Ep. 222: Caveman And To-Do Lists, Crafting A Deep Life, And A Novel Approach To Smartphones

00:00:00.000 | And so I had this idea, why don't we go back and look at what work meant for our ancestors?

00:00:08.360 | So for that first 300,000 years before modernity as we know it emerged, because 300,000 years

00:00:14.300 | is a long enough period of time that we can assume there's some sort of adaptation going

00:00:19.440 | on.

00:00:20.440 | The ways that we approach "work" during the Paleolithic were ways that we can argue that

00:00:27.240 | maybe we have some inclination towards as a species.

00:00:36.360 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 222.

00:00:44.960 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:52.280 | Jesse, we got a big variety pack of a show today in terms of a diversity of different

00:00:58.800 | types of clips and segments and questions we have coming up.

00:01:01.720 | I'm pretty excited about it actually.

00:01:03.040 | Yeah, it's cool.

00:01:04.040 | It's always good to have different topics.

00:01:06.400 | There's a deep dive.

00:01:09.120 | So I have a new New Yorker piece out.

00:01:10.720 | So I like to take some time to talk about those.

00:01:14.040 | We have a live call.

00:01:16.640 | People enjoyed when we did our first live call a couple of weekends ago.

00:01:19.800 | So you get to hear me interact back and forth with a listener.

00:01:24.320 | We have our standard questions and we have a news reaction segment coming up later.

00:01:30.400 | There's some new information and case studies out in the world of kids and phones, which

00:01:36.160 | I thought was interesting and even a little bit optimistic.

00:01:38.560 | So we have that all coming up.

00:01:39.560 | So a lot of different type of segments all combined into the same episode.

00:01:45.020 | So I think we should just get rolling and start as I like to with a deep dive.

00:01:51.200 | The title I want to use for today's deep dive is the question, did cavemen use to do list?

00:02:00.000 | I know caveman is an out of date term, but I like the way it sounds a little pithy title.

00:02:06.080 | So we'll be a little anachronistic there.

00:02:08.720 | This deep dive is about an article that I recently published in the New Yorker.

00:02:13.480 | I will put on the screen now for those who are watching the episode at youtube.com/town

00:02:18.240 | Newport media at the very least.

00:02:20.400 | So we can feature this really cool graphic that Callum Heath put together for the article.

00:02:25.720 | They sent me a black and white draft of this when he was still working on.

00:02:28.560 | I think it's cool for those who are listening.

00:02:30.040 | It was, it's a graphic where two knowledge workers have tipped the desk over and one

00:02:36.480 | of them is holding a spear and they're looking over the desk into a paleolithic Savannah

00:02:41.880 | type situation with some gear out there and it's all digitized.

00:02:45.160 | It's a cool piece of artwork.

00:02:46.520 | So here's the official title of this latest article.

00:02:49.480 | What hunter gatherers can teach us about the frustrations of modern work.

00:02:56.120 | And the pub date on this is November 2nd.

00:02:59.240 | So it just came out somewhat recently.

00:03:01.760 | This is a bit of a beast of an article.

00:03:03.280 | I think it weighs in at 5,000 words and I'll talk a little bit about this in a second.

00:03:09.600 | It wasn't the easiest article to figure out how to structure, but once I did, I think

00:03:12.640 | it made sense.

00:03:13.640 | I want to hone in on this deep dive though at the heart of it.

00:03:18.000 | So the, the premise, the motivating premise here was a thought experiment and it went

00:03:22.880 | something like this.

00:03:25.040 | Humans existed in a hunter gatherer style scenario for about 300,000 years until we

00:03:32.040 | get to the Neolithic revolution, which brings in agriculture and animal husbandry.

00:03:37.160 | And from there we get surplus of crops.

00:03:41.880 | We get surplus income.

00:03:43.120 | We get capital growth, the cities, the modern civilization, everything comes out of that.

00:03:47.600 | That's 15,000 years.

00:03:48.600 | Like that's a very recent piece of our history.

00:03:52.280 | And so I had this idea, why don't we go back and look at what work meant for our ancestors.

00:03:59.520 | So for that first 300,000 years before modernity as we know it emerged, because 300,000 years

00:04:05.480 | is a long enough period of time that we can assume there's some sort of adaptation going

00:04:10.640 | on.

00:04:11.640 | The ways that we approached quote unquote work during the Paleolithic were ways that

00:04:17.520 | we can argue that maybe we have some inclination towards as a species.

00:04:21.680 | And so my idea was let's understand a deep history of work, what work meant for most

00:04:26.060 | of our species history, then compare that to in particular knowledge work today.

00:04:32.160 | That is the subclass of the working population that sits at computer screens most of the

00:04:36.280 | day.

00:04:37.360 | And where we find big differences between how we were adapted to work and how we're

00:04:42.200 | working today might be places where we find sources of frustration or stress.

00:04:48.640 | That when we find ways where our current work is really out of sync with what we did for

00:04:52.400 | most of our species histories, this might be a great way of identifying pain points,

00:04:57.760 | places where we're generating friction with our fundamental nature.

00:05:01.320 | So in other words, this is a high concept premise.

00:05:05.920 | From the deep history of work, we might get some reform ideas for the way we work today.

00:05:12.000 | So that was the premise.

00:05:14.320 | So how do we figure this out?

00:05:15.440 | All right.

00:05:16.440 | So how do we figure out what work was through most of our species history?

00:05:21.840 | And here I make the argument in the piece starting with the work of Richard Lee in the

00:05:27.400 | 1960s, "Journeying to the Dobie Region of the Northwest Kalahari Desert."

00:05:31.760 | I introduced this notion that starting with that pioneering work in the 1960s, anthropology

00:05:38.680 | has learned a lot from extant hunter-gatherer groups, especially in the early, mid 20th

00:05:46.800 | century, before most of these disappeared.

00:05:49.680 | With care, they were able to learn about the functioning of a hunter-gatherer socioeconomic

00:05:56.280 | group from extant tribes, anthropological study of extant tribes, and from that gain

00:06:01.440 | some insight into what life might've been like from a work perspective in the early

00:06:07.520 | history of our species.

00:06:09.920 | And so a whole lot of the beginning of this article is just getting into this movement

00:06:14.800 | within anthropology and establishing that this is something that they figured out how

00:06:18.240 | to do in anthropology.

00:06:20.400 | I want all of this to be taken with a big grain of salt.

00:06:22.720 | This is more thought experiment than rigorous science.

00:06:25.720 | All of the anthropologists I talked to or read are very careful about, you're not seeing,

00:06:30.480 | for example, lost tribes from a Paleolithic past.

00:06:35.320 | Modern hunter-gatherer tribes, or not tribes, communities, the word tribe is not used, communities

00:06:40.480 | are their own thing.

00:06:41.480 | They're modern.

00:06:42.480 | They have their own interactions with the world.

00:06:45.680 | This is not observing a time capsule of time past.

00:06:49.300 | But what you can figure out, this is what anthropology has uncovered, what you can figure

00:06:54.100 | out by looking at extant tribes is just getting down to the economy of how hunting-gathering

00:06:59.640 | works.

00:07:00.640 | What's the effort involved?

00:07:01.640 | How does it break down socially?

00:07:03.560 | What is life like where you have to gather your calories not through agriculture but

00:07:08.280 | through going out and hunting and/or gathering?

00:07:11.440 | So there's some care to be taken here.

00:07:14.760 | But I thought it would be fun to do.

00:07:16.680 | And so I got into this.

00:07:17.680 | I read a bunch of books, read a bunch of papers, talked to a bunch of people, and I ended up

00:07:22.420 | identifying three things to focus on, three places where the way we work today is quite

00:07:29.520 | different than the way we used to work throughout most of our species history.

00:07:34.640 | All right, so let's scroll down.

00:07:37.560 | As you can see, if you're watching on the YouTube, it takes a lot of words to get to

00:07:41.920 | where we are now.

00:07:42.920 | All right, so here are the three observations I made.

00:07:46.560 | So the first has to do with what's known as the immediate return economy.

00:07:52.620 | This is drawing from the work of an anthropologist named James Woodburn.

00:07:58.760 | And this is this notion that in most hunter-gatherer context, the reward for a food-gathering effort

00:08:06.060 | was immediate.

00:08:07.860 | So the quote here, "People obtain a direct and immediate return from their labor.

00:08:13.260 | They go out hunting or gathering and eat food obtained the same day or casually over the

00:08:17.320 | days that follow."

00:08:20.060 | There are some argument, if you look at the planning centers of our brain, we can see

00:08:23.320 | that reflected in the way that our planning action reward loops function in our brain.

00:08:28.600 | Here's what we're going to do.

00:08:29.720 | Let's make a plan.

00:08:30.720 | Let's execute the plan.

00:08:32.180 | We get reward from that plan.

00:08:34.380 | We update the state of our brain.

00:08:35.960 | We move on to what's next.

00:08:37.160 | So our brain likely fits this pattern of, let's go do this.

00:08:41.280 | We're done with this.

00:08:42.440 | Here's the reward.

00:08:43.440 | That, of course, is quite different than the way work unfolds in modern knowledge work.

00:08:50.480 | As I point out here, in office life, our efforts rarely generate an immediate reward.

00:08:57.040 | When we answer an email or attend a meeting, we're typically advancing in fits and starts,

00:09:02.440 | long-term projects that may be weeks or months away from completion.

00:09:05.800 | The modern knowledge worker also tends to juggle many different objectives at the same

00:09:09.400 | time, moving rapidly back and forth between them throughout the day.

