Ep. 211: How To Organize Your Life | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | Some things didn't quite make sense.

00:00:01.700 | Some things seemed like it was just too much.

00:00:03.300 | I was asking myself, there's too many initiatives.

00:00:05.160 | I was trying to get going.

00:00:06.260 | And it really stressed me out to the point where I had a hard time sleeping.

00:00:08.740 | And yesterday morning.

00:00:11.740 | I had an epiphany, and I'm going to put quotation marks

00:00:15.140 | around the epiphany here because it is the exact same epiphany

00:00:19.800 | I have every single fall.

00:00:21.900 | Which is that the planning system that I have been perfecting over a decade,

00:00:28.160 | I've been using this for a decade, is what works for me.

00:00:31.900 | And every time I try to reinvent the wheel.

00:00:34.840 | Or add new components onto this, I get stressed out.

00:00:38.540 | And so I said, you know, I need to do forget this like I do every fall.

00:00:41.500 | Go back to my standard planning system.

00:00:44.840 | Get all of the pieces of this standard system up and running.

00:00:47.840 | And I feel much better.

00:00:48.760 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

00:00:54.760 | Episode two, eleven.

00:00:57.440 | Now, if you're new to Deep Questions,

00:01:00.180 | this is a show where I offer practical advice about living and working

00:01:05.180 | deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

00:01:09.380 | If you want to submit questions or case studies for use on the show,

00:01:14.740 | go to calnewport.com/podcast for instructions.

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00:01:24.580 | go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

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00:01:35.480 | where you'll join over 70,000 other subscribers

00:01:39.480 | who have an essay written by me

00:01:41.940 | about the theory and practice of the deep life delivered to their inbox each week.

00:01:46.980 | All right, on to this week's episode.

00:01:50.140 | My partner, my friend, my friend,

00:01:51.980 | my producer, Jesse is back from his sojourns in Scotland.

00:01:56.220 | Jesse, when you were gone,

00:01:58.420 | I told the listeners that Scotland seemed like a place where I would be really happy.

00:02:02.520 | I would read books and look at castles and walk to moors and think big thoughts.

00:02:07.080 | You were just there.

00:02:08.720 | What would you say, accurate assessment or inaccurate assessment?

00:02:11.380 | Very accurate.

00:02:12.780 | So I was I took some walks around because you were talking about,

00:02:16.080 | you know, taking some pictures and stuff.

00:02:18.420 | And there was a bookstore that you would love.

00:02:20.280 | There's like caves.

00:02:21.180 | There's like all these paths along the ocean.

00:02:23.120 | I mean, I was playing a lot of golf, but I did see a lot of cool stuff.

00:02:25.720 | I mean, that'd be the the one piece that would not work for me

00:02:28.820 | would probably be the playing golf.

00:02:30.460 | It's hard over there.

00:02:31.380 | What's it called? The famous course where the old course, the old course.

00:02:35.360 | Now, is that the you said you told me earlier,

00:02:36.680 | that's the oldest golf course in the world.

00:02:39.180 | Yeah, that's basically I mean, they had golf, but that was where they,

00:02:44.180 | you know, first started.

00:02:45.860 | I mean, they had golf, but that was where they, you know, first had

00:02:49.160 | like a greenskeeper, Tom Morris.

00:02:51.020 | And that's where the British Open was played this year. Right.

00:02:53.720 | I mean, I'm convinced I think you'd back me up here.

00:02:57.420 | If I attempted to play a round of golf

00:03:00.220 | on that course, they would probably end up just shutting it down permanently.

00:03:05.560 | Now, I mean, people play over there, but the cool thing is the ground so hard

00:03:10.360 | you can actually on some shots, you can put it from like 95 yards out.

00:03:14.200 | Well, that rolls up. Oh, never mind. I do great.

00:03:16.960 | All right. So I can putt from 95 yards away.

00:03:18.760 | Oh, then I'd be fine.

00:03:19.560 | Depending on the hole.

00:03:20.360 | Now, I know first swing club out of my hands

00:03:23.900 | kills Phil Mickelson, course shut down.

00:03:26.920 | There's a lot of bunkers that are very, very steep and hard to get out of.

00:03:30.700 | I remember those.

00:03:31.420 | You have to like go backwards.

00:03:32.520 | Used to watch a little golf. I remember those.

00:03:35.100 | So we got a good show.

00:03:35.960 | I want to do a quick plug.

00:03:37.120 | Just a quick plug.

00:03:37.860 | Friend of a friend of ours, friend of the show, Scott Young.

00:03:41.760 | You remember Scott Young, him and I do these online courses together.

00:03:44.760 | The oldest course we've done together is called Top Performer.

00:03:48.720 | And we launched this thing in 2014, if you can believe it.

00:03:51.900 | It was based off of my book.

00:03:53.220 | So good. They can't ignore you.

00:03:55.320 | It operationalize those ideas about how to

00:03:58.600 | systematically engineer a career that's a real source of passion,

00:04:02.660 | real source of meaning, as opposed to just simply saying,

00:04:05.620 | what's my dream job, all my passion.

00:04:08.100 | So it was the course that operationalize those ideas.

00:04:11.400 | 5000 people have taken this course since we launched it.

00:04:14.740 | And we've we've updated it last year. We did a big revamp.

00:04:17.240 | We actually call it Top Performer 2.0.

00:04:19.400 | Anyways, the week that this podcast episode is released.

00:04:22.940 | The course is open for new signups.

00:04:26.340 | So we open it up for signups for one week.

00:04:29.600 | Usually once, sometimes twice a year.

00:04:32.200 | So it's open right now.

00:04:33.500 | If you're interested in Top Performer or finding out more, go to

00:04:38.300 | top-performer-course.com. Do I have that right, Jesse?

00:04:43.100 | You were working on those. Yeah, I think so.

00:04:44.940 | Top-performer-course.com to find out more about the

00:04:49.900 | this sort of famous course that Scott and I have created.

00:04:53.340 | It's open again this week only.

00:04:55.600 | All right. So what type of questions do we have?

00:04:58.040 | Look forward to this week.

00:05:00.660 | We got a good show today.

00:05:01.700 | We've got some two sets of questions.

00:05:04.460 | The first is some practical questions on working deeper.

00:05:07.840 | We've got some questions about task scheduling, open offices,

00:05:10.940 | and planning a wedding without going insane.

00:05:13.440 | I like that one.

00:05:15.240 | And then we have some philosophical deep life questions

00:05:18.000 | about comparing yourself to others and regaining ambition after burning out.

00:05:23.360 | Sounds good. All right. I'm looking forward to those.

00:05:25.900 | Before we get to the questions, though, I want to do a deep dive.

00:05:29.900 | The big question I want to address in today's deep dive is the following.

00:05:36.640 | How does Cal organize his life?

00:05:40.640 | I've talked about this before, but I'm going to get granular today.

00:05:44.740 | And let me tell you why.

00:05:46.240 | Because of a recent experience I had just a couple days

00:05:50.040 | before recording this episode.

00:05:52.740 | I got very stressed slash anxious to the point where I actually lost a lot of sleep.

00:06:00.240 | So yesterday I was very tired.

00:06:02.060 | I was having a hard time sleeping because once my mind got fired up,

00:06:04.960 | I had a hard time falling asleep.

00:06:07.360 | Here was the thing that was making me stressed and anxious.

00:06:09.460 | The fall semester is beginning.

00:06:12.560 | I usually go a little bit lax. We'll talk about this.

00:06:15.860 | I go a little bit lax on my systems in the summer.

00:06:18.160 | I'm a professor slash writer.

00:06:19.560 | So in the summer, I have very little to do but write.

00:06:21.660 | I lean into that.

00:06:23.260 | I take the foot off the gas, put a little bit of my organizational systems.

00:06:26.560 | And then I have to get things locked back in for the fall because things get more busy.

00:06:31.560 | Well, in the summer, I had accreted all of these ancillary new or miscellaneous disciplines

00:06:40.060 | and systems and ideas and projects that I wanted to tackle.

00:06:43.060 | And I had these notes about all these different things I was working on spread out over many

00:06:47.160 | different digital media and many different notebooks.

00:06:50.060 | And a couple days ago, I was like, okay, I have to actually get this stuff all wrangled

00:06:54.160 | and get my systems all ready for the fall.

00:06:55.960 | And I couldn't make it work.

00:06:58.960 | Some of them were redundant with other things.

00:07:01.760 | Some things didn't quite make sense.

00:07:03.460 | Some things seemed like it was just too much.

00:07:05.060 | I was asking myself, there's too many initiatives I was trying to get going.

00:07:08.060 | And it really stressed me out to the point where I had a hard time sleeping.

00:07:11.360 | And yesterday morning, I had an epiphany.

00:07:15.260 | And I'm going to put quotation marks around epiphany here because it is the exact same epiphany

00:07:21.560 | I have every single fall, which is that the planning system that I have been perfecting

00:07:28.660 | over a decade, I've been using this for a decade, is what works for me.

00:07:34.560 | And every time I try to reinvent the wheel, or add new components onto this, I get stressed out.

00:07:40.560 | And so I said, you know, I need to do forget this, like I do every fall, go back to my

00:07:44.760 | standard planning system, get all of the pieces of that standard system up and running and

00:07:49.660 | I feel much better.

00:07:51.660 | Feel much better.

00:07:52.460 | This happens to me every summer.

00:07:54.260 | I think I'm going to come up with some new exciting thing that's going to really jump

00:07:58.560 | start some sort of ambition of mine.

00:08:00.960 | And I always go back to my same old tried and true three-part planning system that has

00:08:07.860 | performed everything I have done as a professional in the last decade, which is most of my books,

00:08:12.660 | most of my academic work happens because of this planning system.

00:08:16.760 | So in honor of it and in honor of it being the fall and back to school and work ramping

00:08:21.660 | up again for a lot of people, I thought I would go through briefly, but clearly through

00:08:27.860 | the planning system I do to organize the stuff in my life and figure out what to do with

00:08:33.460 | my time.

00:08:35.560 | So I have a document.

00:08:38.960 | I call us the root document of the core document where I just described the system.

00:08:43.960 | This I think is an important place to start.

00:08:45.660 | I call this rooted productivity where you have somewhere a core document from which

00:08:49.760 | everything you do actually comes out of it.

00:08:51.960 | Because to me, it's important that everything is written down, you know where to find it.

00:08:54.660 | So I'd like to have one core document that just summarizes, here's the pieces of your

00:08:58.960 | system.

00:08:59.960 | So I just have that somewhere.

00:09:00.960 | It's not floating in my head.

00:09:02.060 | So the start, I actually had Jesse load up here, the actual document I use.

00:09:08.160 | This is the actual document I use that just summarizes the high level of my planning system,

00:09:12.260 | the exact wording I use.

00:09:13.560 | You'll notice as we go through this here, it's not perfectly written.

00:09:17.760 | It's not perfectly clear.

00:09:19.160 | It's for me, but I will go through it.

00:09:21.460 | All right, so let's start with this.

00:09:23.060 | All right, for those of you who are watching on the YouTube channel, you can see this for

00:09:26.460 | those who are listening.

00:09:27.460 | I'll narrate it at the top of this document is a title core systems.

00:09:31.760 | Here's what I say below are summaries of the three main categories that contain the elements

00:09:38.760 | my core systems, core documents, productivity and discipline.

00:09:42.360 | So I've broken this document into those three sections.

00:09:47.360 | Everything related to my core planning system falls under one of those three categories.

00:09:52.360 | All right, so we start with category number one, core documents.

00:09:56.960 | There's two types of core documents I maintain for my system.

00:10:01.160 | One is values, a document that as I say here, describes my roles and values by which I try

00:10:07.560 | to live.

00:10:09.560 | And you'll see like if you're looking this online, it's important.

00:10:13.760 | The wording is kind of weird because again, it's for me.

00:10:16.960 | It's not like an essay on publishing.

00:10:18.160 | It's not polished, doesn't have to be polished.

