ferris came out

00:24:54.960 | and slow productivity was one of the topics

00:24:56.920 | that we got into.

00:24:58.080 | I've also written about slow productivity

00:25:00.600 | for the New Yorker.

00:25:01.920 | So my last of my office-based columns for them,

00:25:04.720 | which came out in early January, was on slow productivity.

00:25:07.600 | And I may or may not be working on a book proposal

00:25:10.720 | on the topic.

00:25:11.560 | So you might be wondering why I'm talking about it.

00:25:13.520 | I mean, ironically for a book on slow productivity,

00:25:17.760 | it can't come out fast.

00:25:19.440 | I think that's the problem.

00:25:20.760 | It was like, guys, I stayed up every night for two months

00:25:25.260 | and got this book done by just relentlessly working

00:25:28.000 | as fast as possible.

00:25:29.040 | I think that's not gonna work.

00:25:30.540 | - Yeah, you talked about this in the past too

00:25:35.040 | in previous podcast episodes where you said

00:25:37.520 | you were gonna kind of walk us through the process

00:25:39.920 | of writing the book and stuff.

00:25:41.160 | So I'm looking forward to that.

00:25:42.560 | It's actually already started.

00:25:44.360 | - Yeah, so maybe there's some breaking news here.

00:25:46.640 | So in past podcast episodes,

00:25:48.680 | we were talking about a book I'm working on a proposal on

00:25:52.440 | for the deep life.

00:25:54.500 | This would be a second book.

00:25:56.500 | So I might be, I'm working on potentially the deep life

00:25:59.600 | and slow productivity in some order

00:26:02.480 | might be the next two books I write.

00:26:03.720 | None of that is inked.

00:26:05.640 | None of that's actually written down or signed

00:26:07.720 | or none of it's official,

00:26:09.920 | but that's what I'm currently thinking

00:26:11.120 | is those might be the next two books I write.

00:26:13.040 | - And that's what you did before the last two books, right?

00:26:15.000 | You worked on them simultaneously.

00:26:16.440 | - Yeah, I like doing that 'cause I wanna just work.

00:26:19.280 | I wanna think deeply and write.

00:26:21.440 | And so I sold digital minimalism in a world without email.

00:26:25.560 | I sold those at the same time.

00:26:26.940 | And then that allowed me to just not worry

00:26:28.580 | about selling books for four or five years.

00:26:31.000 | I could just write.

00:26:31.920 | And when I was done with one book,

00:26:33.300 | I knew what I was working on.

00:26:34.840 | I mean, I'm gonna put my head down and write type of guy.

00:26:36.960 | That makes me happy.

00:26:38.480 | Having to go out and talk about the books,

00:26:40.660 | okay, that's harder for me.

00:26:42.420 | I like the part where it's just me, me and the idea.

00:26:45.960 | I guess me and the idea and Jesse

00:26:48.320 | and tens of thousands of podcast listeners, but that's it.

00:26:51.000 | Just our small circle talking about these things.

00:26:54.880 | So I like that.

00:26:55.720 | I like to sell multiple books at a time if I can.

00:26:57.280 | 'Cause I don't wanna spend, it's a pain to sell books, man.

00:26:59.920 | And it's stressful and it's complicated.

00:27:03.640 | And there's a ton of fiddling overhead on it too.

00:27:07.360 | I mean, these proposals are 50 pages long.

00:27:11.000 | It just takes a long time to write, but it's not fun writing.

00:27:13.840 | It's not, oh, I'm writing about ideas.

00:27:15.880 | It's, you're writing about your marketing plan

00:27:18.120 | and stuff like that.

00:27:18.960 | So I try not to do it more than I need to.

00:27:21.760 | - One thing you mentioned in the Ferris interview

00:27:23.520 | was he started off with your relationship

00:27:26.160 | or your Steve Martin, he was asking about him.

00:27:28.800 | And then you were talking about his autobiography.

00:27:31.800 | I listened to the audio book recently.

00:27:34.240 | And at the end, he had the quote where he was in,

00:27:38.880 | I think it was in "The Jerk"

00:27:39.720 | when he was like leaving the house.

00:27:40.920 | It was like, I just need this and I need this one thing.

00:27:43.320 | And he needed all those things.

00:27:44.600 | It kind of reminds me of what you just said.

00:27:45.440 | - Yeah, he just had this and then just this

00:27:47.840 | and just a little bit of that.

00:27:49.200 | And then just this and yeah.

00:27:51.460 | Good book, "Born Standing Up."

00:27:52.640 | Yeah, I recommend it.

00:27:53.680 | We should probably pay the bills.

00:27:57.920 | Talk about some of the sponsors of the show

00:27:59.320 | that makes this possible.

00:28:01.240 | We are happy to have them.

00:28:02.960 | You know, it's not cheap to do a podcast.

00:28:04.360 | We have, for example, the cost of the podcast hosting.

00:28:09.240 | We have Jesse's $250,000 a month salary,

00:28:12.480 | which, you know, it's not easy.

00:28:13.960 | So there's a lot we have to pay for to get this going.

00:28:18.340 | So Jesse, let me tell you,

00:28:20.240 | one of our first sponsors here is Policy Genius.

00:28:24.560 | So Policy Genius deals with

00:28:27.840 | home and auto insurance coverage, right?

00:28:32.440 | Which is expensive and potentially something

00:28:36.000 | that you're paying way too much for.

00:28:38.480 | But a lot of people will just put up with paying too much

00:28:42.080 | for this type of insurance because they say,

00:28:43.560 | well, I don't know, it's a pain to try to figure out

00:28:45.920 | if there's a cheaper way of doing this.

00:28:48.120 | When am I going to go Google insurance prices or something?

00:28:52.520 | This is where Policy Genius comes in.

00:28:55.080 | So it's a one-stop shop to find

00:28:57.440 | and buy the insurance you need.

00:28:58.800 | You go to policygenius.com and they make it easy.

00:29:03.200 | So you answer a few questions and they say,

00:29:05.840 | here are some price estimates, right?

00:29:07.880 | There's a number.

00:29:08.720 | You can compare it right away

00:29:10.500 | to what you're currently paying.

00:29:13.080 | It will also look for clever ways for you to save money.

00:29:16.480 | Right, so maybe how to bundle home and auto

00:29:19.520 | in a way that's going to save you more money.

00:29:21.760 | They have saved customers an average of $1,250 per year

00:29:26.720 | over what they were paying for home and auto insurance

00:29:28.880 | before they went to Policy Genius.

00:29:31.320 | So Policy Genius is a, not an insurance company,

00:29:34.860 | but a broker that helps you find the insurance companies

00:29:38.040 | that are going to give you the best price.

00:29:39.740 | This is something you can do quickly.

00:29:42.720 | You go to this website, they make it easy,

00:29:44.080 | and suddenly you are saving potentially a lot of money.

00:29:48.800 | Now, Jesse, I think if we went to policygenius.com

00:29:51.720 | and showed them a picture of your truck you drive,

00:29:54.560 | they would just say, uninsurable.

00:29:57.000 | - My insurance is pretty cheap.

00:29:59.360 | I actually, you know, but I've had it for a long time.

00:30:02.600 | - Yeah, Jesse drives the truck from,

00:30:05.440 | like if you watch the show Yellowstone

00:30:07.560 | about those ranches in Montana,

00:30:08.840 | and they sometimes do flashbacks from like the 1970s.

00:30:12.120 | It's like the truck they're driving in 1970.

00:30:14.320 | Do I have that about right?

00:30:15.140 | It's like a 1970s old school pickup truck.

00:30:19.520 | - It's funny too, because every mechanic's like,

00:30:23.000 | I tell them how many miles on it, I'm like 185,000.

00:30:25.200 | Like, oh man, you got so much more time.

00:30:26.720 | Like so much more time.

00:30:28.240 | - There we go.

00:30:29.080 | But so here we go.

00:30:29.920 | So now Jesse could go to, you know, policygenius.com

00:30:32.520 | and find out right away,

00:30:33.760 | maybe he's spending way too much of his $250,000 a month

00:30:37.760 | salary on the insurance.

00:30:38.720 | And that's what makes this website great,

00:30:40.720 | is that it's easy.

00:30:41.560 | It's insurance overpayment is a first mile problem.

00:30:45.960 | How do I get started trying to find something cheaper?

00:30:48.360 | Policy Genius makes that easier.

00:30:51.560 | No extra fees.

00:30:53.080 | They don't sell your information to third parties.

00:30:57.680 | They've helped over 30 million people shop for insurance

00:31:01.080 | and has placed over $120 billion in cover

00:31:03.800 | so they know what they're doing.

00:31:05.320 | So head to policygenius.com

00:31:07.120 | to get your free home and auto insurance quotes

00:31:09.120 | and see how much you could save.

00:31:12.100 | All right, so we have another sponsor I wanna talk about,

00:31:15.960 | which is Synerd.

00:31:17.800 | Now I realize Synerd,

00:31:22.120 | it's not always obvious how to spell what I'm saying here.

00:31:25.360 | So let me actually spell it out.

00:31:27.400 | Synerd, C-E-N-T-E-R-E-D.

00:31:31.200 | So putting something into the Synerd.

00:31:34.760 | Jesse, I'm excited about this one.

00:31:37.000 | This is right up my alley.

00:31:39.240 | This is a computer software

00:31:42.280 | that helps you block out distractions and work deeper.

00:31:45.320 | So, I mean, this is music to my ears.

00:31:50.240 | It's an app that you can run on a Mac.

00:31:52.840 | You can also run it on a Windows

00:31:55.320 | and it has multiple different things

00:31:57.960 | that all come together

00:32:00.120 | that help you actually work deeper.

00:32:03.000 | It can pull all of your tasks into one place.

00:32:05.880 | It can play focus music.

00:32:07.600 | I talked to the founder of this company actually,

00:32:11.160 | and he said, "That's surprisingly popular,

00:32:13.080 | "the playing just the right music to help you focus."

00:32:16.280 | I told him, "I think it's not just the details

00:32:18.880 | "of the specific music you're playing,

00:32:20.200 | "but it's the fact that the users build up an association.

00:32:23.880 | "That music is time to do deep work,

00:32:26.960 | "so you get there quicker."