00:09:13.560 | This idea of, I have nine or 10 ongoing conversations in my hyperactive hive mind inbox, servicing

00:09:19.840 | seven or eight ongoing projects, is really out of sync with the immediate return economies

00:09:25.880 | of most of our past, where it was, we need some food.

00:09:30.880 | All I'm doing now is hunting or gathering.

00:09:32.960 | Now I'm done with that activity.

00:09:34.600 | Here's the reward.

00:09:35.600 | Here is the food.

00:09:37.800 | Doing many different things at the same time, constantly switching back and forth without

00:09:40.680 | immediate rewards, like we do in knowledge work.

00:09:43.760 | That is out of sync with the planning action reward loops that most of our species history

00:09:52.600 | we were using.

00:09:53.600 | All right, let's look at the next point out of the three.

00:09:59.600 | Right here, another place where work and hunter-gatherer societies differs from our modern efforts

00:10:04.760 | is the degree to which the intensity of our work varies over time.

00:10:11.280 | So here I'm quoting Mark Dybul from University College London, who did a study in 2019.

00:10:17.880 | They went to spend time among the Ajta people of the Northern Philippines.

00:10:21.640 | It's an interesting community because it split at some point in the relatively recent past.

00:10:28.240 | Some of this community is rice farming.

00:10:31.060 | Some of this community persist with hunting and gathering.

00:10:34.120 | So you can do this apples to apples comparison, the same people in the same environment with

00:10:40.280 | the same culture.

00:10:42.360 | And so they're really good target for studying how much work is required, for example, how

00:10:45.960 | much effort is required in hunting, gathering versus farming, because all these other variables

00:10:51.780 | are head constant.

00:10:52.780 | So that's why Mark Dybul and his team went out there.

00:10:56.680 | But one of the things he pointed out in his paper and confirmed to me or elaborated to

00:11:01.080 | me when we talked is that the amount of time the hunter and gatherer spent versus their

00:11:07.680 | rice farming brethren is not the full story.

00:11:11.720 | What also matters is how work and leisure was distributed throughout the day.

00:11:17.040 | And so the farmers, he pointed out, engaged, and I'm quoting him here, in monotonous, continuous

00:11:22.440 | work.

00:11:23.800 | The foragers, by contrast, had many more breaks interspersed throughout their daily efforts.

00:11:30.160 | Dybul talked about spending time with a group that was fishing from among the forager group.

00:11:35.960 | And he said, there's long breaks, you know, the fish aren't biting, let's take a nap.

00:11:40.280 | Okay, now we're going to fish some more.

00:11:42.120 | Now we're resting, hunting excursions.

00:11:44.680 | It's not like you were hunting all day, they would go into the forest at the heat of the

00:11:47.760 | day, you might just rest, maybe you weren't finding a good trail.

00:11:51.160 | So he really emphasized with the hunting gatherer group, intensity was up and down, intense

00:11:56.880 | periods, non intense periods.

00:12:00.260 | If we compare this to modern knowledge worker, we of course find something very different.

00:12:04.680 | Modern knowledge workers, and I'll quote myself here, adopt the factory model in which you

00:12:09.080 | work for set hours each day at a continually high level of intensity without significant

00:12:13.760 | breaks.

00:12:14.760 | So we are used to this idea that we have work hours.

00:12:17.440 | During work hours, we're always going.

00:12:20.060 | If there's not a meeting to attend, there's an email to answer or a task that we're behind

00:12:23.560 | on.

00:12:24.620 | So like the rice farmers from that study, we're constantly working all day long at an

00:12:31.120 | intensity level that's that's remained consistently high.

00:12:35.600 | Our ancestors for 300,000 years had intensity levels go up and down, up and down.

00:12:39.880 | My final point of difference, concerns, I'll quote myself here, the nature of work, of

00:12:47.000 | the work occupying our time then and now.

00:12:50.280 | So I go into a lot of detail here about how skilled hunting and foraging activities were

00:12:55.520 | and how much training would go into mastering the art of, let's say, hunting big game, or

00:13:03.800 | the knowledge you would have to have a horticulture in your area to successfully gather enough

00:13:09.840 | calories to be useful for the effort.

00:13:12.600 | And so a lot of the activity, the work activity in our past would have been highly skilled.

00:13:19.240 | We'd be used to that.

00:13:20.280 | This is something hard, and I did it, and I can feel proud about it.

00:13:24.920 | And I pointed out in modern knowledge work, though modern knowledge work is skilled in

00:13:30.800 | the sense that it requires high levels of education and skill, we are, and I'm quoting

00:13:34.480 | myself here, increasingly drowned the application of such talents in a deluge of distraction.

00:13:41.560 | So though we maybe have all these skills we were trained with, more and more of our day

00:13:45.160 | is doing, let's say, communication, it's in meetings, it's sending emails back and forth,

00:13:50.000 | ad hoc messaging, administrative work for other units within our organization.

00:13:54.280 | And when we do get a chance to try to do something skilled, we're going to try to write that

00:13:58.120 | code or put together the strategy memo.

00:14:00.580 | We can't enjoy the feeling of pure application of skill like we would have in our past because

00:14:05.240 | we also have to interrupt that once every six minutes to send a message over here or

00:14:09.000 | to join into a Slack message over there.

00:14:10.720 | So I said, this is a big point of difference.

00:14:12.480 | We were used to back then, I'm going to go start a fire and it's wet and I'm just use

00:14:17.280 | a string bow and I just really know the materials in the woods and how to make this work.

00:14:22.400 | And it's this hard thing and there's a satisfaction of completion.

00:14:25.260 | We just don't have that nearly as much anymore in our modern work.

00:14:29.080 | All right, so we can summarize those three points.

00:14:34.960 | We can say, what's the difference?

00:14:40.120 | We do more stuff now, so we're working more, we have more stuff on our plate than we did

00:14:44.960 | in our ancestral past.

00:14:46.820 | We work at a continually high pace as opposed to a very natural pace like we did in our

00:14:50.600 | past.

00:14:52.280 | And we don't prioritize skill or quality or producing really hard things at the height

00:14:58.540 | of our skill today in the way that a lot of the efforts we would have done in our past

00:15:01.440 | would have been much more intense application of well honed skills.

00:15:07.860 | And so if we want to make our work today closer to what it was there, and that's a really

00:15:13.160 | fraught statement, so let's put a pin in that for now.

00:15:15.820 | You could summarize that as we should work less at a natural pace while obsessing more

00:15:20.540 | over the quality of what we produce.

00:15:22.960 | And so the goal here in this argument is not that we want to be like our Paleolithic ancestors.

00:15:26.880 | This is not like paleo productivity, though I do think that's a catchphrase you could

00:15:30.980 | probably sell a lot of books with.

00:15:32.720 | What it is instead is about being careful about how we shape our modern world that we

00:15:37.360 | don't have direct friction or points of conflict with our fundamental adaptation.

00:15:43.280 | So for example, you don't have to try to eat exactly like we would have eaten 300,000 years

00:15:48.680 | ago to recognize that our body is not used to or adapted to tons of refined sugar.

00:15:54.400 | So maybe I shouldn't eat tons of refined sugar.

00:15:56.560 | We don't need to go obsess about exactly what nuts our Paleolithic ancestors would have

00:16:00.320 | eaten or eat meat raw or something like this, but maybe not eat a lot of sugar.

00:16:05.380 | That makes a lot of sense.

00:16:06.380 | Well, it's something similar here.

00:16:07.560 | If we can find big points of conflict between what work was and what it is today, it's not

00:16:11.880 | that we're going to go dress in furs and work in caves, but we can try to excise from our

00:16:16.120 | modern work particular properties or attributes that are in conflict with our fundamental

00:16:21.120 | adaptation.

00:16:22.360 | And so in the piece, I do get into like what those adaptations might look like.

00:16:26.320 | Shifting, for example, here's examples from the article, shifting towards pole systems

00:16:31.120 | of task allocation, where you work on one thing at a time.

00:16:34.760 | And then when you're done, you pull a new thing in to work on.

00:16:38.540 | Cavemen didn't have pole systems, right?

00:16:41.060 | But that would be a approach to workload that is much more compatible with our wiring because

00:16:46.220 | in our past, we typically did one thing at a time.

00:16:49.060 | We didn't have 30 things ongoing.

00:16:51.040 | So offloading all of this concurrent work to an external system and having individuals

00:16:55.620 | work on one thing at a time is a thoroughly modern way of working, but it is attuned to

00:17:01.000 | our thoroughly old wiring as humans.

00:17:05.980 | What about working at a more natural pace?

00:17:07.700 | Well, that would require breaking free of the factory surveillance model of here is

00:17:12.180 | your hours to work during those hours you need to be working.

00:17:15.180 | We will be surveilling you either in person, are you at your desk or digitally?

00:17:19.700 | Are you answering my emails?

00:17:20.700 | Are you answering slacks to make sure that you're not slacking off?

00:17:24.500 | We would have to move away from that model to get to something that's more natural and

00:17:28.540 | varied.

00:17:30.140 | There are people and places that do this in modern knowledge work.

00:17:34.120 | In this article, I point to an article I wrote last year for the New Yorker about results

00:17:38.660 | only work environments.

00:17:41.300 | It's a work philosophy where you're only evaluated on what you produce.

00:17:46.540 | There are no expectations about when and where you work.

00:17:49.700 | In fact, it's encouraged for you to be self-optimizing in that way.

00:17:54.660 | Maybe the afternoons you're off doing soccer games with your kids and it's Sunday mornings

00:17:59.100 | you like to work whatever, it doesn't matter about it.

00:18:02.660 | These type of philosophies exist.

