Full Length Episode | #169 | January 31, 2022

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions,

00:00:09.000 | episode 169.

00:00:11.540 | I'm here as always in the Deep Work HQ.

00:00:18.600 | Happy to announce that Jesse is back.

00:00:21.380 | Jesse, you look healthy and hale over there.

00:00:24.440 | - I'm doing okay, it's good to be back.

00:00:26.400 | - I forgot in just the two sessions you weren't here,

00:00:31.120 | how much time it takes me, how slow I am.

00:00:34.440 | And all the clicking and dragging that is involved

00:00:37.720 | manipulating the computer to actually record these episodes.

00:00:40.200 | I got spoiled with you being here.

00:00:41.640 | When I had to go back and do it by myself,

00:00:43.240 | I was like putting a two-year-old on a computer.

00:00:46.120 | It's like, let me click on that

00:00:48.520 | and let me, it took me forever, man.

00:00:50.760 | So I'm glad you're back, let's put it that way.

00:00:53.880 | - Yeah, it's good to be back.

00:00:54.840 | Thanks for having me back.

00:00:56.400 | - You look good, you're healthy, everything fine?

00:00:59.360 | - Yeah, I'm doing totally fine.

00:01:00.880 | I was, you know, followed the protocols and now I'm back.

00:01:05.400 | - Yeah, now I think if my reading

00:01:07.840 | of the medical literature is correct,

00:01:09.640 | because you have had vaccine shots and you got COVID,

00:01:14.200 | you are now, and I believe this is the technical term,

00:01:16.920 | immortal.

00:01:17.760 | Do I have that right?

00:01:19.560 | I don't know if I have the science quite right,

00:01:20.880 | but that's what I understand from med Twitter,

00:01:22.920 | that you are now immortal.

00:01:25.240 | - That sounds good, I'll take it.

00:01:26.960 | - That'd be an interesting turn for our show

00:01:29.920 | if we just had a large segment each week

00:01:33.480 | that was just us giving terrible COVID advice.

00:01:37.240 | It was just, it was just so wrong.

00:01:40.080 | I'm like, Jesse, I'm not sure if you know this,

00:01:42.640 | but users of the time block planner,

00:01:46.320 | 70% less likely to be mechanically ventilated.

00:01:48.960 | So let me just put that out there.

00:01:50.640 | Did we just get kicked off YouTube?

00:01:53.840 | - Hopefully not, we just had the channel.

00:01:55.440 | - Yeah, I know.

00:01:56.560 | Yeah, maybe this would not be the best idea.

00:01:58.760 | YouTube, that was satire.

00:02:02.920 | The time block planning has no association

00:02:07.160 | with COVID outcomes.

00:02:09.400 | Yeah, maybe we should stick with this type of advice.

00:02:13.840 | But there is a connection

00:02:15.480 | because while Jesse was in COVID isolation,

00:02:19.400 | that actually gave enough time for us

00:02:20.880 | to get the YouTube channel launched.

00:02:22.480 | That is rolling right now, we're excited about it.

00:02:25.320 | Jesse, what's the update?

00:02:26.160 | What do we need to know about the YouTube channel?

00:02:27.680 | Everything's rolling fine?

00:02:29.200 | - Everything's rolling.

00:02:30.040 | We're in the first stage, so all the videos are up.

00:02:33.440 | We've got to fix some of the intro music,

00:02:35.360 | which I'm in the process of doing

00:02:36.640 | 'cause people said it was too loud,

00:02:37.800 | which going back on it, they were right.

00:02:39.960 | And then we'll continue to fix the thumbnails and stuff.

00:02:43.960 | We had some good fan feedback about some stuff

00:02:47.800 | and they had some good advice.

00:02:49.080 | We're gonna implement that

00:02:50.080 | and then keep on putting out a lot of videos.

00:02:52.560 | - And what's the timeline people should expect?

00:02:55.360 | So if you're listening to this episode,

00:02:57.920 | let's say the day it comes out on a Monday,

00:03:00.280 | what's our rough timeline for when you can expect

00:03:02.800 | the video of each of the questions in today's episode

00:03:05.400 | to then be on YouTube?

00:03:06.600 | - Pretty much within that day, maybe in the next day,

00:03:11.480 | but going for like in a month, like definitely that day.

00:03:14.960 | - Oh, okay, excellent. - Yeah, that's my goal.

00:03:16.360 | - Yeah, that's even better than I thought.

00:03:17.720 | So, all right, so as you know, audience,

00:03:22.360 | every question, every deep dive is going

00:03:24.480 | onto the YouTube channel with its own standalone video.

00:03:27.120 | So you can now go back and review, save, share,

00:03:29.360 | whatever you wanna do with the individual questions

00:03:31.760 | that particularly interest you.

00:03:33.400 | And as Jesse just said,

00:03:35.200 | within a day or two of these episodes going live,

00:03:37.240 | you should be able to find those questions.

00:03:39.920 | Right now we have some basic playlist on there.

00:03:42.520 | I think we're doing full episodes, deep dives,

00:03:45.480 | deep work questions, deep life questions.

00:03:48.000 | As we put more and more videos up there,

00:03:49.640 | we'll put more refined playlists,

00:03:52.960 | sort of sub topics that are popular.

00:03:54.880 | So feel free to send suggestions about,

00:03:58.960 | hey, what playlist would you like to see, et cetera.

00:04:01.240 | Jesse, can they send this right to you?

00:04:02.920 | Is that, is your Jesse address at calnewpoy.com?

00:04:05.480 | - It works. - It works.

00:04:06.320 | - I was emailing with, I forget the one guy's name,

00:04:09.680 | but I was emailing with the one guy

00:04:11.200 | and he gave some really good advice.

00:04:12.680 | - Oh, there we go.

00:04:13.520 | So thoughts on the YouTube channel,

00:04:16.320 | be it like what playlist we should break these videos in

00:04:19.040 | or technical things about whatever,

00:04:22.320 | jesse@calnewport.com.

00:04:25.720 | Jesse is the maestro of the YouTube.

00:04:27.240 | So he will take a look at that.

00:04:29.520 | All right, so I wanna do a deep dive today.

00:04:34.360 | It's a new special class of deep dive

00:04:37.920 | that I just wanna briefly motivate.

00:04:39.880 | So I wanna do a series of deep dives,

00:04:41.920 | maybe not every episode, but on a lot of episodes

00:04:44.240 | in the near future that I'm calling core ideas.

00:04:48.400 | And the idea is to go back and revisit the big ideas

00:04:54.440 | from my writing that we talk about

00:04:57.760 | all the time on this show.

00:04:59.440 | Listeners who have been here since the beginning

00:05:03.480 | know these ideas pretty well.

00:05:05.120 | I've talked about them before, but for newer listeners,

00:05:08.120 | for newer viewers, they don't always know exactly

00:05:10.040 | what we're talking about or what the details are.

00:05:12.360 | And now that we have the ability to post video

00:05:15.800 | of just these segments, I thought we should have a deep dive

00:05:18.320 | on each of the core ideas I talk about

00:05:20.040 | so I can just reference it.

00:05:21.640 | Hey, if you need to remind yourself about the deep life

00:05:26.080 | or my time management philosophy or career capital

00:05:30.200 | or what have you, just go watch the core idea video

00:05:32.400 | and you can quickly get back up to speed.

00:05:34.280 | So we're gonna start that today.

00:05:36.560 | Today, I wanna do my first core idea deep dive,

00:05:41.560 | I should say my first core idea deep dive

00:05:43.640 | and the topic I wanna do it on is time management.

00:05:48.640 | So my goal here is to give a brief summary

00:05:54.480 | of my thinking about time management

00:05:58.360 | and what that's gonna consist of is let me define for you

00:06:01.520 | what I mean by time management.

00:06:04.160 | Let me give you the three principles in my writing

00:06:08.960 | and on this podcast, we always talk about

00:06:10.800 | that any good time management system

00:06:13.320 | should probably satisfy and then I will briefly talk

00:06:15.800 | through my particular system, which we can think of

00:06:19.680 | as one example of a time management system

00:06:22.840 | that satisfies these principles.

00:06:24.520 | So you can do something else,

00:06:25.360 | but so you see what a real fully fledged

00:06:27.720 | time management system that satisfies

00:06:29.160 | these principles look like.

00:06:30.000 | And then I'm gonna have a bonus fourth principle

00:06:32.640 | I wanna talk about that debatably

00:06:35.000 | is not really about time management,

00:06:36.720 | it lives right outside time management, but it's related.

00:06:39.040 | So I'm gonna talk about that briefly at the end.

00:06:40.680 | So that is my agenda for this core idea discussion

00:06:43.680 | on time management.

00:06:46.040 | So let's start what do I mean by time management for me,

00:06:51.560 | at least in the context of this discussion,

00:06:53.720 | I'm thinking about work.

00:06:56.080 | So time management in work, the way you deal with your time

00:07:00.080 | outside of work is a little bit different.

00:07:01.720 | So I'm gonna put that aside.

00:07:03.680 | And in the context of work,

00:07:05.960 | I'm gonna define time management to be

00:07:09.000 | whatever philosophy process systems or rules

00:07:12.440 | that you deploy to make decisions

00:07:13.960 | about what you're gonna do right now with your time.

00:07:16.560 | How do you figure out it's 1226 on a Friday,

00:07:22.360 | what do I do next?

00:07:23.660 | In the end, that's what a time management system is,

00:07:26.720 | a way to help you answer that question

00:07:30.240 | in as useful a manner as possible.

00:07:33.240 | Now, everyone who works has some sort of

00:07:37.080 | time management system they're using.

00:07:40.140 | If you don't know what it's called,

00:07:41.680 | if you can't tell me the details of it,

00:07:43.320 | if you've never thought about that,

00:07:44.680 | it's just a really bad one, probably,

00:07:46.680 | but you still have one, one way or the other,

00:07:48.500 | you're making these decisions.

00:07:49.600 | The question is just how do we wanna make these decisions?

00:07:52.480 | What is going to work better?

00:07:54.080 | So I'm gonna give you the three properties

00:07:57.400 | I think any good time management system should have.

00:08:00.460 | I love alliteration,

00:08:03.440 | long-time listeners of the podcast know this.

00:08:05.820 | I love Cs in my alliteration,

00:08:08.880 | as long-time listeners of this podcast know.

00:08:11.380 | So I named the three key properties here with three Cs,

00:08:14.720 | capture, configure, control.

00:08:18.440 | Let's talk about these each briefly in the abstract,

00:08:21.280 | and I'll tell you about my system that satisfies these.

00:08:23.680 | Number one, capture.

00:08:26.040 | I believe a good professional time management system

00:08:28.880 | needs to have some place in which you store

00:08:34.480 | all the information that's important to making decisions

00:08:38.880 | about what you need to be doing

00:08:40.120 | and what you should be doing, that is trusted.

00:08:43.000 | It's a place that you are going to look at,

00:08:45.620 | things that go in there will not be forgotten.

00:08:48.120 | These ideas get out of your head and into a system

00:08:50.560 | so you're not wasting brain cycles

00:08:52.720 | on trying to remember or keep fresh

00:08:55.760 | stuff that you need to do.

00:08:57.160 | Now, in the context of tasks,

00:09:01.160 | we can give credit to this idea to David Allen.

00:09:03.920 | So David Allen and his seminal

00:09:07.080 | post-computer time management book,

00:09:09.640 | and I mean that very specifically

00:09:10.840 | because as I've written about before,

00:09:12.840 | time management goes through big evolution.

00:09:14.920 | So post-computers, computer networks, and email,

00:09:17.160 | time management went through a big revolution

00:09:18.680 | and David Allen was there at the beginning.

00:09:21.200 | He had this idea of full capture,

00:09:23.840 | where he said all of your tasks should be in a trusted system

00:09:25.880 | that you review regularly, not in your head.

00:09:29.840 | He actually adapted that idea

00:09:31.360 | from a previous business thinker named Dean Acheson,

00:09:35.180 | unrelated to President Truman, Secretary of State,

00:09:38.920 | same name, different person, who had first developed,

00:09:41.680 | I believe in the 1970s, this notion of full capture

00:09:44.200 | and David Allen expanded it.