00:32:28.760 | They have a virtual coach.

00:32:30.520 | Jesse's gonna put me out of business.

00:32:33.480 | They have a virtual coach who has an English

00:32:35.960 | or can be configured to have an English accent.

00:32:38.120 | And this is actually a popular feature on this app.

00:32:42.120 | It nudges you very nicely of,

00:32:44.640 | "You know, I don't know that you need to be on Facebook

00:32:47.880 | "for another hour.

00:32:48.880 | "Maybe you need to get back."

00:32:50.080 | And again, the users of Centered

00:32:52.160 | find that to be really effective.

00:32:54.680 | You know, that's gonna break our plan, Jesse,

00:32:56.880 | our money-making plan,

00:32:57.720 | where you just hire me to sit over your shoulder as you work.

00:33:01.520 | - Well, if you get a better English accent,

00:33:03.320 | then maybe, you know, get back in the game.

00:33:06.200 | - The way I do it is I have,

00:33:08.040 | I would want my coach to sound like Jocko Willink

00:33:10.880 | and to basically berate me.

00:33:12.520 | Just like, "Get up at 4.30."

00:33:15.480 | "Why are you still in bed, you wuss?

00:33:18.600 | "Get focused."

00:33:19.960 | Yeah, now Centered has this better figured out.

00:33:22.560 | They also have analytics.

00:33:24.240 | They come back, "Here's what you're doing.

00:33:25.320 | "Here's how you're actually spending your time."

00:33:26.800 | That's incredibly, incredibly effective.

00:33:29.120 | They've done some research.

00:33:30.240 | So Centered research has showed that their users

00:33:33.400 | are getting through their important tasks

00:33:35.280 | 30% faster than they expected.

00:33:38.040 | So we know that it has effects.

00:33:40.000 | As I mentioned before, simple task management,

00:33:42.880 | 100 hours of this custom flow music,

00:33:45.000 | the automated coaching to encourage you.

00:33:47.520 | If you're not using Centered with their automated coaching,

00:33:49.640 | I'm sending Jocko to your house to berate you.

00:33:51.600 | So let that be motivation.

00:33:53.600 | A great do not disturb mode.

00:33:54.960 | I didn't mention that before,

00:33:55.960 | but if you wanna just lock in so I can't be interrupted,

00:33:58.760 | they have a great do not disturb mode.

00:34:00.400 | Anyways, I love this type of space.

00:34:03.120 | I think for too long, productivity software

00:34:07.080 | was just about how do we get people

00:34:10.000 | quicker access to information and make communication faster.

00:34:14.440 | That's what productivity has meant.

00:34:16.080 | And I think what productivity software should mean

00:34:18.160 | is what Centered is doing,

00:34:19.200 | which is how do we actually make the computer

00:34:21.200 | in which you're interacting better match

00:34:23.280 | the wiring of your brain as a human

00:34:24.680 | so you get better work done in a way that's more sustainable.

00:34:28.640 | So you can download Centered today

00:34:30.680 | at centered.app/deepquestions.

00:34:35.680 | And use that promo code, deepquestions, one word,

00:34:41.000 | and you will get a free month of Centered,

00:34:43.520 | including all of its premium features.

00:34:46.600 | So that's centered.app/deepquestions.

00:34:50.520 | Good, I'm glad that app exists, Jesse, because-

00:34:54.480 | - Yeah, free month is pretty good.

00:34:55.680 | - Yeah, it would be pretty busy for me

00:34:56.880 | if I had to actually just go around

00:34:57.960 | and look over people's shoulders and yell at them.

00:35:00.400 | I don't think that scales.

00:35:01.480 | I think they have a more scalable model.

00:35:03.600 | Would be my guess there.

00:35:05.680 | All right, we should probably do some questions.

00:35:07.640 | As always, let us start with some questions about Deep Work.

00:35:14.040 | Well, we've got a healthy start to this podcast here.

00:35:16.200 | We're 35 minutes in.

00:35:17.560 | - Yeah, so barkedivity in the ads were good stuff.

00:35:21.600 | - Yeah, well, look, now that we have

00:35:23.360 | standalone versions of these questions,

00:35:24.800 | I'm gonna be nice and pithy here,

00:35:27.840 | which means I'm about to spend 25 minutes

00:35:29.520 | on the first question.

00:35:31.600 | Well, John, it's a good question.

00:35:32.600 | Let's start with our Paleolithic ancestors

00:35:34.920 | and then go into the neuroscience

00:35:36.520 | of how our brain is wired.

00:35:37.880 | And then I wanna talk about the development

00:35:39.600 | of Enlightenment philosophy and their take on this.

00:35:41.880 | No, no, pithy.

00:35:43.280 | All right, our first question here comes from John.

00:35:47.400 | John asks, "What does your general knowledge management

00:35:50.560 | system look like these days?

00:35:54.040 | Do you have a system like Second Brain

00:35:56.520 | or software tools like Notion or Roam?

00:35:58.680 | My biggest challenge is finding interesting papers

00:36:00.720 | or information relevant to my field,

00:36:02.120 | but having an effortless way to retrieve the information

00:36:04.600 | at the right time and place."

00:36:07.040 | Well, John, we talk about this a lot these days.

00:36:10.800 | I get yelled at a lot by Zettelkasten people

00:36:13.400 | for being, I guess, insufficiently enthusiastic,

00:36:17.520 | but here's my quick answer.

00:36:18.960 | I use Roam for most of my knowledge management these days,

00:36:23.720 | which I enjoy because I think it gives me more flexibility

00:36:27.760 | in storing and linking information

00:36:29.800 | than having to be in strict hierarchies of folders

00:36:32.600 | and subfolders and subfolders,

00:36:34.280 | and I'm getting better at it.

00:36:36.560 | Two, I think effortlessness is largely a myth.

00:36:40.400 | Okay, I like having a better place to store information.

00:36:46.080 | It makes an epsilon difference, right?

00:36:49.000 | It might make things 20% easier to find something.

00:36:51.360 | It might generate the occasional extra idea,

00:36:54.440 | but as I always say when I talk

00:36:55.920 | about knowledge management systems is I just think

00:36:58.040 | for a lot of high-end work, effortlessness is a myth.

00:37:01.040 | Like here's the reality, for example,

00:37:03.560 | of let's say article writing,

00:37:05.400 | like working on an article like I am right now

00:37:08.080 | for "The New Yorker."

00:37:09.640 | It is true that having an interesting system

00:37:12.320 | where you encounter lots of things and they're stored

00:37:14.440 | might help spark an idea.

00:37:16.000 | You know, I saw this interesting article

00:37:18.840 | and it got into my system,

00:37:20.080 | and I saw another article two months later,

00:37:22.000 | and the comparison between those two,

00:37:23.520 | the contrast between those two gives me a spark

00:37:25.480 | of an idea that could be an article.

00:37:27.120 | So it can provide a spark, but then what has to happen?

00:37:31.560 | It is probably gonna be focused,

00:37:33.920 | intentional research to say,

00:37:35.720 | okay, now I wanna write this article.

00:37:37.840 | I'm not gonna just effortlessly find in my system

00:37:40.320 | everything I need.

00:37:41.760 | I'm gonna have to, in a much more systematic manner,

00:37:45.080 | go out there and do old-school research,

00:37:46.560 | pull articles, do interviews, endless Google searching,

00:37:51.560 | get this all into Scrivener somewhere

00:37:54.560 | and start staring at it,

00:37:55.960 | realize I have a whole of my knowledge,

00:37:57.680 | go out there and find new information.

00:37:59.200 | So I don't really think there's a way to avoid

00:38:01.640 | in a lot of idea generative type work,

00:38:05.560 | I don't think there's a lot of way to avoid

00:38:06.960 | having to do focused information acquisition

00:38:11.960 | for the project you're working on.

00:38:15.360 | No matter how much stuff you have stored in your system,

00:38:17.560 | there's 50 more articles you're gonna have to read

00:38:19.360 | before you can actually say something smart about the idea.

00:38:21.760 | So anyways, I like these type of Zettelkasten inspired

00:38:25.440 | link-based storage systems

00:38:28.360 | as a reasonable way to categorize information.

00:38:30.560 | I just don't place as much expectations

00:38:34.560 | on what the system's gonna provide for me.

00:38:36.660 | That wasn't too bad.

00:38:39.440 | Three minutes, feel good about that.

00:38:41.080 | All right, we have a question here from Raquel.

00:38:43.280 | Raquel, sorry Raquel.

00:38:45.320 | Raquel asks, do you carry or keep two analog pieces

00:38:49.960 | on your desk, one being your time block planner

00:38:51.800 | and another for notes or just your planner?

00:38:54.840 | So Raquel, my two always around processed

00:39:00.920 | during every shutdown ritual every day capture tools

00:39:06.880 | is my time block planner,

00:39:09.000 | which has for every day space for notes and tasks

00:39:12.440 | that I can write down.

00:39:13.680 | And that's where my checkbox is that I have to check

00:39:15.560 | when I do my shutdown routine at the end of each day.

00:39:17.840 | So I know that's all gonna be processed.

00:39:19.440 | The second tool I always have is my working memory.txt

00:39:24.440 | plain text file on my computer desktop.

00:39:26.620 | I'm gonna say on my computer desktop,

00:39:29.160 | I have multiple computers, they each have one.

00:39:31.880 | But my main computer I use on a normal workday

00:39:34.560 | would be my laptop and I have it right there.

00:39:36.800 | So I always have my paper notebook,

00:39:38.960 | I can capture things on it,

00:39:40.200 | especially if I'm away from my computer.

00:39:42.520 | And then I have that working memory.txt,

00:39:44.160 | which collects a lot of information during the day,

00:39:46.760 | especially when I'm doing stuff on my computer

00:39:49.900 | and a lot of information pops up.

00:39:51.360 | Imagine for example, you're in a Zoom meeting

00:39:54.080 | and there's some notes you have to think about

00:39:55.440 | and six tasks that come out of that meeting.

00:39:56.940 | I'm just typing that right into my working memory.txt

00:39:59.920 | right there on my computer.

00:40:00.800 | I can type much faster than I can write.