00:18:04.020 | I think one of the reasons why they're successful where they're applied is because it allows

00:18:08.100 | the pace your work to be more natural.

00:18:09.840 | Some days more intense than others.

00:18:11.180 | Some part of the days you're going hard, some days you're taking off the afternoon because

00:18:14.780 | the focus is on the results that's allowed.

00:18:17.240 | That puts us more in tune with our ancient wiring.

00:18:19.580 | I mean, again, it's not let's have a schedule like a caveman.

00:18:24.260 | Let's have a thoroughly modern approach to work that doesn't directly conflict with the

00:18:27.740 | way that we're wired.

00:18:30.660 | What about the skill?

00:18:31.660 | Well, this comes down to, again, the constant distraction.

00:18:36.660 | So when we move towards a notion of work like the types of notions I write about in a world

00:18:41.580 | without email where we have structure around communication and collaboration, it's not

00:18:45.460 | ad hoc back and forth messaging, thereby freeing up long periods of time where you can actually

00:18:50.020 | focus at the thing in front of you without having to tend to ongoing conversations.

00:18:54.240 | These type of changes take modern work and make it, again, much more compatible with

00:19:00.500 | our brain because now it's I'm doing this hard thing till I'm done and I can get that

00:19:03.860 | satisfaction.

00:19:05.740 | All these type of changes, of course, are hard.

00:19:08.380 | Switching to a poll system, that's a big deal.

00:19:10.860 | That feels eccentric in most contexts, but I think it's a good idea.

00:19:13.780 | As I documented, results only work environments are difficult to get right.

00:19:18.460 | They take a huge amount of training and buy in from people at the top.

00:19:24.200 | And as I write about in a world without email, moving away from the hyperactive hive mind

00:19:27.280 | is no easy task.

00:19:29.940 | It's a convenient way to collaborate.

00:19:31.480 | To replace it with alternatives is a pain.

00:19:33.920 | So this article is meant to maybe give us one more point of motivation for actually

00:19:42.920 | making these type of hard changes.

00:19:45.240 | So I'll leave you with the way I end this article.

00:19:50.080 | So I say we're built to work, but not this way.

00:19:54.160 | In the conclusion of his paper and his time spent among the Johansi, Lee argued that through

00:19:59.480 | most of our species histories and most of the environments in which we have lived, hunting

00:20:02.960 | and gathering was a well-adapted way of life.

00:20:06.260 | Perhaps the time has come to demand something similar from the types of work that take up

00:20:09.900 | so much of our time today.

00:20:11.200 | So there we go, Jesse.

00:20:14.200 | 5,000 words of lots of stuff.

00:20:17.960 | Yeah.

00:20:18.960 | Cool image.

00:20:19.960 | Yeah.

00:20:20.960 | And that cool picture.

00:20:21.960 | Yeah.

00:20:22.960 | Yeah.

00:20:23.960 | So you don't go on social media.

00:20:26.120 | When you're in deep work sessions, do you get the urge to check your texts or check

00:20:30.360 | email?

00:20:31.360 | Yeah.

00:20:32.360 | So you get that?

00:20:33.360 | Yeah.

00:20:34.360 | Do you get it a lot?

00:20:35.360 | Yeah.

00:20:36.360 | Well, it's typically at the beginning of the sessions versus like once you get going, it's

00:20:41.280 | okay.

00:20:42.280 | I think it's the same as resistance to going to the gym or exercising, right?

00:20:46.240 | Our brain, rightly so, is a jealous protector of energy.

00:20:52.520 | We got to be careful about our calories and how we expend it.

00:20:55.160 | So why do we feel procrastination about going to the gym or exercising?

00:20:58.700 | It's often because our brain is thinking, what are we going to do?

00:21:02.680 | We're going to go over here and like move these heavy things and burn all these calories

00:21:05.720 | for no reason.

00:21:06.720 | Like we're not building something.

00:21:07.720 | We're not hunting something.

00:21:08.720 | Nothing.

00:21:09.720 | We're not trying to have a tangible outcome and we have to overcome that natural instinct.

00:21:12.720 | And then once we get going and exercising, we feel good about it.

00:21:15.440 | Deep work is the same way.

00:21:16.440 | Our brain's like, I don't want to expend all of these calories cogitating.

00:21:21.680 | Like what are we thinking about here?

00:21:23.800 | Like we're not figuring out a plan to get away from the tiger.

00:21:26.560 | So I think we feel a real resistance to deep work.

00:21:29.440 | And that's why my arguments for what you do to be better at deep work sessions is you

00:21:35.360 | have to have a steadfast rule.

00:21:37.600 | There's just no context switching.

00:21:39.040 | If you want a context switch, you want to look at email, you want to look at text.

00:21:42.200 | It's not deep work.

00:21:43.280 | So do something else or don't pretend like you are.

00:21:45.600 | Don't even have exceptions.

00:21:46.600 | Like that's just what it is.

00:21:49.000 | So don't even give yourself the option.

00:21:51.160 | And then have a scheduling philosophy.

00:21:52.680 | So it's, this is when I do deep work.

00:21:54.560 | And we have a question about that coming up later.

00:21:56.880 | And then add rituals around it too.

00:21:58.440 | I get this coffee, I go to this room, I have a different location.

00:22:01.560 | All of that is basically trying to trick our instinct, which is not in this article, but

00:22:06.560 | I think it's a good point.

00:22:07.560 | We're not wired for deep work.

00:22:09.760 | That's pretty artificial.

00:22:10.760 | I mean, we are hijacking sophisticated components of our brain that were meant for doing things

00:22:16.400 | like constructing and evaluating plans or simulating the minds of other people so we

00:22:20.840 | can do complex social interactions.

00:22:22.680 | We're hijacking that to do symbolic abstract thinking.

00:22:26.240 | And this was not a big part of the Paleolithic, trying to figure out a complex abstract strategy.

00:22:32.440 | Yeah.

00:22:33.440 | Yeah, I've heard you say that stuff a bunch, but I always like hearing it more.

00:22:38.600 | Yeah, it's hard.

00:22:40.720 | Deep work is hard.

00:22:41.960 | But maybe these type of things will make it easier.

00:22:45.080 | All right.

00:22:46.280 | So we have coming up soon here, a live call.

00:22:50.160 | So I'll tackle a conversation with one of you live, one of our listeners.

00:22:54.920 | I first want to mention, however, a sponsor that helps make the Deep Questions podcast

00:22:59.800 | possible.

00:23:00.800 | And that is our friends at Hinson shaving.

00:23:02.920 | Jesse, will you say my shave looks pretty good today?

00:23:06.240 | Yeah.

00:23:07.360 | You would not be a good spokesperson for Hinson's with your artful.

00:23:11.360 | I go back and forth a lot.

00:23:12.520 | Yeah.

00:23:13.520 | When you have the artful beard stubble.

00:23:14.520 | Yeah.

00:23:15.520 | It's white now.

00:23:16.520 | Yeah, so is mine.

00:23:17.520 | It's true.

00:23:18.520 | When I grow a beard out a little bit, it's white in there.

00:23:22.040 | So I shave it and I shave it with Hinson's.

00:23:24.200 | All right.

00:23:25.200 | So you've heard me talk about them before.

00:23:26.200 | Here's why.

00:23:27.200 | You know, I like quality.

00:23:28.840 | You know, I like something designed and implemented really well.

00:23:32.760 | That's what you get with Hinson's shaving.

00:23:35.600 | It's actually a company that specialize in doing precision parts manufacturing for the

00:23:40.800 | aerospace industry.

00:23:42.080 | We're talking parts on the Mars Rover.

00:23:43.820 | We're talking parts on the International Space Station.

00:23:47.000 | And they have these super high precision CNC routers they can use to build metal things

00:23:53.560 | to incredible precision.

00:23:55.680 | So they put this to work for designing a razor.

00:24:00.320 | And so the Hinson's razor is beautifully manufactured, very precise piece of solid aluminum.

00:24:06.720 | You take a standard 10 cent safety razor blade and you put it on the Hinson's razor and you

00:24:14.200 | screw the base to tighten it together.

00:24:16.640 | And this thing is so precisely built that you only have point, and I'm looking at the

00:24:20.300 | number here, 0013 inches of the blade emerging past the edge on either side of the razor.

00:24:29.460 | So this eliminates the diving board effect you get with cheaper blades where the edge

00:24:34.800 | of the blade can move up and down.

00:24:36.800 | And that's what gives you nicks.

00:24:38.220 | That's what can give you burn.

00:24:39.220 | When you have just less than the thickness of a human hair sticking beyond the edge of

00:24:45.040 | your razor, you can get this very firm blade edge, which does a really nice cut.

00:24:50.820 | And what I love about it is you're just spending 10 cent on the blade.

00:24:55.380 | All of the magic is in the razor itself and this really nice piece of aluminum.

00:24:59.060 | So you pay more up front for this beautiful piece of metal, but then going forward, you're

00:25:04.820 | not paying very expensive monthly subscriptions for a subscription service.

00:25:08.440 | You're not going to the drugstore and buying those incredibly expensive plastic disposable

00:25:13.280 | blades where I believe it's up to now 19, but 19 different blades and the one big plastic

00:25:19.480 | contraction or whatever it is.

00:25:21.240 | You just have 10 cent safety razors, safety razor blades in this beautiful actual metal

00:25:28.360 | razor and you get the really good shave from it.

00:25:30.880 | You can keep it forever.

00:25:31.920 | You can use it your whole life.

00:25:33.640 | I am a big fan.

00:25:34.760 | It is the razor that I use.

00:25:38.960 | So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime.