00:09:45.480 | So that's really the core of this.

00:09:48.680 | And David Allen's articulation of full capture said,

00:09:52.080 | don't waste mental energy remembering things,

00:09:55.000 | have it in a system so your brain can be clear

00:09:57.120 | to actually focus on working.

00:09:59.840 | This also reduces a lot of stress

00:10:01.560 | because your brain gets stressed

00:10:02.800 | when it's worried about forgetting things you need to do.

00:10:06.040 | I generalize capture though, beyond what Allen talks about.

00:10:09.840 | In addition to each of your commitments

00:10:12.160 | being somewhere you trust,

00:10:15.320 | I want your plans to also be somewhere you trust.

00:10:18.640 | So any thinking you've done

00:10:20.960 | about what you're working on

00:10:22.240 | on all sorts of different timescales,

00:10:24.720 | that should be written down somewhere you trust

00:10:26.520 | and review regularly as well.

00:10:28.400 | I think that's often overlooked,

00:10:29.820 | but the planning process of what's going on,

00:10:32.060 | how do I wanna get my work done?

00:10:33.280 | What needs to be done this semester?

00:10:34.660 | What do I have to get done this week to hit this goal?

00:10:37.120 | That's a really important part of time management.

00:10:39.280 | I don't want that all in your head.

00:10:41.240 | That also gets captured.

00:10:43.800 | All right, second property, configure.

00:10:46.980 | All right, this is a twist that I've become

00:10:51.400 | increasingly a loud advocate for,

00:10:54.100 | which is care more about how you actually organize

00:10:57.980 | this information that you're capturing.

00:10:59.920 | I think you really need to think through,

00:11:02.920 | once I have this information written down somewhere,

00:11:06.080 | where do I put it?

00:11:07.360 | How do I organize it?

00:11:08.960 | Is it in categories?

00:11:10.160 | Is it broken up by role?

00:11:13.320 | Equally important,

00:11:15.200 | getting the relevant information consolidated.

00:11:17.880 | I'm really big on this.

00:11:18.840 | So not only do you have a really smart organization

00:11:21.960 | for all the stuff on your plate,

00:11:24.200 | you're also gathering in one place

00:11:26.120 | all the relevant information.

00:11:27.560 | You're not searching through your email inbox

00:11:30.520 | to try to remember what does this mean?

00:11:32.200 | And where are we?

00:11:33.180 | And what do I owe this person?

00:11:34.640 | I'm supposed to get back to Derek about the program codes.

00:11:38.120 | What does that mean?

00:11:38.960 | Let me go through my inbox.

00:11:39.780 | Now, all that should be in one place.

00:11:42.600 | So these are our two goals with organize.

00:11:44.940 | A, that the information is organized well,

00:11:47.960 | where what you wanna happen here,

00:11:49.560 | what you wanna have happen here

00:11:50.840 | is that you can very quickly get the gestalt

00:11:53.160 | of what's on your plate, what's due, what's not,

00:11:54.920 | who you're waiting to hear back from.

00:11:56.040 | The information is put aside in such a way

00:11:57.760 | that it's not just a list with 100 things.

00:11:59.560 | And two, all the relevant information is there.

00:12:02.120 | I'm not scrambling around to figure out

00:12:05.040 | what I need to know to do this thing.

00:12:07.320 | All the information is there.

00:12:08.760 | All right, control.

00:12:12.840 | The third property of a good time management system.

00:12:15.600 | Control says, instead of being reactive

00:12:21.200 | in your decisions about what you wanna do with your time,

00:12:24.640 | and by reactive, I mean just saying,

00:12:26.040 | okay, it's 1223 on Friday.

00:12:28.240 | What do I wanna do next?

00:12:30.540 | I don't know, let me see what seems relevant.

00:12:32.240 | Let me look at my inbox.

00:12:35.480 | Let me look at Slack.

00:12:37.020 | Maybe I'll look at a to-do list

00:12:38.560 | and try to choose something off of it.

00:12:40.640 | Control says, don't be reactive.

00:12:42.000 | Don't wait till you get to the moment

00:12:43.360 | to say, what should I do next?

00:12:45.400 | Instead, be proactive.

00:12:47.800 | Make a plan for your time in advance

00:12:50.640 | that makes the most of the time

00:12:52.400 | that you actually have available.

00:12:54.360 | So you think ahead, you look at the time you have available

00:12:57.040 | and you say, what do I wanna do with this?

00:12:59.560 | I'm planning the whole picture at once.

00:13:02.480 | I'm not waiting till the moment to say what happens next.

00:13:05.280 | Now, on the podcast, I talk often

00:13:09.680 | about doing this control at multiple timescales.

00:13:14.200 | You'll hear me talk about multi-scale planning.

00:13:16.360 | This is where that actually applies.

00:13:17.760 | And what I recommend is that you should be doing

00:13:19.400 | this type of planning on three timescales,

00:13:21.640 | quarterly, weekly, daily.

00:13:23.140 | So quarterly, you have a plan

00:13:27.880 | for what you wanna try to get done that quarter.

00:13:30.640 | What's important?

00:13:31.480 | What are the big projects you're working on?

00:13:33.960 | There could even be daily work

00:13:35.460 | that you wanna really emphasize,

00:13:36.800 | like, look, I gotta get my cold calls up.

00:13:39.640 | So every Monday, Wednesday, Friday,

00:13:41.200 | I spend the first hour doing cold calls, whatever it is,

00:13:43.320 | but you're making this plan for the quarter,

00:13:45.960 | looking ahead at the quarter.

00:13:46.920 | Is this a busy quarter, not a big quarter?

00:13:48.920 | What are the big deadlines this quarter?

00:13:50.720 | Is there a huge trade fair halfway through it?

00:13:52.680 | That means the first half of the quarter

00:13:54.080 | has to be really focused on preparing for that trade fair.

00:13:56.880 | You're looking at the whole picture of the quarter

00:13:58.800 | and at this pretty big granularity coming up with a plan.

00:14:02.080 | Every week, you then look at that quarterly plan

00:14:07.120 | and produce a plan for the week ahead of you.

00:14:09.760 | Now you're doing weekly planning.

00:14:12.960 | And when you're doing weekly planning,

00:14:15.160 | what you really wanna do is get a sense

00:14:17.760 | of what's gonna happen which day.

00:14:19.400 | And then finally, you get down to the daily scale

00:14:24.000 | where you say, what am I actually doing

00:14:25.720 | during the hours of the day?

00:14:28.280 | So we're in weekly planning,

00:14:29.640 | you are looking at what am I gonna do

00:14:31.120 | the different days of this week?

00:14:32.780 | At daily planning, you're saying, here's my day.

00:14:36.400 | I have a meeting here, I have a call here,

00:14:37.720 | I have two meetings here, here's a time that's free,

00:14:39.360 | what do I wanna do during that time?

00:14:41.120 | So multi-scale planning, I think is the right way

00:14:43.680 | to think about control.

00:14:45.160 | You're giving your time a job as opposed to asking

00:14:49.240 | in the moment, what should I do next?

00:14:51.720 | And so I think any good time management system

00:14:53.240 | should do capture, configure, control.

00:14:55.620 | Let me talk briefly about my specific instantiation

00:15:01.000 | of these properties, what my time management system

00:15:03.760 | looks like at the moment.

00:15:05.940 | So for capture, there is where I actually store

00:15:10.940 | the things I need to do, and I use Trello,

00:15:15.700 | which is a task board software system.

00:15:18.060 | So it gives you a visual metaphor for cards on a board

00:15:21.460 | arranged vertically in columns.

00:15:23.580 | I use Trello to keep track of tasks and commitments

00:15:27.140 | and I use Google Docs to keep track of plans,

00:15:31.160 | the plans I have about various things.

00:15:34.420 | So Trello is where all my tasks are,

00:15:36.660 | Google Docs are where my plans live.

00:15:39.620 | So that's where in multi-scale planning,

00:15:41.820 | my quarterly plan lives, that's where other plans live.

00:15:46.820 | Jesse and I, for example, have a Google Doc

00:15:49.380 | where we have our plans for the podcast, et cetera.

00:15:54.100 | Trello for tasks, Google Docs for plans.

00:15:58.580 | In addition to the storage systems,

00:16:01.380 | you have to have the capture tool

00:16:04.220 | so the tools you use to capture things during the day

00:16:07.300 | on the fly that will then get later moved

00:16:09.420 | into those storage systems.

00:16:10.660 | Now, for me, I use two main ones.

00:16:12.380 | I have my TimeBlock Planner.

00:16:15.060 | I am in a lucky situation where I was able to design

00:16:19.580 | and publish my own planner.

00:16:20.740 | So you can obviously find out more about that

00:16:22.660 | at timeblockplanner.com, but that planner has

00:16:25.500 | for every day a page in which you can capture stuff.

00:16:28.500 | So I capture stuff right in that planner.

00:16:30.940 | On my computer, I also have a text file on my desktop.

00:16:35.020 | I call it workingmemory.txt because I think of it

00:16:39.380 | as like an expansion of my actual working memory.

00:16:43.980 | And I use that when I'm on my computer to capture things,

00:16:46.260 | especially when I'm cleaning out my email.

00:16:48.780 | I can just type much faster than I can write

00:16:50.860 | and I capture all sorts of notes in this document.

00:16:53.820 | I work through ideas on the document.

00:16:55.460 | It really is like an extension of my working memory.

00:16:57.360 | So a lot gets captured in there.

00:16:58.700 | If I'm in a meeting on Zoom,

00:17:01.420 | things are popping up I have to do,

00:17:03.300 | I'm writing it probably right there

00:17:04.940 | in that workingmemory.txt.

00:17:07.220 | At the end of every day, I do a shutdown.

00:17:09.700 | My planner even has a box I checked.

00:17:12.700 | It says shutdown complete.

00:17:13.900 | That indicates I've done my shutdown.

00:17:15.660 | As part of that shutdown process,

00:17:18.260 | I look through everything in that planner,

00:17:20.520 | everything in workingmemory.txt,

00:17:22.580 | and I get it into one of those more stable systems.

00:17:25.140 | Goes on the Trello or I update my Google Doc.

00:17:28.380 | So those things get pushed back down to zero.

00:17:31.300 | They're temporary tools to capture

00:17:33.020 | and then they get moved into the more stable systems.

00:17:36.040 | The one addendum I should add there is the calendar.

00:17:39.660 | Obviously some of these things are appointments,

00:17:41.100 | so that goes right to the calendar.

00:17:42.500 | All right, configure.

00:17:44.360 | I mentioned I use Trello for my task.

00:17:48.140 | The way I actually use Trello is I have a separate board

00:17:51.460 | for each of my different professional roles.

00:17:53.720 | I keep a separate board as a writer,

00:17:57.540 | a separate board, for example, as a teacher,

00:18:00.900 | which I keep as a separate board as a researcher, et cetera.

00:18:05.900 | Those are then split up into columns.

00:18:07.540 | There's a few standard columns

00:18:09.040 | that every one of these boards have.

00:18:11.020 | I typically have a column where I put tasks on there

00:18:14.020 | that's called to be processed.

00:18:15.760 | It's a pretty complicated thing I need to do,

00:18:18.660 | and I don't quite understand all the details of it,

00:18:20.460 | but I don't want to keep track of it in my head.

00:18:22.020 | But also, you know, it's five o'clock and I'm shutting down.

00:18:24.620 | I don't have time to spend 20 minutes figuring out

00:18:27.060 | what does this mean?

00:18:28.960 | Like, what are the actual actions here?

00:18:30.360 | So I'll just throw that in the to be processed column.

00:18:33.060 | I usually have a column on each of these boards

00:18:34.820 | for waiting to hear back from.

00:18:37.460 | So if I've sent someone a note

00:18:40.280 | and I need information from them,

00:18:42.860 | and that information is critical

00:18:44.080 | for me to keep making progress,

00:18:45.300 | I like to put a card on my Trello board

00:18:48.300 | under waiting to hear back that says,

00:18:50.100 | here's what I'm waiting to hear back from,

00:18:51.780 | and here's what I'm gonna do once I get that information.