00:40:02.640 | I can put voluminous notes into there.

00:40:05.220 | Don't overthink it, don't make it too pretty,

00:40:06.680 | just boom, boom, boom.

00:40:08.400 | End of the day when I do my shutdown routine,

00:40:10.520 | I look at the time block planner, what's in there,

00:40:13.640 | everything get put into my permanent systems,

00:40:15.240 | I look at working memory.txt.

00:40:17.240 | Let's take care of everything that's in there.

00:40:19.400 | Right, so that's the regular things I use.

00:40:22.160 | I then will introduce project specific analog notebooks.

00:40:27.160 | So if I'm working on a particular

00:40:31.100 | computer science research paper,

00:40:32.440 | I might have a grid notebook.

00:40:35.000 | I like grid line notebooks for doing mathematics

00:40:37.420 | that I'm just bringing with me to work on that project.

00:40:40.720 | If I'm working on a new book,

00:40:42.920 | I might get a Moleskine notebook dedicated to that book,

00:40:46.080 | just to put ideas in there as I have them,

00:40:50.320 | collect inspiration when I'm away from a computer, et cetera.

00:40:54.160 | And those I will use and process in a way

00:40:56.800 | that is bespoke to their corresponding project.

00:40:59.640 | So when it comes time to work on that academic paper again,

00:41:02.840 | hey, here's my notebook for that particular paper.

00:41:05.520 | Let me see what I had in there.

00:41:07.040 | And that's where I'm storing it.

00:41:08.400 | So I have two permanent collection mechanisms,

00:41:11.120 | one analog, one digital.

00:41:12.980 | And then I will, when useful,

00:41:15.120 | have these project specific notebooks.

00:41:18.340 | - What about the pocket size Moleskine

00:41:20.200 | that you carry around?

00:41:21.800 | - Yeah, okay, so that, it's a good question.

00:41:23.800 | So I also have a pocket size Moleskine

00:41:28.560 | that I use basically for reflections on the deep life.

00:41:33.560 | I didn't have that terminology

00:41:35.720 | when I first started using this.

00:41:36.700 | I first started this method in 2004.

00:41:39.600 | And I used to post pictures on my newsletter

00:41:42.520 | of the growing stack of the old Moleskines.

00:41:46.600 | And so that's not, the reason why I didn't mention it here

00:41:50.560 | is that that's not work related.

00:41:53.120 | But I'm, Justin, I'm glad you brought it up

00:41:54.480 | because it's important.

00:41:55.640 | When I have reflections about my life,

00:42:00.040 | intimations about this thing I just saw or read resonated,

00:42:05.640 | reflections, this has been a tough two weeks.

00:42:08.720 | Why, what's going on here?

00:42:09.600 | What can I learn about what's making me miserable

00:42:11.600 | and I might want to avoid?

00:42:13.040 | Ideas about what if we rethought

00:42:16.420 | this part of our working life?

00:42:17.800 | What if in my constitution bucket

00:42:20.520 | I rethought how exercise was in my life?

00:42:22.800 | So everything related to living the deep life.

00:42:25.100 | When I have ideas, inspirations, and reflections,

00:42:27.100 | I carry with me also in my bag

00:42:29.560 | an old school pocket size Moleskine.

00:42:32.360 | Why that particular notebook?

00:42:33.480 | It's because it's what I bought at the MIT co-op

00:42:36.680 | the first week I was on campus at MIT as a grad student.

00:42:39.720 | And that's when I started this habit.

00:42:41.980 | So for me, it is the comfort of,

00:42:44.440 | that's what I've always used.

00:42:45.280 | You can use whatever notebook you want.

00:42:46.960 | That I look at when I'm doing updates

00:42:50.040 | to my semester quarterly plan.

00:42:52.740 | So there, if I'm thinking through,

00:42:54.360 | okay guys, let's check in.

00:42:55.800 | What are we working on for the next semester?

00:42:58.960 | That's where, because when you work on those,

00:43:00.360 | you look at your values and you typically have a vision

00:43:03.320 | at the top of each of these documents

00:43:04.600 | about where you want to be.

00:43:05.920 | Great time to look at those, look at those Moleskines.

00:43:08.880 | The only other tip I'll give you

00:43:09.880 | about that Moleskine method is

00:43:11.080 | what do you do when you fill it?

00:43:12.640 | My rule is anything you, you go through it

00:43:17.600 | and say, is there anything in here

00:43:19.640 | that I want to remember and I haven't done something with?

00:43:22.320 | Like it didn't change my strategic plan or something,

00:43:25.020 | but I don't want to forget it.

00:43:25.920 | It's a good idea.

00:43:27.120 | You copy that into the next notebook.

00:43:29.100 | And what, what tends to happen is

00:43:32.480 | only a very small amount of these ideas

00:43:34.680 | actually will end up meriting being copied

00:43:36.720 | into the next notebook.

00:43:37.560 | By the time you get to the notebook, the next notebook,

00:43:39.000 | only a very small number of ideas will pass

00:43:40.600 | from that one to the next one.

00:43:42.120 | And so it's a way of making sure things aren't lost,

00:43:44.460 | but it also helps you purify.

00:43:45.640 | Like what's the idea that I've carried with me

00:43:47.880 | through four or five notebooks?

00:43:49.180 | Okay, that's a signal that maybe I really need

00:43:51.500 | to make a change around that or I need to listen to it.

00:43:54.680 | So yeah, so that's a good caveat.

00:43:55.680 | So I do have that, that Moleskine as well,

00:43:57.680 | non-work related, but critical to my pursuit

00:44:00.440 | of the deep life.

00:44:02.220 | All right, we got a question here from Candice.

00:44:08.480 | Candice says, do you have any tips

00:44:13.240 | for how to apply the deep work approach

00:44:16.840 | to job seeking for a first job?

00:44:19.160 | I'm feeling overwhelmed with all the options out there,

00:44:21.160 | and I don't know what metrics actually reflect

00:44:22.880 | the efficiency of my search.

00:44:25.300 | All right, well, Candice, you're,

00:44:28.260 | you're over-defining the word deep work.

00:44:31.260 | This is a common theme on the show

00:44:35.520 | that people will expand the term deep work

00:44:38.960 | to capture all sorts of different things.

00:44:41.320 | But let's keep it really focused.

00:44:42.480 | Deep work means I'm working on something difficult

00:44:46.760 | without distraction, so I'm not context shifting,

00:44:49.260 | and giving it my full attention.

00:44:52.420 | And the whole idea behind deep work is

00:44:54.520 | that is the most effective cognitive state

00:44:56.440 | to produce non-trivial or valuable work,

00:44:59.800 | is giving something your full attention

00:45:01.080 | and not context shifting.

00:45:02.420 | That really has nothing to do with organizing a job search.

00:45:05.400 | What I think what you mean here is how do I do this

00:45:07.340 | in a way that is deep in the more general sense,

00:45:11.100 | meaning focusing on what matters,

00:45:12.700 | giving that intense intention,

00:45:13.920 | and not wasting your time with things that don't.

00:45:17.000 | That general application of deep,

00:45:18.400 | I think is quite appropriate here.

00:45:20.840 | What I'm gonna recommend is what years ago,

00:45:23.600 | I'm talking 2007, when I was blogging

00:45:28.400 | mainly at a student audience.

00:45:31.040 | And I'd introduced this notion called the textbook method

00:45:34.280 | where when you're trying to master something complicated

00:45:38.560 | and non-trivial, you should approach the challenge

00:45:41.280 | like you're writing a book about it.

00:45:43.820 | Let me go gather information about this,

00:45:45.440 | organize my thoughts, and actually write it out

00:45:47.240 | like a little book.

00:45:49.320 | Do that about your job search.

00:45:51.580 | I wanna write a book on, in your case,

00:45:55.040 | it's biomedical engineering,

00:45:56.680 | on how to get your first job in biomedical engineering.

00:45:59.800 | Won't be a long book, but something I feel good about.

00:46:02.360 | Well, how am I gonna write this book?

00:46:04.160 | Well, I better go learn about how do you succeed

00:46:07.040 | in doing your first job search in biomedical engineering.

00:46:09.640 | Well, how do I do that?

00:46:10.760 | I guess I should go talk to people.

00:46:12.620 | Let me talk to the seniors from last year

00:46:14.240 | who were in my program and got good jobs.

00:46:18.800 | Let me talk to three of them

00:46:20.120 | and walk them through their job process

00:46:21.820 | and then have them reflect what mattered and what didn't.

00:46:24.040 | If they had to do it again, what would they focus on?

00:46:26.500 | Why don't I go to the career services center

00:46:28.020 | at my university and talk through job searching for this.

00:46:32.460 | Let me go to a career fair,

00:46:33.460 | maybe talk to one of the reps from one of these firms

00:46:35.460 | and say, let me ask you, when you're hiring,

00:46:37.620 | how's this work on the other end?

00:46:38.700 | What matters?

00:46:39.540 | What are you looking for?

00:46:40.460 | Get the real information and organize it and write it down.

00:46:44.620 | Not a full-length book,

00:46:45.520 | but like you're putting together a pamphlet

00:46:46.940 | that's evidence-based on here's the right way

00:46:48.820 | to job search in my field to get a first job

00:46:52.280 | and then go execute that.

00:46:53.580 | And that's almost always the key to taking this

00:46:58.140 | general deep approach to things in your life.

00:47:01.120 | If you want to focus your energy intensely on what matters,

00:47:03.540 | not waste time on things that don't,

00:47:05.860 | you got to know what matters and that requires evidence.

00:47:09.860 | And keep in mind, reality is often

00:47:12.980 | not what you want it to be.

00:47:15.040 | If you say, I'm just going to make up

00:47:16.480 | what I want to matter for job searching,

00:47:18.740 | you will come up with something that you like.

00:47:21.340 | It's hard, but not too hard, doesn't, you know, whatever,

00:47:23.980 | but it might not have any connection to the real world

00:47:26.900 | and what really matters.

00:47:27.780 | So I really like this deep approach to almost anything,

00:47:30.540 | but it requires an evidence-based approach.

00:47:32.180 | So that's my advice, Candace.