00:10:19.760 | I know what it means.

00:10:20.760 | All right, the other type of documents I keep are my career and personal strategic plans.

00:10:26.360 | This is me reading the words here.

00:10:28.060 | I have one plan for each of these two parts of my life that lays out my current thoughts,

00:10:31.560 | experimental systems and plans for living true to my values.

00:10:35.160 | So what I'm trying to say there again, because the writing is not perfect here is like just

00:10:37.880 | what's my plan for pursuing those parts of my life in a way that is true to my values.

00:10:41.360 | I then have a note that says sometimes I'll have extended plans that I'll link to from

00:10:45.760 | those documents.

00:10:46.760 | So if there's a particular big project or initiative I'm working on, I might describe

00:10:50.960 | that in its own document and link to it from let's say the professional strategic plan.

00:10:55.760 | All right, so those are the three documents at the core of my system.

00:10:59.060 | My values, here are my values, the roles of my life, the values by which I live those

00:11:03.360 | roles, and then my career and non-career strategic plans.

00:11:08.960 | I have the subcategory here called maintenance and it talks about how I update these documents.

00:11:15.760 | And there's three things here and I'll just summarize this at the high level.

00:11:18.560 | Once a week, I look at my values and create what I call a values plan.

00:11:23.000 | This is where I emphasize particular values I maybe need to be focusing on or I've fallen

00:11:28.440 | off of them.

00:11:29.440 | Sometimes I'll have some habits in mind to help emphasize a particular value.

00:11:33.320 | Community connection is important.

00:11:34.520 | Maybe I need to try for this week calling someone every day, that type of thing.

00:11:39.640 | So I put this into a kind of a separate, what I call a value plan.

00:11:43.120 | So it's sort of clarifying and calling out what's important to my values for that week.

00:11:46.520 | I've noted on here that I also include in my value plan, best practices for mental health.

00:11:51.840 | So what am I doing to help keep my mind sharp and healthy and away from anxiety?

00:11:58.920 | I like to think through my practices, have those written down.

00:12:01.480 | So I try to about once a week to update this values plan.

00:12:05.360 | All right.

00:12:06.760 | For my strategic plans, how do I maintain those?

00:12:10.120 | Well, once a week, I review them.

00:12:13.200 | We'll get into that more.

00:12:14.800 | And then I say here, I can tweak them or change them at any time.

00:12:18.260 | But I want to make sure at the very least at the beginning of each new semester, I overhaul

00:12:22.640 | it.

00:12:23.640 | So they're written for a semester at a time, but I can tweak them at any time I feel like

00:12:26.560 | I should.

00:12:27.560 | And then finally, I talk about my idea notebook or digital idea storage system.

00:12:31.800 | So I use Obsidian as well as Moleskine.

00:12:34.920 | And I keep ideas in there.

00:12:36.520 | And at the very least, when I do my semester plans or the updates to the strategic plans,

00:12:40.200 | I'll go through and check those ideas and see if I need to act on any of them.

00:12:44.520 | All right.

00:12:45.720 | So that is the core documents and how I maintain them.

00:12:48.680 | So quick summary of a document of my values.

00:12:51.040 | I have a career and personal strategic plan.

00:12:54.320 | I look at the values once a week and pull out this values plan to just to help keep

00:12:57.960 | that at the center of my life.

00:12:59.140 | And I update those strategic plans usually about once a semester.

00:13:03.520 | All right.

00:13:05.080 | The next category for my core systems is productivity.

00:13:09.440 | So how do I actually organize my time in a way where I am happy with what I'm producing?

00:13:16.720 | I break this down into weekly and daily planning.

00:13:21.740 | So weekly, each week, I build a weekly plan based on a review of my strategic plans, my

00:13:28.520 | calendar, my task list, and my value plan.

00:13:30.000 | So I do a weekly plan.

00:13:31.000 | You've heard me talk about this.

00:13:32.000 | I don't get into detail here about what goes into the weekly plan because I play it by

00:13:35.320 | ear.

00:13:36.320 | I'm flexible.

00:13:37.320 | A very complicated week in the middle of an academic semester might have an intricate

00:13:41.760 | Jenga game of how I'm going to make the whole week work.

00:13:45.240 | A week in July in the middle of the summer might say, "Write!"

00:13:49.800 | Exclamation point, exclamation point, and that's it.

00:13:52.840 | So I don't have a set format for that, but it's how I make sense of what am I working

00:13:56.760 | on this week?

00:13:57.760 | What do I need to keep in mind?

00:13:59.220 | Are there any habits or heuristics I want to have on top of mine?

00:14:01.920 | Is there any particular things I need to get done this week?

00:14:04.560 | I need to remember to get it done.

00:14:06.600 | How am I even just attacking this week?

00:14:08.600 | All that's in the weekly plan.

00:14:10.160 | All right.

00:14:11.560 | Then each day, I review my weekly plan.

00:14:15.360 | I review my value plan.

00:14:16.440 | I look at my calendar.

00:14:17.440 | And if it's a weekday, I make a time block plan.

00:14:21.240 | So my weekly plan, I check it every day.

00:14:24.320 | The calendar I check every day.

00:14:25.680 | Look at my value plan.

00:14:26.680 | I got to remember what am I focusing on, what's important in my values.

00:14:29.040 | And then I make my time block plan for the day.

00:14:31.160 | If it's not a weekday, then I do something looser.

00:14:33.400 | I don't time block plan weekends, but you might sketch a quick plan.

00:14:37.280 | "Hey, what am I working on today?

00:14:38.680 | What do I need to remember?"

00:14:40.980 | That's how my planning works.

00:14:42.480 | So you see how these things start to connect together.

00:14:46.120 | The strategic plan influences the weekly plan.

00:14:48.680 | You look at that weekly plan when you're making your daily plan.

00:14:51.000 | Your daily plan figures out what you're doing right now.

00:14:53.460 | So what you're doing right now in this particular system is influenced by your big picture strategic

00:14:58.560 | plans, but you don't have to think about your big picture strategic plans right now.

00:15:02.160 | It comes down through these different levels.

00:15:04.360 | All right.

00:15:05.360 | Two other pieces to my productivity system.

00:15:09.240 | Clear work shutdowns with a shutdown complete ritual.

00:15:11.880 | So you got to have a clear separation between work and non-work.

00:15:15.880 | Make a rough but intentional plan for what you want to do with the rest of your day when

00:15:18.920 | you shut down.

00:15:19.920 | That's my shutdown routine.

00:15:20.920 | And then full capture.

00:15:23.720 | David Allen right here.

00:15:25.640 | Full capture of tasks.

00:15:27.200 | Make sure at the very least at the shutdown each day, you process all the tasks that you've

00:15:31.040 | captured into the appropriate systems.

00:15:33.880 | Again, this is all about for me, stress management.

00:15:38.520 | I don't want open loops.

00:15:39.680 | I want to trust if I write something down, it will get seen.

00:15:42.780 | It will get processed.

00:15:43.780 | It'll get put on the calendar if it's an appointment or reminder.

00:15:46.960 | It'll get put on my task list if it's a task.

00:15:49.160 | It will update my weekly plan if it's a thought about what I need to change for my plan.

00:15:53.740 | And there it will be seen the next day.

00:15:55.680 | It'll be seen in when I look at my weekly plan.

00:15:57.600 | It'll get reflected in my time block plan.

00:15:59.240 | It'll be seen when I look at the calendar to make the plan on the relevant day.

00:16:02.440 | The whole game here is trusting.

00:16:04.920 | I don't have to keep track of things in my mind.

00:16:08.440 | I can have this ambitious schema for how I'm trying to advance these big picture goals

00:16:13.060 | that have all these moving parts that are rapidly changing in the moment.

00:16:16.000 | I don't want to worry about any of it except for what I'm doing in the moment.

00:16:19.000 | And if it's in the evening, then I should just be worried about whatever relaxing thing

00:16:22.600 | that I'm trying to do.

00:16:23.920 | All right, the third category here is discipline.

00:16:29.540 | So I maintained my strategic plans and evolving list of core disciplines.

00:16:34.400 | This might be things about like exercise.

00:16:37.460 | It might be things about the number of deep work hours you're going to do each day.

00:16:40.520 | It might be something if you're in sales about the number of calls you make every day, whatever.

00:16:44.680 | But the point is, they're disciplines that I try to strictly follow to lay a foundation

00:16:48.480 | for a deep life.

00:16:49.480 | So I think it's important to have hard disciplines.

00:16:51.880 | I do this, I do that, and I do this other thing.

00:16:55.140 | And I always do those things.

00:16:56.520 | These hard boundaries that you follow to help establish a foundation of a deeper life.

00:17:04.740 | And so that's the third part of my system is having this evolving list of disciplines.

00:17:08.760 | I talk about here is I often track these with metrics.

00:17:12.040 | Sometimes I don't.

00:17:14.080 | So typically, if it's during an academic semester, I'll have a metric code for each of my disciplines

00:17:20.600 | where I can keep track of my time block planner and the metric planning space.

00:17:23.560 | Did I do this today?

00:17:24.560 | Did I do this today?

00:17:25.560 | I like to actually see it.

00:17:27.760 | Other times I take a break from it, like in the summer, for example, or over a break,

00:17:32.240 | there are periods I'll take a break for it.

00:17:33.540 | So that is there, but I'm typically collecting these metrics.

00:17:37.800 | That's it.

00:17:38.800 | That's the system.

00:17:39.800 | That system can support massively complicated ambitions.

00:17:44.560 | That system can support an incredibly complicated, fast moving professional environment where

00:17:51.120 | it's very difficult to keep track of all the different things that have to fit together.

00:17:55.040 | This system will support that.

00:17:57.040 | This system will support a life outside of work that you can be present and intentional

00:18:03.640 | and interesting and pursue things that are interesting to you and develop yourself and

00:18:06.680 | develop your mind, develop your relationships, not get lost in work and not get completely

00:18:10.720 | overwhelmed with anxiety and stress.

00:18:13.040 | This system will support your pursuit of living truer to your values, living a good life,

00:18:19.440 | trying to actually practice and implement the things that make a good life good.

00:18:22.800 | All of these things are important.

00:18:24.320 | This simple system that I described in these three categories of notes in this one document

00:18:30.000 | handles everything.

00:18:31.640 | And it has in my life for over a decade.

00:18:34.040 | So all this extra type of stuff I was trying to do in the last few weeks, I realized that

00:18:37.360 | all fits in here.

00:18:39.120 | I know this, I trust this.

00:18:40.680 | It's not perfect.

00:18:41.680 | Some of this stuff is redundant.

00:18:43.100 | Not all of it makes perfect sense.

00:18:44.320 | Why is the value plan a separate thing?

00:18:45.960 | Shouldn't that be part of the weekly planning?

00:18:47.840 | There's all these little legacy incongruities.

00:18:50.400 | Did I say that right, Jesse?

00:18:54.120 | Incongruities.

00:18:55.120 | Yeah, you said it right.

00:18:57.120 | Incongruities.

00:18:58.120 | Let me write that down in my disciplines.

00:19:00.280 | Say words correctly.

00:19:03.620 | But it all can be captured here.

00:19:06.120 | And it's a system that can flex.

00:19:08.960 | When you're doing complicated things, these documents can get big.

00:19:12.000 | Your strategic plans get big.

00:19:13.240 | Your task lists get really big.

00:19:15.400 | Your calendar is full.

00:19:17.060 | You have extended plans that you're linking to from your strategic plans.

00:19:20.040 | Your weekly plans look like epic essays.

00:19:22.600 | And other periods, you're burnt out.

00:19:25.160 | You're going through a hard time.

00:19:26.820 | The system can contract.

00:19:29.120 | Really just down to the basics.

00:19:30.360 | Here's my values.

00:19:31.360 | I've got to get these core things done in my life.

00:19:34.520 | A lot of trying to get out of the despair, get out of the depths.

00:19:37.680 | The system contracts to that as well.