00:18:53.740 | I don't want to remember that in my head.

00:18:56.140 | So I put it on there.

00:18:56.980 | I typically have a column for things

00:18:58.180 | I'm working on this week.

00:18:59.500 | And I'll typically have a column for,

00:19:01.940 | if there are specifically persistent initiatives

00:19:04.460 | within that role, I'll give it its own column.

00:19:07.580 | So I can really quickly see for this thing I'm working on,

00:19:10.820 | what are all the different things that need to be done?

00:19:14.900 | So as a researcher, there might be a column for a paper

00:19:17.020 | we're preparing for publication.

00:19:19.200 | In my administrative role at Georgetown,

00:19:21.100 | there might be a column for a search committee that I'm on.

00:19:24.060 | Here's the relevant tasks.

00:19:26.360 | The time that I really get into and clean this up

00:19:29.720 | and look at it and move things around and check in on it

00:19:32.040 | is when I do my weekly plan.

00:19:34.360 | So once a week as part of my commitment to configure,

00:19:37.440 | I really go through these systems and I update it.

00:19:41.540 | Once a week when I'm building my weekly plan,

00:19:44.680 | is also when I'm reviewing the Google Docs

00:19:46.360 | that capture these other types of plans that are going on

00:19:48.560 | and update them and remind myself what's on them.

00:19:50.400 | So the weekly scale is when I'm really

00:19:53.200 | getting my hands dirty.

00:19:54.800 | Throughout the week, I'm just throwing stuff into here

00:19:57.000 | at the end of each day, but each week I really go in

00:19:58.920 | and clean things up.

00:19:59.920 | All right, finally is control.

00:20:02.960 | I already talked about multi-scale planning.

00:20:05.160 | I think it's the best way to do control.

00:20:06.680 | You could do it other ways, but I do,

00:20:08.500 | for me it's semester instead of quarterly,

00:20:10.040 | but semester, weekly, daily planning,

00:20:13.920 | semester plans in a Google Doc, weekly plan.

00:20:17.480 | I actually type it up in a text document and print it out.

00:20:22.240 | And I keep it with me in the back of my time block planner.

00:20:24.600 | So that's how, and I'll update it and reprint it

00:20:26.520 | as I need to throughout the week.

00:20:28.640 | And then for my daily plan, I'm time blocking,

00:20:30.720 | like I talked about, here's my day.

00:20:33.240 | Let me block off everything on my calendar.

00:20:35.240 | Here's the time that remains.

00:20:36.680 | What do I wanna do during that time?

00:20:38.940 | Well, let me look at my weekly plan to remind myself

00:20:40.920 | of what my big picture plan is for this day.

00:20:43.080 | And then I'm blocking off actual hours of time

00:20:45.520 | and saying, here's what I'm doing here.

00:20:46.680 | Here's what I'm doing there.

00:20:48.400 | And I fill in all that information.

00:20:49.760 | I do that right in my time block planner,

00:20:51.260 | but you can do this in any type of notebook.

00:20:54.120 | There's a whole video at my site, timeblockplanner.com

00:20:57.440 | that walks through the details of how time blocking works.

00:20:59.600 | So that is how I do the daily piece.

00:21:02.320 | You put those all together,

00:21:03.760 | there's my commitment to control.

00:21:06.160 | All right, so stepping back, capture, configure, control.

00:21:10.420 | You do those three things,

00:21:12.360 | you're gonna be making smart decisions

00:21:14.720 | about what you wanna be doing with your time professionally.

00:21:18.720 | Now I know people get concerned.

00:21:21.680 | They say, well, I might be injecting too much structure

00:21:25.200 | into my life and this is gonna make my work life more rigid

00:21:28.800 | and I'll be less creative.

00:21:31.440 | I call nonsense and all of that.

00:21:33.040 | Just because you're in control of everything

00:21:35.960 | doesn't mean you need to schedule every seven minutes

00:21:39.700 | of your time like a crazy person.

00:21:42.080 | I mean, when you're in control of your time,

00:21:44.120 | you can now start to make decisions like,

00:21:46.520 | Thursday afternoon, starting at 12, I wanna do no work.

00:21:49.000 | I'm gonna go to the woods

00:21:49.840 | and just think about this problem I'm working on.

00:21:52.620 | When you're doing capture, configure, control,

00:21:55.520 | you could do that with confidence

00:21:56.800 | because you know what's on your plate,

00:21:58.000 | you've cleared out that time,

00:21:59.520 | you know things aren't being forgotten.

00:22:01.980 | You made sure that you had time on Wednesday

00:22:04.040 | to catch up on things people need to hear about Thursday.

00:22:05.960 | Because you're in control,

00:22:07.600 | you can aim that control at more breaks, more free time,

00:22:11.240 | more creativity, less stress.

00:22:14.000 | You can significantly, like a lot of my listeners do,

00:22:16.640 | reduce the amount of time it takes for you

00:22:18.200 | to get your normal workload done.

00:22:20.400 | And because you're in complete control of things,

00:22:22.040 | move it into certain days and keep whole days free

00:22:24.400 | to basically do phantom part-time jobs.

00:22:26.440 | There's a lot you can do that makes your life

00:22:28.120 | more interesting and creative and less stressful

00:22:31.120 | once you have an intentional way of making these decisions

00:22:34.780 | about what do I wanna do next with my time.

00:22:37.680 | All right, now I promised you a bonus property

00:22:39.680 | that arguably has to do with time management,

00:22:42.500 | arguably it's something different,

00:22:43.560 | so I'll just mention it briefly.

00:22:45.680 | And that is constrain.

00:22:47.960 | So circling this whole idea is how you figure out

00:22:54.280 | what gets on your plate to be managed in the first place

00:22:58.360 | and how you actually manage that work.

00:23:00.500 | Now I'm just gonna plant the seed here

00:23:03.640 | because this is a bigger conversation,

00:23:05.760 | but we need to be very careful about how we decide

00:23:09.840 | what we say yes to and what we say no to.

00:23:12.860 | We would really like to avoid the situation

00:23:15.020 | where we have so much work on our plate

00:23:16.760 | that yeah, we can control it and be organized about it,

00:23:19.200 | but we still don't have enough time to get it done.

00:23:20.880 | We wanna avoid that situation.

00:23:22.880 | So having clear rules in place about how do I decide

00:23:26.160 | what I let on my plate, that's really important.

00:23:28.660 | Processes is the second thing

00:23:31.320 | that I think is really important

00:23:32.720 | when it comes to constraining,

00:23:34.720 | figuring out how do I wanna do this work?

00:23:39.120 | The stuff I let on my plate,

00:23:40.480 | can I put a process in place

00:23:41.920 | that will reduce the footprint this has on my schedule?

00:23:46.680 | There's a lot of different things this can mean.

00:23:48.320 | And again, because we're just seed planting here,

00:23:50.140 | I'm just gonna very briefly skim the surface,

00:23:53.160 | but there may be automation you're doing here.

00:23:55.520 | You know what?

00:23:56.360 | We have to produce this same client report every week.

00:24:00.440 | I don't wanna just send emails back and forth

00:24:02.920 | and kind of figure it out at the last minute.

00:24:04.440 | Here is our process for doing it.

00:24:05.960 | And you figure out a whole process that's the same thing,

00:24:08.120 | the same things happen at the same times every week,

00:24:10.220 | you can rely on it.

00:24:11.720 | You've taken that burden off of your planning system

00:24:13.940 | to have to figure out from scratch.

00:24:16.100 | For small questions and back and forth,

00:24:18.200 | you might push that all towards office hours.

00:24:20.940 | Three days a week for one hour, well publicized,

00:24:24.640 | I'm in my office, Zoom is on.

00:24:26.140 | Come to that office hours

00:24:28.540 | if you have a small question for me.

00:24:30.160 | Come to that office hours

00:24:31.080 | if there's a little bit of information you need.

00:24:32.480 | Come to that office hours

00:24:33.680 | if there's something we can figure out

00:24:34.980 | in two minutes of back and forth.

00:24:36.640 | And when people bother you with an email or Slack,

00:24:40.260 | like, "Hey, what are we doing again about this?"

00:24:42.160 | Or can explain to me again what this thing means,

00:24:43.880 | just say, "Yeah, come to my office hours."

00:24:46.360 | These type of processes are all about reducing what it is

00:24:51.160 | that you actually do have to manage

00:24:52.580 | with your Capture Configure Control System.

00:24:54.480 | You wanna simplify that, simplify what's on your plate,

00:24:56.800 | simplify how the things that are on your plate are executed.

00:24:59.160 | The easier you can make

00:25:01.360 | the planning version of yourself's job,

00:25:04.360 | the better you're gonna do at your actual job.

00:25:06.680 | All right, so let me summarize it there.

00:25:09.480 | That is my thinking on this core idea of time management.

00:25:14.480 | All right, so that's a lot.

00:25:21.340 | It's a lot on time management there, Jesse.

00:25:24.800 | Do you do Capture Configure Control?

00:25:26.200 | Have I converted you yet to my full philosophy?

00:25:27.840 | - Oh yeah, like I was a fan

00:25:29.400 | when you first started your podcast,

00:25:30.960 | so I started implementing all that.

00:25:33.000 | I actually do have a question though.

00:25:34.120 | So in terms, what's the latest you ever put together

00:25:36.400 | your weekly plan?

00:25:38.360 | - Monday morning, yeah.

00:25:40.440 | And sometimes, actually, let me be honest.

00:25:42.080 | Sometimes, so I often do it on Mondays.

00:25:45.320 | Sometimes I don't, like I'll have meetings

00:25:48.560 | right off the bat on Monday or something like this.

00:25:50.560 | And in those days, it'll actually get done later on Monday.

00:25:54.080 | But basically, I wanna have my weekly plan done

00:25:56.880 | before I get to any non-spoken for time in that week.

00:26:01.880 | So if I know I have a meeting from nine to 11, that's fine.

00:26:05.500 | But if at 12, I don't have something scheduled,

00:26:09.500 | I don't wanna make a decision about that

00:26:12.260 | without a weekly plan to reference.

00:26:14.520 | And so I'll do that.

00:26:15.360 | And it takes a long time, I should say, for me,

00:26:17.060 | because I have 17 jobs.

00:26:19.420 | It can take me one to two hours to do my weekly plan.

00:26:23.860 | And some people think that's crazy.

00:26:25.060 | They're like, "That's two hours

00:26:25.900 | you could be getting work done."

00:26:26.720 | But I'm like, I'm telling you, man,

00:26:27.980 | if I do a good weekly plan

00:26:29.340 | and I spend two hours doing that weekly plan,

00:26:31.380 | I'm gonna get two X more done in the time that follows.

00:26:34.540 | So I will trade two hours for two X factor increase

00:26:38.140 | on what I get done.

00:26:39.120 | So it's worth it, man.

00:26:40.340 | - Do you ever do it on Sundays?

00:26:42.080 | - I don't do it on Sundays.

00:26:44.080 | I gotta keep, so I'm pretty big on keeping weekends clear.

00:26:48.600 | I gotta recharge.

00:26:49.700 | So we don't work on Shabbat, I don't work on Saturday.

00:26:52.900 | Sundays, I'll write.

00:26:54.740 | I'll write on Sundays, Sunday mornings.

00:26:56.620 | It's a long tradition I have,

00:26:57.660 | but I do not wanna do email on Sundays.

00:26:59.740 | If I can all avoid it, I don't wanna be,

00:27:02.040 | I don't wanna move my brain into the,

00:27:06.260 | okay, we're turned on for work mindset.

00:27:08.620 | So I can go and write without having to completely

00:27:11.740 | go into the context of I got this meeting

00:27:13.660 | and this person needs this and this is due.

00:27:15.660 | And so that's just part of my fixed schedule productivity

00:27:19.020 | notion, which we should do a core ideas video on,

00:27:21.340 | but fix the time you wanna work,

00:27:23.120 | work backwards from that to say,

00:27:25.340 | what do I have to do to make that fit?