00:47:34.580 | Basically go do the research to write a book

00:47:36.420 | on how to do biomedical job searching

00:47:38.580 | and then execute that plan.

00:47:40.380 | That's how you're going to be confident

00:47:41.420 | that you're doing the right thing.

00:47:42.940 | All right, let's see here.

00:47:47.140 | We got a question from Mark.

00:47:50.980 | Mark, who describes himself as from Utah,

00:47:53.020 | the gateway to Colorado.

00:47:54.680 | Jesse, is that like Utah, self-hating Utah?

00:48:01.060 | What is that like self-deprecation?

00:48:02.740 | Is there like a--

00:48:03.580 | - I couldn't tell.

00:48:04.420 | I was thinking maybe he goes to Colorado a lot.

00:48:06.580 | I mean, maybe he drives.

00:48:08.300 | - This is like a pro Colorado partisan, anti-Utah guy.

00:48:12.820 | All right, so here's what he asks.

00:48:15.980 | "What are you learning from people who apply your work?

00:48:20.980 | "You have to be hearing good things from people

00:48:23.940 | "who are reading and applying the principles in deep work.

00:48:25.960 | "I'd love to hear them.

00:48:26.840 | "Also, what are the important things

00:48:28.980 | "that you can learn from your book

00:48:30.060 | "that you wish your fans/cultist could learn?"

00:48:35.060 | Well, the only place I have cultish followers,

00:48:38.620 | I think is in that Utah.

00:48:41.580 | 'Cause they just really, they really suck.

00:48:44.420 | Here's what I always say, and Jesse knows this.

00:48:46.660 | If only Utah could just be more like Colorado.

00:48:49.360 | Then what I'm doing here, Jesse,

00:48:51.860 | is I'm pandering to this question asker.

00:48:55.520 | Okay, so what have people learned from deep work

00:48:58.340 | and what did they not learn?

00:49:00.380 | Did I wish they, what have I learned about the book?

00:49:03.660 | It's a good question.

00:49:04.500 | Well, Jesse, you do some deep work.

00:49:06.020 | What have you learned?

00:49:06.860 | What's your real-world experience with trying to be deeper?

00:49:12.680 | - I think it goes hand-in-hand

00:49:14.020 | with all the podcast episodes

00:49:15.380 | that you put out in the other books.

00:49:16.560 | I mean, working on stuff without distraction.

00:49:20.520 | You get a lot more done.

00:49:22.400 | Essentially, closing down your email.

00:49:26.460 | - Yeah.

00:49:28.120 | - Not checking that all the time.

00:49:29.700 | You know, just having certain times where you check that.

00:49:31.940 | - I would say that's pretty consistent.

00:49:33.400 | People will say, however I do it,

00:49:38.200 | when I'm able to be more sequential

00:49:40.200 | and when I do hard things,

00:49:41.460 | just do the hard thing without context switching

00:49:43.200 | until I'm done.

00:49:44.080 | You hear this a lot.

00:49:45.080 | They say, I get so much more done.

00:49:47.920 | I would say that's pretty consistent.

00:49:50.040 | - Your face the dragon motto is really solid too.

00:49:52.960 | Like that hit home with me.

00:49:54.360 | I have it on my board at home, so I see it.

00:49:56.860 | - Yeah, and that's relevant, right?

00:49:59.440 | I mean, with face the dragon,

00:50:00.400 | what I'm saying is look at everything on your plate.

00:50:03.640 | Like don't run away from it.

00:50:04.640 | Look at everything on your plate.

00:50:06.120 | And I call it the productivity dragon,

00:50:07.880 | face the productivity dragon.

00:50:09.520 | And here's the thing.

00:50:10.360 | If it is inconquerable,

00:50:13.440 | then you have to see it and confront it.

00:50:15.940 | And for a lot of people,

00:50:17.060 | that's why I'm glad you brought it up, Jesse,

00:50:18.200 | what that leads to is they face the productivity dragons.

00:50:20.360 | They've written down everything.

00:50:22.000 | A lot of times what'll happen is they write down everything

00:50:24.160 | and then they try to come up with a strategy

00:50:26.600 | for how do I deal with all of this.

00:50:28.000 | They start trying to build out their autopilot schedule

00:50:29.840 | and I'll work on this here and this here.

00:50:31.440 | And it just doesn't work

00:50:32.520 | because it's just way too much stuff.

00:50:34.820 | And what that leads them to do is to say,

00:50:36.520 | oh, I'm gonna cut out half of this stuff.

00:50:39.000 | - Yeah, and then the other thing that's great

00:50:41.040 | is with your time block planner,

00:50:42.760 | you showed how if certain things go over,

00:50:45.920 | you cross out your existing plan

00:50:47.680 | and just start a new one on the same day.

00:50:50.260 | So there's oftentimes where I'll be doing stuff

00:50:53.120 | and run out of time.

00:50:54.060 | And it's as slow productivity as you talk about it.

00:50:56.760 | You just wait till the next day

00:50:58.760 | and then try to factor it in.

00:51:00.120 | - I like that.

00:51:00.960 | You had a plan, you were intentional,

00:51:03.760 | you've won the game.

00:51:05.440 | - Yeah, I mean, there is no gold stars for,

00:51:08.700 | wow, you came up with a time block plan

00:51:12.040 | and you hit it exactly.

00:51:13.000 | Or you came up with a weekly plan or even worse,

00:51:16.580 | a quarterly plan about how this thing was gonna unfold

00:51:20.000 | and you hit it exactly.

00:51:21.800 | No one comes along and says, great, you get extra money,

00:51:25.000 | you get extra sales for your book,

00:51:26.840 | you get gold bars or something like that.

00:51:29.800 | It doesn't matter.

00:51:30.640 | What matters is, are you being intentional with your time?

00:51:33.800 | Because who cares if you get it right or not,

00:51:36.720 | is all that tells you is it's a little bit of luck

00:51:40.920 | and how good are you at guessing how long something takes?

00:51:44.860 | But in the end, it's gonna take however long it takes.

00:51:46.720 | And so the key thing is that you're working on something

00:51:49.160 | consistently and with intention until it's done

00:51:52.040 | and it gets done well,

00:51:53.960 | whether you guessed properly how long that was gonna take

00:51:56.720 | or not is not that important.

00:52:00.160 | - The automation stuff and finding different environments

00:52:04.120 | for different work is awesome.

00:52:06.360 | Like I'm taking Spanish lessons right now,

00:52:08.680 | so I know like certain days I'm gonna do my homework,

00:52:11.300 | you know, in different spot.

00:52:12.680 | - All right.

00:52:13.520 | - And it's just, you know, done.

00:52:15.080 | - All right, so good.

00:52:15.920 | So we have three things so far about applying deep work

00:52:19.320 | in the real world, what people have learned.

00:52:21.000 | So in particular, what Jesse has learned,

00:52:23.140 | facing a productivity dragon is important.

00:52:25.240 | Intention trumps accuracy.

00:52:27.820 | The key is that you have plans.

00:52:29.420 | Don't beat yourself up if you don't have plans.

00:52:32.040 | And then three, Jesse is saying the idea of having set times

00:52:35.640 | and places you do set work is a hack

00:52:37.520 | that really works pretty well.

00:52:39.160 | Where's your Spanish lesson environment or ritual?

00:52:44.160 | - It depends on the day.

00:52:47.000 | This Saturday, I'm gonna do it.

00:52:48.560 | I'm gonna do it tomorrow morning at, you know,

00:52:52.040 | at a separate desk in my house.

00:52:53.800 | And then at the same desk that I do something else.

00:52:57.320 | - Which is a good point.

00:52:58.320 | Sometimes it's minor.

00:52:59.220 | We talked about this in a recent episode.

00:53:01.320 | - Yeah.

00:53:02.160 | - Where we were telling someone to put a second desk

00:53:04.160 | in the same room.

00:53:05.640 | It doesn't have to be dramatic.

00:53:07.640 | You don't have to fly down to Mexico every Saturday

00:53:11.360 | to do your Spanish lessons.

00:53:12.640 | It's just, this is the place I go to do my Spanish lessons,

00:53:15.380 | even if it's a different desk in my same house.

00:53:18.600 | Yeah.

00:53:19.560 | - And then even listening to your interview

00:53:23.440 | with Ferris yesterday,

00:53:25.240 | and you were talking about going down to DC,

00:53:26.880 | going to the Botanical Garden, stuff like that.

00:53:28.900 | I mean, that type of stuff I've factored into

00:53:33.280 | to like the way I do things,

00:53:34.480 | like going to like the local library

00:53:36.480 | or going to some other things to do,

00:53:38.180 | going to different coffee shops to do something.

00:53:39.840 | And then if you do that for an hour,

00:53:41.920 | it like adds up, keep on doing it.

00:53:43.840 | - That's one of the,

00:53:44.680 | that's a slow productivity plug as well.

00:53:47.180 | It's one of the things that goes in my life

00:53:50.640 | when I get near that chronic overload threshold.

00:53:54.140 | Like right now I'm near that chronic overload threshold

00:53:56.420 | because I'm helping with a few university initiatives,

00:53:59.740 | which I think are very important.

00:54:00.800 | So I'm doing this by choice,

00:54:01.880 | but it's a lot of stuff I don't typically like

00:54:06.100 | involving Zoom and PDF files, right?

00:54:08.980 | The overhead of that gets to the point

00:54:14.020 | where you no longer have those half days free

00:54:17.240 | or those full days free,

00:54:18.220 | where I would say I'm gonna go down to DC

00:54:20.280 | and like think about one problem for most of the day.

00:54:23.080 | And that's a real slow productivity thing.

00:54:25.040 | That when you, when your load is reasonable,

00:54:27.940 | you can do things like I'm gonna go down to a museum

00:54:31.700 | and work and then go walk through the galleries

00:54:33.960 | to get inspired and then go work some more

00:54:35.920 | and move around the city and make a whole day about it.

00:54:38.540 | You can't do that anymore when you're overloaded,

00:54:40.200 | but when you can do that,

00:54:41.660 | you're gonna produce something cool at the end of that year.

00:54:44.960 | When you can't do that,

00:54:46.060 | you're gonna get a lot of Zoom meetings done

00:54:48.260 | and get a lot of PDF files read.