00:25:43.240 | Visit HinsonShaving.com/Cal, they picked a razor for you and use code CAL and you will

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00:26:02.160 | That's 100 free blades when you head to HinsonShaving.com/Cal and use that code CAL.

00:26:12.120 | I also want to talk about our friends at Rhone, R-H-O-N-E.

00:26:18.880 | As we've talked about before on the show, I'd long been a fan of Rhone's athletic t-shirts

00:26:26.000 | because they look, they looked great.

00:26:28.160 | They were breathable, they were flexible, they were high quality.

00:26:31.960 | That's what I wear basically every day in the summer here in DC.

00:26:35.300 | It's why I was excited to find out that they now have a dress shirt.

00:26:40.480 | They call it the commuter shirt and it's the most comfortable, breathable and flexible

00:26:44.700 | shirt known to man.

00:26:47.820 | And here's why.

00:26:48.820 | It has Rhone's comfortable four-way stretch fabric, the same stuff I loved in their t-shirts.

00:26:54.400 | This gives you breathability and flexibility.

00:26:57.840 | It's wrinkle free.

00:26:59.800 | This is why I like the commuter shirt when I travel to a conference, when I travel to

00:27:03.200 | give a talk, throw the Rhone commuter shirt in my bag, it's going to look great.

00:27:07.960 | It's not going to be covered in wrinkles like a cotton shirt would.

00:27:11.000 | And it has GoldFusion anti-odor technology.

00:27:13.760 | So you know, when you're up on stage and it's hot out, it's hot and you're really getting

00:27:17.640 | into it about deep work, the shirt's going to stay fresh.

00:27:20.860 | It's going to take care of that sweat.

00:27:23.220 | You're not going to end up after smelling weird.

00:27:27.960 | So I love the commuter shirt.

00:27:30.160 | It is lightweight.

00:27:31.160 | I really like this.

00:27:32.160 | I mean, I get hot, I run hot.

00:27:33.160 | It's very lightweight, very flexible.

00:27:35.760 | So I really do.

00:27:36.760 | For me, this is my, I need to be exuding a lot of energy on a stage or in a classroom

00:27:42.920 | or on a multi-hour podcast interview.

00:27:45.920 | And I want to look good, but I don't want to get too hot.

00:27:48.200 | The commuter shirt is my new go-to.

00:27:49.960 | So Rhone, good for you for bringing your technology into this particular space of fashion.

00:27:57.120 | So the commuter shirt can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes

00:28:01.520 | next.

00:28:02.520 | Head to Rhone.com/Cal and use the promo code Cal to save 20% off your entire order.

00:28:07.840 | That's 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E.com/Cal and use code Cal.

00:28:16.680 | It's time to find your corner office comfort.

00:28:20.040 | All right, Jesse, let's talk to a real live person.

00:28:26.240 | Just a reminder for anyone else who wants to potentially do a live call on our show,

00:28:30.360 | here's how you sign up.

00:28:32.880 | Just go submit a question like you normally would using the survey link that's right there

00:28:37.040 | in the show notes.

00:28:38.080 | At the bottom, it says, would you be willing to do this question on the show live?

00:28:43.120 | And if so, give us your email address and just put your address down there.

00:28:46.040 | If we think it's a good fit for the show, we will let you know and get you on the line.

00:28:50.800 | All right, Jesse, let's see who we have on the line today.

00:28:55.600 | Looks good.

00:28:57.640 | Finny, thank you for calling in to the Deep Questions podcast.

00:29:03.040 | What is your question you have for me today?

00:29:05.680 | Hi, Cal.

00:29:07.200 | Yeah.

00:29:08.200 | So my question revolves around understanding my limits and setting boundaries to respect

00:29:13.160 | that.

00:29:14.160 | Specifically, I've noticed that I have a habit of taking on too much and overworking myself.

00:29:21.720 | So I'm looking for recommendations around parameters and guiding questions I should

00:29:27.400 | keep in the back of my mind so that I can recognize when this is happening and start

00:29:31.920 | to dial back before burnout sets in.

00:29:34.200 | Right.

00:29:35.200 | Well, a great question, because I hear similar complaints or similar concerns from a lot

00:29:41.640 | of my listeners.

00:29:42.640 | Why don't we start by getting a little bit more background?

00:29:45.320 | Could you walk us through, for example, a recent example in your life where you took

00:29:52.400 | on too much and the type of damage that caused?

00:29:55.440 | Yeah, sure thing.

00:29:58.040 | So my full-time job, I work in finance, and that's my full-time job.

00:30:05.400 | But then on my nights and weekends, I like to tinker with Internet-type stuff, like taking

00:30:11.820 | pictures with my smartphone and writing things that I'm interested in writing about.

00:30:16.880 | And then about a month ago, I got a scholarship to do a master's level program, which was

00:30:26.000 | self-paced, so I thought I had some wiggle room.

00:30:30.680 | But as I started the program, I realized, well, one, I didn't have my study work on

00:30:37.400 | autopilots.

00:30:38.400 | And, you know, I know from previous experience that going two, three weeks into that kind

00:30:43.520 | of program, if you're not on autopilot, it's really difficult to do well in the classes.

00:30:49.760 | And so, you know, what I ended up doing was just dropping the class, and I figured I'll

00:30:54.840 | try again another time.

00:30:56.360 | But it was just too much to add, you know, full-time work plus hobbies and, you know,

00:31:04.080 | commitments like being part of a family and having friends that I want to keep in touch

00:31:09.240 | with and then adding school on top of that.

00:31:12.080 | Right.

00:31:13.080 | So you were trying, with your full-time job and other nonprofessional commitments, you

00:31:19.480 | were adding in coursework, and you were doing so without the structure of an autopilot.

00:31:23.560 | So I hear this correctly, you were basically kind of winging it.

00:31:25.720 | Hey, what do I need to work on today?

00:31:28.240 | Was that the situation in which the course became too much?

00:31:31.240 | Yeah.

00:31:32.240 | Well, yeah, so the course became too much, I think, for two reasons.

00:31:35.960 | For one, I felt like I wasn't, when I sat down to model what a week, a typical week

00:31:43.320 | could look like, I felt like I didn't prioritize the relationships I wanted.

00:31:51.680 | I didn't give them a high enough priority outside of work.

00:31:55.000 | And then on top of that, I wasn't able to get my study work on autopilot quickly enough.

00:32:02.520 | And I wasn't willing to jeopardize, like, sacrifice those relationships.

00:32:06.880 | And you know, with the autopilot not in place, it didn't make sense to stick with it.

00:32:12.560 | Yeah.

00:32:13.560 | Well, OK, I think you did the right thing in trying to sketch out an autopilot schedule

00:32:20.640 | that made sense.

00:32:21.640 | And this is what I'm going to lean into in my answer here.

00:32:24.520 | The exercise I think is going to be most revealing for you is actually going through the process

00:32:29.680 | of, as we say, facing the productivity dragon.

00:32:32.840 | And in this case, it's going to be actually working out a sample week schedule.

00:32:38.080 | Here's work, here's other things happening in my life.

00:32:41.160 | Here's all of the different work I need to do for my class.

00:32:44.360 | Let me find time for that.

00:32:45.600 | Let me go through this experiment.

00:32:46.640 | So this is for the listeners who don't know what the autopilot schedule is.

00:32:49.840 | That's what it is, finding regular times for regularly occurring work.

00:32:55.560 | Work that all out for a week.

00:32:57.260 | And if you stare at that and says, this doesn't work, that is a really useful signal.

00:33:04.220 | That is a signal not to ignore.

00:33:05.860 | That is a signal that this isn't going to fit.

00:33:08.380 | I actually need more time if this is going to work.

00:33:10.980 | And if I can't generate more time, let's say by temporarily reconfiguring my work, maybe

00:33:15.760 | I have a half day on this day where I can catch up on a lot more work.

00:33:18.600 | If you can't find the time, if the schedule doesn't fit, we have to actually face that

00:33:23.520 | reality and say there's going to have to be a significant change.

00:33:26.360 | I mean, that's often how I tell people to figure out if there's too much going on is

00:33:29.880 | to actually stare at everything that's going on, move those puzzle pieces and say, does

00:33:34.160 | this actually fit into a reasonable, sustainable schedule?

00:33:37.640 | And if it doesn't, let that be the motivation to make some sort, there's going to have to

00:33:41.040 | be some sort of larger change.

00:33:42.880 | Something is going to have to give.

00:33:43.880 | And again, it could be a slight reconfiguration of work.

00:33:47.040 | It could be a slight reconfiguration of your life outside of work.

00:33:50.880 | The hobbies are going on the back burner.

00:33:53.120 | Saturdays are now dedicated to my course.

00:33:55.000 | I don't want to do this forever.

00:33:56.600 | I can do this for a semester.

00:33:58.240 | It might be that or it might be I can't do these two things at the same time.

00:34:03.280 | And this is the evidence that I have actually facing me.

00:34:06.680 | How does that seem to you?

00:34:07.680 | How's that sound?

00:34:08.680 | This idea of actually just seeing the schedule and accepting what you see as it is, you know,

00:34:13.720 | not wistfully thinking, but looking at the reality.

00:34:16.280 | Right.

00:34:17.280 | Yeah.

00:34:18.280 | I mean, it was difficult.

00:34:20.320 | I think it was difficult to come to that conclusion that, you know, I looked at it, tried different

00:34:27.360 | configurations and it just didn't, it was too much to, there was a mental load with

00:34:35.200 | that that I couldn't hold in my head.

00:34:39.400 | And so that's why it made sense to say, okay, well, you know, the chance to go to school

00:34:45.120 | is probably going to come up again.