00:27:27.820 | And part of that's getting more productive.

00:27:29.180 | And then after that doesn't work,

00:27:30.300 | it's just reducing what's on your plate.

00:27:32.800 | And so for me, I keep weekends clear.

00:27:35.840 | I mean, I have enough, you get enough work stress.

00:27:39.040 | - Yeah.

00:27:39.880 | - That I'll still be working on weekends.

00:27:41.640 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:27:44.240 | Let's do some questions.

00:27:46.160 | We will start here as always with some questions

00:27:49.000 | about deep work.

00:27:50.800 | Coffee up.

00:27:55.100 | All right, so our first question comes from Alessandro.

00:27:59.560 | Alessandro asks, what does deliberate practice look like

00:28:04.180 | for computer programming?

00:28:06.300 | And he goes on to clarify that he finished a master's

00:28:10.660 | in applied math.

00:28:12.060 | He has a junior software developer job

00:28:14.740 | and he wants to get better fast.

00:28:17.660 | All right, so we talk about deliberate practice

00:28:19.260 | all the time.

00:28:20.760 | Quick primer is the best framework we have

00:28:23.500 | for understanding how people get better at complex skills,

00:28:25.820 | be them physical or intellectual.

00:28:27.820 | It requires stretch.

00:28:29.280 | So activity is designed to stretch you

00:28:32.380 | past your current comfort point.

00:28:33.880 | If you're not stretching, you're not gonna improve.

00:28:36.960 | And then two, it requires feedback.

00:28:38.920 | Feedback so that you know that whatever you're doing here,

00:28:42.680 | the stretch activity you're doing,

00:28:43.920 | that you're doing it right.

00:28:45.680 | Right, that you're doing it right and you're doing it well

00:28:48.400 | because underneath the hood that is our skull,

00:28:53.400 | you're really trying to isolate the relevant neural circuit.

00:28:57.800 | And fire it as cleanly as possible

00:29:00.080 | because what fires together wires together.

00:29:01.800 | So you're gonna get more myelination

00:29:04.640 | on those circuit connections if you isolate it.

00:29:06.760 | So what you wanna be doing is really focusing

00:29:08.660 | on doing the thing you wanna do better.

00:29:11.360 | So you need feedback to make sure

00:29:12.360 | that you're doing it right.

00:29:13.440 | All right, so how do you get that in computer programming?

00:29:16.360 | Write real code, right?

00:29:20.000 | Be doing the thing you wanna get better at.

00:29:22.720 | So you wanna be writing real code.

00:29:24.840 | The feedback is really clear in computer programming.

00:29:27.600 | A, does it compile?

00:29:29.440 | And B, if it compiles,

00:29:30.280 | does it do the thing it's supposed to do?

00:29:32.720 | So you're constantly getting that feedback.

00:29:34.840 | Rookie mistake we see

00:29:35.880 | in the computer science curriculum all the time,

00:29:37.640 | I don't really teach programming courses

00:29:39.040 | because I'm a theoretician,

00:29:39.880 | but I hear this from the professors

00:29:42.080 | that do teach the skill of programming

00:29:43.800 | to computer scientists is that

00:29:45.480 | rookie computer programmers often do too much

00:29:51.160 | before they test.

00:29:52.240 | Like in some sense, they say,

00:29:53.160 | okay, I'm gonna just try to make this whole thing work

00:29:55.440 | and see if it works.

00:29:57.360 | More adept programmers,

00:29:58.680 | what they're gonna do is test

00:30:00.880 | at the level of their uncertainty.

00:30:02.600 | So at the very smallest granularity at which

00:30:06.680 | I'm not quite sure,

00:30:07.520 | I'm not 100% sure that what I did

00:30:09.000 | is actually gonna do this,

00:30:10.080 | then you need to be testing.

00:30:11.880 | And testing could be as simple

00:30:13.000 | as you have print lines in there.

00:30:15.320 | But if you're doing, let's say some assignment,

00:30:17.880 | like I'm gonna use a linked list

00:30:20.240 | as part of a program to add polynomials.

00:30:25.240 | Don't just write the whole program.

00:30:27.640 | Like, does this work?

00:30:28.920 | I gave it a polynomial

00:30:29.960 | and another one did to add it properly.

00:30:32.080 | You should be with little print statements in there,

00:30:33.920 | testing everything along the way,

00:30:35.480 | especially if you're new.

00:30:36.480 | Does my link list work?

00:30:38.440 | Let me just make sure and do a little test there.

00:30:40.160 | Okay, is it properly storing

00:30:42.320 | all the parts of the polynomial?

00:30:43.440 | Let me print everything there.

00:30:44.640 | Okay, is this ad routine being called properly?

00:30:48.640 | So you wanna be getting feedback from,

00:30:50.800 | does the code compile first of all,

00:30:52.280 | and two, does it do what I wanna do?

00:30:54.960 | But that means you have to have

00:30:56.040 | this very small granularity,

00:30:57.560 | especially if you're new.

00:30:58.400 | Just a little bit at a time,

00:30:59.480 | make sure it works, do the next thing.

00:31:01.800 | If you're compiling and praying,

00:31:04.860 | or like I wrote a bunch of code,

00:31:08.120 | it doesn't compile.

00:31:09.760 | I'm just gonna randomly change a bunch of stuff

00:31:11.880 | and try again and see if it compiles.

00:31:13.800 | You're not learning, incremental.

00:31:16.520 | Does it compile?

00:31:17.360 | Did it work?

00:31:18.180 | All right, let me add one more little thing

00:31:19.680 | to what I'm doing here.

00:31:20.520 | Some new print statements to test it.

00:31:21.480 | Does it compile?

00:31:22.320 | Does it work?

00:31:23.140 | That's how you get the feedback.

00:31:24.920 | And then finally, to get the stretch,

00:31:27.240 | whatever you're programming should be hard.

00:31:29.640 | There's something you're trying to learn how to do.

00:31:33.680 | So you're actually stretching yourself

00:31:36.480 | to do that in the program that you're writing.

00:31:38.280 | If it's too hard,

00:31:39.400 | then you're out of luck.

00:31:42.780 | If you're new to programming and you say,

00:31:44.760 | okay, here's my challenge.

00:31:46.080 | I wanna write my own Minecraft style voxel engine.

00:31:50.520 | That's too big of a stretch.

00:31:53.220 | But if you're kind of new to programming and you say,

00:31:57.280 | I'm gonna write a, look up in a textbook,

00:32:00.160 | a sorting algorithm,

00:32:02.640 | and I'm gonna actually implement that sorting algorithm

00:32:04.600 | to see if I can sort this array.

00:32:05.720 | I'm not quite comfortable with looking up algorithms

00:32:08.820 | and implementing them.

00:32:09.960 | That's like a very good,

00:32:11.400 | that's like a very good healthy stretch.

00:32:13.280 | All right, so I'm getting a little nerd,

00:32:14.400 | I'm getting the nerd weeds here,

00:32:16.020 | but Alessandro hopes that helps.

00:32:18.800 | Write real code, compile and test as your feedback.

00:32:22.260 | Make sure that code is hard.

00:32:23.560 | You're doing something you didn't know how to do before,

00:32:25.080 | but not too hard.

00:32:25.980 | There's actually, my kids like,

00:32:30.440 | some of my kids like Minecraft.

00:32:31.520 | Jesse, there's a, you probably don't know Minecraft

00:32:33.800 | because you're not a 12 year old boy,

00:32:36.800 | but it has a very complicated graphics engine.

00:32:41.360 | It's a voxel engine, blah, blah, blah.

00:32:43.940 | There's these YouTube videos.

00:32:45.000 | My son was showing me where people see how fast

00:32:49.480 | they can build it from scratch.

00:32:51.320 | So they put the, it's like a screenshot of their computer

00:32:53.680 | and they cut through time a lot,

00:32:54.760 | but they basically build the game from scratch in a day.

00:32:57.740 | Yeah, which is, which brings me to my other point.

00:33:02.280 | I can't help but think what societal good

00:33:05.520 | could they be doing instead with that brain?

00:33:07.440 | You see somebody could do that.

00:33:08.520 | You're like, I don't know, man,

00:33:09.340 | couldn't you be like working on vaccines

00:33:12.640 | or coding up a system to help people find new jobs?

00:33:17.640 | Or I often, that's often my thought when I see YouTube

00:33:22.440 | is like, that's a smart person

00:33:23.880 | with a lot of time on their hands.

00:33:25.120 | And maybe they should be organizing a food drive

00:33:28.320 | at their church or something.

00:33:29.920 | And yet we're on YouTube.

00:33:31.400 | So rocks, glass houses, things are shattering.

00:33:34.980 | All right, let's keep rolling here.

00:33:36.920 | We got a question from Pythicus.

00:33:41.680 | Pythicus says, is it rational to quit your job

00:33:44.520 | if it implies a potential harm to society?

00:33:48.720 | And some pretty hairy details here.

00:33:52.840 | This is actually a structural engineer.

00:33:56.680 | Let me see here or whatever.

00:33:59.680 | He's working, he's supervising a project

00:34:01.880 | on building apartment towers.

00:34:04.320 | And he thinks there's a problem, a design flaw

00:34:08.560 | in the towers that under very rare circumstances

00:34:10.760 | could be catastrophic.

00:34:11.800 | And there he's being ignored within his company

00:34:14.280 | when he brings this up.

00:34:16.240 | All right, so let me give you a general

00:34:18.200 | and a specific response to this issue.

00:34:20.440 | In general, in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You,"

00:34:23.880 | I talk about disqualifiers for a job.

00:34:28.880 | Things that if they are true is a perfectly valid reason

00:34:33.560 | to say I'm gonna go to a new job.

00:34:35.000 | And the reason why I have those disqualifiers in the book

00:34:37.180 | is that a big idea in that book

00:34:40.860 | is that we're too quick to switch jobs and to quit.

00:34:44.200 | We care too much about does this job match my passion?

00:34:49.200 | You know, do I love the work every day?

00:34:52.020 | And it's an unrealistic and naive view

00:34:54.060 | of how people actually craft real meaning in their work.

00:34:56.140 | And so the book in general discourages

00:34:59.140 | very quick job jumping, job switching.

00:35:02.140 | But I was like, look, there's some clear disqualifiers.

00:35:04.820 | That means you gotta get out of there.

00:35:05.660 | And one of those disqualifiers is that

00:35:07.260 | the work actively goes against your values.

00:35:09.900 | Do not stay in a job

00:35:12.100 | if it is actually corroding your own values.

00:35:15.820 | If you think there is something that's happening

00:35:18.860 | that's illegal, for sure get out of there.

00:35:20.400 | If you think there's something that happens

00:35:21.460 | that's perfectly legal but is bad for society,

00:35:23.920 | you gotta get out of there, right?

00:35:27.300 | Because that will corrode at your soul

00:35:29.260 | if you're doing work that goes against

00:35:31.720 | what you think is important.

00:35:33.920 | Now let's get really specific here.

00:35:35.660 | Formally registering your complaint

00:35:38.940 | all the way up the ladder at the company

00:35:40.740 | you really need to do, this is important.

00:35:42.780 | If that's not working to formally register

00:35:47.220 | that complaint outside the company,

00:35:48.500 | you're probably ethically obligated to do that as well.

00:35:50.940 | Basically some whistleblowing behavior.

00:35:52.700 | Now, I mean, I get the hesitation

00:35:54.020 | because you're not quite sure that this is an issue.

00:35:56.540 | You're actually not, you know, like the head engineer,

00:35:58.980 | but you see this could be an issue

00:36:00.980 | and you think they're not paying enough attention to it.

00:36:02.580 | There's probably an ethical obligation here

00:36:04.600 | to make sure that the right people

00:36:06.580 | who do not have conflicts of interest

00:36:08.760 | have all the information you've given them.

00:36:11.360 | And if even after all of that, people like,

00:36:13.120 | I think it's fine, then maybe this issue

00:36:14.880 | is not what you think it is, right?