00:19:39.040 | So it's really a flexible system.

00:19:40.920 | So this is my public apology to my system.

00:19:44.880 | Sorry for thinking I could do a little better.

00:19:47.640 | You've always been what I need in my life.

00:19:50.400 | This then is my call to you out there in my audience.

00:19:53.240 | If you don't already have a pretty effective system that captures all of the parts of your

00:19:57.640 | life, the things that matter to you, professional, non-professional, and goes from, captures

00:20:02.480 | those for everything from those big thoughts all the way down to what you're doing today,

00:20:07.960 | what you're doing tomorrow.

00:20:08.960 | If you don't have a system like that, try this one.

00:20:12.800 | Try this one for a month.

00:20:14.200 | I don't know why it works so well, but it does.

00:20:16.640 | These parts in the way they mingle and the daily, weekly, and the flexibility, it's a

00:20:21.000 | decade's worth of experimentation.

00:20:24.320 | It does work.

00:20:25.880 | Give it a try.

00:20:27.200 | At first it feels like a lot of moving pieces.

00:20:29.040 | You get in the rhythm and it actually makes you feel freer and actually makes you feel

00:20:33.360 | more relaxed.

00:20:34.360 | Hey, trust it.

00:20:35.360 | The system's got me.

00:20:36.360 | And in the end it does produce stuff that matters.

00:20:39.000 | So that's how I do it.

00:20:41.840 | I don't know.

00:20:42.840 | You've heard me talk about the system before.

00:20:44.400 | It's not too complicated.

00:20:47.080 | I'm used to it because I've done it for a decade.

00:20:49.120 | It's like muscle memory for me, but I don't know.

00:20:51.080 | When I read it from scratch, I'm like, do these pieces click?

00:20:55.480 | I think for people who hear it for the first couple of times, they just got to watch this

00:20:59.360 | video and then hear you say it a couple of times because it does make a lot of sense

00:21:03.840 | after.

00:21:04.840 | And I've been doing it for a couple of years since you started your podcast.

00:21:08.160 | Yeah, it's worked for you, right?

00:21:10.320 | Yeah, it's great.

00:21:11.480 | And then in terms of the discipline stuff, I was thinking about your buddy, Ryan, is

00:21:16.400 | writing a new book called Discipline.

00:21:17.640 | Have you already read it?

00:21:19.520 | Not yet.

00:21:20.520 | Discipline is something.

00:21:21.520 | I forgot the word.

00:21:24.520 | Yeah, because Ryan's doing a book on each of the four cardinal virtues.

00:21:27.520 | Yeah.

00:21:28.520 | Yeah.

00:21:29.520 | Yeah, he has a whole book coming out.

00:21:30.520 | I'm excited for it.

00:21:31.520 | I don't know if he gave you like an advanced copy or something.

00:21:33.520 | He will.

00:21:34.520 | I mean, we share an editor.

00:21:36.520 | Yeah.

00:21:37.520 | We tend to see each other's work.

00:21:38.520 | I talk to him quite a bit.

00:21:41.880 | That was the last thing, by the way, that was added to my, if you look at a decade,

00:21:45.360 | the last thing that was added to my system was being explicit about what are the disciplines?

00:21:50.800 | What are the, I do these seven things and just being clear about that.

00:21:53.680 | I was kind of informally doing things like exercise or whatever.

00:21:57.320 | But for me, if it's not written down, other people don't have this issue, but for me,

00:22:00.800 | if it's not written down, I don't fully trust it.

00:22:02.640 | And then I get anxious.

00:22:04.360 | So I have to have it written down and it all has to connect back.

00:22:10.120 | It all has to connect back to this root document.

00:22:12.120 | So there we go.

00:22:14.360 | I was listening to an interview with Sisson and Rogan.

00:22:20.480 | And he, it was actually from 2021.

00:22:23.840 | I listened to that one.

00:22:25.520 | Yeah.

00:22:26.520 | I just listened to it yesterday.

00:22:27.520 | I just stumbled across it, but he was talking about, they were talking about discipline

00:22:31.440 | and Rogan was talking about his 15, like his 25 minute session in the sauna and then 15

00:22:37.000 | minutes, like the last 10 minutes, he's got this breathing routine.

00:22:40.560 | If he thinks about anything else, he adds like an extra breath.

00:22:43.720 | But if you ever heard Joe Rogan talk to Laird Hamilton, I don't know, he was on the show

00:22:50.120 | a couple of years ago.

00:22:51.520 | You know, Laird Hamilton, Laird Hamilton fan and Rogan, I guess was talking about his,

00:22:55.000 | like I do this like hardcore sauna thing.

00:22:57.160 | And Laird was like, hold my beer.

00:22:59.760 | Laird is like insane.

00:23:00.760 | That guy is so interesting.

00:23:02.920 | He swims with like dumbbells.

00:23:03.920 | He swims with dumbbells.

00:23:04.920 | He has a giant sauna.

00:23:06.400 | And so Rogan's like, man, I stay in my sauna for like 15 minutes, 25 minutes.

00:23:12.440 | Yeah.

00:23:13.440 | Laird Hamilton brings an assault bike into the sauna, which for people who don't know

00:23:17.040 | is like the hardest single piece of exercise equipment.

00:23:20.840 | It's like you do your arms and your legs and resistance and you're like mountain climbing.

00:23:24.640 | I don't know.

00:23:25.640 | It's impossible.

00:23:26.640 | Right.

00:23:27.640 | It's like one of the hardest single exercise you can do.

00:23:29.400 | He brings one of those into a giant barrel sauna and does it and then gets into an ice

00:23:34.600 | bath.

00:23:36.360 | So you know, his discipline document is more impressive than mine.

00:23:41.080 | All right.

00:23:42.080 | Well, I want to get to these questions, but first let's quickly mention one of the sponsors

00:23:44.700 | that makes the deep questions podcast possible.

00:23:49.000 | And that is our good friends at Grammarly.

00:23:53.940 | It's a point I make often communicating clearly is like a superpower in the knowledge economy

00:24:01.800 | because of all the emails and the text messages and the chats and the proposals and the documents.

00:24:07.280 | If you come across really clear and confident in your writing, people will say this person

00:24:11.760 | knows what they're doing.

00:24:13.640 | You'll get more responsibilities, you'll get more flexibility, you will advance faster.

00:24:17.480 | The problem is writing clearly is hard.

00:24:21.440 | This is where Grammarly can enter the scene.

00:24:24.720 | It is free to download and works where you do.

00:24:28.380 | It has multiple features that will impress you.

00:24:33.440 | We've come a long way since the old days of simply correcting grammar mistakes.

00:24:38.460 | So if you're using the free version of Grammarly, you're going to get comprehensive spelling,

00:24:41.600 | grammar and punctuation suggestions.

00:24:42.880 | Okay, that's the that's the foundation you expect for grammar checkers.

00:24:46.520 | Grammarly is best in the business for that.

00:24:50.360 | If you go to Grammarly premium, which is what I recommend, you will then get clarity focused

00:24:55.040 | sentence rewrites will actually say, take the sentence, rewrite it this way.

00:25:00.220 | People are going to understand you better.

00:25:02.080 | This is like all I do, by the way, when I'm working with my editors at magazines with

00:25:05.540 | my book editor, so much of this work is be clear.

00:25:08.680 | How do we fix this?

00:25:09.680 | How do we make this more direct?

00:25:10.820 | If you don't have a Penguin book editor, New Yorker editor looking over your shoulder,

00:25:15.800 | Grammarly can actually help you do this with software.

00:25:18.600 | It also has a tone detector.

00:25:20.400 | It'll tell you this is the tone that your email has.

00:25:23.680 | We're bad.

00:25:24.680 | I talked about this in my most recent book.

00:25:26.440 | We're bad at predicting how people will emotionally receive our written text.

00:25:31.000 | Grammarly can help you.

00:25:32.480 | So get more time in your day with confidence and more confidence in your work with Grammarly.

00:25:36.520 | Go to Grammarly.com/deep to sign up for a free account.

00:25:41.260 | When you're ready to upgrade to Grammarly premium, you will get 20% off just for being

00:25:46.020 | my listener.

00:25:47.020 | That's 25 or 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/deep.

00:25:55.020 | All right.

00:25:59.740 | I also want to talk briefly about Wren, W-R-E-N, which is a startup that's making it easy for

00:26:07.400 | everyone to make a meaningful difference in the climate crisis.

00:26:12.420 | So right now, here's what they're offering is monthly subscriptions where you calculate

00:26:16.240 | your carbon footprint, then offset it by supporting awesome climate projects that plant trees,

00:26:22.640 | protect rainforests and remove CO2 from the sky.

00:26:28.140 | Their goal is to unlock the collective action in millions of individuals to drive the systemic

00:26:31.360 | change we need to end the climate crisis.

00:26:33.400 | Jesse, you're not helping.

00:26:35.800 | I heard, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, that for your trip to Scotland, you

00:26:40.880 | took your truck, which if I have this right, is from 1948, one of the most pollution producing

00:26:47.360 | trucks in existence.

00:26:48.760 | You chartered a private jet to fly your truck to Scotland so that you could drive that truck

00:26:54.600 | in Scotland because you felt a little bit more comfortable with it.

00:26:56.840 | Do I have, I think that's more or less right.

00:26:58.340 | That's right.

00:26:59.340 | But it was awkward because everybody else drives on the, the right side.

00:27:01.780 | Which you refuse to do.

00:27:02.780 | Yeah.

00:27:03.780 | Yeah.

00:27:04.780 | God bless America.

00:27:05.780 | Smoke coming out of it, tarnishing the old course in St. Andrews with soot, Jamie blasting

00:27:12.900 | country music out of his pickup truck that he had shipped over there.

00:27:16.160 | So he went on Wren.co, he went on Wren the other day, Wren.co and calculate his carbon

00:27:21.680 | footprint and in the site, it broke temporarily, but it's up now.

00:27:25.880 | But anyways, we have to compensate for the damage being caused by Jesse.

00:27:31.080 | And this is where Wren can help.

00:27:32.960 | I mean, it's a cool idea.

00:27:33.960 | Like how much do I produce?

00:27:35.540 | Let me literally offset exactly that.

00:27:37.600 | They do the hard work of figuring out how to do those offsets.

00:27:40.440 | Signing up for Wren is an easy way to do something meaningful about the climate crisis.

00:27:45.840 | So it's going to take all of us to end the climate crisis.

00:27:47.780 | Do your part today by signing up for Wren.

00:27:51.140 | Go to Wren.co/deep, sign up and they will plant 10 extra trees in your name.

00:28:00.400 | That's Wren.co/deep.

00:28:04.560 | Start making a difference.

00:28:05.560 | All right.

00:28:06.560 | Enough of that.

00:28:07.880 | Let us get to some questions.

00:28:08.880 | Again, if you're new to the show, this is where I take questions from you, the listeners,

00:28:12.560 | about how to put my ideas into action in the specific circumstances of your life.

00:28:20.000 | Go to calnewport.com/podcast to figure out how to submit your own questions for future

00:28:24.720 | episodes of the show.

00:28:25.720 | All right, Jesse, what do we have for our very first question this week?

00:28:29.460 | The first question we have is from Helen and she has a question on how do I improve on

00:28:33.680 | estimating the time required for a task?

00:28:37.080 | It's a good question, especially if you're a time block planner, you have to actually

00:28:41.080 | figure out in advance how much time to put aside for a particular task that you're scheduling.

00:28:49.020 | The default answer here is most people are very bad at this and you should take whatever

00:28:54.400 | estimate you are sure is right and double it.

00:28:59.760 | That's what I recommend unless you've been doing this for a long time and have been pretty

00:29:03.320 | accurate.

00:29:04.320 | Most people are off by a factor of two.

00:29:05.320 | If we're going to be honest, you should probably also in most days have a open buffer period.

00:29:14.200 | So a period of time that's not assigned to any particular work, it's just there under

00:29:18.780 | the assumption that stuff's going to run long and you want a little bit of breathing room.