00:34:48.440 | And ultimately I think what I'm going to do is scale back a little bit and just do a smaller

00:34:54.040 | portion of that program and then pick up more later as opportunity presents itself as my

00:35:03.160 | career progresses.

00:35:04.160 | Well, I mean, Finney, this makes sense to me.

00:35:07.960 | I mean, what you're saying you did, this is more now a case study than a question.

00:35:13.320 | And the way I'm going to try to make this concrete for the audience is that this is

00:35:17.200 | the difference between a calendar centric approach to your life and a resume centric

00:35:24.240 | approach to your life.

00:35:25.360 | So the resume centric approach is all I'm walking in here is how would this look to

00:35:30.200 | be on my resume?

00:35:31.200 | Oh, it would be really cool to have this degree would be really useful.

00:35:34.040 | Oh, it'd be really cool to have written a novel.

00:35:35.920 | So why don't I do this?

00:35:36.920 | Oh, I want to run a marathon.

00:35:38.280 | That would look cool.

00:35:39.280 | Let me start training for a marathon.

00:35:40.600 | It's just managing that list of things that you want to display.

00:35:44.760 | The calendar centric approach to your life is looking at the time you have available.

00:35:49.200 | And when you're trying to understand what mix of activities to bring into your life,

00:35:53.400 | saying, does this fit?

00:35:55.240 | Does the life to show me when I'm looking at how much time I'll have?

00:35:58.840 | Does that seem sustainable?

00:36:00.620 | That's what you were doing.

00:36:02.440 | That's by the way, how I approach my life.

00:36:04.080 | I get that exact same sinking feeling in my gut when I'm staring at my calendar and it's

00:36:09.680 | not working.

00:36:11.280 | My wife knows this.

00:36:12.360 | This is what she thinks of as Monday morning syndrome.

00:36:14.600 | When I'm doing a weekly plan Monday morning in a period where my schedule has got too

00:36:19.200 | complex, I just feel terrible because I'm forced to stare at the calendar and it doesn't

00:36:24.360 | fit and nothing makes me more unhappy.

00:36:26.560 | We got to trust that gut.

00:36:28.080 | So I'm going to say you have my stamp of approval for exactly how you thought of this.

00:36:32.360 | And I'm actually going to thank you for sharing a case study with everyone else about how

00:36:36.140 | this calendar centric thinking really leads to more sustainable lifestyle.

00:36:41.000 | You're still going to do awesome things.

00:36:42.620 | You're going to go to school.

00:36:43.620 | I think you're going to find an opportunity going forward where maybe you're going to

00:36:47.360 | be able to officially work this in with your job at some opportunity in the future.

00:36:52.080 | There's going to be a reduction in your hours.

00:36:53.640 | You can have time.

00:36:54.640 | There's going to be a sabbatical.

00:36:55.720 | I'm not sure how it's going to play out, but you know what you're looking for now.

00:36:59.040 | So I have no doubt that you're going to continue to do cool things.

00:37:02.400 | But I give you my stamp of approval for this approach to actually tackling this particular

00:37:06.620 | issue.

00:37:07.620 | So hopefully that makes you feel better, Finney, but I'm giving you a thumbs up.

00:37:10.980 | Right on.

00:37:11.980 | Thank you very much.

00:37:12.980 | And I will say that I think, you know, I'm coming out of the, I just finished using the

00:37:18.340 | first my set, my first version of your, your weekly planner.

00:37:24.020 | And I think that that helped a lot.

00:37:25.980 | So please, please, thank you very much for doing this.

00:37:29.740 | And I hope you continue.

00:37:30.740 | All right.

00:37:31.740 | Thank you very much, Finney.

00:37:32.740 | And keep me posted for sure.

00:37:33.740 | We want to hear how this goes.

00:37:34.740 | Okay.

00:37:35.740 | All right.

00:37:36.740 | Well, that was fun.

00:37:37.740 | It's really nice talking to people back and forth.

00:37:40.220 | That's something different, but we don't want to neglect the bread and butter here, of course,

00:37:43.860 | which is the written questions that you submit.

00:37:46.360 | So let's get into some of those.

00:37:48.380 | Jesse, what's our first written question of the show?

00:37:53.580 | First question is from Hari.

00:37:56.060 | How do I apply the journalistic mode of scheduling deep work when I'm feeling exhausted and fatigued

00:38:01.140 | most of the time?

00:38:02.140 | We'll just do a quick preview here or review, I should say, not preview, review of what

00:38:07.820 | he means by the journalistic mode of scheduling deep work.

00:38:12.740 | In my book, Deep Work, I said, you have to have a scheduling philosophy, some sort of

00:38:20.260 | strategy or philosophy about this is how I schedule deep work sessions.

00:38:24.340 | You need some sort of philosophy or strategy.

00:38:26.300 | You cannot just wing it.

00:38:28.180 | You cannot just say, I'll wait, tell him in the mood to do deep work and have nothing

00:38:31.120 | else going on, and then I'll actually get into it.

00:38:33.260 | If that's your plan, you're never going to do deep work.

00:38:35.980 | So in the book, I said, OK, let me give you some examples of general categories of deep

00:38:41.980 | work scheduling strategies that I have seen people succeed with.

00:38:45.940 | And I gave three, three different examples, three different categories, rhythmic, bimodal

00:38:52.180 | and journalistic.

00:38:53.900 | So Hari is asking about the journalistic mode of deep work scheduling, how to succeed with

00:38:58.980 | that and in particular, how to succeed with that when he finds himself overworked and

00:39:02.660 | tired in his elaboration.

00:39:04.900 | I'll point out he's a CEO of a startup, I believe.

00:39:07.860 | So he's someone who has a lot going on.

00:39:10.180 | So to answer that question, let's just do the quick run through of what all three of

00:39:13.780 | these scheduling strategies entail.

00:39:17.580 | Rhythmic scheduling of deep work is perhaps the most obvious.

00:39:22.660 | You work the same times on the same days, week after week.

00:39:25.900 | So when you hear someone say, I get up at six, I work on my novel for 90 minutes every

00:39:30.880 | morning before I get ready and go to work.

00:39:33.320 | That's the rhythmic schedule.

00:39:34.540 | When you hear people say, I don't teach on Fridays.

00:39:38.200 | So from 10 to four on Fridays is all research.

00:39:41.400 | That's the rhythmic schedule.

00:39:42.400 | It's the same time, same day, same week.

00:39:44.220 | So you don't have to think about it.

00:39:45.940 | You just know when the deep work happens.

00:39:48.060 | Your brain gets used to the idea of that when deep work happens as well.

00:39:50.420 | So you can get into the mode easier.

00:39:53.420 | Bimodal is more extreme.

00:39:55.040 | It's where you go back and forth between two different modes where either you're doing

00:39:58.160 | no deep work or you're in a mode where all you are doing is deep work.

00:40:03.900 | And this applies on different types of timescale.

00:40:06.920 | So if you take a summer to write your book as an academic and then don't work on the

00:40:12.940 | book during the academic year, that's bimodal.

00:40:15.780 | In the book deep work, I give the example of professor and author Adam Grant, who implemented

00:40:20.660 | bimodal on a smaller timescale.

00:40:24.160 | So he would go two or three days in a row where he was doing nothing but deep work on

00:40:27.940 | his research, completely unreachable.

00:40:30.340 | And then when he was out of those sessions, he was 100% reachable.

00:40:33.080 | My door is open.

00:40:34.460 | Adam's really big on answering emails quickly.

00:40:36.540 | And so he would just go back and forth between these modes.

00:40:39.460 | Carl Jung, this opened the book deep work.

00:40:42.060 | I talked about Carl Jung going to Bollingen Tower, this fairy tale inspired stone house

00:40:47.220 | he built on the shore of Lake Geneva near the town of Bollingen.

00:40:52.200 | That was a bimodal work philosophy.

00:40:54.360 | When he was in Zurich, very busy.

00:40:57.720 | When he would go out to his fairy tale house on the lake, he would lock himself in a meditation

00:41:02.060 | room and just think.

00:41:03.880 | Different modes.

00:41:04.880 | Journalistic, which is what Hari is asking about, is where you look at the days or time

00:41:11.120 | ahead and sort of figure out on the fly, when am I going to have time to do deep work?

00:41:14.640 | So it's one week will look different than another.

00:41:18.000 | You're finding room for deep work sessions where you can.

00:41:21.280 | I call it the journalistic method because journalists often get really good at I find

00:41:26.800 | times to write.

00:41:27.800 | I just have to write.

00:41:28.800 | I'm on location.

00:41:29.800 | I'm reporting on an election.

00:41:30.960 | I'm reporting on a war and I just the work has to get done.

00:41:35.280 | I'm just going to sit down and write my article draft right now in the back of this truck.

00:41:40.240 | So that's why I call it the journalistic method.

00:41:43.400 | So how do you succeed with the journalistic method?

00:41:47.320 | I argue more recently, I typically argue that this is best implemented at the weekly scale.

00:41:52.840 | So when you're doing your weekly plan, you find those times when you're going to do deep

00:41:58.800 | work that week and you schedule them on your calendar like you would any other meeting.

00:42:04.000 | The reason why this is journalistic and not rhythmic or bimodal is that it's not rhythmic

00:42:07.860 | because the days and times you deep work depend on the week.

00:42:11.800 | So it's not regular.

00:42:13.560 | So this week I have a busy Tuesday, but Wednesday, nothing's happening until noon.

00:42:16.640 | So I'm going to take Wednesday morning the next week, Wednesday is hard, like a horror

00:42:19.600 | show.

00:42:20.600 | But if I do Tuesday and Thursday morning, I have time to do deep work.