00:54:50.180 | But it's like me right now,

00:54:52.300 | month whatever of working on my book proposals,

00:54:54.640 | they're still not done,

00:54:55.820 | which what I probably need is just a couple of days

00:54:57.380 | at the botanical garden.

00:54:58.900 | So yeah, it's an argument for slow productivity.

00:55:00.660 | If you don't have the space to take a slow day

00:55:03.140 | to work on one project,

00:55:04.940 | you probably have too many projects.

00:55:06.740 | All right, so that's good.

00:55:09.420 | So there we go.

00:55:10.740 | That is, there is straight from the mouth of someone

00:55:15.020 | who's working with these ideas.

00:55:16.940 | These are some of the things that we have learned

00:55:18.740 | or people have learned about putting deep work

00:55:20.460 | into practice in the real world.

00:55:23.460 | All right, I think we have time for,

00:55:24.360 | let's do one more deep work.

00:55:25.660 | Wow, we're really 55 minutes.

00:55:27.760 | All right, let's do one more deep work question

00:55:29.160 | and then we'll get going with some deep life questions.

00:55:31.520 | This last one comes from Walter.

00:55:33.160 | Walter asked, do you think it's possible

00:55:36.720 | to push past the four hour a day limit for deep work?

00:55:41.340 | Yeah, Walter, it's possible.

00:55:45.060 | The four hour limit comes from research

00:55:47.500 | of professional musicians.

00:55:49.520 | Four hours is roughly probably a cap

00:55:52.980 | on really intense deep work,

00:55:55.900 | but most knowledge workers don't get anywhere

00:55:58.180 | near that level of intensity.

00:56:00.400 | So that number came from the study of,

00:56:02.020 | I think it was professional violin players.

00:56:04.180 | You see similar numbers for professional chess players

00:56:07.500 | for what as well.

00:56:08.380 | They do a very intense training

00:56:10.100 | where they're trying to solve puzzles.

00:56:12.220 | Here's a position puzzle

00:56:13.680 | and it takes really intense concentration.

00:56:15.180 | There's only so much of that you can do,

00:56:16.680 | maybe around four hours.

00:56:18.540 | Most people doing knowledge work

00:56:19.740 | are not anywhere at that level of intensity.

00:56:22.340 | What's actually happening in their brains,

00:56:23.940 | they're going up and down, focusing really hard

00:56:26.140 | and relieving that pressure for a while,

00:56:27.620 | then focusing really hard.

00:56:28.660 | So yes, you could spend,

00:56:30.220 | and people do spend more than four hours

00:56:31.980 | working on things deep.

00:56:33.860 | The only addendum I would add is why?

00:56:36.220 | I mean, if you're spending more than four hours

00:56:39.260 | locked in on one thing,

00:56:41.420 | really trying to push yourself past

00:56:42.940 | where you're getting good returns,

00:56:46.140 | the question is maybe you should just slow it down.

00:56:49.020 | Good work day after day after day, let that break up.

00:56:51.260 | So yeah, you can do it,

00:56:52.460 | but I wouldn't build a professional strategy

00:56:54.780 | around let me spend 10 hours a day working on one thing.

00:56:58.260 | I don't think you're gonna end up in a much better place

00:57:00.140 | than spending three hours a day,

00:57:01.780 | but working on it day after day after day,

00:57:03.500 | that's probably gonna get you to some better work.

00:57:05.020 | And I don't know that you're gonna save time

00:57:08.020 | heroically trying to fill your day anyways,

00:57:09.740 | 'cause that brain is gonna tire out.

00:57:14.260 | All right, so that's it for Deep Work Questions.

00:57:16.620 | We have a good collection of questions for the Deep Life.

00:57:19.580 | Before we get there,

00:57:20.740 | a couple other sponsors we wanna talk about

00:57:24.420 | help make this show possible.

00:57:26.820 | The first one of those sponsors is Magic Spoon.

00:57:31.700 | Now you've heard me talk about Magic Spoon

00:57:34.100 | quite a bit on this show.

00:57:35.700 | They were one of the first sponsors of this show.

00:57:38.940 | They put out a cereal that tastes like that treat cereal

00:57:43.220 | you used to eat as a kid in the '80s or '90s,

00:57:45.900 | but without all of the junk, zero grams of sugar,

00:57:49.700 | 13 to 14 grams of protein,

00:57:51.780 | and only four net grams of carbs in each serving.

00:57:55.620 | Only 140 calories a serving as well.

00:57:57.780 | It's keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free,

00:57:59.700 | soy-free, and low carb.

00:58:02.500 | Compare that to the cereals that we were eating

00:58:04.820 | in the 1980s, which I believe not only satisfied

00:58:08.340 | none of those properties,

00:58:09.540 | but were also 30% petroleum products.

00:58:13.100 | I don't know if that's true, but I do get the sense

00:58:15.780 | that probably there was old tire rubber

00:58:20.060 | involved in that cereal.

00:58:21.100 | So now we can eat that type of cereal that we enjoyed

00:58:23.260 | and actually have something that is healthy for us.

00:58:26.780 | Jesse, you're a Magic Spoon guy, right?

00:58:28.140 | Unrelated to them being our sponsor.

00:58:29.860 | - Yeah, I actually bought some

00:58:31.740 | because I was always a listener of your show,

00:58:33.820 | and then I bought the peanut butter kind.

00:58:36.220 | It's really good.

00:58:37.140 | - Is that your, now I hear from listeners

00:58:41.060 | that the expert move is to take the peanut butter Magic Spoon

00:58:44.660 | and mix it with the cocoa Magic Spoon, and it's Reese's.

00:58:49.060 | - Yeah, that would be pretty good.

00:58:50.820 | I could try the fruity Prebles kind too.

00:58:54.140 | It's good.

00:58:54.980 | I mean, I've always been a huge fan of cereal,

00:58:56.380 | but cereal is horrible for you.

00:58:57.660 | So if you can find something that's decent,

00:58:59.900 | which it was, I mean, much more healthy

00:59:02.020 | than the other cereal,

00:59:03.340 | but cereal is always kind of like my cheat,

00:59:04.740 | but now it feels better.

00:59:06.060 | - Yeah, now you can save that cheat for something else.

00:59:08.020 | So anyways, it's a Magic Spoon cereal.

00:59:11.060 | I feel good about eating it, and also it tastes good.

00:59:14.380 | So here's what we can offer for you.

00:59:15.940 | If you go to magicspoon.com/cal,

00:59:20.940 | you can grab a custom bundle of Magic Spoon cereal.

00:59:25.540 | And if you used a promo code CAL, C-A-L at checkout,

00:59:29.420 | you will save $5 off your order.

00:59:33.380 | Magic Spoon is so confident in their product

00:59:34.940 | that it's backed with a 100% happiness guarantee.

00:59:37.540 | So if you don't like it for any reason,

00:59:38.900 | they will refund your money, no questions asked,

00:59:41.740 | or you can just send your box here

00:59:43.020 | and Jesse and I will eat it for you.

00:59:44.740 | Remember, get your next delicious bowl

00:59:46.820 | of guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com/cal

00:59:50.740 | and use that code CAL to save $5 off.

00:59:55.740 | Jesse, we should get like a kitchenette here or something.

00:59:59.740 | We need a coffee maker, like a place-

01:00:01.700 | - I'm surprised you don't have a coffee maker, actually.

01:00:03.660 | I was thinking about that the other day

01:00:05.180 | when I was at work.

01:00:06.020 | - I have this weird block about decorating

01:00:08.460 | and furnishing the HQ.

01:00:09.820 | I don't know, you gotta help me with this.

01:00:11.020 | We gotta make this place a reason.

01:00:12.220 | I wanna be able to go get like a bowl of Magic Spoon cereal

01:00:15.180 | and a cup of coffee in these offices

01:00:18.580 | without me having to go home.

01:00:20.080 | - I'm gonna bring the camera next week

01:00:22.100 | and we can film it and then show the audience

01:00:24.540 | and then they can start motivating you to-

01:00:26.420 | - It will be peer pressure.

01:00:27.940 | Peer pressure from the viewers will say,

01:00:30.900 | "You gotta make this HQ better."

01:00:33.380 | Like we're trying to live vicariously here

01:00:35.580 | and it looks like this was like a crime scene or something.

01:00:40.580 | It was a crime scene and this is after

01:00:43.260 | they took most of the stuff away for evidence

01:00:45.260 | and this is what's left.

01:00:46.460 | So, okay, I like that idea.

01:00:48.580 | Let's do, speaking of decorating,

01:00:50.860 | which is gonna cost some money,

01:00:52.340 | one more sponsor to talk about,

01:00:54.360 | and that is ExpressVPN.

01:00:57.260 | Jesse, do you know what a VPN is?

01:00:59.900 | - Only through you 'cause you've explained it before, but-

01:01:03.500 | - Yeah, so my explanation as a computer scientist

01:01:07.140 | is that with a VPN,

01:01:08.780 | when you wanna connect to a website, right?

01:01:11.420 | So, Jesse is at the gym and is connecting

01:01:15.300 | to magicspoon.com to order something.

01:01:19.100 | Instead of just directly connecting to that website

01:01:21.700 | where everyone can look at your packet

01:01:23.860 | and say, "Who are you connecting to?

01:01:25.420 | "Why are you connecting to them?

01:01:26.840 | "Maybe you had too much Magic Spoon,"

01:01:28.500 | or whatever the issue is, a VPN says,

01:01:30.700 | "No, what you do instead is form a connection

01:01:32.540 | "to a VPN server."

01:01:34.540 | So you have an encrypted connection to the VPN server

01:01:37.220 | and you tell that VPN server,

01:01:39.540 | your browser or whatever software you're using,

01:01:41.660 | tells that server through an encrypted connection,

01:01:44.080 | "This is the website I really wanna talk to."

01:01:46.780 | And then the server talks to that website on your behalf.

01:01:49.860 | And then it gets the answer back from that website

01:01:51.680 | or from whatever service you're trying to access

01:01:53.660 | and then sends that back to you

01:01:55.060 | over this encrypted connection.

01:01:56.460 | So no one around you knows what you're up to.