00:29:24.760 | So you should have at least one buffer period.

00:29:26.280 | So if you're doubling your time estimates and put a buffer period, you'll be okay.

00:29:30.760 | You'll probably still have to drop one thing off your schedule each day.

00:29:33.840 | It's just basically impossible.

00:29:35.280 | It is so difficult to figure out how long things take, but this is definitely our bias.

00:29:41.280 | We want our plan to reflect a world in which everything happens in the best possible way

00:29:44.880 | because we feel good about it in the moment.

00:29:46.440 | It never goes that way.

00:29:47.440 | So double your estimate, put in buffers and psychologically be okay with still having

00:29:52.160 | to take things off your plate.

00:29:56.240 | I talk about that in the Time Block Planner.

00:29:58.720 | I sell timeblockplanner.com.

00:30:01.960 | There's a whole chapter on productivity in the planner.

00:30:04.440 | Just for whatever, there's a long essay on productivity.

00:30:07.200 | I talk about estimates in that.

00:30:09.200 | So there you go.

00:30:10.200 | There's a little Easter egg in that planner.

00:30:11.200 | And then the thing that I'll finish that is put off to the next day based on the weekly

00:30:15.000 | plan, right?

00:30:16.000 | So even when you do your schedule shutdown routines, if you're using my core planning

00:30:21.240 | system, you're processing your capture.

00:30:24.200 | As part of processing that capture, you're dealing with the stuff on your plan you didn't

00:30:26.520 | get to.

00:30:27.520 | Yeah, you figured out.

00:30:28.520 | So maybe it goes on your calendar for another day.

00:30:29.520 | Maybe it goes into your weekly plan.

00:30:30.760 | You update your weekly plan.

00:30:32.300 | Maybe you bounce it back to your task list and say, "I'll just have to deal with that

00:30:34.880 | later."

00:30:35.880 | What doesn't happen is it doesn't just go away.

00:30:37.400 | It doesn't just disappear.

00:30:38.840 | All right, what do we got next?

00:30:41.440 | All right.

00:30:42.440 | The next question we have from Kimberly.

00:30:44.520 | Kimberly's asking, "How does Cal feel about open office spaces?"

00:30:49.600 | And she goes on to elaborate a little bit more.

00:30:51.400 | Her office is planning to change to a hybrid and they can either work from home or come

00:30:56.080 | into the office.

00:30:57.680 | The work environment in the open place is going to have some shared tables and she wants

00:31:01.340 | your thoughts on that.

00:31:02.840 | Well, I mean, as you can imagine, Kimberly, I'm a big fan of open offices.

00:31:08.160 | I think it's great because you know what?

00:31:11.400 | How are we going to have serendipity if we don't all sit in the same cacophonous hangar

00:31:17.960 | at shared tables to work?

00:31:19.200 | And in fact, what I think we should really do is just have giant shared couches we all

00:31:23.600 | lounge on, all aimed at a huge flat screen TV in which we're projecting Slack channels

00:31:28.760 | on which we're all participating.

00:31:31.360 | And we can just have tubes coming from the ceiling that delivers off soylent so we can

00:31:35.640 | just get nutrition as we Slack jaw stare at all the rapid communication all next to each

00:31:39.960 | other.

00:31:42.040 | That is a sarcasm, Kimberly.

00:31:43.840 | No, I'm not a big fan of open offices.

00:31:45.960 | I've written a lot about them.

00:31:48.520 | My argument in a nutshell is that open offices hurt 90% of what we think about when we think

00:31:56.240 | about knowledge, work, productivity, the actual production of the things that your organization

00:32:03.360 | produces to make money or to satisfy its funders, the actual work that your company or organization

00:32:09.080 | needs to do to exist.

00:32:11.080 | Open offices for the most part hurts that actual execution.

00:32:15.560 | What they're supposed to be good for is that extra 10% of serendipity connection inside

00:32:21.200 | Oh, I run into someone, we have a chat, we figure out something new.

00:32:25.720 | That's usually one of the big reasons people use to justify open offices.

00:32:29.320 | I think that's a very minor piece of productivity.

00:32:31.680 | The big piece is actually doing the work and it act actively hurts it.

00:32:36.280 | There's data to support this.

00:32:37.720 | There's a really good study that was published a few years back in the proceedings of the

00:32:42.680 | Royal Society, really good sociometer study where they took an office that was about to

00:32:49.440 | switch to an open format, but had not yet.

00:32:51.960 | So they could do a B testing.

00:32:54.080 | So right before this particular company switched to an open office, they put these meters for

00:32:59.880 | people to wear around their necks that could measure face-to-face interaction.

00:33:03.840 | Oh, I am talking to Jesse and it could log that.

00:33:06.360 | And then they also had logs of what was going on in everyone's computer.

00:33:10.160 | Then the exact same team working on the exact same projects, just a few days later, switched

00:33:14.960 | to an open office and they gathered data in the open office as well.

00:33:17.600 | A B comparison, good, fair comparison.

00:33:19.680 | The only variable that changed was the office.

00:33:22.120 | What they found is when they went to the open office, face-to-face interaction, the entire

00:33:27.200 | justification of open offices, serendipitous encounters went down.

00:33:34.480 | Email and instant messaging went up.

00:33:38.080 | And the metrics they were using as a proxy for production or productivity also went down.

00:33:44.480 | So it made people less productive.

00:33:46.720 | And it actually had the opposite effect on the proximal outcomes that people cared about.

00:33:51.000 | The explanation was actually real simple.

00:33:53.940 | People talk to each other less because in an open office, it bothers more people.

00:33:58.580 | So actually, when they were in the old setup, and I had a quick question for you, I might

00:34:03.360 | go to your office and talk to you into that office because we're not bothering other people

00:34:07.760 | in the open office.

00:34:08.760 | I'm actually going to be more reticent to do that because there's 50 other people at

00:34:11.360 | our stupid share table.

00:34:12.360 | And I don't want to hear anything we're talking about.

00:34:14.080 | So people actually had less interaction.

00:34:15.720 | So it's really a bad idea.

00:34:17.800 | It doesn't make people more productive.

00:34:19.420 | It doesn't lead to more face-to-face interaction.

00:34:22.040 | It doesn't lead to more serendipity.

00:34:23.400 | So why do we have these things?

00:34:26.560 | We have them because of Silicon Valley.

00:34:29.640 | That is where these ideas were incubated and spread.

00:34:32.000 | And I will say this, the Silicon Valley companies that really leaned into open offices were

00:34:36.840 | not being stupid, but they also weren't trying to make their employees more productive.

00:34:42.420 | My argument has always been that the original innovation of open offices was to signal to

00:34:48.480 | potential hires and potential investors that your company was disruptive, that your company

00:34:54.200 | was not like normal companies.

00:34:56.560 | If you're a Silicon Valley startup, that's critical because getting those hires or getting

00:35:00.920 | that investment is what matters.

00:35:02.840 | It is one of the most important things.

00:35:04.800 | So if signaling, look, we're disruptive, we have an open office and we have ping pong

00:35:09.000 | tables and we have these nap pods, you're more likely to get that MIT grad.

00:35:14.240 | They're like, "Yeah, that sounds more interesting than going to work for Procter and Gamble."

00:35:21.000 | You're more likely to get that seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz.

00:35:23.760 | It's like, "Yeah, these people are up to something new.

00:35:25.560 | We could imagine big innovation coming out of there."

00:35:27.960 | So they were invented for a very rational reason, but it was a signaling purpose.

00:35:32.440 | Then it spread to other companies where that signaling value goes down.

00:35:37.160 | Procter and Gamble can switch to open offices.

00:35:39.800 | They're not tricking anybody.

00:35:41.800 | They're not tricking anybody.

00:35:43.040 | They're not going to see that as an innovative company.

00:35:45.680 | So when it spread out of Silicon Valley and the signaling value went away, then it became

00:35:48.840 | basically just a net negative.

00:35:51.080 | So I think that it's a bit of an accident of management theory that these things actually

00:35:55.880 | spread.

00:35:56.880 | There's a good reason for them.

00:35:57.880 | They're cheaper.

00:35:58.880 | That's why I think Kimberly, if that was her name, that's why Kimberly might be seeing

00:36:03.160 | her company doing it, is if you're significantly consolidating space because most employees

00:36:08.320 | are remote at most times and the overhead of keeping an office for every possible employee

00:36:14.480 | is too high, then that might make sense.

00:36:17.960 | If it's 20% of the time people are here, let's just hot swap some desks.

00:36:21.320 | So there is a money saving argument, but for the most part, they don't work.

00:36:23.760 | They don't make you more productive.

00:36:24.760 | They don't generate more ideas.

00:36:27.440 | I don't like them.

00:36:31.720 | You know, it's Apple.

00:36:33.000 | Jesse is mentioning this.

00:36:34.640 | They're having a big fight with their employees.

00:36:36.400 | I just saw that.

00:36:37.400 | And yeah, I'm doing a thing, writing about it.

00:36:40.860 | So I've been kind of going deep on it, but it's one of the things the employees argued

00:36:43.560 | about.

00:36:44.560 | They want remote work to stay.

00:36:45.560 | And Tim Cook is like, we spent $2 billion on this headquarters.

00:36:49.400 | Like we want you to come in.

00:36:50.920 | One of the big things they argued is it's too full of open offices.

00:36:55.040 | We can't work.

00:36:56.040 | I was not annoyed, a little bit annoyed though, that the quote was from the big official letter

00:37:02.680 | that the Apple group wrote.

00:37:04.720 | That was like, this is why we don't want to go back to remote work.

00:37:06.840 | They wrote this in the spring.

00:37:07.840 | It was a group called Apple Together.

00:37:09.960 | And in their letter, they said, these open offices make it difficult for us to do deep

00:37:14.960 | thought.

00:37:15.960 | Like, no, deep work.

00:37:19.600 | This is what you're thinking about.

00:37:21.060 | This could have been free publicity.

00:37:22.060 | It's the words you're thinking about.

00:37:23.060 | It's not deep thought.

00:37:24.060 | Deep thoughts is jack handy.

00:37:25.060 | That's not what you're talking about.

00:37:26.700 | So it's close.

00:37:27.700 | They were so close.

00:37:28.700 | I know they're thinking about deep work, but they got, it's like when people will also

00:37:31.220 | say deep focus.

00:37:32.220 | It's like, no, it's not deep focus.

00:37:35.220 | It's not deep focus.

00:37:36.660 | That's not the right way to think about it.

00:37:40.020 | Focus is, it's like an, it's an adjective.

00:37:42.340 | Something can be focused, but work is the actual thing that you're trying to do.

00:37:46.780 | It's not deep focus.

00:37:47.780 | It's deep work.

00:37:48.780 | So I was close to getting free publicity in that, in that letter.

00:37:53.420 | One word away.

00:37:54.420 | Cook only wants them to come back like twice a week though.

00:37:57.820 | Right?

00:37:58.820 | It was, I think it's three times.

00:37:59.820 | Well, it's shifting so much.

00:38:02.020 | The only thing I don't buy, okay.

00:38:03.420 | I don't want to get into too much detail because I'm writing about it, but this is not from

00:38:06.420 | that.

00:38:09.020 | The one side I noticed is, so the, they've been doing this since September of 2021.

00:38:15.780 | They keep saying, okay, here's when we're doing it.

00:38:17.180 | And they postpone.

00:38:18.180 | They're like, here's when we're doing it.

00:38:19.180 | I think they've done it six times.

00:38:20.180 | They postponed it.

00:38:21.180 | The big one where he's like, this is it, was in April of this year was when Tim Cook was

00:38:25.860 | like, no, no, we call it, we're going to give it a fancy name that no one cared about.

00:38:28.740 | We call it the hybrid work pilot.

00:38:30.140 | It was just, you come in three days a week.

00:38:33.980 | And this is when the letter was written.

00:38:35.500 | Also like a key employee quit.