00:42:22.760 | There's different from week to week.

00:42:24.560 | It's also not bimodal because you're not spending one or more days just in a state of deep work.

00:42:29.720 | The sessions fit within a day that have other types of activities.

00:42:33.720 | So my own life in when I wrote deep work, I said I'd mainly do journalistic.

00:42:39.360 | I would say now that varies.

00:42:42.360 | So I'm writing a book right now in a semester where I'm not teaching.

00:42:47.220 | So I have a big queue of deep work efforts and a lot more flexibility on my schedule.

00:42:52.020 | So I have more of a rhythmic thing going where almost every morning I work on the book first

00:42:55.440 | thing and then I hybridize that with journalistic scheduling by adding extra blocks on different

00:43:01.720 | days depending on what's happening in my schedule.

00:43:05.200 | So Hari, to get to your question about exhaustion.

00:43:11.080 | So how do you succeed with this when you find that you are exhausted by the time you get

00:43:14.440 | to these scheduled blocks is I would say two things.

00:43:18.600 | One, do less.

00:43:20.920 | So you're exhausted may just be a symptom of you have too much going on.

00:43:24.880 | Your brain is fatigued.

00:43:25.880 | I mean, you're exhausting your brain.

00:43:27.960 | It's not your scheduling systems fault necessarily that you're exhausted when it comes time to

00:43:31.000 | do deep work.

00:43:32.000 | You're asking too much of your brain.

00:43:35.320 | If you are an athlete and you said, look, I'm having trouble doing this particular type

00:43:39.160 | of training because my muscles are so fatigued by the time I get there, I would say if that

00:43:42.560 | type of training is important, then you need to do less exercise of other types.

00:43:46.120 | You're burning out your body.

00:43:49.000 | The second thing I would suggest is if you're dealing with overwork and exhaustion, you

00:43:53.400 | might want to step away from the journalistic and head towards the rhythmic.

00:43:57.600 | The rhythmic schedule scheduling philosophy can deal better with heavy workloads, especially

00:44:03.600 | if the rhythmic approach is first thing in the morning.

00:44:07.180 | First thing I do every day when my energy is the highest is a little bit of deep work

00:44:09.880 | on this thing is important.

00:44:11.100 | That's probably the most resistant, the most fatigue resistant deep work scheduling strategy

00:44:16.600 | that's out there.

00:44:18.520 | So if you've got a lot going on, simplify your deep work life first thing in the morning,

00:44:23.960 | you have better luck with that, and then see if you can actually just reduce the total

00:44:27.400 | load of work you're doing.

00:44:28.840 | Because again, if you're overworking your mind, you're overworking your mind and there's no

00:44:32.280 | system that can reverse that reality.

00:44:38.120 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:44:41.400 | Next question is from Roger, a senior level consultant in Wisconsin.

00:44:45.520 | For midsize projects such as preparing a large proposal for a new client, my tendency is

00:44:50.040 | to allow the effort to fill the available time up to the deadline.

00:44:53.360 | How do I know when something is good enough to be done?

00:44:56.560 | Yeah, these type of perfectionist issues are common, especially in knowledge work where

00:45:02.400 | you have many different things you're being asked to do.

00:45:05.620 | It can be psychologically difficult at some point to say this is good enough, let's move

00:45:09.160 | on.

00:45:11.120 | If you can't get to that point, you end up like Roger is talking about here, feeling

00:45:15.920 | every minute staying up late, letting other things fall on the wayside because you're

00:45:20.320 | just not quite comfortable finishing because it could be better.

00:45:24.800 | What about this?

00:45:25.800 | What about that?

00:45:26.880 | And that can be damaging both psychologically, but also to your career prospects.

00:45:32.640 | So one thing I would recommend, Roger, is clearly identifying the subset of things you

00:45:37.080 | do in your job that are what I call needle mover activities.

00:45:42.280 | These are the things that really make the biggest difference in your career.

00:45:46.180 | These are probably gonna be the things that most heavily leverage your hard won skills

00:45:50.520 | and or produce the most value for your organization.

00:45:54.240 | These are the things if you can do them at a very high level, will give you leverage

00:45:58.480 | over everything else.

00:46:00.680 | This is what we care about, right?

00:46:02.120 | So if you are a ad copywriter, a madman type situation, it's like how effective are the

00:46:08.680 | ad campaigns you're writing?

00:46:10.560 | Are they actually generating a lot of business for clients?

00:46:12.700 | That's the needle mover activity.

00:46:13.960 | If you're the developer at a startup, how crisp and robust is your code?

00:46:20.640 | If you can write really sharp code that's very stable and very efficient, man, that's

00:46:24.600 | what matters.

00:46:25.600 | That's what allows our product to work.

00:46:28.880 | It saves us all these hours of repair and support.

00:46:32.520 | It's the skill that matters.

00:46:33.640 | If you're a professor, papers.

00:46:35.640 | Are you writing papers that are attracting citations and are being published in top venues?

00:46:40.380 | These are needle mover activities.

00:46:42.280 | Once you clearly identify what the needle mover activities are, you can be much more

00:46:46.080 | comfortable with the psychological toll of saying this is good enough with everything

00:46:49.440 | else.

00:46:50.440 | So you're the ad copywriter.

00:46:53.200 | This is the thing that really matters.

00:46:55.440 | When there's a one-off thing you're asked to do, like, "Hey, can you get together client

00:46:58.840 | testimonials for our website?"

00:47:01.780 | You're more comfortable saying like, "I'll just do a good enough job.

00:47:05.360 | I found some testimonials.

00:47:06.680 | I made a plan.

00:47:07.680 | I found them.

00:47:08.680 | I checked them.

00:47:09.680 | I did it on time.

00:47:10.680 | It's at a reasonable level of quality.

00:47:11.680 | Great.

00:47:12.680 | Let me get back to the thing I really care about."

00:47:13.680 | You're a professor doing a committee.

00:47:15.160 | "Let me make sure I'm responsible and reasonable and I show up and do the stuff I say I'm going

00:47:20.000 | to do.

00:47:21.000 | I don't want to hand in crap, but I'm keeping this pretty contained.

00:47:24.560 | I have an hour for it here, a half hour for it here, and I'm happy with just that's good

00:47:29.160 | enough."

00:47:30.160 | So when you know what really matters, you don't sweat so much about the stuff that doesn't

00:47:35.680 | matter so much.

00:47:38.800 | Now keep in mind, if you don't take this approach, if you instead fall back on the perfectionist

00:47:45.080 | approach, "I just want everything to be beautiful," this can actually be counterproductive for

00:47:51.720 | your career.

00:47:53.880 | If people learn, "Oh, you are someone that no matter what I give them is going to do,

00:47:58.080 | they're going to obsess about it and it's going to be 2x better than I would do myself.

00:48:02.760 | If I tell them to get client testimonials, it's going to be they're going to find all

00:48:06.260 | these different testimonials and go back and get them revised and they're going to find

00:48:09.480 | images and it's going to be really great for the website.

00:48:13.240 | I'm going to start wanting you to do more and more of these things.

00:48:16.920 | You will become my go-to person for these type of activities."

00:48:20.920 | And what you're going to find yourself then is drowning in what in the research literature

00:48:24.440 | they called non-promotable activities.

00:48:26.920 | So activities that are not directly related to the main thing you do.

00:48:30.680 | You're the professor who everyone wants on their committees because you really do such

00:48:33.920 | a good job, but now you can't do your research.

00:48:36.160 | And that's what ultimately matters for you keeping your job.

00:48:39.440 | The ad copywriter that everyone wants to pull onto their internal facing initiatives because

00:48:44.200 | they know that stuff will get done.

00:48:46.240 | And because of that, you're not producing the award-winning campaigns on which you could

00:48:49.280 | build your career.

00:48:51.480 | So there's a cost beyond just the psychology of, "Oh, my schedule is full because I can't

00:48:55.680 | let things go."

00:48:56.680 | There's a cost to your career trajectory if you're too good at too many things.

00:49:01.440 | Put your energy into the needle moving activities.

00:49:03.640 | Be a reasonable, responsible human on everything else.

00:49:07.240 | "I won't be late.

00:49:08.280 | I won't drop the ball and I'll be fine."

00:49:11.520 | But I'm not really trying to blow you away with the stuff that doesn't really matter.

00:49:14.880 | I think it's actually better for your career growth paradoxically to be worse at some things

00:49:19.800 | and better at others.

00:49:21.200 | It's not the case that be as good as possible at all the things you do is actually going

00:49:24.240 | to be the fastest route to progression inside your career.

00:49:29.320 | All right.

00:49:32.400 | Rolling right along here.

00:49:33.400 | What do we got next?

00:49:34.400 | All right.

00:49:35.400 | Next question is from Mettie, a 30-year-old engineer and PhD candidate.

00:49:38.960 | "I work full-time and do a part-time PhD.

00:49:42.080 | I'm currently writing my dissertation.

00:49:43.640 | I have the opportunity to take up to two months off work next year.

00:49:47.520 | I fantasize about using it to go deep into a deep immersion mode.

00:49:51.440 | Maybe even spend a portion of that time in a cabin or room elsewhere where all I do is

00:49:55.840 | wake up, drink coffee, and write, take deep walks.

00:50:00.000 | Is this a good idea or should I write more gradually?"

00:50:02.800 | So, I think you should write more gradually.

00:50:06.760 | I think if you tried to contain your dissertation writing to two months in a cabin, you're going

00:50:14.880 | to get cabin fever and a far from complete dissertation.

00:50:20.080 | That's not really the right way to do this.