00:36:17.320 | But you do, I think in your specific case,

00:36:18.920 | have an obligation to not just think about

00:36:22.080 | whether or not you wanna leave this company,

00:36:23.420 | but make sure that this issue

00:36:26.940 | is something that the right people have seen.

00:36:28.820 | So that's not the easiest thing, Pythicus,

00:36:30.420 | but you know, do the hard thing here.

00:36:32.260 | All right, we got a question now moving on from Luke.

00:36:37.260 | Luke says, when is deep work

00:36:41.820 | not the most important personal metric?

00:36:46.040 | All right, he elaborates in the book, "Decoding Greatness,"

00:36:52.480 | Ron Friedman talks about the importance

00:36:54.660 | of tracking your important metrics.

00:36:56.220 | He even quotes you.

00:36:57.840 | How do I know if hours of deep work

00:36:59.600 | is the highest leverage metric for me

00:37:01.800 | or something else?

00:37:03.580 | Well, it's a good question.

00:37:05.820 | I think a useful bit of terminology

00:37:10.120 | when thinking about professional metrics

00:37:12.480 | comes from the book,

00:37:15.880 | "The Four Disciplines of Execution," 4DX,

00:37:19.520 | which I talk about briefly in my book, "Deep Work."

00:37:22.280 | And they make a useful distinction,

00:37:26.080 | which I've heard other people make as well,

00:37:27.380 | between what they call lead indicators

00:37:30.960 | and lag indicators,

00:37:33.160 | when it comes to measuring what matters

00:37:35.120 | for your work to be more successful.

00:37:36.920 | Lag indicators are the things in the end

00:37:40.560 | you actually care about, right?

00:37:42.600 | I mean, this is the thing in the end

00:37:43.700 | that you want to actually improve,

00:37:45.440 | and it's very specific to the type of work you do.

00:37:48.680 | The example in 4DX is a supermarket bakery counter

00:37:52.720 | or something like this,

00:37:53.560 | and the lag indicator was sale numbers.

00:37:56.480 | In the end, we want sales numbers to go up.

00:37:58.840 | If you run a podcast,

00:38:00.760 | the lag indicator might be downloads,

00:38:04.000 | you know, how many people are listening to the show,

00:38:05.440 | or how many, in writing, how many people buy my book,

00:38:08.480 | or in, you know, how much units do we sell of this product?

00:38:13.480 | It's the thing you actually care about in the end.

00:38:16.220 | Now, what they talk about,

00:38:17.140 | and maybe this is what Friedman's talking about too,

00:38:19.440 | is just tracking lag indicators

00:38:23.460 | is not enough to actually help you in the moment

00:38:27.120 | do the things that matter,

00:38:28.320 | because it lags.

00:38:30.520 | It's not like you can do something today

00:38:33.160 | and immediately see its impact

00:38:34.560 | on those indicators that matter.

00:38:36.000 | And so what they argue is you should have lead indicators,

00:38:38.720 | things you can track today,

00:38:41.120 | and it can influence your behavior today,

00:38:44.040 | that if you hit good numbers on those,

00:38:46.100 | it will down the line,

00:38:47.560 | help the lag indicators grow.

00:38:50.140 | So in the bakery scenario,

00:38:53.600 | you want the sales to go up,

00:38:55.280 | but the lead indicator might be something like

00:38:58.200 | how many customers did we help,

00:39:00.420 | or how many different display cases,

00:39:04.120 | or did we clean?

00:39:05.120 | I mean, I don't know about bakery,

00:39:05.960 | but stuff you can actually do.

00:39:08.280 | Deep work is a lead indicator.

00:39:09.840 | For a lot of jobs,

00:39:12.680 | keeping track of how much deep work am I doing

00:39:16.360 | is a useful lead indicator,

00:39:17.760 | because if deep work is necessary

00:39:20.560 | for moving the needle in your job,

00:39:21.720 | you need to do it to actually move the needle in your job.

00:39:24.040 | So it is useful.

00:39:25.840 | I don't know if I would call it

00:39:27.160 | the most important metric though.

00:39:29.600 | I mean, in this case, two other things matter.

00:39:32.560 | A, do you have your lag indicators right,

00:39:34.400 | and are you looking at them?

00:39:35.960 | If you're just doing deep work

00:39:36.920 | for the sake of doing deep work, meaningless.

00:39:39.660 | You gotta know the needle you're trying to move in the end.

00:39:42.720 | You gotta be watching that needle to see if it's moving.

00:39:45.600 | And that needle is not moving,

00:39:46.640 | even though you're doing a lot of deep work,

00:39:48.080 | then two, you have to care about

00:39:50.360 | what deep work am I doing?

00:39:52.480 | Like what is the right type of deep work

00:39:55.240 | that's gonna move the needle on this particular thing

00:39:57.720 | that I care about on this particular lag indicator?

00:39:59.840 | So don't get too obsessive about just,

00:40:01.720 | here's my deep work tally.

00:40:03.320 | I got six hours this week.

00:40:04.720 | That's an important tally to do,

00:40:07.840 | but only if you know what you're doing

00:40:10.280 | during those deep work hours,

00:40:11.320 | and it's tied to a very specific longer term goal

00:40:13.760 | that you're keeping a very careful eye on.

00:40:15.860 | All right, so let's do another question here.

00:40:20.080 | We got one from Jeffrey.

00:40:23.520 | Jeffrey says, "Should I stay at a job

00:40:26.120 | where the management actively tries to stifle productivity?"

00:40:31.000 | Context is important here.

00:40:34.020 | Looking at the elaboration,

00:40:36.300 | Jesse, or Jeffrey, not Jesse.

00:40:38.040 | Jeffrey has been at this job for eight years.

00:40:40.280 | I don't wanna just think about that.

00:40:42.880 | That would be funny if this was a question from Jesse,

00:40:45.300 | and it was Jesse being like,

00:40:46.360 | how do I get out of a position

00:40:48.160 | where my manager is so unproductive

00:40:51.000 | and makes me unproductive?

00:40:52.280 | And it was just like a passive aggressive way

00:40:54.880 | of getting back at me,

00:40:55.880 | and it turns out like I'm a terrible boss

00:40:57.480 | that's like really chaotic and disorganized.

00:41:00.080 | All right, all right, Jeffrey.

00:41:04.520 | You've worked there for eight years.

00:41:07.840 | They manipulate, your managers manipulate your workloads

00:41:10.840 | by assigning them at random times

00:41:12.540 | that are very disadvantageous,

00:41:14.120 | like Friday afternoons or afternoons

00:41:15.680 | before I leave to take the day off.

00:41:17.440 | It's good paying benefits,

00:41:18.520 | but he's getting frustrated because it's our fault.

00:41:20.840 | I mean, we have been infecting poor Jeffrey here

00:41:24.920 | with visions of how knowledge work can actually unfold,

00:41:29.800 | ways that's not overloaded,

00:41:31.320 | ways that's not stressful,

00:41:32.400 | ways in which you are in control of your time,

00:41:34.800 | and you're moving the needle and getting things done,

00:41:37.200 | but on your own terms, you're not overworked,

00:41:38.880 | you're not overstressed.

00:41:39.760 | And he's learned that that's all possible,

00:41:41.440 | and he turns around and his boss is like,

00:41:43.440 | I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday.

00:41:49.080 | We're in Lumberg territory.

00:41:51.200 | It's an office space reference.

00:41:53.040 | All right, what do we do about this?

00:41:55.320 | Jeffrey, here's what I'm gonna suggest.

00:41:58.000 | Don't leave your job right away,

00:41:59.960 | but I'm gonna make you more rigid.

00:42:03.760 | I'll explain how in a second.

00:42:07.040 | If that blows up, if the Lumberg in your life says,

00:42:12.040 | no way, I said I need this tomorrow, get it done,

00:42:16.620 | then you start looking somewhere else,

00:42:19.360 | and you can be confident that it was a good thing to do.

00:42:21.120 | So here's what I mean by getting more rigid.

00:42:23.320 | Get your systems in place,

00:42:25.680 | and enforce them, enforce them.

00:42:30.160 | So like in this case, you need a system,

00:42:33.040 | and this is something I've been working on recently

00:42:34.960 | in some of my thinking that I haven't published a lot yet.

00:42:38.240 | So I'm giving you some ideas that are hot off the presses.

00:42:40.880 | I'm a big believer in this external work system approach,

00:42:47.040 | where instead of just in knowledge work,

00:42:49.560 | thinking about all things that need to be done

00:42:52.360 | as existing on individual people's plates.

00:42:55.360 | We just throw these around on the people's plates.

00:42:57.480 | Jeffrey, do this, now it's on your plate,

00:42:59.280 | and I'll have to worry about it.

00:43:01.200 | You know, hey, Jesse, you do this, now it's on your plate,

00:43:03.580 | I don't have to worry about it.

00:43:05.200 | I'm a big believer in having an external system

00:43:08.000 | into which work that needs to get done goes,

00:43:11.700 | and that people then pull work out of that external system

00:43:15.800 | as they have the appropriate time to do it.

00:43:17.960 | I think this is actually probably the right structure

00:43:20.880 | for work assignment in most knowledge work scenarios.

00:43:23.480 | A good external system has a few things to it.

00:43:26.480 | One, a good filter.

00:43:28.120 | So it's really clear, like here's the different type of work

00:43:30.080 | that could come into the system,

00:43:31.120 | and it has to go through these properly shaped portals,

00:43:33.740 | and if your work doesn't fit, then it doesn't go in.

00:43:36.120 | So you're making the person assigning the work do more work.

00:43:38.260 | Two, there's a real organizational ethic

00:43:40.120 | inside of the system,

00:43:41.080 | how the work gets organized and prioritized,

00:43:42.760 | that's thoughtful.

00:43:44.240 | And three, status is really clear to anyone who cares.

00:43:47.240 | All right, this thing I put into the external system,

00:43:49.440 | it's been organized, no one's working on it yet,

00:43:51.680 | but it has, you know,

00:43:53.240 | it's relatively high on the priority list,

00:43:55.200 | probably someone will get to it in the next two weeks.

00:43:57.960 | I think in the end,

00:43:58.800 | that's what most knowledge work organizations need.

00:44:02.080 | Now, Jeffrey, they're not gonna do this,

00:44:04.060 | so I want you to simulate this with yourself.

00:44:06.320 | I want you to basically imagine

00:44:10.200 | that you have an external system you can control

00:44:12.240 | where work comes in through these holes,

00:44:13.920 | it gets organized, if it doesn't fit,

00:44:15.720 | then it can't come in,

00:44:16.800 | and clear status is given to the people who care about it.

00:44:19.000 | And then there's what you're actually working on

00:44:21.200 | this week and this day,

00:44:23.200 | and you work on a reasonable amount of stuff

00:44:24.600 | till it's done,

00:44:25.440 | and then you pull more stuff out of this system.

00:44:26.400 | And how do you simulate something like this?

00:44:27.840 | I mean, I'm still working out the details,

00:44:29.280 | but a few different things.

00:44:31.200 | So how do you simulate that clear filter on what comes in?

00:44:34.920 | Well, someone puts something on your plate

00:44:37.720 | that is half-baked,

00:44:38.920 | and they don't give you all the information,

00:44:40.220 | and they're just playing obligation hot potato

00:44:42.000 | and just trying to get it off their plate

00:44:43.340 | because it's on their head,

00:44:44.360 | and they don't want it to be on their head.

00:44:45.960 | You say something like,

00:44:47.400 | all right, I'm happy to take this on board,

00:44:52.020 | this is the information I'll need, right?

00:44:55.780 | That's back to them.

00:44:58.080 | So they'll have to give you and get you that information.

00:45:00.380 | If you really wanna push it here,

00:45:02.800 | you can involve processes here.

00:45:05.120 | You can say, I'm happy to take this on board.

00:45:07.360 | There's a bunch of questions

00:45:11.860 | that would need to be resolved for me

00:45:12.980 | to really understand what you need here.

00:45:15.680 | Please, I have these clear office hours.