00:38:36.860 | It was like, I'm going to go to Google.

00:38:38.180 | They'll let me do whatever I want.

00:38:40.420 | So then they were like, okay, nevermind.

00:38:41.420 | We take it back.

00:38:42.420 | Right.

00:38:43.420 | So they took it back in April.

00:38:44.740 | And now a couple of weeks ago, he was like, forget that we are going to come back.

00:38:48.260 | But in back in April, after all that protest, he's like, ah, we take it back.

00:38:51.960 | The reason he cited was coronavirus.

00:38:55.640 | I don't buy that in April, 2022, that that's why like, oh, it's not at all about this,

00:39:01.300 | like pretty worrying labor dispute we're having with our employees.

00:39:05.640 | We're worried about coronavirus.

00:39:06.820 | I don't see how they make that argument when every single one of their kids is in school

00:39:13.020 | all day long.

00:39:14.020 | I looked it up.

00:39:15.020 | San Francisco County does not even require masks for their students in schools where

00:39:18.700 | the I looked this up from the Labor Bureau.

00:39:20.940 | Their metrics from May.

00:39:22.660 | It's been a factor of four drop of knowledge workers reporting that they're working from

00:39:27.140 | home.

00:39:28.140 | Their company has been working from home due to coronavirus.

00:39:29.460 | Like basically no one's doing that anymore.

00:39:31.900 | It just seems really hard to make the argument in April of 2022.

00:39:36.340 | This somehow is going to be a problem.

00:39:38.860 | It's like some Apple employees are in the office.

00:39:42.580 | The last people not in an office.

00:39:43.940 | So anyways, there's just a little aside like clearly you're delaying it because this is

00:39:47.060 | like a major complicated labor dispute and you don't know what to do.

00:39:50.220 | Oh, and by the way, the letter from Apple together, no mention of coronavirus.

00:39:55.660 | The guy quitting the head of that machine learning head, no mention of coronavirus.

00:40:00.380 | Like it was the cop out dodge.

00:40:03.460 | Sure.

00:40:04.460 | Tim Cook not wanting to get address the deeper unrest of his employees.

00:40:08.220 | He's like, no, we just, you know, Omicron.

00:40:12.980 | That's why we're.

00:40:14.580 | You would think a lot of the technicians and stuff would have to go on because they have

00:40:17.180 | like labs and stuff that they're like testing and prototyping stuff, right?

00:40:20.180 | Yeah.

00:40:21.180 | But I mean, a lot of it's digital.

00:40:22.180 | If you think about Apple, a lot of that's programming.

00:40:24.740 | Even like the interfaces of like the hardware and stuff.

00:40:27.420 | They're probably in.

00:40:28.420 | Yeah, probably.

00:40:29.420 | But you know, one of those labs, not Johnny Ives, but there was a, you know, and I don't

00:40:33.580 | know which group this was, but there's a group that was run by a super hotshot and I thought

00:40:38.940 | it was a design group.

00:40:39.940 | It might not be, but when they were opening that new office, uh, Cupertino's, if you've

00:40:44.540 | seen it like a giant, yeah, it's mainly open from what I understand.

00:40:49.660 | He just said, no, he's like, my group's not going there.

00:40:52.860 | We're not going to work in that open environment.

00:40:55.340 | We don't want to be surrounded by thousands of people.

00:40:57.340 | We know how to get work done and we need to, we need to be together and we need to be,

00:41:02.460 | um, have offices, be able to work and have a hub and spoke configuration.

00:41:05.660 | Like I talk about in my book, deep work.

00:41:07.620 | And he just said no.

00:41:08.620 | And he was such a big shot.

00:41:09.620 | They're like, okay, well he doesn't have to do it.

00:41:10.980 | Yeah.

00:41:11.980 | So that's interesting.

00:41:12.980 | They probably have a pretty sweet gym there.

00:41:14.700 | I've lived a lot of gyms.

00:41:16.460 | Yeah.

00:41:17.460 | Yeah.

00:41:18.460 | Yeah.

00:41:19.460 | I got some rovers there.

00:41:20.460 | And when you think of like Silicon Valley tech employees, don't think about, I was about

00:41:24.340 | to say you don't think about people in great shape, but then Bezos.

00:41:26.580 | Yeah.

00:41:27.580 | Yeah.

00:41:28.580 | He's a beast.

00:41:29.580 | Yeah.

00:41:30.580 | I mean, that's changing.

00:41:31.580 | All right.

00:41:32.580 | Uh, let's see here.

00:41:33.580 | What do we got next?

00:41:34.580 | Jesse.

00:41:35.580 | Uh, next question we got from Mika and he asked, does listening to a podcast count as

00:41:41.580 | reading?

00:41:42.580 | Uh, no, I don't count it the same.

00:41:46.340 | I think these are two different classes of intellectual substance that you're ingesting.

00:41:52.740 | Here's the quick way I discern between the two.

00:41:54.960 | So when you're, when you're reading the book, you're ingesting a, a fully formed, carefully

00:42:01.360 | thought through thought structure.

00:42:04.640 | And we're talking nonfiction here, but you have a writer who has really thought something

00:42:08.040 | through it might be their, their lifelong expertise or something they researched deeply.

00:42:11.900 | They spent a long time trying to organize these thoughts into a structure that is internally

00:42:15.880 | coherent and makes sense and has been validated.

00:42:18.260 | So when you're reading a good nonfiction book, you can basically take this well-crafted thought

00:42:21.840 | structure and just graft it onto your cognitive framework.

00:42:24.360 | Oh, now I understand, you know, uh, the influence of cryptocurrency on whatever.

00:42:31.160 | Yeah.

00:42:32.160 | Currency markets, plug that in podcast.

00:42:35.600 | It's more conversational.

00:42:36.720 | I think of podcast as a source of the type of material with which you could build one

00:42:42.760 | of these structured thoughts, right?

00:42:44.640 | Oh, I might learn a bunch of interesting stuff from a podcast, but there's still a lot of

00:42:48.920 | work to be done probably to take the various things I heard in this interview or got out

00:42:52.680 | of this conversation and mix it with things I've learned elsewhere and build it together

00:42:56.080 | into a coherent thought to build it together into something I could write 10,000 words

00:43:00.440 | on or write a book about.

00:43:01.440 | So you're, you're getting raw thought stuff on podcasts then in books.

00:43:06.280 | That's why I think about it differently.

00:43:07.660 | It's also why it's less cognitively demanding to listen to a podcast.

00:43:11.200 | You can, you can zone in and out, be in conversational mode.

00:43:14.920 | And when you hear something interesting, then pay attention to sort of collect that for

00:43:17.640 | use later.

00:43:18.640 | So I see it as being different things.

00:43:20.880 | The exception of course is this podcast.

00:43:23.640 | Nothing about this is raw.

00:43:25.660 | This is all finely honed intellectual material.

00:43:29.240 | My, my proposal, I think this is reasonable, is that listening to this podcast should legally

00:43:35.280 | be equivalent to being awarded a doctorate from an accredited university.

00:43:40.800 | And that's just a, it's just one man's opinion.

00:43:44.040 | What's your view on podcasts versus music?

00:43:48.040 | Different things like music's an aesthetic experience.

00:43:51.200 | So you know, especially if you have music appreciation, I just either it's like a, an

00:43:55.280 | appreciation experience.

00:43:56.280 | Like I just really enjoy this musician or it's a kind of like a neurotropic experience.

00:44:02.000 | I'm working out and I want to whatever, just get fired up or it's a, just want to get lost

00:44:06.640 | or listen to something funny, like mood alteration.

00:44:08.920 | So it's like an aesthetic experience, mood alteration.

00:44:10.920 | I think that's different than information ingestion.

00:44:14.520 | Yeah.

00:44:15.520 | So I count them differently.

00:44:16.520 | All right.

00:44:17.520 | What do we got next?

00:44:19.920 | All right.

00:44:21.320 | Next question is from Nathaniel.

00:44:24.280 | He asks, how do I plan a wedding without drowning in minutia?

00:44:27.660 | He goes on to explain that he's getting married in a month.

00:44:31.040 | Partner's amazing, but he's getting overloaded with minor details.

00:44:36.520 | All right.

00:44:40.640 | Wedding planning.

00:44:41.640 | I was very young when I got married.

00:44:42.640 | I don't remember a lot of this and our wedding was informal.

00:44:46.560 | I think I, based on some of the weddings I've been to recently, I now understand it as a

00:44:50.440 | more complicated procedure than it once was.

00:44:55.520 | So here's the, I would say the big point I would deliver here, Nathaniel, is that these

00:44:59.460 | vendors work for you, you're paying them.

00:45:05.060 | So you have a lot of flexibility in setting the standards by which your interactions are

00:45:10.000 | going to happen.

00:45:12.300 | Most vendors are not productivity gurus, right?

00:45:16.200 | So left to their default, it's going to be like, I don't know, I'm just going to shoot

00:45:19.240 | you off a text message or an email.

00:45:20.480 | I have a bunch of clients.

00:45:21.480 | I'm just like, all day long.

00:45:23.560 | And you could get sucked into that and then you're all day long.

00:45:26.400 | It'd be the technical description of what it's like to fall into the hyperactive hype

00:45:30.760 | mind.

00:45:31.760 | I say you should figure out, here's how I want to work with you.

00:45:34.080 | Here's how I want to communicate, where we want to store information, how we deal with

00:45:37.000 | various types of interactions that will happen common in our relationship.

00:45:40.820 | Here's how it's going to work.

00:45:41.820 | Okay, I'm paying you.

00:45:43.200 | So you kind of have to say yes.

00:45:45.400 | And you can engineer these interactions to be much less ad hoc, much less haphazard and

00:45:51.400 | require much less on demand attention.

00:45:55.960 | So for example, you might use dedicated email addresses, a dedicated address for the planning

00:46:01.280 | itself or even multiple dedicated addresses for different aspects of the planning.

00:46:06.720 | Wedding planning office hours could be a critical idea.

00:46:10.980 | I have 30 minutes put aside every day.

00:46:13.740 | Maybe it's during your drive home.

00:46:15.240 | Right?

00:46:16.240 | I don't know when it is.

00:46:17.800 | This is the time that you just keep every time one of these vendors is like, okay, we're

00:46:21.440 | not sure about like the lilies.

00:46:24.440 | We have a different type of purple.

00:46:25.440 | We're not sure what's going to work or we need your approval and this or that.

00:46:28.880 | You always just say until they have it seared into their brain, call me during four to four

00:46:34.760 | thirty.

00:46:35.760 | You can always call me.

00:46:36.760 | Don't even bother emailing me about just call me then.

00:46:38.560 | I'm always here.

00:46:39.920 | And you know what?

00:46:40.920 | They will love that.

00:46:42.060 | Vendors love just like any type of client.

00:46:44.020 | They really do love the clarity.

00:46:45.980 | I know exactly how to get an answer.

00:46:48.140 | I don't have to send something out there and try to remember it.

00:46:50.820 | And is it going to be like all my other jerk clients and forget to respond to this?

00:46:53.540 | I can always just call Nathaniel.

00:46:55.140 | I always call him at four.

00:46:56.660 | He's always there.

00:46:57.980 | There's 50 or 60 percent of your communication.

00:47:01.540 | Agree on processes in advance.

00:47:03.220 | If like this is what we're going to do.

00:47:04.700 | Okay, we're picking the flowers.

00:47:07.380 | Let's talk this through in our initial meeting.

00:47:08.940 | Like what's going to happen here?

00:47:10.000 | This will happen.

00:47:11.000 | We'll have to see these samples.

00:47:12.000 | We'll have to give you some approval.

00:47:14.000 | You're going to build a sample thing.

00:47:15.120 | You'll have these questions.

00:47:16.960 | Figure out the whole process in advance and sit there and write it down.

00:47:19.480 | Here's how we're going to do it.

00:47:21.980 | By this date, you'll put this here.

00:47:24.000 | We have a conversation for a half hour here.