00:50:22.560 | What I would recommend doing instead is a more slow accumulation strategy.

00:50:26.520 | I would say maybe four to five mornings a week, and you can use a weekend morning in

00:50:30.480 | there.

00:50:31.480 | Maybe in the morning when your energy is highest before you go to your other job, you're working

00:50:35.240 | on your dissertation.

00:50:37.480 | One to two hours of very sharp thinking.

00:50:41.200 | You're collecting maximally sharp thinking day after day after day.

00:50:45.640 | If you work all day in a cabin, maybe you have two hours in there that are particularly

00:50:50.080 | sharp and seven hours in there where you're exhausted, but because you're in the stupid

00:50:54.880 | cabin and have nothing else to do, you're kind of trying to force the work and trying

00:50:57.360 | to keep things going.

00:50:58.700 | If you work one to two hours a day, it's sharp, sharp, sharp, sharp, and that accumulates.

00:51:04.560 | This chapter that took 15 days to write is 15 days worth of sharp thinking, and it shows.

00:51:12.320 | Slow but steady, carefully building.

00:51:14.760 | Everything you do is not too much, but what you do is really good, really sharp.

00:51:18.880 | That's probably the better way if you're working on a dissertation part time.

00:51:22.280 | That's the better way to do it.

00:51:24.400 | Two extra things I'll say there.

00:51:26.400 | Instead of spending two months on an unpaid leave to write your dissertation, take a one

00:51:32.000 | day of vacation every two to three weeks.

00:51:35.000 | So now you can throw into your mix every couple of weeks.

00:51:38.280 | I take a day off from my main job, and it's a day that I can go super deep on.

00:51:43.060 | Maybe there's like a really complicated thing.

00:51:45.960 | What's the thesis for this chapter?

00:51:47.600 | I really got to figure that out.

00:51:48.600 | Then I can write it for two weeks, but I really got to figure out what I'm saying.

00:51:50.880 | I'm going to take a day off and walk the woods and think.

00:51:54.720 | Do that every two to three weeks.

00:51:56.040 | You're going to get way more bang for the buck out of that than putting all those days

00:51:59.320 | together and having the pressure of everything has to come out of this.

00:52:03.040 | The second thing I'll say is where a retreat typically is more useful in this type of work

00:52:08.440 | is closer to the end.

00:52:10.960 | I've been working on this a while.

00:52:11.960 | I have most of my ideas down.

00:52:14.960 | There's 50 small things that have to happen for this dissertation to finish.

00:52:17.640 | I have to go back and do this, and I have to change all these citations, and I have

00:52:21.040 | to figure out a conclusion for this.

00:52:22.520 | There's all these little small things that have to happen, and I feel like all these

00:52:26.200 | loose ends will never get tied up.

00:52:28.120 | That's where taking two weeks could be really effective.

00:52:30.840 | I'm going to shut this thing down.

00:52:32.400 | I'm going to close down this project and get it out the door.

00:52:34.560 | I'm close.

00:52:35.560 | Now let's push it to the finish line.

00:52:37.520 | That is effective for taking time off.

00:52:39.840 | To do the whole project in a period of concentrated work like that, I think that's unlikely to

00:52:45.960 | be as successful.

00:52:47.240 | I think slow and steady is the way to go.

00:52:49.920 | Jesse, this comes up in book writing a lot, especially in nonfiction.

00:52:56.200 | You'll see this often, especially in pragmatic nonfiction, so non-full-time writers.

00:52:59.720 | They're like, "Okay, I'm going to write this book on whatever, marketing."

00:53:05.960 | You hear people say this all the time, like, "Oh, I locked myself away for six weeks and

00:53:11.600 | just pounded out the book."

00:53:14.120 | That's going to be a really bad book because most of those hours are going to be fatigued

00:53:19.000 | hours.

00:53:20.000 | Most of those hours are going to be pulling from an already emptied reservoir of creative

00:53:23.640 | insight.

00:53:25.040 | It's going to be a book that's forced.

00:53:26.280 | It's going to be a book that feels like writing for the sake of writing, a book that's full

00:53:29.400 | of lazy colloquialisms, rhetorical questions, and conversational tone because you're just

00:53:34.000 | trying to fill in those pages because you have four or five more hours to go.

00:53:38.120 | Professional writers who write really good books, work, work, work, work, work, work,

00:53:41.480 | work, work, day after day, week after week, month after month, are coming at it sharp,

00:53:44.520 | day after day, day after day, and they're building this thing very carefully.

00:53:48.120 | That's how really good work comes out.

00:53:49.920 | I see this in nonfiction writing all the time.

00:53:52.000 | As soon as I see a writer brag about, "I was in monk mode in a cabin for two months and

00:53:57.000 | did nothing but write this book," I immediately think this is not going to be a good book.

00:54:00.720 | That's interesting.

00:54:01.720 | The writing's not going to be good.

00:54:02.720 | All right, what do we got next?

00:54:06.520 | Next question is from Carl.

00:54:08.560 | Have you read Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross' recent book, Talent?

00:54:12.520 | I'm curious what you think about their claim that answering email quickly is a good marker

00:54:16.880 | of talent.

00:54:17.880 | Well, I haven't read Talent yet, but I do find it to be a safe bet to not disagree with

00:54:25.080 | Tyler Cowen when the opportunity arises.

00:54:29.080 | So I tracked down the particular paragraph that Carl's referring to here, and it looks

00:54:34.480 | like if I found the right passage, there's a conversation between Cowen and who I assume

00:54:40.040 | is Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator, the current president of OpenAI.

00:54:46.400 | So Cowen asks, "How quickly should someone answer your email to count as quick and decisive?"

00:54:54.360 | And Altman says, "You know, years ago, I wrote a little program to look at this, like how

00:54:58.560 | quickly our best founders, the founders that run billion-dollar-plus companies, answer

00:55:02.440 | my emails versus our bad founders.

00:55:04.440 | I don't remember the exact data, but it was mind-blowingly different.

00:55:07.480 | It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times."

00:55:11.960 | And then it zooms out from that conversation.

00:55:14.080 | So I think this might be Cowen or Daniel commenting on that exchange.

00:55:19.200 | And they write, "In essence, this quality of speed of response is picking up on how

00:55:23.360 | much the individual is focused on being connected to the world and responding to plausibly important

00:55:27.720 | queries."

00:55:28.720 | All right.

00:55:30.080 | So that, of course, seems like it's in direct contradiction to everything I'm warning about

00:55:35.600 | in a world without email where I talk about quick responses like that means you have to

00:55:40.200 | constantly be checking inboxes.

00:55:41.640 | If you're constantly checking inboxes, you're constantly in a state of attention residue,

00:55:45.560 | which means you have a drastically reduced cognitive capacity.

00:55:48.680 | Now, my argument is a psychological and neurologically verifiable hypothesis.

00:55:54.960 | I think the evidence there is clear.

00:55:57.080 | If you are keeping up with digital conversations as a priority, you cannot produce complicated

00:56:03.680 | thought matter at the same level, the same speed or level of quality as someone who is

00:56:07.440 | not context switching.

00:56:10.000 | That doesn't, however, mean that Sam is wrong.

00:56:13.060 | And that's because he's talking about founders of early stage startups.

00:56:20.080 | That is a very specific place to be in the world of work.

00:56:23.920 | And it is a place that I talk about in my book, Deep Work.

00:56:28.280 | So in Deep Work, I specifically pull up the example of Jack Dorsey, who at the time was

00:56:33.400 | the CEO of both Twitter and Square.

00:56:36.600 | And I go through his schedule because it was considered so unusual to be a CEO of two companies

00:56:42.280 | at the same time.

00:56:43.680 | A lot of articles were written that got into the details of how Jack Dorsey worked out

00:56:47.680 | his schedule.

00:56:48.680 | So we got a rare insight into the daily schedule of a tech startup CEO.

00:56:54.240 | And I went through these schedules that I was re recreating from profiles.

00:56:57.800 | I was saying, look how interrupted it is.

00:57:01.360 | Jack is constantly answering questions, getting feedback, giving feedback back to people all

00:57:07.800 | day long.

00:57:08.800 | He would move from one place to the other.

00:57:10.040 | He'd sit in this open desk.

00:57:11.320 | People would come by all day long.

00:57:12.320 | I was like, there's no deep work happening there.

00:57:14.200 | And what I argued in my book was that's fine.

00:57:17.400 | For Jack Dorsey, for that job, for that person, maximizing the quality and quantity of high

00:57:25.780 | end cognitive output is not that important that if you're a CEO of a fast moving startup,

00:57:31.580 | the particular role you play that's valuable, there is a decision engine.

00:57:36.320 | The most valuable thing you can do for that company is be a source of decisions on lots

00:57:40.380 | of different things.

00:57:41.460 | And if all these decisions go through you, you can have a consistent vision applied to

00:57:46.080 | these decisions.

00:57:47.080 | So the startup evolves at this early stage in an aggressive, consistent way that aligns

00:57:50.660 | with your vision as a founder.

00:57:53.260 | So a founder of a company in these early stages doesn't need five hours of uninterrupted thinking.

00:57:59.700 | You hire programmers to do that and be very careful to not make them be on Slack all day.

00:58:04.820 | But you as the founder actually, and this is exactly what I argued in deep work, are

00:58:08.460 | most valuable if you are available.

00:58:11.900 | So all of these different action decisions come through you and the answers that come

00:58:15.260 | out are coherent and that helps the startup grow.

00:58:18.900 | So what Sam is saying is absolutely right, but it should not be generalized because for

00:58:23.140 | most people it'd be a disaster.