01:01:59.200 | The ISP you connect to, the access point at your gym,

01:02:02.540 | whatever, can't keep track of who are you connecting to,

01:02:04.960 | who are you talking to.

01:02:06.560 | So there's a lot of reasons why you might use a VPN.

01:02:08.760 | There's security reasons, there's privacy reasons,

01:02:11.340 | but there's one cool little benefit you can get from them.

01:02:14.460 | With a service like ExpressVPN,

01:02:16.860 | they have VPN servers all around the world

01:02:19.800 | you can choose to connect to.

01:02:22.020 | So if you are connecting to a service

01:02:24.720 | through a VPN server somewhere else around the world,

01:02:27.720 | that service thinks you're coming from that country.

01:02:30.800 | So Netflix, for example, offers different content

01:02:34.120 | based on where you are in the world.

01:02:36.000 | So if you wanna unlock different Netflix content,

01:02:39.880 | you can just connect to an ExpressVPN server in that country

01:02:43.880 | and then just use Netflix as normal.

01:02:46.000 | And you will see only the Netflix content

01:02:48.560 | that's available to that country.

01:02:49.680 | So it's actually pretty surprising

01:02:51.300 | how much stuff you're missing.

01:02:53.440 | The copy here says, "Watching Netflix

01:02:55.280 | without using ExpressVPN is like paying

01:02:57.640 | for a gym membership,

01:02:59.200 | but only being able to use the treadmill."

01:03:01.560 | Jesse, that sounds like something that you would not,

01:03:03.640 | you would not tolerate that, I would assume,

01:03:05.680 | as someone who spends a lot of time in gyms.

01:03:08.400 | - I agree, I agree, for sure.

01:03:09.840 | I like to get around, see different equipment.

01:03:12.320 | - So before the pandemic,

01:03:13.960 | I traveled a lot internationally in my role as a professor

01:03:17.320 | and as a writer.

01:03:18.680 | So I use VPNs all the time, especially when I'm overseas,

01:03:22.600 | because A, I don't know who's tracking me

01:03:24.400 | and B, I wanna be able to access services

01:03:27.200 | back in the States, for example.

01:03:29.040 | ExpressVPN is my go-to.

01:03:30.960 | Here's what they have that makes it my favorite.

01:03:33.580 | Many different server locations.

01:03:35.240 | So wherever you are,

01:03:36.080 | there's probably a server not too far away.

01:03:38.240 | Really fast speeds.

01:03:39.640 | This is everything with a VPN.

01:03:41.080 | You have to have fast speeds

01:03:42.420 | because now you're going through an intermediate server.

01:03:44.360 | They have blazingly fast speeds, great encryption setup,

01:03:48.080 | and it's really seamless

01:03:49.560 | the way it works with your computer.

01:03:50.680 | You're just using your computer like normal

01:03:52.200 | and you're going through the ExpressVPN servers.

01:03:55.040 | You wanna do a VPN, which you should.

01:03:56.560 | ExpressVPN is my recommendation.

01:04:00.540 | So be smart, stop paying full price for streaming services

01:04:03.440 | and only getting access to a fraction of their content.

01:04:05.600 | Get your money's worth at expressvpn.com/deep.

01:04:10.600 | Don't forget to use my link at expressvpn.com/deep

01:04:16.200 | and you will get an extra three months

01:04:19.640 | of ExpressVPN for free.

01:04:22.080 | Three months is pretty good.

01:04:23.760 | - Yeah.

01:04:24.600 | - Give it a try.

01:04:25.440 | All right, well, now that we are about seven hours

01:04:28.480 | into this podcast,

01:04:29.660 | we'll do a few deep life questions

01:04:32.620 | and then we'll wrap it up.

01:04:34.880 | I blame myself.

01:04:36.680 | I get excited about core ideas.

01:04:38.760 | Like I got, yeah, slow productivity is exciting to me.

01:04:40.720 | So I sort of had to go on a tangent there.

01:04:43.520 | - No, that was great.

01:04:44.620 | - All right, what do we got here?

01:04:47.400 | Question number one comes from Anne.

01:04:51.160 | Anne is asking about time management for undergraduates

01:04:54.240 | from underrepresented backgrounds.

01:04:57.320 | She's a university professor,

01:04:59.860 | mentor students from traditionally

01:05:01.280 | underrepresented backgrounds.

01:05:02.520 | So Anne says, and this is interesting.

01:05:05.440 | When we talk about time management,

01:05:06.940 | often the challenging part for these students

01:05:08.800 | is getting their parents or younger siblings

01:05:10.680 | to respect their deep work time.

01:05:13.280 | I find this challenge really different

01:05:14.800 | than what I face as a parent,

01:05:16.020 | where it's much easier for me to carve out time for my work

01:05:18.200 | because I'm the head of the household.

01:05:20.000 | What would you recommend for non-traditional students

01:05:22.520 | in building effective time management strategies

01:05:24.280 | that take into account multi-generational households

01:05:27.560 | and unique demands faced by underrepresented minorities?

01:05:31.080 | It's a good question.

01:05:33.320 | And an interesting thing I would say about my college books

01:05:38.160 | and in particular, how to become a straight A student,

01:05:41.120 | is as far as I can tell,

01:05:43.080 | the number one market for that book

01:05:46.120 | is non-traditional college students.

01:05:49.800 | You would imagine, oh, that book is read by

01:05:53.320 | a bunch of young Cal Newports.

01:05:54.840 | It's a traditional 19-year-old residential college.

01:05:58.800 | They're there for four years.

01:06:00.280 | That's actually not the number one market for that book

01:06:03.160 | because the traditional 19-year-old

01:06:06.800 | coming to a residential college

01:06:08.240 | out of their upper middle-class neighborhood,

01:06:10.840 | they don't even really want advice.

01:06:13.000 | To them, college is like a social experience

01:06:16.600 | as much as an intellectual one,

01:06:18.040 | and they just wanna have fun.

01:06:19.360 | But it's non-traditional students

01:06:21.280 | from many different definitions of that term

01:06:23.960 | that are much more focused on,

01:06:26.600 | hey, I'm here to learn and to get grades

01:06:29.040 | to open up opportunities, are way more receptive to,

01:06:31.880 | I want every piece of advice I can get.

01:06:34.480 | So how to become a straight A student, for example,

01:06:36.600 | is used in a lot of first-generation

01:06:39.200 | college mentoring programs

01:06:41.320 | where a lot of schools like Georgetown

01:06:43.280 | will have a very particular program

01:06:45.480 | if you're a first-generational student.

01:06:47.480 | And how to become a straight A student

01:06:49.040 | is used a lot, it's used in some veteran,

01:06:52.720 | military veteran programs.

01:06:54.600 | We're preparing military vets

01:06:56.120 | who are returning to college

01:06:57.480 | a little bit later in life on the GI Bill.

01:06:59.760 | Let's get our act together, let's get after it.

01:07:01.640 | So I'll just say that as a preamble.

01:07:04.560 | The books like How to Become a Straight A Student

01:07:07.560 | are, I think, more popular among people

01:07:09.560 | who are much more willing to say,

01:07:11.920 | I wanna do this well, and I'm looking for advice.

01:07:14.720 | All right, so how do we deal with that particular problem

01:07:17.800 | of carving out time?

01:07:20.240 | The things I think are important is

01:07:23.000 | you need to treat your schoolwork in this situation

01:07:25.640 | using the same idioms with which you would treat a job.

01:07:28.400 | This is my job, it's a part-time job I have,

01:07:31.520 | it's a part-time job which is getting this degree

01:07:33.440 | from this school, right?

01:07:35.200 | So first of all, when talking to your family,

01:07:37.680 | talking to your relatives, talking to your friends,

01:07:39.200 | this is one of my part-time jobs.

01:07:41.240 | Then you have to actually treat it like a job,

01:07:44.080 | meaning this is when and where I do the work.

01:07:47.640 | This is the idiom surrounding work we're much more used to.

01:07:52.640 | Oh, you have a job, and you have shifts,

01:07:55.400 | and these shifts are on these days at these times.

01:07:57.840 | All right, when you have a shift for your work,

01:08:01.680 | you're not available to do something else.

01:08:03.680 | We understand those conventions.

01:08:05.240 | You have to essentially in this situation

01:08:07.440 | treat your schoolwork the same way.

01:08:09.040 | And this is where autopilot scheduling

01:08:10.520 | is gonna play a really big role.

01:08:12.120 | Let me look at all the work I have to do

01:08:13.720 | on a regular basis for my classes.

01:08:16.320 | Let me figure out when and where I always do that work,

01:08:19.840 | and then I can make that really clear.

01:08:22.080 | This is my shift schedule for school.

01:08:24.560 | And then people just recognize,

01:08:25.720 | ah, it's Tuesday from four to six.

01:08:28.760 | That's when he's working on school.

01:08:33.160 | So we just know he's not available then.

01:08:35.280 | As opposed to treating it more, again,

01:08:37.080 | like a student at a residential college

01:08:39.160 | where you just say, man, what's due tomorrow?

01:08:41.440 | Ah, man, I got a lot of things due tomorrow.

01:08:42.840 | I better go do a lot of work.

01:08:43.960 | And suddenly there's other people saying,

01:08:45.600 | wait, we needed you to help look after your little brother,

01:08:48.000 | and we need you to give a ride for your grandma.

01:08:50.120 | Like, you can't just be gone all day.

01:08:53.000 | Like, you didn't tell us about this.

01:08:54.200 | We have stuff we need to do.

01:08:56.200 | So you have to actually really focus, I think,

01:08:58.120 | on the autopilot scheduling approach to schoolwork

01:09:00.760 | when you're in these situations

01:09:02.200 | where it's not just my full-time job

01:09:04.440 | is I'm at school living in a dorm,

01:09:05.920 | and I have nothing else going on.

01:09:09.040 | So that is what I'd recommend.

01:09:10.600 | To the extent possible,

01:09:11.680 | do this work not in your house, too.

01:09:13.240 | I think that makes it more clear.

01:09:15.360 | If you can do it on the campus

01:09:16.520 | where you're taking the classes,

01:09:17.520 | if you can do it surrounding the classes,

01:09:19.160 | works really well.