00:47:26.440 | We'll deal with all of these things.

00:47:27.880 | Put the photos up here.

00:47:29.240 | I will figure out the whole process.

00:47:31.000 | It all goes onto your calendar.

00:47:32.160 | It's all written down.

00:47:33.160 | They see it.

00:47:34.160 | You see it.

00:47:35.160 | Every ounce of planning energy has to be further invested in this particular interaction.

00:47:39.200 | You have it all figured out.

00:47:40.500 | Again, vendors like clients in general want clarity more than they want like, oh, I can

00:47:45.980 | just reach you at any point.

00:47:48.300 | Reaching you at any point is not the big deal.

00:47:49.460 | The big deal is getting you to actually do stuff and not them have to not worry about

00:47:52.500 | it.

00:47:53.500 | Clarity trumps accessibility.

00:47:54.500 | Finally, wedding planning is actually a good situation in which hiring a part time assistant

00:48:02.040 | is worth it.

00:48:04.360 | It's a type of work where a part time assistant is actually quite useful.

00:48:07.540 | It's like very specific.

00:48:09.080 | It doesn't require domain knowledge about like what you do for a living.

00:48:14.980 | You're spending, and this is looking at the official estimate of the average wedding budget

00:48:20.980 | of 2022, you're spending quote, all of your money anyways.

00:48:25.700 | So the cost of a few hundred dollars a month for the part time assistant is nothing.

00:48:31.620 | And it could make a really big difference.

00:48:33.660 | A for a good one.

00:48:35.420 | It's worth it.

00:48:37.040 | And have them be the point of contact, like three or four of these vendors, you talk to

00:48:41.420 | them.

00:48:42.420 | So if you can't get your vendors to call you at the same time, you have a half hour conversation

00:48:45.420 | every other day with your assistant.

00:48:46.420 | We're like, here's all the things going on.

00:48:48.100 | You're like, great, here's my answer to this, my answer to that for this one, get me a sample

00:48:52.640 | for this one, get on my calendar, you know, a meeting day.

00:48:55.940 | And the very last suggestion I would have Nathaniel is have a certain half day where

00:49:01.580 | this is when you do the meetings that have to happen.

00:49:05.480 | And you just build your work schedule around leaving whatever Friday, noon to four clear.

00:49:10.440 | So it's really easy when people like, all right, well, we got a call, we got to talk

00:49:13.400 | about this.

00:49:14.400 | He's like, yeah, just grab a time, use a calendar, have this time open in the same same period.

00:49:19.820 | Now the reason why I'm going into sub steps about wedding planning, and I need to qualify

00:49:25.620 | this so it doesn't get back to my wife.

00:49:27.580 | And she's like, wait a second, what are you up to?

00:49:29.700 | Why are you thinking so much about wedding planning?

00:49:32.860 | The reason why I'm getting into this is because what I just went through there applies to

00:49:37.820 | many different professional relationships you might have in your life.

00:49:42.100 | Big conferences, you're trying to organize a new client that you're trying to get on

00:49:48.220 | board a new service, you're offering whatever.

00:49:50.300 | There's lots of professional situations in which a lot of haphazard ad hoc interactions

00:49:56.700 | going to have to happen to make it pull off.

00:50:00.080 | Do not in those situations just default to let's just rock and roll, man.

00:50:04.340 | Here's my text message.

00:50:05.340 | I have WhatsApp going, I'll check email all the time.

00:50:08.720 | And let's just don't do that.

00:50:12.780 | Take the time up front to be like, how are we going to structure these interactions and

00:50:15.700 | all the different types of things I just talked about.

00:50:19.120 | My suggestions for Nathaniel for wedding planning can apply to any number of other professional

00:50:24.780 | situations in which a complicated thing involving many different vendors or clients and peers,

00:50:29.220 | colleagues has to come together.

00:50:31.620 | Structure it.

00:50:32.620 | Do not just rock and roll.

00:50:33.900 | All right, let's do, I think we have time for one more question in this block.

00:50:40.820 | What's our final question of the first question block, Jesse?

00:50:43.020 | Final question is from Philippe.

00:50:45.580 | He lost his love for work and he's trying to get it back.

00:50:48.460 | He explains how he's working for a construction company and the railroad doing railways.

00:50:55.380 | And it's been his hobby since the child and he was always fulfilled.

00:50:59.380 | But now he's wondering if she'd go back to university.

00:51:03.780 | So he's trying to get it back.

00:51:06.460 | Right.

00:51:07.460 | Well, Philip, and I'm thinking about your wording, I'm looking at it here.

00:51:12.740 | Clearly you don't want to go back to your academic job.

00:51:15.940 | I mean, look, I'm looking at words you wrote here.

00:51:19.940 | I lost my interest.

00:51:22.420 | I had no motivation.

00:51:23.740 | I felt deprived.

00:51:25.860 | It completely sucked motivation and drive out of my brain and soul.

00:51:29.180 | You described your new field as your hobby since childhood and a source of fulfillment.

00:51:34.760 | So okay, Philip, clearly you're not trying to set this up.

00:51:37.900 | So I say, go back to your PhD program.

00:51:41.820 | More importantly, though, you don't need someone to answer that question for you because

00:51:47.820 | the stakes here are not that high.

00:51:50.620 | And here's what I mean by it.

00:51:53.860 | The focus in general of, but is this the right job for me is premised on the assumption that

00:51:59.360 | there is a right job for you.

00:52:02.740 | Longtime listeners of the show and readers of my book know I do not subscribe to that

00:52:05.980 | notion.

00:52:06.980 | I do not believe in that idea that we're each wired with an inborn passion that we were

00:52:10.220 | born with, and the key to professional success is to match your job to that passion.

00:52:14.980 | That's not the way it works.

00:52:17.220 | Passion and meaning and fulfillment are cultivated over time through the very careful crafting

00:52:22.060 | of a career in conjunction with a clear vision of your ideal lifestyle.

00:52:28.300 | Many different jobs can be deployed like tools in your toolbox to build this life that's

00:52:32.740 | deeply meaningful.

00:52:33.940 | So you know, things didn't work out in your academic position.

00:52:37.220 | There's a longer elaboration here about what happened there, departmental infighting, etc.

00:52:40.700 | etc.

00:52:41.700 | I'm looking at it now.

00:52:42.700 | And you found something else that works, has options, matches interest.

00:52:47.340 | Great, good.

00:52:48.740 | That step is done.

00:52:50.900 | You got the clay.

00:52:52.300 | How do we mold this down to something cool?

00:52:53.860 | So I don't want you to focus too much.

00:52:55.420 | You're in this new job.

00:52:56.420 | It's going well.

00:52:57.420 | Great.

00:52:58.420 | Let's look forward to how you build a life that is deep, a life that is meaningful.

00:53:03.860 | Let's stop looking backwards at should I have done this instead?

00:53:07.620 | Is there another job that's going to be better?

00:53:08.900 | If you have a job that's working, that's the right job for you.

00:53:12.940 | So stay in that job.

00:53:14.900 | Fine.

00:53:15.900 | But put your head forward.

00:53:17.500 | Start thinking through what's my ideal lifestyle?

00:53:20.620 | How do I shape my career towards it?

00:53:22.420 | I will suggest that you go back and listen to I think it's last week's episode, Jesse

00:53:27.060 | 210.

00:53:28.060 | I did.

00:53:29.060 | I called it deep life, something deep life university, deep life academy, deep life

00:53:33.700 | academy.

00:53:34.700 | I named the segment deep life academy, but it was basically me going into detail about

00:53:40.700 | how to then design ideal lifestyle and come back and let that direct your career.

00:53:45.660 | So that's where you are now.

00:53:46.660 | And we're going to put that up or probably is up as a video clip or it will be by the

00:53:50.020 | time people listen to this.

00:53:51.420 | Right?

00:53:52.420 | Yeah.

00:53:53.420 | A hundred percent.

00:53:54.420 | YouTube.

00:53:55.420 | It came out last Thursday.

00:53:56.420 | Oh, it's already out.

00:53:57.420 | So youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

00:53:58.420 | Look for that deep life academy video.

00:54:01.540 | But your job's fine.

00:54:02.540 | Don't worry too much about the details.

00:54:03.980 | All right.

00:54:04.980 | So we have a good second block of questions to get to.

00:54:08.220 | This was some of the more philosophical questions that Jesse previewed.

00:54:12.540 | First want to pay the bills briefly.

00:54:14.340 | Talk about another sponsor.

00:54:16.260 | That's our friends at 80,000 hours.

00:54:19.820 | When I say friends, I mean that literally I've known the guys working on this since

00:54:24.180 | they got started years ago.

00:54:27.300 | And that's because of what they focus on.

00:54:29.580 | The 80,000 hours refers to roughly speaking, the number of hours you have in your career.

00:54:34.580 | So 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years, multiply those out.

00:54:37.780 | You get the 80,000.

00:54:39.700 | So those 80,000 hours are your biggest opportunity to make a positive impact on the world.

00:54:47.080 | So it can be pretty hard to stressful to figure out what should I be doing with my working

00:54:49.820 | life to build the biggest impact with my 80,000 hours.

00:54:53.540 | That's what this nonprofit does.

00:54:55.860 | It is dedicated to helping people do that.

00:55:00.660 | So they take some of the best strategies, the best research, the best tactical advice

00:55:05.060 | out there, and they deliver it to the public for this philanthropic goal of having people

00:55:12.260 | be able to make a bigger positive impact with their working life.

00:55:16.620 | So this nonprofit was founded by Will McCaskill from Oxford.

00:55:20.740 | You might know him because he's been on a lot of podcasts recently.

00:55:23.740 | He did Ferris's podcast recently.

00:55:25.420 | He did Sam Harris's podcast recently.

00:55:27.140 | I think he did maybe Ezra Klein's podcast recently.

00:55:29.860 | He has a new book out.

00:55:30.860 | He's one of the founders of effective altruism, which is all about being quantitative and

00:55:36.020 | precise about what altruism is going to have the biggest impacts.

00:55:38.740 | You've probably heard of him.

00:55:39.860 | He's the founder of 80,000 hours.

00:55:43.960 | So what can you do with them?

00:55:45.260 | You can join the free newsletter.

00:55:46.860 | All right.

00:55:47.860 | If you do that, they will send you an in-depth guide to help you do things like figure out

00:55:53.260 | problems that are pressing and figuring out how you can personally make the biggest impact.

00:55:56.620 | They have a job board with over 800 opportunities to work on important problems and to get one

00:56:02.740 | on one advice about helping switching career paths.

00:56:05.300 | If that's what you end up wanting to do.

00:56:07.020 | They have an excellent podcast, the 80,000 hours podcast that does in-depth conversations

00:56:11.580 | with experts about these issues.

00:56:14.020 | Check out episode 94 with Ezra Klein.

00:56:16.140 | That's a good one.

00:56:17.140 | He's always a thoughtful guest.

00:56:18.940 | So I love the idea of this nonprofit.

00:56:22.300 | To find out more, go to 80,000 hours.org/deep.

00:56:28.100 | That's 8000 hours, H-O-U-R-S.org/deep.

00:56:36.640 | Check it out.

00:56:37.640 | I really encourage you to go to that site.

00:56:38.640 | Figure out how to make more out of your career.

00:56:41.940 | Say it one more time.

00:56:42.940 | 80,000 hours.org/deep.

00:56:43.940 | 80,000.

00:56:44.940 | That's one, two, three, four zeros.

00:56:47.940 | 80,000 hours.org/deep.

00:56:48.940 | So let me also talk about another sponsor that is in the same vein.

00:56:58.960 | I'd like these sponsors we have before the second block.

00:57:01.200 | The second block of questions is more philosophical.

00:57:03.220 | These are both philanthropic sponsors.

00:57:05.840 | This new sponsor is called Giving What We Can.

00:57:10.780 | Most of us want to leave the world a better place.

00:57:13.920 | Many of us give to charity to help make that a reality.