00:45:19.520 | So whenever it's convenient for you,

00:45:21.800 | you just jump on one of these, here they are,

00:45:24.560 | and I'll get from you all the information I need.

00:45:27.240 | Or here's my Calendly, take a 30-minute slot,

00:45:31.360 | and that's where I'll get all the information I need.

00:45:33.400 | So now you are having these carefully shaped portholes

00:45:38.400 | in which information could come in,

00:45:41.740 | that if it doesn't have everything you need,

00:45:43.160 | it's not coming in the system.

00:45:44.080 | None of this like, hey, Jeffrey,

00:45:45.760 | can you see what we need to get this client's

00:45:50.000 | reimbursement up to date or something?

00:45:52.040 | Like, no, no, no, no.

00:45:53.160 | Let's figure out exactly what that means.

00:45:55.680 | And you can use processes and systems there.

00:45:58.680 | Two, okay, once they're in the system,

00:46:01.080 | make its status really clear to people.

00:46:03.320 | All right, I've taken this into my queue,

00:46:06.080 | I'm looking at my queue now,

00:46:08.140 | and there's like three or four things ahead of this.

00:46:11.520 | So my best guess is probably it'll be a week from now

00:46:16.480 | before I can get to it without changing priorities

00:46:20.400 | on the queue.

00:46:21.240 | Now, this means you gotta have this information

00:46:24.680 | really well put together.

00:46:25.680 | You gotta have, you know,

00:46:27.160 | a keeping track of everything, what I'm working on.

00:46:29.000 | I mean, you gotta have your act together, Jeffrey,

00:46:30.920 | if you're gonna pull this off.

00:46:32.420 | But you're giving them that good status update.

00:46:35.160 | And then from an organizational perspective,

00:46:36.880 | you're keeping it really clear, all the things,

00:46:38.640 | all the information, their status,

00:46:40.080 | use a Trello board for this.

00:46:41.160 | Like here's the stuff that I have all the information,

00:46:42.960 | here's the stuff I'm waiting to hear back on,

00:46:44.560 | here's the relative priority.

00:46:45.840 | And you gotta be very careful

00:46:46.720 | in your weekly and daily planning

00:46:48.240 | to be pulling things from this list

00:46:49.640 | and actually getting the things done and being reliable.

00:46:51.880 | They can depend on you.

00:46:52.960 | You can get idiosyncratic credits,

00:46:57.960 | idiosyncrasy credits, that's the term.

00:47:00.200 | It's an Adam Grant term.

00:47:01.840 | You can get those credits,

00:47:03.020 | the ability to do things weird if you actually deliver.

00:47:05.960 | If you don't deliver that you get no leeway.

00:47:08.000 | And then actually, there it is,

00:47:10.440 | the stuff's in my system,

00:47:11.280 | I pull out what's reasonable for the week.

00:47:13.560 | They don't have the option anymore

00:47:15.920 | of saying it's Friday afternoon,

00:47:16.960 | get this done by Saturday morning.

00:47:19.700 | And if they wanna push back, they can push back,

00:47:22.420 | but they have to push back on your system.

00:47:23.800 | And they have to say,

00:47:25.560 | I don't wanna have to give you that information.

00:47:28.160 | If they say, no, I want this, whatever,

00:47:29.520 | you're like, okay, but let me just tell you,

00:47:31.000 | these are the things that have to get moved

00:47:32.320 | to lower priority, right?

00:47:34.040 | They have to confront how much time

00:47:35.400 | you actually have available.

00:47:37.480 | One of two things will happen.

00:47:39.560 | One, they will say, Jeffrey's great,

00:47:40.880 | he's been here eight years, he delivers, he's awesome,

00:47:43.400 | we don't wanna lose him.

00:47:44.600 | I really just wanted clarity anyways, right?

00:47:48.800 | I mean, I, and here I'm simulating the boss.

00:47:51.680 | I'm really disorganized, I hate having things in my head.

00:47:54.160 | I throw things on your plate as soon as I think about them

00:47:56.220 | because I don't wanna have to worry about them.

00:47:58.780 | So long as I know I can trust you,

00:48:00.880 | oh, it's in your system, you have the information,

00:48:02.840 | it's gonna happen in two weeks and fine.

00:48:05.100 | I don't have to think about it, you do you.

00:48:08.080 | Or they say, no, no, no, no, like forget that.

00:48:13.080 | You need to just respond to me

00:48:15.960 | and do everything right when I say it.

00:48:17.100 | And then you, Jeffrey, you have the information you need

00:48:19.840 | that it's time to find a different position.

00:48:21.560 | It might be quitting that job,

00:48:22.580 | it might be changing your position within that company

00:48:24.640 | so that you're much more independent

00:48:26.760 | when you're trading performance for freedom.

00:48:30.920 | All right, I'm gonna be more like a consultant,

00:48:33.000 | pay me by my performance, but you can't bother me,

00:48:35.120 | whatever you need to do.

00:48:37.320 | But give that a try, give the external system a try.

00:48:40.840 | You might be surprised how much they'll put up with.

00:48:43.160 | All right, let's see here.

00:48:46.440 | We got time for one more question.

00:48:47.440 | Let me do one more quick, deep work question.

00:48:49.800 | This one comes from Sammy.

00:48:51.960 | Sammy says, what are your tips

00:48:53.980 | for a mother of two small kids doing master's?

00:48:56.900 | Well, I mean, first of all,

00:48:59.760 | the fact that you have two small kids

00:49:01.040 | doing master's degrees tells me

00:49:02.360 | that you've got some pretty amazing genes,

00:49:04.000 | so congratulations.

00:49:06.920 | I was trying to explain to my oldest son, who's nine,

00:49:10.680 | the plot of "Doogie Howser, M.D."

00:49:14.520 | which was a show that was popular

00:49:16.760 | when Jesse and I were kids.

00:49:18.300 | It did not compute.

00:49:21.160 | He was like, wait a second.

00:49:23.560 | There's so many questions, and you know what?

00:49:25.280 | It didn't compute not because he couldn't understand it,

00:49:27.380 | but because there are a lot of questions

00:49:29.200 | about "Doogie Howser, M.D."

00:49:31.000 | and the fact that this 12-year-old

00:49:32.780 | was being licensed to do practice clinical medicine

00:49:35.880 | in emergency rooms.

00:49:36.720 | There's a lot of questions about that show,

00:49:38.440 | but that's what I think about

00:49:39.480 | when I think about two small kids doing master's degrees.

00:49:42.880 | There was, Jesse, there was at,

00:49:46.000 | and I don't mean to go on the side,

00:49:47.060 | but MIT had some of this stuff going on, right?

00:49:50.160 | Like MIT CS program gets some

00:49:53.160 | pretty interesting, weird brains,

00:49:54.880 | but there was a kid when I started my PhD program,

00:49:59.880 | who was another incoming computer science student,

00:50:04.400 | and he was 14, maybe, 15, maybe,

00:50:09.400 | maybe 16, but I think like 15 years old.

00:50:13.840 | He had not only finished his undergraduate degree

00:50:15.960 | in computer science from University of Washington,

00:50:18.440 | which is a great program,

00:50:20.280 | he had gone and worked at Microsoft for a while,

00:50:23.160 | and was bored.

00:50:24.120 | It's like, I gotta go get a PhD.

00:50:25.560 | So he had been in the workforce for a while

00:50:28.440 | before he came back to get his PhD,

00:50:30.760 | and he was like 15 years old.

00:50:32.640 | So, so it was a strange place.

00:50:34.560 | - Did you talk to him a lot?

00:50:36.440 | - He was a systems guy, so I didn't know him well,

00:50:38.440 | but, and I don't think he actually stayed for his PhD.

00:50:42.000 | The problem with PhD programs like at MIT

00:50:44.400 | is the entire time you're there,

00:50:47.720 | there's like literally people, not literally, okay,

00:50:50.520 | so the opposite of literally,

00:50:51.480 | but there's people knocking at your doors

00:50:53.520 | with wheelbarrows full of money.

00:50:55.120 | In reality, it's emails from headhunters, et cetera,

00:50:58.800 | but basically, here is a wheelbarrow full of money.

00:51:02.280 | If you follow me to a job,

00:51:05.520 | and they pick a lot of people off,

00:51:08.640 | you'll just get things from headhunters,

00:51:10.680 | like we will, starting salary, $450,000,

00:51:15.000 | let's rock and roll, come to my quant fund or whatever.

00:51:18.240 | So you lose a lot of people,

00:51:20.160 | they'll get their masters along the way,

00:51:22.360 | and then they're out the door.

00:51:24.200 | So it's only us suckers that actually stick it out

00:51:26.960 | all the way and become low paid professors.

00:51:29.480 | All right, Sammy, I'm sorry,

00:51:31.200 | I'm completely off your question now.

00:51:32.600 | All right, I was making fun of your ambiguous wording.

00:51:35.800 | Sorry about that.

00:51:36.640 | So let's start this again.

00:51:37.760 | Sammy says, "What are your tips for a mother

00:51:39.720 | of two small kids doing masters?"

00:51:41.600 | All right, it's a, what is that, like a dangling modifier?

00:51:44.520 | It's the mother, not the children's doing the masters.

00:51:47.120 | All right, we get that.

00:51:48.640 | "How can she find focus time in the midst of being a wife

00:51:52.280 | and a mother?"

00:51:54.200 | That's good ages, nine-year-old and a three-year-old.

00:51:57.400 | I have one of each and a seven-year-old in between,

00:52:00.200 | so I empathize.

00:52:01.880 | Sammy, two things.

00:52:03.320 | One, acknowledge it's a really hard thing

00:52:07.080 | you wanna do right now.

00:52:08.240 | So it's important that you don't come into this

00:52:11.000 | with a psychology of, "Oh, I should just be able to do this.

00:52:15.560 | No big deal.

00:52:16.480 | Let's just rock and roll.

00:52:18.680 | I bought a bullet journal, we're good.

00:52:20.520 | Let's just go after it.

00:52:23.520 | I read Lean In."

00:52:24.520 | That's really hard.

00:52:26.120 | If you're, those are hard ages.

00:52:29.400 | The nine-year-old is probably in school,

00:52:31.480 | but the three-year-old might not be.

00:52:33.640 | So that's hard, acknowledge that.

00:52:36.080 | Think about it like you told people,

00:52:37.440 | "I'm gonna run a marathon."

00:52:38.760 | We're like, "Oh, that's so hard."

00:52:39.960 | And like, that's how you think about it.

00:52:41.040 | Don't think about this as an easy thing to do, it's not.

00:52:43.640 | So I don't want you to feel bad about this being hard.

00:52:46.560 | Two, in those situations,

00:52:47.640 | you need to autopilot all the work.

00:52:49.640 | And by autopilot, this is my terminology.

00:52:54.440 | This goes way back to the early days of my writing

00:52:57.440 | on my website for students.

00:52:59.560 | But autopilot schedules was where

00:53:01.560 | all of the work that needs to be done,

00:53:04.160 | you figure out in advance.

00:53:05.040 | This is where it always gets done,

00:53:06.320 | when it always gets done.

00:53:08.400 | You can't, in this situation, succeed by just saying,

00:53:12.400 | "Oh, what's due tomorrow?

00:53:14.440 | Oh, I gotta do some readings and write a paper.

00:53:16.800 | Let me go get that work done."

00:53:18.280 | That barely works for 19-year-olds

00:53:20.120 | who are living in a dorm and only doing school.

00:53:23.040 | It's not gonna work for a mother of two children.

00:53:24.720 | So you gotta just figure out,

00:53:25.640 | like, this is when my reading gets done.

00:53:27.440 | All right, I dropped a three-year-old off at daycare

00:53:29.600 | and I have this two-hour window,

00:53:30.720 | and that's always when I do my reading

00:53:32.080 | for the English class.

00:53:33.440 | And Sunday afternoons is for paper writing.

00:53:36.760 | So every other Sunday I work on papers.

00:53:38.320 | Like, you really gotta not be thinking at all

00:53:40.640 | about what should I be doing today.

00:53:42.720 | Autopilot that all out.

00:53:43.920 | Figure out how much time you need,

00:53:45.040 | what work you have to do when it gets done.