01:09:20.240 | I'm going to school to the lecture,

01:09:22.920 | and then for the next hour after the lecture,

01:09:24.320 | I do the schoolwork related to the next lecture.

01:09:26.320 | So it's all just combined with I'm gone, doing school,

01:09:29.200 | it's my shift, and then I'm back.

01:09:30.480 | So that clarity, I think, is gonna go a long way.

01:09:33.360 | We got a question here from a frustrated mom

01:09:39.840 | who is asking about college admissions hysteria

01:09:43.040 | and the selectivity of colleges for future employment.

01:09:48.080 | Let me excerpt this question a little bit.

01:09:51.160 | But this querier says,

01:09:54.800 | "My teenager is utterly unmotivated

01:09:57.640 | and likely has an undiagnosed learning disability

01:10:00.520 | because she seems quite intelligent outside of academics.

01:10:02.880 | I'm in California where kids seem to take an average

01:10:06.560 | of eight AP exams and seem to have weighted GPAs over four.

01:10:10.160 | I worry for her future,

01:10:11.360 | and it upsets me when people point to examples

01:10:14.240 | like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison

01:10:15.680 | and claim a college degree is not important to succeed.

01:10:18.440 | If this were true, then please tell me why companies

01:10:21.240 | aren't lining up the higher out of high school

01:10:23.560 | or community college or second tier schools,

01:10:26.040 | but all make a beeline the higher from the Ivies."

01:10:29.520 | And she says, "What about kids who need to work

01:10:33.040 | or can't handle the pressure of doing it all?

01:10:35.280 | If college was so optional,

01:10:36.640 | then why the hiring queues outside of Harvard and Princeton

01:10:39.880 | and why the sentencing of teens who didn't do it all

01:10:42.760 | at an already vulnerable time in their lives?"

01:10:45.360 | All right, so frustrated mom,

01:10:46.440 | this is something I used to do a lot of work on,

01:10:49.000 | college admissions stress.

01:10:51.160 | When I was a graduate student in the first decade

01:10:55.760 | of the 2000s,

01:10:57.200 | there was a huge issue with college student stress

01:11:00.640 | because of two things that occurred during this period.

01:11:03.680 | One was demographics.

01:11:05.680 | So I'm a part of the millennial generation,

01:11:07.520 | which is the children of the baby boomers.

01:11:09.040 | It's a very large demographic group.

01:11:11.200 | I'm at the very older end of the millennials, right?

01:11:14.360 | So I'm one of the first millennials.

01:11:15.800 | So when I was just arriving at graduate school,

01:11:19.240 | you had a huge number of millennials

01:11:23.280 | entering college admission season.

01:11:25.000 | So there's suddenly this huge strain on college admissions.

01:11:28.280 | And then at the same time,

01:11:29.360 | they introduced the common application.

01:11:32.400 | So it used to be like when I applied to school,

01:11:35.600 | when I wanted to apply, I applied to Dartmouth,

01:11:38.040 | there was an application for Dartmouth.

01:11:39.600 | And I had to go use a typewriter at my dad's office

01:11:42.080 | because you had to typewrite in information in the fields.

01:11:45.360 | And for your essays,

01:11:46.520 | you would write your essays and print them.

01:11:48.040 | And I vaguely remember like pasting them into this thing.

01:11:51.040 | I mean, the application was a physical booklet

01:11:53.400 | you would send away for you,

01:11:54.240 | you would send them money

01:11:55.440 | and they would send you back this thing.

01:11:57.160 | And it was a huge pain.

01:11:58.480 | So you were pretty selective.

01:11:59.680 | I'm applying to three schools and it took me a while.

01:12:02.840 | But the common app, it was,

01:12:04.480 | oh, I fill out all this information on the website once

01:12:07.000 | and I can apply to anywhere I want

01:12:08.720 | just by clicking a button.

01:12:09.680 | And now suddenly people are applying to 20, 30 schools.

01:12:12.600 | And everyone who is at least a little bit smart would say,

01:12:15.600 | well, I might as well just do Harvard.

01:12:17.720 | I might as well do Princeton,

01:12:18.560 | I might as well do Yale, you never know.

01:12:20.000 | And suddenly they had these admissions percentages

01:12:23.200 | that just seemed like they were plummeting.

01:12:25.120 | When in reality, it was just,

01:12:26.200 | you had a bunch more people applying

01:12:27.760 | who never would have before

01:12:28.920 | because they already knew they weren't gonna get in.

01:12:30.520 | Anyways, it caused a huge issue.

01:12:32.200 | College admission stress became a problem.

01:12:36.200 | There was a bunch of national cases,

01:12:38.880 | case studies that were drawing national attention

01:12:40.840 | like Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California,

01:12:43.120 | where they had a string of suicides.

01:12:45.360 | This was starting to happen with high school students.

01:12:47.880 | Which is all to say, I wrote a book eventually

01:12:49.560 | called "How to Become a High School Superstar."

01:12:52.200 | And it was all about defusing college admissions stress.

01:12:54.920 | So I feel your pain.

01:12:57.120 | Let me give you a few points

01:12:59.400 | before I just say read that book,

01:13:00.680 | which by the way, I think you're gonna like.

01:13:02.040 | But let me give you a few points.

01:13:03.320 | Yes, college matters.

01:13:04.760 | Ignore the Silicon Valley types that say,

01:13:07.000 | Steve Jobs didn't go to college.

01:13:09.200 | Because your kid's not Steve Jobs.

01:13:11.120 | And your kid's not Larry Ellison.

01:13:15.360 | And so yes, if you want to do a knowledge sector type job,

01:13:20.360 | like an office job, for better or for worse,

01:13:24.800 | you have to go to college.

01:13:26.440 | There are obviously other types of work.

01:13:28.200 | Read Matt Crawford's book, "Shop Classes," "Soul Craft."

01:13:32.400 | That there's a lot of other really good work

01:13:34.160 | that has to do with skilled manual trades,

01:13:35.880 | which I think we definitely overlook.

01:13:37.680 | But I think the people for which that is well-suited

01:13:39.640 | know that.

01:13:40.480 | It doesn't sound like this is your daughter.

01:13:42.480 | Like there's some people that know,

01:13:43.560 | like I want to repair things and fix things

01:13:46.640 | or work on a ranch.

01:13:47.960 | And the people who want to do that know they want to do that.

01:13:49.800 | And I think we need to normalize that more.

01:13:51.200 | But if that's not your path, yeah, college matters.

01:13:53.600 | So yes, I agree.

01:13:55.080 | You can't just skip colleges.

01:13:57.040 | I also agree, yes, it's true

01:13:58.840 | that the very selective colleges

01:14:00.840 | open up a lot more opportunities,

01:14:04.160 | especially for very high paying elite jobs.

01:14:06.560 | They go to the very selective colleges

01:14:08.320 | to do that type of recruiting.

01:14:10.320 | You know, there was this famous study

01:14:12.560 | that everyone kept talking about

01:14:13.840 | during that first wave of college stress.

01:14:15.680 | There's this famous study that people are talking about

01:14:17.640 | that said, aha, it doesn't matter what school you go to.

01:14:21.600 | See, we did this study where we looked at students

01:14:25.600 | who got into good schools, but also to less good schools

01:14:30.120 | and went to the less good school

01:14:31.520 | and some went to the better school and it didn't matter.

01:14:33.360 | In the end, they both did as well.

01:14:34.600 | So it's the person, not the school that really matters.

01:14:36.880 | This study was really popular because people like that idea.

01:14:41.000 | Don't over sweat the school you go to,

01:14:42.320 | it doesn't really matter.

01:14:43.560 | I wrote an article about this way back when, like in 2008.

01:14:46.560 | That's a crazy interpretation of the data.

01:14:49.400 | If you actually look at this study,

01:14:50.640 | it turned out to matter quite a bit, actually.

01:14:53.240 | If you went to a better school,

01:14:54.960 | you made more money out of it.

01:14:56.520 | It was crazy the interpretations

01:14:59.640 | that media outlets were making of that study.

01:15:02.440 | And I don't mean to go on a tangent here,

01:15:03.760 | but basically there was one way you could rank schools

01:15:08.760 | by which you could show that effect went away.

01:15:10.920 | That's something to do with like the median SAT score.

01:15:13.280 | But if you looked at the most natural way to rank schools,

01:15:16.400 | which was looking at their ranking in a,

01:15:20.240 | it wasn't US News, it might've been Barron's,

01:15:21.760 | but whatever, just looking at their ranking,

01:15:23.320 | it made a big difference.

01:15:24.640 | In these dyads, the students who went

01:15:27.480 | to the higher ranked school versus the lowest ranked school

01:15:29.360 | made more money.

01:15:30.200 | Okay, so that's true.

01:15:31.040 | There's jobs that are open to people in the Ivy Leagues

01:15:33.160 | that aren't open otherwise.

01:15:35.280 | You can't do much about that.

01:15:36.720 | Can't do much about that, that's true.

01:15:40.840 | But I'm gonna try to make you feel better here,

01:15:42.800 | frustrated mom.

01:15:43.640 | I don't think you want most of those jobs.

01:15:48.040 | Yes, you can be a derivatives trader,

01:15:49.760 | you can be a management consultant,

01:15:52.400 | and that you can get into really good law schools,

01:15:54.360 | but I don't know that you're not, so?

01:15:56.520 | Like, so where does that end you, right?

01:15:59.720 | That you have a very expensive penthouse apartment

01:16:02.200 | in New York, I mean, you're also completely stressed out

01:16:04.320 | and alienated from your family

01:16:05.800 | 'cause you're a managing director at a big bank.

01:16:07.400 | I mean, some people wanna do that, most people don't.

01:16:09.320 | So that's my first point, so what?

01:16:11.520 | And then two, I would say,

01:16:15.080 | don't think about that hype.

01:16:20.400 | Go to a good school, go to the best school you can get into,

01:16:24.200 | do well when you're at that school,

01:16:26.440 | find an interesting job that gives you options,

01:16:30.400 | do career capital theory

01:16:31.640 | and lifestyle-centric career planning,

01:16:33.800 | make yourself an awesome life.