00:57:19.000 | I for example have a charity where what we do is we teach deep work principles to infants

00:57:28.560 | so that we can inculcate the next generation of super focused workers.

00:57:35.940 | So that's my charity.

00:57:38.460 | It's not a nonprofit.

00:57:39.460 | 98% of the expenses go to support Jesse and I's lifestyle, mainly shipping his truck to

00:57:47.420 | Scotland, but 2% goes to the charity.

00:57:51.060 | So have you ever wondered about how much impact your donations are having?

00:57:54.420 | So this is why I use my charity as an example.

00:57:56.420 | You may have given to that charity and then realized, my God, they are terrible misanthropes

00:58:00.180 | and I'm really mad that I gave my money to Cal and Jesse's infant deep work charity.

00:58:05.900 | This is why it matters that you have some way of figuring out what will this charity

00:58:09.780 | I want to give with actually do with my money.

00:58:13.400 | This makes a difference.

00:58:14.400 | The best charities out there can have 100 times more impact than an average charity

00:58:18.220 | and 100,000 more impacts than Jesse and I's charity.

00:58:21.820 | What this means is donating $100 to an outstanding charity is as good as giving $10,000 to an

00:58:26.740 | average one.

00:58:27.740 | So it really helps your money go farther if you actually know who am I giving this money

00:58:31.500 | with and how good of stewards will they be.

00:58:34.800 | Once we're giving what we can enters the picture.

00:58:37.620 | It's a community of people dedicated to finding the best donation opportunities, working on

00:58:42.340 | some of the world's most important problems, right?

00:58:44.860 | So it doesn't matter if we're talking helping people, animals, climate change, pandemic

00:58:47.940 | preparedness, giving what we can has recommendations for highly effective charities you can trust.

00:58:53.420 | The recommendations are backed by tens of thousands of hours of research from charity

00:58:58.100 | evaluators and over 20,000 donors right now are trusting, giving what we can to make their

00:59:04.260 | decisions.

00:59:06.660 | So if you care about using your donation to do as much good as possible, go to giving

00:59:11.220 | what we can.org/deep to start finding charities that can help you maximize your impact.

00:59:18.300 | That's giving what we can.org/deep.

00:59:26.380 | Our charity has really taken a hit ever since giving what we can came along.

00:59:31.280 | And then people who we're trying to get the work for our charity at lavish salaries, they're

00:59:36.020 | not coming anymore because of 80,000 hours.

00:59:37.620 | And they're like, "Oh, that's not a good job."

00:59:39.380 | So we were screwed because of these altruists that are actually doing good in the world.

00:59:45.500 | Can't skim off our baby deep work charity.

00:59:47.700 | The infants aren't going to be focused.

00:59:48.700 | What are we going to do, man?

00:59:49.700 | Infants are the future.

00:59:50.700 | All right.

00:59:51.700 | I think we have time for a couple more questions.

00:59:53.340 | What do we have next?

00:59:54.340 | All right.

00:59:55.340 | So kind of talking about some of these deep life questions.

00:59:59.140 | This question is from Joe and it's about, "Does Cal struggle with comparing himself

01:00:06.500 | to others?"

01:00:08.500 | No, because I'm the best.

01:00:11.700 | All right.

01:00:13.740 | That's the way I think about it.

01:00:15.260 | I did compare myself to others and I'm better than them.

01:00:20.000 | Now the real answer is yes and yes.

01:00:22.660 | I do compare myself to others and yes, it can be a problem because think about what

01:00:26.780 | I do for a living.

01:00:28.900 | Two things, I'm an academic and I'm a writer.

01:00:32.020 | Academia especially in theory like I'm in, but you can very precisely assess how good

01:00:38.160 | you are.

01:00:39.160 | I mean, you can tell really fast where are you publishing, how much of those results

01:00:43.620 | getting cited, how much are you publishing?

01:00:48.020 | You can get to that quick.

01:00:49.340 | It doesn't take me much time to figure out exactly where you stand in the pecking order

01:00:53.300 | of intellectualism.

01:00:54.700 | And then if you actually have conversations with people, you can very quickly sort out,

01:00:57.780 | well, this person is more of a hot shot in this field than I am.

01:00:59.780 | I'm more of a hot shot than that person.

01:01:01.100 | It's all pecking order.

01:01:02.100 | It's like baseball.

01:01:03.380 | You just walk around with your OPS.

01:01:04.580 | And I got to be careful about that because Jesse, just a quick aside, but you know we

01:01:08.140 | did the survey where we solicited feedback from listeners about what they liked and didn't

01:01:13.060 | like about the show and it was great and we got 400 responses.

01:01:16.260 | I've never seen more unanimity than I saw in people making it clear to us that the thing

01:01:22.020 | they most do not want me to talk about on this show is baseball.

01:01:26.580 | Get out.

01:01:27.580 | I'm not clear about that.

01:01:28.580 | So I should, I should, but which I will now respond to it.

01:01:32.460 | And I'm going to come back to the question too, but let me now respond to with a, with

01:01:35.260 | a quick, with a quick sidetrack about baseball.

01:01:39.460 | So you know, uh, I'm a fan of this broadcaster around here in the DC area.

01:01:43.260 | Grant Paulson.

01:01:44.260 | Yeah.

01:01:45.260 | Who's an interesting character because he was a, a, a sports reporter savant.

01:01:49.940 | So it was like a kid.

01:01:51.600 | He was in the locker room at the caps.

01:01:52.940 | I think he was on, he would go on Letterman because it was like this novelty.

01:01:56.180 | It's like 10 year old who was a sports reporter.

01:01:58.220 | His whole life has been, has been focused on this.

01:02:00.380 | So I mentioned him in an episode, like I got to find an excuse to have on the show so we

01:02:04.420 | can talk Nats, right?

01:02:05.740 | Get, get the details.

01:02:07.140 | Well someone sent me an email the other day where I guess someone knows Grant and tweeted

01:02:14.500 | at him.

01:02:15.500 | It was like, Hey, the worlds are coming together.

01:02:18.000 | Like I always listen to deep questions and, and they're talking about you.

01:02:22.740 | And Grant gave it a something, I don't know, a thumbs up emoji.

01:02:26.380 | So he's, he's as good as a cohost at this point, which again, according, I can't emphasize

01:02:31.500 | this enough according to our survey, what people like and don't like about our podcast,

01:02:35.100 | it would literally be the end of the show.

01:02:37.180 | It'd be awesome because we just talked baseball until he realized, wait, what's your audience?

01:02:41.900 | Then he just hear footsteps and then, you know, his car, his car taken off.

01:02:47.060 | All right.

01:02:48.060 | Anyways, back to the real question for the listeners who remain.

01:02:50.260 | Yes, in academia, it's very easy to compare yourself to others.

01:02:53.820 | I mean, if anything, I was protected a little bit by the fact that I went to a place where

01:02:58.020 | people were so smart and I'm talking about the theory group at MIT that I didn't even

01:03:02.020 | have to see myself as being in the uncanny Valley as someone who could compete.

01:03:06.900 | I mean, especially the faculty there, they were just so incandescent smart.

01:03:10.780 | I was like, this is just cool.

01:03:11.780 | Like, look at that, look what this guy's doing.

01:03:13.780 | So that helped me a little bit, but yes, in academia, it's, it's crystal clear.

01:03:16.740 | There's so many milestones you can see.

01:03:18.420 | Oh, you got tenure before me.

01:03:20.700 | You're at this school is ranked here.

01:03:21.700 | And I'm at that school.

01:03:22.700 | You published four papers.

01:03:23.700 | You only did three.

01:03:24.700 | You won the best paper award.

01:03:25.700 | You didn't crystal clear.

01:03:26.700 | So yes, writing's the same thing.

01:03:28.380 | Success number of copies sold.

01:03:30.820 | You can't escape the number.

01:03:32.180 | It directly influences how much you're paid for your books.

01:03:34.980 | It's like, you can't escape it.

01:03:36.420 | It's it's destiny.

01:03:37.420 | So I'm in a world, two worlds where I can, I can see exactly where I stand.

01:03:44.180 | As my wife will tell me, I tend to look up, not down.

01:03:48.220 | So I mean, I'm happy about where I am, but also I'm always have this like ambitious next

01:03:52.660 | level I'm going to.

01:03:53.660 | All right.

01:03:54.660 | So how do I deal with that?

01:03:55.660 | Four pieces of advice that work for me.

01:03:58.780 | Number one, be clear about your vision for your life.

01:04:01.840 | Get excited about that vision.

01:04:03.100 | So know specifically what you are trying to do.

01:04:05.680 | What is your vision of a life well lived?

01:04:08.420 | We talked about in the last answer that from episode 210, I do a deep life academy segment

01:04:15.540 | about lifestyle centric career planning.

01:04:17.140 | That's exactly what I'm talking about here.

01:04:19.140 | So know what you have is your definition of success so that you're not going to be pushed

01:04:23.860 | around by arbitrary numbers is publishing the most papers of you in your field.

01:04:28.980 | Your definition is that part of your vision, then you should care about that.

01:04:31.620 | But if it's not, then you shouldn't.

01:04:33.700 | All right.

01:04:34.700 | So that leads us to point number two, which is don't worry about things not related to

01:04:37.660 | your vision.

01:04:40.460 | And when people do really cool things in your field that aren't directly related to what

01:04:44.220 | you are trying to do with your life, be proud of them, be impressed.

01:04:48.140 | Like, that's cool.

01:04:49.140 | Look at that, man.

01:04:50.140 | Look at this thing.

01:04:51.500 | This guy wrote 10 papers last year.

01:04:53.780 | That's awesome.

01:04:54.980 | But like maybe you have a vision for your academic career, and I'm just making this

01:04:58.800 | up that involves you also doing a bit of writing and having some breathing room and maybe doing

01:05:04.260 | a podcast with Grant Paulson where you talk about baseball for three hours each year.

01:05:07.660 | So 10 papers a year was not part of your vision.

01:05:10.420 | So you don't have to be upset at yourself for not doing that.

01:05:14.020 | That's not part of the plan.

01:05:15.020 | All right.

01:05:16.020 | Number three, for people who are executing better than you on the things you care about,

01:05:23.140 | it's okay to have that light a fire, but aim that fire at process, not the person.

01:05:29.100 | No, I definitely do this.

01:05:30.780 | I want to have a fire lit.

01:05:32.420 | Like, and this person is kind of in the same space as me, but selling more books.

01:05:39.500 | I want, we can do that.

01:05:41.060 | I want that.

01:05:42.060 | Why am I not there?

01:05:43.060 | Like, okay, we got to figure this out.

01:05:44.220 | Or like just my academic, I'm not happy where I am.

01:05:47.420 | I'm not the respect I'm getting at.

01:05:49.460 | I'm not where I want to be.

01:05:50.900 | It's okay to let that light a fire if it's directly related to your vision of a life

01:05:53.780 | well live, but you aim that fire at your process, not at the person.

01:05:56.740 | You don't look at that person and start thinking like, man, what's wrong with them?

01:06:02.100 | Or it's not fair.

01:06:03.260 | Or I can't, that guy's so awesome.

01:06:04.660 | I'm so inferior.

01:06:05.660 | You put the fire on your process.

01:06:07.060 | You're like, well, I'm on social media a lot.

01:06:09.860 | Like I'm messing around with this other junk.

01:06:11.660 | Like I got to get my act together.

01:06:12.860 | I'm not really reading.

01:06:13.860 | I need to simplify my life.

01:06:14.980 | I got to refocus on the things that matter.

01:06:17.340 | Light the fire, but aimed at it.

01:06:18.500 | What matters aiming at process.

01:06:22.220 | Number four, never, and just make this a blanket rule.

01:06:27.860 | Never try to take down someone else in the vein of hope.

01:06:32.900 | It's going to make you feel better about you.

01:06:36.180 | It is a hundred percent, the human instinct, especially in conversation with others.

01:06:40.700 | Like this guy's out selling me when I'm talking to Jesse, I'm going to kind of undercut him.