00:53:47.760 | So you can be really optimal about this

00:53:49.480 | and really be smart about where you try to fit that time.

00:53:53.200 | If it still doesn't fit, which it might not,

00:53:56.120 | then you have to slow down.

00:53:57.420 | You have to slow down the program.

00:53:58.680 | You have to find a way to do it on a longer timeline.

00:54:00.800 | Face the productivity dragon,

00:54:02.400 | but if the dragon is too big, don't charge into the cave.

00:54:05.360 | That's a great thing about autopilot scheduling

00:54:07.360 | is you get to stare it in the face and say,

00:54:09.400 | "Can I make this work?"

00:54:10.900 | And if you can, this autopilot schedule

00:54:14.400 | is gonna give you the best possible chance

00:54:16.480 | of making it work.

00:54:17.320 | And if you can't, you say, "Okay, what can I make work?"

00:54:20.640 | And you adjust what you're doing until it fits.

00:54:24.500 | All right, I think that's good for questions on deep work.

00:54:30.120 | Looking at our time now, running long, that's okay.

00:54:32.080 | Let's do a few questions on the deep life.

00:54:34.760 | All right, we got a question from Sarah.

00:54:40.940 | Oh, another parent question.

00:54:43.240 | Sarah says, "Do you view raising children

00:54:47.680 | as something that can be part of the deep life

00:54:49.560 | or something that is mostly an obstacle to the deep life,

00:54:53.440 | though valuable in a different way?"

00:54:56.380 | So Sarah, when I think about the deep life,

00:55:00.360 | as you know from the show,

00:55:02.800 | I often think it's useful to break up

00:55:05.200 | the aspects of your life in the different areas

00:55:07.140 | that for historical reasons on this show,

00:55:09.560 | we call buckets,

00:55:10.400 | even though that might not be the best terminology.

00:55:13.060 | And what you really wanna make sure

00:55:14.400 | is that in each of these buckets,

00:55:15.840 | each of these areas that's important,

00:55:18.400 | you're putting energy,

00:55:20.860 | real energy into things that are really important,

00:55:23.280 | things that are really important in that bucket

00:55:24.640 | and not wasting too much energy on things that are not.

00:55:28.080 | One of those buckets that's probably, I would say,

00:55:30.360 | the most important bucket is what I often call community,

00:55:34.060 | but community is family, friends,

00:55:37.060 | and the people around you.

00:55:38.940 | That's the key one.

00:55:41.520 | I mean, I've said this before on the show.

00:55:43.480 | If you neglect that one, the other ones don't matter.

00:55:48.360 | Like you might be okay for a while

00:55:51.120 | neglecting what's in that community bucket,

00:55:52.840 | neglecting family, neglecting friends,

00:55:54.440 | neglecting the people around you,

00:55:55.680 | but you have no resilience.

00:55:57.880 | And when you hit hard times, that bottom is gonna fall

00:56:00.840 | and you are gonna plummet.

00:56:02.120 | Homo sapiens are very social beings.

00:56:05.600 | Sacrificing on behalf, time and energy on behalf of others

00:56:09.400 | that are important to us is at the absolute foundation

00:56:12.620 | to living a deep life.

00:56:13.820 | So no, it's not an obstacle to the deep life.

00:56:16.740 | It's a bucket you have to take care of first

00:56:18.960 | before you think about the craft bucket, for example,

00:56:22.960 | where your work might be,

00:56:25.200 | or before you think about the constitution bucket,

00:56:28.480 | where exercise and fitness and health might be, for example.

00:56:33.100 | Now, the reason why I think this is an important question

00:56:36.560 | is you know that, so I think the issue is

00:56:41.040 | there's a semantic thing we should clarify.

00:56:44.760 | So when you say valuable in a different way,

00:56:46.880 | I think what's happening here is that you are

00:56:49.380 | defining the deep life too narrowly.

00:56:51.740 | You're probably thinking of the deep life as meaning

00:56:56.140 | I do deep work in my job.

00:56:59.080 | And so a deep life does a lot of that.

00:57:02.980 | And anything else that gets in the way of that

00:57:04.320 | is an obstacle to that.

00:57:05.460 | That is not the deep life.

00:57:07.680 | And this is why I actually introduced

00:57:08.940 | the notion of the deep life,

00:57:09.900 | which I coined the term in March of 2020.

00:57:13.900 | The historians among you will look at your calendars

00:57:16.500 | and realize there were some important things happening

00:57:18.940 | during that month.

00:57:19.880 | And the whole point of actually coining the term

00:57:22.260 | the deep life and starting that thinking in March of 2020

00:57:26.000 | was to make sure that we were considering

00:57:28.440 | the whole picture of what matters in life.

00:57:30.340 | That was a time period, at least that month,

00:57:32.380 | where people did not care much

00:57:34.000 | about exactly how much deep work

00:57:36.980 | they were doing on their job.

00:57:38.420 | Because if you're in the type of job that you do deep work,

00:57:43.460 | what you really were doing was being on Zoom all day

00:57:45.620 | and just panicking.

00:57:47.420 | So it was a time period where we said,

00:57:49.660 | okay, the whole life matters,

00:57:50.940 | this disruption makes that clear.

00:57:53.540 | If you do not have all of the buckets firing,

00:57:55.500 | what happens when there's huge disruption?

00:57:58.100 | Your bottom falls out, you plummet,

00:58:00.080 | we don't want that to happen again.

00:58:01.580 | All parts of the deep life matter.

00:58:02.840 | So no, your kids are critical to it.

00:58:05.820 | My whole professional life is built in part

00:58:09.060 | around making sure that that bucket of my deep life

00:58:12.060 | is serviced.

00:58:14.060 | It's why, I mean, I do the work I do.

00:58:17.120 | It's why I really prioritize,

00:58:19.220 | and I built my entire career trajectory around this,

00:58:22.420 | autonomy and flexibility, control over my time.

00:58:25.800 | I wanna be, on the short scale, I wanna be able to,

00:58:29.020 | though I can't do it every day,

00:58:30.220 | have days where I'm just take the whole afternoon off

00:58:32.800 | and I pick the kids up and spend time with them.

00:58:35.840 | I wanna be able to take them to their practices.

00:58:37.420 | On the bigger scale, I wanna take summers really quietly.

00:58:40.140 | I wanna just be around.

00:58:42.140 | I wanna have long breaks.

00:58:44.260 | The academic life gives you long breaks.

00:58:45.820 | The writing life gives you full autonomy.

00:58:47.860 | I'm really big on having huge flexibility and seasonality,

00:58:52.020 | busy periods and not busy periods,

00:58:53.220 | so I can be around and deeply ingrained in my kids' life.

00:58:56.580 | We decided where we moved.

00:58:57.760 | We're in Tacoma Park because a family is the right place

00:59:00.120 | to raise a family, et cetera.

00:59:01.300 | So Sarah, that's all to say, no,

00:59:03.580 | your kids are key to your definition of the deep life.

00:59:06.440 | But you gotta look at all the buckets

00:59:07.740 | and then come up with a configuration of life

00:59:09.580 | that serves all of them.

00:59:10.780 | All right, good question.

00:59:13.380 | We got a question here from Coach Pete.

00:59:17.540 | Coach Pete says, "Is listening to audio books

00:59:21.340 | "just as beneficial as reading actual hard copy books?"

00:59:25.980 | Yeah, just read a lot, read a wide variety,

00:59:29.900 | use a lot of formats.

00:59:31.720 | It's all good.

00:59:32.560 | It's all good.

00:59:34.620 | I just think reading is calisthenics for your brain.

00:59:39.620 | It opens up your brain.

00:59:40.740 | It's also the source of raw ideas and vocabulary

00:59:44.820 | and even argument structure.

00:59:46.860 | It is the grist that you then chew up in your brain

00:59:49.460 | to make that brain way more effective.

00:59:50.980 | So I just say read as much as you can

00:59:53.620 | and don't sweat the details.

00:59:55.440 | This is why you'll see, for example,

00:59:57.900 | when I do my monthly report on the books I read

01:00:00.900 | that I'm all over the place.

01:00:04.100 | I read a huge variety of different topics

01:00:05.980 | and I don't care.

01:00:06.820 | I just, let's go, let's read.

01:00:08.220 | You know, let's just have it going.

01:00:10.460 | And I think it's the same thing

01:00:11.300 | as if you wanna just be generally in shape,

01:00:13.940 | do a bunch of different things.

01:00:16.060 | Bike, I row, I lift weights, I do calisthenics,

01:00:18.140 | I do some CrossFit, I'm playing on an Ultimate Frisbee team.

01:00:20.380 | You just throw a bunch of stuff at it.

01:00:22.180 | It's good for you.

01:00:23.080 | All right, we've got a question here from Jacob.

01:00:27.540 | Jacob asks, "How do I realistically accomplish

01:00:30.100 | "a digital detox when all of my leisure

01:00:33.700 | "is currently spent on technology?

01:00:35.180 | "I am currently an online student

01:00:36.700 | "and I spend all of my vast amounts

01:00:38.260 | "of leisure time on my phone.

01:00:40.660 | "I really wanna do a digital detox,

01:00:42.100 | "but I believe it might be too drastic and unsustainable."

01:00:45.940 | So Jacob, read my book, "Digital Minimalism,"

01:00:48.860 | where I really walk through how to do this.

01:00:51.660 | Two points here.

01:00:52.940 | One, I do not use the terminology digital detox.

01:00:57.300 | That term has been appropriated by people

01:01:01.180 | in the digital space in what I believe

01:01:03.300 | to be an inappropriate way.

01:01:05.620 | They took this term that's most heavily used

01:01:08.820 | in substance abuse and they completely changed it

01:01:10.620 | to be the opposite of its original use,

01:01:13.900 | its original intention, so I don't like it.

01:01:15.580 | So if you look in the substance abuse community,

01:01:18.780 | what is a detox?

01:01:20.820 | Well, you're literally trying to eliminate

01:01:24.620 | the chemical dependence on the substance

01:01:26.740 | and doing it under a controlled circumstance.

01:01:28.620 | So you're at a detox center,

01:01:29.980 | so there is no alcohol there,

01:01:31.580 | and there's people there who can watch

01:01:33.580 | to make sure that from a health perspective

01:01:35.500 | that you're okay, so that's part of it.

01:01:39.580 | But the second part of it,

01:01:41.860 | and it's the part that makes the whole thing make sense,

01:01:44.800 | is that you also then re-engineer your life

01:01:47.740 | during this process so that when you come out of it,

01:01:50.980 | you no longer have that relationship

01:01:52.940 | with the substance that caused the problem

01:01:54.300 | in the first place.

01:01:55.300 | You would not run a very successful,

01:01:59.020 | let's say, alcohol detox center

01:02:00.540 | if you say, "Here's our plan.

01:02:01.540 | "You come here, you spend the month,

01:02:03.900 | "it's really hard, you get the DTs,

01:02:06.080 | "trying to get off your alcohol dependency,

01:02:09.480 | "you white-knuckle it, we get you off of it,

01:02:11.460 | "and then on day 31, we all go to the bar

01:02:13.920 | "to celebrate you doing it."

01:02:15.380 | No, you build a whole life without alcohol,

01:02:18.140 | and yet in the digital community,

01:02:19.460 | they have taken this term and they apply it

01:02:22.580 | to mean exactly that.

01:02:24.340 | Like, yeah, let's take a break

01:02:25.940 | from these technologies that we feel like

01:02:28.520 | are ruining our lives before going back

01:02:29.980 | to using them as before.

01:02:31.380 | That is the opposite of the intention of a detox,

01:02:33.820 | so I do not like that term.

01:02:35.940 | So I introduced a new term in my book, declutter,

01:02:39.220 | digital declutter.

01:02:40.300 | And you spend 30 days away

01:02:42.980 | from all these optional technologies

01:02:44.820 | with the goal of completely rebuilding

01:02:47.340 | your digital life from scratch when you're done

01:02:49.300 | so that it's something that is sustainable

01:02:50.700 | and a source of good, not bad.