01:16:36.120 | That's the recipe.

01:16:38.040 | And California's crazy about this stuff.

01:16:40.400 | DC is kinda bad about it,

01:16:41.520 | California's crazy about this type of college stuff.

01:16:44.160 | And they really, and I can see it in your question,

01:16:45.880 | so I have so much empathy here,

01:16:46.960 | but they really get under your skin

01:16:48.440 | and make it seem like, well,

01:16:49.440 | if you're not going to Yale or University of Chicago,

01:16:54.440 | dot, dot, dot, but you know what?

01:16:56.320 | Follow out that dot, dot, dot.

01:16:58.480 | What happens?

01:16:59.840 | Yeah, I don't get to go work for Goldman Sachs.

01:17:03.080 | I would say, congratulations,

01:17:05.560 | you don't wanna do that anyways, right?

01:17:07.160 | I mean, what happens?

01:17:08.200 | So you focus on your grades, get the best grades you can,

01:17:12.400 | go to a good school.

01:17:13.440 | My advice is typically go to your state school

01:17:17.600 | unless you can get into a small number of very elite schools

01:17:22.200 | that are much, much better than your state school.

01:17:25.120 | I'm a bit of a curmudgeon on this,

01:17:26.360 | I'm not a big believer in shopping

01:17:28.280 | for random private schools that are nowhere near you

01:17:30.920 | just because you like the look of the campus.

01:17:34.440 | I mean this with respect, teenagers,

01:17:36.040 | because I'm talking about myself at that age,

01:17:37.600 | but 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds are idiots.

01:17:40.200 | How much do we really wanna give them

01:17:42.400 | weight to their decision of,

01:17:43.680 | "No, I definitely need to go to this random school

01:17:45.520 | "halfway across the country."

01:17:46.520 | I was like, go to your state school probably,

01:17:48.400 | unless you can get into a fantastic school.

01:17:51.600 | Okay, if you're really into government and politics

01:17:54.360 | and get into Georgetown, go to Georgetown.

01:17:56.600 | But don't go to a random private school

01:17:58.720 | halfway around the country

01:17:59.680 | because you like something in their brochure

01:18:01.960 | about their gym and the campus look nice.

01:18:05.000 | Go to your state school unless you get into an elite school.

01:18:07.560 | Don't overschedule, do really well in your major,

01:18:10.440 | get good grades, this will open up job opportunities,

01:18:13.080 | build a cool life.

01:18:15.600 | I think that's the takeaway message.

01:18:17.400 | So to bring that back to my book,

01:18:21.000 | what I did in that book,

01:18:22.960 | "How to Become a High School Superstar"

01:18:24.160 | is I profiled a bunch of kids

01:18:25.520 | that did fine in college admissions

01:18:27.320 | but weren't at all stressed out.

01:18:28.880 | And I kinda walked through what their life was like,

01:18:30.800 | what matters, what doesn't.

01:18:31.840 | And spoiler alert, they're not overscheduled,

01:18:35.560 | they wander and stumble into interesting things,

01:18:38.480 | they're pretty smart about their study habits

01:18:40.160 | so they get good grades without having to study all the time

01:18:42.720 | and that's kind of it.

01:18:45.080 | So I am giving you permission, frustrated mom,

01:18:47.360 | to not get too caught up

01:18:49.120 | in this selective college hysteria.

01:18:52.400 | You should help your daughter with good study habits,

01:18:56.600 | don't overschedule her,

01:18:58.280 | let her live up to her academic potential,

01:19:00.480 | go to the good school,

01:19:02.240 | maybe one of the great UC system schools,

01:19:05.360 | don't pay twice as much to go to a school

01:19:07.080 | across the country,

01:19:08.080 | and let them do well there, read my type of advice,

01:19:11.480 | find themselves, find their flow, do good work,

01:19:13.920 | and then lifestyle-centric career planning,

01:19:16.080 | build a really cool, interesting life.

01:19:17.600 | I think that is what most people should be doing

01:19:21.200 | and we need to stop obsessing about this dream

01:19:23.240 | that, I don't know, you're gonna go to Harvard

01:19:25.320 | and then the Yale Law School

01:19:26.480 | and be like a senator at 30 or something like that.

01:19:29.600 | Hey, spoiler alert, that's not gonna happen to you.

01:19:32.080 | Like it's gonna happen to a small number of people

01:19:33.840 | but don't build your whole life around

01:19:35.280 | that's what you need to do, I guess.

01:19:38.320 | What did you, was it like,

01:19:41.720 | Jesse, did you have that pressure?

01:19:43.680 | How do you remember that college?

01:19:45.400 | Because we were the same age.

01:19:46.480 | We were like--

01:19:47.320 | - It's funny you bring up the common application.

01:19:49.200 | - Because it got worse,

01:19:50.640 | right after we went through this whole thing.

01:19:53.560 | - Yeah, I mean, the common application was key to me

01:19:55.880 | 'cause I never would have applied to Tufts

01:19:57.240 | if they didn't take it.

01:19:58.080 | I just submitted at the last minute

01:19:59.640 | and ended up getting accepted.

01:20:00.960 | And then once I weighed other schools,

01:20:03.860 | I selected it and ended up having a great time and loved it.

01:20:08.120 | But I didn't think about the admission rates

01:20:12.600 | with the common application until you just mentioned it.

01:20:14.480 | It makes a lot of sense.

01:20:15.320 | - It inflated them.

01:20:16.140 | So it made it seem super impossible.

01:20:18.520 | I mean, the point I make in that book

01:20:20.480 | is the key thing about college admissions

01:20:22.120 | is that it is a vanishingly small number of schools

01:20:24.600 | and students for which things

01:20:26.880 | like your extracurricular activities or whatever matters.

01:20:30.640 | For the vast majority of colleges

01:20:32.160 | and the vast majority of kids,

01:20:33.920 | what's your grades, what's your SAT scores?

01:20:36.720 | Are they in the range of our accepted students?

01:20:38.860 | Yes, you get to come here.

01:20:39.880 | That's the vast majority of colleges,

01:20:41.320 | the vast majority of kids.

01:20:42.420 | So get the best grades you can, get good SAT scores,

01:20:47.420 | pick, find schools that you're in the middle of that range,

01:20:50.080 | go to those schools, don't even sweat it.

01:20:51.680 | It's such a small subset of people

01:20:53.680 | for which you're applying to a school

01:20:55.440 | in which they're like, we have so many students

01:20:58.060 | who have grades that are pegged at the top of our range

01:21:00.800 | that now we have to start differentiating

01:21:03.360 | among other factors.

01:21:05.200 | But even then, that's not most students

01:21:06.720 | because a lot of those slots are reserved

01:21:09.600 | for various sports or for the orchestra needs someone

01:21:12.360 | to be able to play a part in that.

01:21:14.180 | So now we're down to a really small number of students.

01:21:17.240 | And then there's some shoe-ins

01:21:18.280 | because these type of colleges want as interesting

01:21:21.400 | as a possible of class.

01:21:22.640 | So there's just some really interesting people.

01:21:24.760 | And then there's people who are daughters of presidents,

01:21:27.560 | so they need to come here too

01:21:28.680 | because we're trying to create a whatever.

01:21:30.840 | And now we're down to a very small number of slots

01:21:33.760 | at a very small number of schools

01:21:36.000 | where you have an admissions officer saying,

01:21:38.520 | what activities do you do?

01:21:40.640 | And I know that everyone is obsessed with,

01:21:43.440 | what are my activities?

01:21:44.360 | And they're wrong about it.

01:21:45.600 | That's the whole point in that book.

01:21:46.920 | One of the big points in my book is that people are wrong

01:21:51.120 | in terms of what they think is important

01:21:52.560 | when it comes to activities.

01:21:53.800 | They focus way too much on quantity,

01:21:55.960 | thinking somehow that raw quantity of activities

01:21:58.960 | is somehow impressive.

01:22:00.160 | It's not.

01:22:01.800 | Or they fall into the trap of looking for activities

01:22:04.460 | that have incredibly clear competitive structures,

01:22:06.340 | like am I the first chair of the state orchestra?

01:22:08.800 | Only one person in your state gets to be that

01:22:10.640 | for the instrument,

01:22:11.480 | so it's not necessarily a great place to be competing.

01:22:13.560 | So I don't mean to rant,

01:22:14.560 | but I just wanna give more people permission to say,

01:22:18.520 | I'm gonna get the grades that,

01:22:20.320 | I'm gonna work hard, get good grades,

01:22:21.880 | see what schools that opens up, go to that school,

01:22:23.680 | have a good experience in that school, build a cool life.

01:22:26.680 | And we look, and of course I'm saying this

01:22:28.720 | as someone who went to an Ivy League school

01:22:30.240 | and trained at MIT.

01:22:31.480 | So maybe it's easy for me to say,

01:22:33.860 | but I don't know that my school opened up

01:22:36.920 | for the vast majority of my peers,

01:22:38.920 | really cool, interesting, happy lives.

01:22:41.560 | They all just went to Harvard Law School.

01:22:42.840 | Everyone I know just went to Harvard Law School

01:22:44.360 | and are all law partners now and are tired.

01:22:47.800 | So congratulations.

01:22:50.120 | They have nice houses though, but.

01:22:51.800 | Oh, well, all right.

01:22:54.100 | We should probably call this one, Jesse.

01:22:56.720 | What do you think?

01:22:57.560 | We're at like an hour 30 here.

01:22:58.760 | (Jesse laughs)

01:23:00.040 | - Sounds good to me.

01:23:01.840 | - All right, everyone.

01:23:02.800 | Well, thank you for sending in your questions.

01:23:06.680 | And as always, if you liked what you heard here,

01:23:10.200 | you'll like what you read on my newsletter,

01:23:11.800 | which you can sign up for at calreport.com.

01:23:15.280 | For videos of every episode

01:23:16.840 | and standalone videos of every question,

01:23:18.840 | go to the YouTube page linked in the show notes.

01:23:21.400 | And until next time, as always, stay deep.

01:23:24.640 | (upbeat music)

01:23:27.220 | (upbeat music)

01:23:29.800 | (upbeat music)

Full Length Episode | #171 | February 7, 2022

Chapters