01:06:48.500 | Like yeah, but you know, like this guy, he's got this weird timing.

01:06:52.980 | He really, he's like friends with Joe Rogan and was on the show.

01:06:55.380 | Yeah.

01:06:56.380 | You sort of tried to like undercut it and your mind's like, this is going to work.

01:06:58.960 | They're going to be like, yeah, you're right.

01:07:00.860 | I don't, I'm not impressed by him.

01:07:03.340 | I'm impressed by you.

01:07:04.820 | That's right.

01:07:05.820 | He didn't really deserve that.

01:07:06.820 | You're awesome.

01:07:07.820 | That never ever works.

01:07:08.820 | Most people see it exactly what it is, man, you are vindictive and jealous.

01:07:13.820 | And I now think about you less and you're just, and you're going to realize that and

01:07:16.420 | feel worse about yourself.

01:07:17.420 | It never works.

01:07:18.540 | So instead have the simple rule that whenever you feel the impulse to bring down someone

01:07:23.580 | who's doing better at something that you care about, whenever you feel that impulse, that

01:07:28.220 | should be a Pavlovian bell that says, okay, it's time for me to say something nice about

01:07:31.580 | him and just force yourself to say something nice about him.

01:07:34.860 | That's a cool book.

01:07:36.420 | It's impressive what he did with that.

01:07:38.380 | Yeah, I wish, I wish that's great.

01:07:40.820 | Oh, here, let me tell you something cool about that guy.

01:07:43.420 | This is what I do.

01:07:44.420 | This is my rule on podcasts, by the way.

01:07:45.620 | Like if, if someone brings up on the interviewee and someone brings up someone else who I know

01:07:50.660 | or is in the field, my rule is almost always find something really cool, something cool

01:07:55.140 | about that person to emphasize, you know?

01:07:57.540 | Oh, well, let me tell you, let me, let me tell you something cool about Tim Ferriss

01:08:00.580 | that you might not have heard.

01:08:01.580 | Like, you know, cool things about him.

01:08:03.020 | Here's something you might not have known that I think is also really cool.

01:08:05.700 | I mean, otherwise you just get drowned in pettiness and jealousy and, uh, you end up,

01:08:12.580 | I don't know, up real late on Twitter.

01:08:15.300 | And I think that's like most people on Twitter now is people who are just sort of upset at

01:08:20.260 | other people for various reasons and, uh, are in a cave and have the Phantom of the

01:08:25.020 | Opera half mask on and they're deformed because that's what happens if you use Twitter too

01:08:30.340 | much, you get the formed and they're at an Oregon and then just like tweeting, like you're

01:08:34.940 | awful emoji.

01:08:35.940 | It's my Twitter simulation.

01:08:36.940 | Oh, well, okay, let's do one more.

01:08:37.940 | All right.

01:08:38.940 | Final question is from Amy.

01:08:39.940 | She asked, how can I reset my ambitions after burning out?

01:08:52.900 | She's talking about how she's overwhelmed with her career and she's trying to improve

01:08:56.940 | at that and she's fresh off a burnout and is lost on where to start.

01:09:02.660 | It's a good question because I don't think we, we don't get into this enough burnout

01:09:09.420 | and the sources of burnout.

01:09:10.420 | We don't get into that enough when we talk about optimistic forward-looking discussions

01:09:14.740 | of productivity and planning, organization, et cetera.

01:09:17.260 | So let's, let's, let's be clear here.

01:09:20.860 | You need to do, you know, your lifestyle centric career planning.

01:09:23.140 | That's the theme of this episode.

01:09:25.140 | Lifestyle centric career planning is a great way.

01:09:27.060 | It's a theme of block two, at least know your vision, work backwards to figure out what

01:09:31.540 | to do with your career.

01:09:32.620 | Here's the key.

01:09:34.820 | Keep the sources of your burnout in mind when you construct that vision, it should be your

01:09:39.780 | vision of an ideal life should keep in mind the things that really tax you, the things

01:09:45.780 | that tend to accumulate and lead to burnout.

01:09:48.060 | Your ideal life should be a life in which you're free from burnout.

01:09:51.420 | That has to be part of the vision.

01:09:54.220 | I think too often what people do is they invalidate the burnout and the things that lead to burnout.

01:09:59.580 | Like that's malformed and successful people don't have that.

01:10:04.900 | And so my vision of what I'm trying to do with my life has to be one that ignores that.

01:10:09.620 | And it might be a vision that has all of the stressors, all of the anxiety triggers, all

01:10:14.500 | of the things that really don't match well with you and lead to burnout in it.

01:10:18.180 | And that's not going to work.

01:10:19.180 | So build an ideal vision of a life should be a life without burnout, which means the

01:10:23.300 | things that cause the burnout should be largely absent from it.

01:10:27.220 | I do this.

01:10:29.220 | I do this with my own planning, my vision with which I think about my life because my

01:10:37.300 | body has this really clear, I talk about this a bunch on the show.

01:10:41.100 | It has this really clear feedback mechanism on don't like where you're going, the workload,

01:10:46.860 | the type of work and it's insomnia.

01:10:50.300 | I have trouble sleeping when things get out of whack.

01:10:55.120 | That feedback mechanism, and that's my burnout.

01:10:57.900 | That feedback mechanism has a huge impact on the vision of my life that I build.

01:11:02.260 | I steer away from visions, especially the professional part of my life that are getting

01:11:09.260 | after it busy, where it's a startup and it's like, let's go and we're going to just get

01:11:16.060 | after it and have all these different things going on and calls and meetings and we're

01:11:19.980 | going to move and we're going to build this thing big and make $20 million off of it.

01:11:23.980 | I have to steer away from that because if I have too much going on and then I might

01:11:29.060 | start getting insomnia, it'd be very hard to keep up those hard schedules.

01:11:31.980 | It's a governor.

01:11:32.980 | So my vision doesn't involve that.

01:11:34.140 | Think about the visions that you see playing out of my own life.

01:11:37.020 | They're all slow productivity related.

01:11:39.820 | It's all based on things that no particular single day matters.

01:11:45.020 | What matters is that over time, you're coming back again and again to work on this book.

01:11:50.020 | Over time, you're thinking deep thoughts.

01:11:51.820 | Hey, tomorrow, if you're tired, who cares?

01:11:54.260 | But this month, you spent a lot of days thinking about this paper.

01:11:56.940 | You spent a lot of days working on this book.

01:11:58.500 | So I've constructed an ideal vision that keeps explicitly in mind the specific things that

01:12:03.480 | lead to my sources of burnout, my particular definition of burnout.

01:12:08.140 | I think that's really important.

01:12:11.100 | If you get drained when you're not feeding off other people, you're very social, your

01:12:15.860 | family and friends are important, you better have a vision of your life in which you're

01:12:19.860 | not working 80 hours a week.

01:12:21.720 | It's got to be a vision of your life where you live near family, where you spend a lot

01:12:24.980 | of time with community and friends.

01:12:26.460 | I'm going to give a specific example here.

01:12:29.660 | There's a writer whose book I read, and I feel bad because I forgot the name of it.

01:12:35.060 | I think it's Donald Miller is his name.

01:12:37.340 | He had a self-help advice book.

01:12:39.620 | But anyways, the thing that I remember from that book is they bought a bunch of land outside

01:12:45.440 | of Nashville and built it.

01:12:48.060 | They wanted it to be like a retreat center and a place where writers and musicians and

01:12:51.180 | artists they know could always be coming through and having retreats and working.

01:12:56.140 | They could be outside a lot, work on the land a lot, have a lot of people they found really

01:13:00.300 | interesting there.

01:13:01.300 | It was a vision of success for this person in the world of business that really focused

01:13:06.420 | on what he needed.

01:13:08.900 | Probably this would be someone where 90 hours in their office at McKinsey, where you're

01:13:14.500 | not seeing anybody and you're just cut off and you and your spreadsheet would be immiserating.

01:13:20.260 | Your vision is what I'm trying to say here, has to keep your sources of burnout in mind

01:13:24.660 | because your vision needs to be one in which burnout is infrequent and unexpected when

01:13:30.380 | it does happen.

01:13:31.380 | That's what I'm saying.

01:13:32.380 | I mean, so update your vision and it might require radical change.

01:13:36.540 | If the source of your burnout is going to be unavoidable, you're in an academic department

01:13:42.660 | where there's acrimony through the roof and it just stresses you out and you can't get

01:13:46.580 | more than a semester or two without just it wearing you down.

01:13:50.340 | You might have to do something radically different.

01:13:52.320 | You need a vision of your life in which that doesn't happen.

01:13:56.100 | So I want to validate your burnout and say, use that in your planning.

01:14:00.820 | All right.

01:14:02.500 | Speaking of burnout, we've been at it a lot.

01:14:07.740 | We're recording late today, actually, right, Jesse?

01:14:09.220 | I mean, we usually record earlier in the day, but I gave a talk, I did a meeting, I was

01:14:13.740 | closing out a New Yorker article, then we did this recording.

01:14:17.140 | So I declare myself burnt out.

01:14:20.580 | The episode really tied itself together from the first question to the last question.

01:14:26.620 | Even last week with lifestyle-centric planning.

01:14:29.260 | Yeah, I know.

01:14:30.620 | The questions seem to be clustered now.

01:14:33.540 | And I'm optimistic going forward because we're switching, starting with this episode, to

01:14:38.500 | a brand new question survey.

01:14:40.660 | So this is insider baseball.

01:14:43.340 | Up until this point, we would send out periodic surveys to solicit questions to my email list.

01:14:50.540 | And then we would use those questions until they were done.

01:14:52.980 | And then we would send out a new survey, which meant we're working now on a survey from December,

01:14:59.980 | I think, that only went to my email list.

01:15:01.900 | So we've switched, started with this episode, that anyone can submit questions at any time

01:15:05.820 | at a persistent open collection survey, calnewport.com/podcast.

01:15:10.620 | But I think because we're starting from right now, everyone asking questions are going to

01:15:14.380 | be completely up to date with what we talk about, the rhythm of the show.

01:15:19.540 | And so I think the questions we're going to get going forward are going to be more on

01:15:22.580 | point.

01:15:23.580 | Also, we're asking for case studies now.

01:15:25.340 | I want to spend more time talking about the details of people's lives, what they've done

01:15:30.700 | right, ways they have found depth in their work or life is impressive.

01:15:33.340 | So we're going to have some more case studies as well.

01:15:35.060 | So I'm excited about what we're going to have going forward.

01:15:38.620 | So the new format is going to be we're going to get a quick question out of the way, three

01:15:42.220 | hours with Grant.

01:15:44.180 | So we're going to because we have to have an hour on like the minor league system update,

01:15:47.200 | we got to have an hour on you know, what's happening with like the vet players and the

01:15:51.260 | free agent season and then just like an hour on I think, the Watson and the development

01:15:57.740 | staff.

01:15:58.740 | So three hours on that.

01:15:59.740 | Then we'll do another question.

01:16:00.740 | And that'll be the show.

01:16:01.740 | So I think we got a pretty good, pretty good show.

01:16:06.460 | Pretty, pretty good format.

01:16:07.900 | Yeah.

01:16:08.900 | Again, I cannot be more clear about how much people do not want us talking about baseball

01:16:15.140 | by far the most common thing cited in don't talk.

01:16:20.260 | So I am great.

01:16:22.260 | I haven't mentioned the word.

01:16:23.660 | I am great at listening to stories.

01:16:25.460 | All right.

01:16:26.460 | That's enough.

01:16:27.460 | Enough nonsense.

01:16:28.460 | Thank you everyone for listening.

01:16:30.060 | Go to calnewport.com/podcast to submit your own questions.

01:16:32.780 | Go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia to watch this episode or clips.

01:16:37.140 | We'll be back next week with a full I promise baseball free episode and until then, as always,

01:16:42.780 | stay deep.

01:16:44.180 | [Music]

Ep. 211: How To Organize Your Life | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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