01:02:52.640 | So no detox, declutter.

01:02:56.180 | Read the book, and I walk through how to actually do it.

01:02:58.800 | The key thing you're gonna see is that

01:03:00.400 | if this is gonna work, you have to aggressively fill

01:03:05.060 | the newly free time with experimentation and reflection.

01:03:08.060 | You have to actually go do lots of other activities,

01:03:11.480 | learn new things, try new things.

01:03:13.040 | You have to join things and go places.

01:03:15.060 | You have to spend a lot of time alone

01:03:16.300 | with your own thoughts and reading.

01:03:18.080 | Active, active, active.

01:03:19.480 | That is the key, Jacob, is you replace

01:03:24.240 | what you're doing before with things that are better.

01:03:26.320 | You get much more insight about what matters to you,

01:03:28.140 | what you find important, what real pleasure feels like

01:03:30.900 | versus superficial dopamine hacking

01:03:33.880 | that these devices are doing.

01:03:34.940 | And then when you're done with those 30 days,

01:03:36.420 | you rebuild your life from scratch.

01:03:38.180 | Read "Digital Minimalism," chapter three, I believe,

01:03:42.820 | will walk you through exactly how to do it.

01:03:46.820 | And I gotta say, Jacob, you need to do it.

01:03:49.660 | You are spending, and I'm quoting you,

01:03:51.340 | "vast amounts of leisure time on your phone."

01:03:54.480 | That is a simulacrum of a real life.

01:03:56.680 | You, my friend, are in the matrix,

01:04:00.640 | but if they were running the matrix

01:04:02.000 | off a kind of sucky computer,

01:04:03.500 | you're in like an Apple IIe matrix

01:04:05.840 | where it's not only like a simulation of life,

01:04:08.240 | but a pretty bad simulation,

01:04:09.360 | pretty impoverished simulation of life.

01:04:10.880 | You don't even know the feelings of deeper satisfaction

01:04:14.960 | you could be experiencing.

01:04:15.800 | You don't even know the sense of competency

01:04:18.480 | and awe and gratitude that you could be feeling.

01:04:20.400 | You don't even know what's possible professionally

01:04:22.500 | with building skills and crafts

01:04:24.020 | and seeing your intentions in your brain

01:04:25.980 | be made manifest concretely in the world,

01:04:28.300 | the quiet satisfactions that provide,

01:04:30.340 | the non-trivial sacrificing of time and attention

01:04:32.900 | on behalf of people that you really care about.

01:04:34.660 | There is a depth and a resilience that is possible in life.

01:04:39.340 | It makes life not only worth living,

01:04:40.860 | but allows you to go through the ups and the downs

01:04:43.380 | with your head held high

01:04:45.460 | and still doing good in the world.

01:04:47.240 | All of that is possible

01:04:48.660 | once you stop spending your vast amount

01:04:50.260 | of leisure time just looking at your phone.

01:04:52.600 | You are clocking in right now into a factory, my friend,

01:04:55.240 | a factory that is being run

01:04:56.380 | by a small number of social media companies.

01:04:58.060 | And you're doing long shifts,

01:04:59.120 | producing stuff for them that's valuable for them.

01:05:00.940 | And you're doing it for free

01:05:02.320 | and you're doing it at the sacrifice

01:05:03.660 | of the stuff that really matters in your life.

01:05:05.760 | Quit that virtual job in the Instagram factory

01:05:09.360 | and let's build a deeper life.

01:05:11.640 | And this podcast will help you do it.

01:05:14.840 | Look at my episodes about the deep life, keep listening,

01:05:18.520 | but I want you to get better.

01:05:20.740 | All right, we got time here for,

01:05:25.500 | we'll do two more quick deep life questions.

01:05:27.100 | So we have one here from Charles.

01:05:29.500 | Charles says, how can high school students excel

01:05:33.420 | in this new age without SATs?

01:05:35.700 | Well, Ben, focus on your grades.

01:05:39.100 | I mean, the academic formula has always been grades

01:05:42.500 | plus SAT scores for the vast majority of colleges.

01:05:46.460 | Basically the only thing that matters is your grades

01:05:48.500 | and SAT scores, if they're where they need to be,

01:05:50.600 | you get in, if they're not, you don't.

01:05:52.760 | So now you're just doing grades

01:05:53.880 | instead of grades plus SAT scores.

01:05:56.040 | If you're in one of the very narrow group of people

01:06:00.280 | who's applying to a college that is selective enough

01:06:03.020 | that grades alone are not gonna be enough

01:06:05.480 | to determine if you get in

01:06:06.440 | and they're gonna look at other aspects of your life

01:06:08.120 | and your activities,

01:06:09.480 | read my book, "How to Become a High School Superstar."

01:06:12.000 | I get into how to do that game sustainably.

01:06:14.880 | How to make yourself impressive

01:06:17.400 | as a college admissions officers

01:06:18.500 | without living a overworked, miserable grind life.

01:06:23.020 | It's a cool book.

01:06:24.100 | I profile a bunch of students I call relaxed superstars

01:06:27.140 | who got into good schools without stressing out

01:06:29.420 | and I deconstruct how they do it.

01:06:30.900 | So you'll like that book.

01:06:32.180 | But again, for the most part,

01:06:33.300 | for 95% of the people, get good grades.

01:06:36.700 | All right, final question here comes from Helen.

01:06:41.340 | Helen says, can you talk about the dangers of social media

01:06:43.580 | in two particular contexts, stalkers

01:06:47.300 | and people who put their jobs at risk

01:06:49.920 | by silly things they post?

01:06:51.380 | Both of these are real issues.

01:06:54.760 | Helen, these are good.

01:06:55.600 | I'm glad you brought these up.

01:06:56.880 | There's lots of issues that come with

01:06:58.680 | having a kind of constant interactive interaction

01:07:02.280 | with basically the entire world

01:07:04.960 | in a wide scale platform with a homogenized interface.

01:07:08.040 | So everyone just looks the same to everyone else.

01:07:10.000 | Yeah, stalkers are a big deal.

01:07:11.840 | You get weird.

01:07:12.980 | Sometimes it's just trolls,

01:07:14.080 | but sometimes it can be more scary than that.

01:07:17.040 | Tim Ferriss have talked about this.

01:07:18.440 | Tim Ferriss has huge issues with this.

01:07:20.900 | People find him, they look up his address

01:07:22.740 | and real estate records.

01:07:23.800 | They crazy people get obsessed with them.

01:07:26.320 | But yeah, there's a cost to putting yourself out there.

01:07:27.920 | Now, Tim Ferriss is very famous,

01:07:29.960 | but why expose yourself to those costs?

01:07:32.720 | Especially if you don't get the,

01:07:35.220 | whatever the fame and fortune that comes with that fame.

01:07:38.360 | Social media just allows you to expose yourself

01:07:40.200 | to this type of issues without the reward.

01:07:42.060 | And then people who put their jobs at risk.

01:07:43.560 | Yes, it's a big source of stress.

01:07:46.920 | That's a big source of stress.

01:07:49.280 | You hear these stories because they get captured

01:07:53.240 | and amplified and spread of individuals

01:07:54.960 | that said the wrong thing, whatever.

01:07:59.880 | It was a joke that landed flat or was taken out of context

01:08:03.360 | or they weren't at their best and then their job is gone.

01:08:06.660 | Yes, there's a fear of that happening to you,

01:08:09.400 | but way more pervasive is the fear.

01:08:12.660 | I mean, that could actually happen,

01:08:14.060 | but the fear that that could happen

01:08:15.760 | is just gonna pervade your life

01:08:17.240 | if you've decided that I'm gonna just post

01:08:18.880 | a lot of things on social media.

01:08:20.480 | I do not understand this cultural belief we had.

01:08:26.360 | It's something I've really pushed back on a lot.

01:08:28.800 | They're like, everyone has to be

01:08:29.800 | on these platforms using them.

01:08:32.040 | They don't, and most people shouldn't be.

01:08:33.520 | Most people should not be on Facebook or Twitter

01:08:36.440 | or whatever sharing their thoughts about everything.

01:08:38.480 | I mean, I know it presses some buttons,

01:08:39.980 | but people don't care.

01:08:40.820 | They're not following you.

01:08:41.660 | They don't really care,

01:08:42.920 | but you're giving yourself all these stresses

01:08:44.900 | by being out there in the public eye.

01:08:46.660 | I mean, I'm barely in the public eye

01:08:48.780 | and there's like 80% of it I hate.

01:08:50.720 | Why would you wanna do this voluntarily?

01:08:54.200 | I mean, this video camera

01:08:55.960 | makes me a little bit uncomfortable.

01:08:57.200 | I'm like somewhat uncomfortable

01:08:58.600 | with people knowing what I look like.

01:08:59.980 | I'm an academic writer.

01:09:01.160 | I like books to come out.

01:09:02.520 | Now, I thought this was important

01:09:04.060 | because this information's important

01:09:06.880 | and it has to be broken up into whatever.

01:09:08.880 | I mean, we've talked about this whole thing,

01:09:10.760 | but why bring this upon yourself,

01:09:12.320 | the stress of weirdos that can now follow me,

01:09:15.380 | the stress of what if I say something wrong

01:09:16.940 | and I get fired?

01:09:17.780 | And again, whether or not that's actually gonna happen,

01:09:19.260 | doesn't matter.

01:09:20.100 | The fear is causing issues in your life.

01:09:22.620 | And there's other things, Helen,

01:09:23.660 | that you're not mentioning here that can be just as bad.

01:09:25.940 | The stress of seeing someone say something negative

01:09:29.140 | about you or what you said.

01:09:30.500 | We're not wired to handle that.

01:09:32.960 | We're wired to take that very seriously

01:09:34.500 | because historically when someone is saying,

01:09:37.000 | you're terrible, it was someone in our tribe

01:09:40.520 | and it meant that we were probably doing something terrible.

01:09:43.460 | Now it's just sport on Twitter,

01:09:44.800 | but why expose yourself to that?

01:09:46.460 | This cultural idea that you have to be on social media

01:09:50.900 | and it's weird if you're not, I think it's just crazy.

01:09:53.580 | I think social media should be a thing

01:09:54.780 | that for some people has a very clear use.

01:09:57.620 | But it's not a universal.

01:10:00.900 | It's not like if you're not on Twitter,

01:10:02.840 | it's deciding to ride a horse instead of driving a car

01:10:06.540 | or you don't own a television.

01:10:08.140 | I think it should be way more narrow than that.

01:10:09.780 | Most people don't need to be on there.

01:10:11.300 | Most people, at least posting on there,

01:10:13.620 | most people's life would be significantly less stressful

01:10:16.140 | if they weren't for all these types of reasons.

01:10:17.700 | There's a lot of negative externalities

01:10:19.660 | to interactive social media use.

01:10:22.300 | And Helen, you were right to bring this up

01:10:24.340 | 'cause it's yet another reason

01:10:25.460 | why we should be way more careful about these technologies

01:10:28.060 | and be way more suspicious

01:10:30.580 | about the current cultural climate

01:10:32.880 | that at least until a minute ago,

01:10:35.300 | basically made it seem like if you were not

01:10:37.660 | on all these platforms sharing your thoughts with the world,

01:10:40.300 | that somehow there was something wrong about you.

01:10:43.380 | Being in the public eye is a weird place to be.

01:10:45.940 | It's a fraught place to be.

01:10:47.820 | Don't throw yourself into that for no other reason

01:10:50.260 | than just people thought it would be cool to have that at.

01:10:54.380 | All right, well, that's all the time

01:10:58.260 | we have for this episode.

01:11:00.020 | Thanks for watching.

01:11:00.860 | Thank you everyone who sent in their questions.

01:11:03.700 | If you like what you heard,

01:11:05.340 | you will like what you read.

01:11:06.460 | In my newsletter at calnewport.com, go subscribe to that.

01:11:09.260 | We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode.

01:11:11.700 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:11:15.460 | (upbeat music)

01:11:18.060 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:11:21.420 | [MUSIC]

Full Length Episode | #169 | January 31, 2022

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