00:58:25.340 | For most people whose value comes not from you being the brilliant founder of a company

00:58:29.300 | that's laying out the vision on which the company is going to unfold.

00:58:31.820 | If that's not you, then you need to be producing at the height of your cognitive abilities.

00:58:37.120 | If you're writing computer code, if you're writing business strategy, if you're putting

00:58:39.900 | together consultant reports, if you're writing academic papers, your value is not maximized

00:58:45.540 | by being a consistent source of aggressive decisions.

00:58:48.980 | It's maximized by you producing really smart cognitive output and you want to reduce cognitive

00:58:54.140 | context switching to do that at the highest possible level.

00:58:59.020 | So most people aren't Jack Dorsey.

00:59:00.940 | Interestingly, after deep work came out, I got a note from one of the early funders of

00:59:05.940 | Twitter who knows Jack well and remembers him during this period.

00:59:11.140 | And he said, you're right in the sense that he'd made a lot of decisions and there's big

00:59:15.820 | parts of the day where he's very accessible.

00:59:17.420 | But he's like, you're wrong when you say that deep work was not important for him.

00:59:21.660 | Jack would also preserve periods of deep concentrated work for thinking through strategy at a higher

00:59:27.780 | level.

00:59:28.780 | So even I was being a little bit too bullish there.

00:59:32.300 | And this person said, yes, he was very accessible, but not all the time.

00:59:34.980 | And he really did prioritize deep work as well.

00:59:37.180 | So even Sam Altman's founders, yes, you want them to be decisive and responsive and being

00:59:41.940 | able to filter what's important and what's not important.

00:59:44.340 | But you should also be happy if you're Sam Altman to know that your founder has two hours

00:59:47.680 | a day where you can't find them because they're thinking really intensely and organizing their

00:59:52.380 | thoughts.

00:59:53.380 | So when they spend the rest of the day making all those decisions, they're coming from a

00:59:56.020 | place of really considered projections and theorizing and strategizing.

01:00:02.180 | And so that's my response.

01:00:04.380 | So do not take that.

01:00:06.100 | The rest of you out there who aren't Jack Dorsey, don't take that conversation as an

01:00:10.820 | excuse to, oh, I should check my email more.

01:00:12.340 | That's really going to help my career.

01:00:13.780 | All right.

01:00:14.780 | Let's see, Jesse, we got a couple of quick questions.

01:00:19.060 | I'm looking at our notes here.

01:00:20.300 | Yep.

01:00:21.300 | Got a couple of questions with fast answers.

01:00:22.620 | I'm excited about.

01:00:24.500 | Here is a question from Charlotte.

01:00:26.540 | Is there some kind of document I can find on your website to help me start using your

01:00:29.820 | quarterly weekly daily planning technique?

01:00:32.340 | Yes, it's not a document.

01:00:34.260 | It's a video on the YouTube page, youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

01:00:40.100 | Look at the core ideas playlist and the video in their title, time management.

01:00:46.780 | And I just go through that system.

01:00:48.740 | I believe also, Jesse, this is what we, Tim Ferriss played, right?

01:00:53.620 | The clip he played.

01:00:54.620 | Yeah.

01:00:55.620 | Yeah.

01:00:56.620 | So, so also, you know, Tim Ferriss on a show sometimes will collect clips from other people's

01:01:00.620 | shows and package them together.

01:01:02.100 | So last month I was involved in one of those packages and the clip that we sent him was

01:01:07.260 | the discussion of that multi-scale planning.

01:01:09.780 | So that's the best document for that right now.

01:01:11.860 | There's also timeblockplanner.com where they can, there's a video up on there too, right?

01:01:16.100 | Yeah.

01:01:17.100 | So if you want it, that's a good, good point.

01:01:18.100 | So for the, the specific piece in there of daily planning with time blocking, there's

01:01:22.980 | a pretty good video I did at timeblockplanner.com where that's just about time blocking.

01:01:27.960 | So yeah, you might watch the core ideas, time management video to get my whole system.

01:01:32.340 | And then you might also watch that time block video at timeblockplanning.com to really hone

01:01:36.200 | in on the time blocking.

01:01:38.220 | And of course, all of these issues we've talked about individually as well.

01:01:41.860 | I mean, we've done a bunch of stuff on weekly planning, a bunch of stuff on strategic planning,

01:01:46.020 | but that video is the best, best document I have right now for that planning system.

01:01:51.460 | All right.

01:01:52.460 | What's our other quick question?

01:01:54.340 | All right.

01:01:55.340 | Question from James.

01:01:56.740 | Speaking of time block, you mentioned several months ago that a revised edition of your

01:02:01.700 | time block planner was in the works.

01:02:03.740 | Do you have any updates to share with your listeners?

01:02:05.780 | Well, I do.

01:02:07.060 | Your timing is good.

01:02:08.060 | James, we're working on this as we speak.

01:02:11.260 | I have a bunch of dummy planners for the new version at my study at my house right now.

01:02:16.820 | And we've honed in on exactly that.

01:02:18.860 | We now have finalized all those details.

01:02:21.100 | Yesterday, I submitted my responses to the copy editing of the new text for the new version

01:02:26.580 | of the planner.

01:02:27.580 | So we're actually in that process right now.

01:02:29.660 | So the good news is a really cool V2 of the planner is coming together.

01:02:35.840 | Just to give you a preview of some of the things that we'll have.

01:02:39.420 | Spiral binding, completely lay flat, thicker cover, no warping issues.

01:02:45.620 | I've condensed the weekend.

01:02:48.940 | So instead of having two full double page spreads for the weekend, which kind of goes

01:02:52.680 | against my advice of don't time block the weekend, we now have a weekend page where

01:02:57.320 | one page is custom designed for looser weekend planning and the adjoining pages for the weekly

01:03:02.480 | plan.

01:03:03.480 | This saved us a lot of pages.

01:03:04.520 | We've added a whole other month worth of weeks to the planner.

01:03:07.440 | So you're now going to get four full months worth of planning in one planner.

01:03:11.940 | Also we're updating the design interior, making it sharper.

01:03:14.880 | I updated the front matter.

01:03:16.820 | There's an author's note about what I've learned since the first planner came out and some tweaks

01:03:20.600 | to the advice.

01:03:21.600 | So this is the good news.

01:03:22.600 | There's a really cool V2 of this planner coming out.

01:03:25.060 | The bad news is because of supply chain issues, we're looking at late summer.

01:03:29.740 | So it's going to be a little while till this is ready.

01:03:32.220 | And again, this is just supply chain nonsense, which is afflicting everyone.

01:03:36.720 | But we have everything standing by to come out as soon as that's possible.

01:03:41.180 | So I would recommend don't wait.

01:03:44.600 | You know, if you're currently time blocking with my current planner, keep doing it.

01:03:48.400 | When the new planner comes out, you can switch over to those.

01:03:50.600 | If you're thinking about time blocking, don't wait until next summer to start.

01:03:54.560 | I mean, the current planner works great.

01:03:56.560 | Learn the habit now get going and just know at some point you'll be able to upgrade that

01:03:59.600 | to an even better planner.

01:04:00.680 | And some point after that, I'll probably update it again.

01:04:03.220 | As I tell people, when you're buying your first time block planner, it's less about

01:04:07.400 | this one physical product you have.

01:04:09.400 | It's more about the system you're buying into.

01:04:11.880 | If you go through these, you'll keep buying new planners over the years, the planners

01:04:15.720 | physical formal update.

01:04:17.320 | It's the commitment to time blocking that really matters.

01:04:19.340 | So cool stuff is coming, but don't wait for it.

01:04:21.480 | If you're thinking about doing it now.

01:04:22.960 | And as we mentioned the last question, timeblockplanner.com explains it explains the whole thing.

01:04:30.120 | Here's the planner.

01:04:31.120 | Here's how it works.

01:04:32.120 | Here's a video that explains the system.

01:04:33.120 | So go there to learn more about my time block planner.

01:04:37.280 | All right, just I want to do a case study.

01:04:41.640 | I like doing case studies so we can see some of my ideas and action in the real world.

01:04:46.480 | So I have a written case study here from Liz.

01:04:51.280 | And so I'm going to read what Liz sent me.

01:04:55.480 | Thanks to your books and podcast, I doubled my income while cutting my hours in half.

01:05:01.440 | I am a freelance copywriter working in the advertising space.

01:05:04.200 | I came up through the ranks working the 60 plus hour weeks that advertising is known

01:05:08.920 | for.

01:05:09.920 | But along the way, I created some commercials and campaigns that got national recognition

01:05:13.020 | and earned me enough career capital to go freelance after the birth of my first son.

01:05:18.160 | That career capital was enough to get me clients as a new freelancer, but not enough to get

01:05:22.960 | me the lifestyle I was hoping for.

01:05:25.000 | I was still working crazy hours and feeling burnt out.

01:05:28.460 | This is where your ideas changed my life.

01:05:31.880 | I began implementing office hours with my clients via Slack and devoting large chunks

01:05:38.720 | of my day to doing uninterrupted writing.

01:05:41.280 | This immediately increased my quality of work while cutting my hours by at least 30%, if

01:05:46.200 | not more.

01:05:48.080 | My clients didn't bat an eye because I was still agreeing to use their preferred method

01:05:51.440 | of communication, which was Slack, and I was responding promptly to them during my next

01:05:55.920 | office hour.

01:05:56.920 | It also didn't hurt that I framed those office hours as a way to maximize their money, because

01:06:03.000 | at the end of the day, every client will acknowledge they aren't paying me to talk to them on Slack,

01:06:07.120 | they're paying me to write good ads.

01:06:10.480 | I also quit all forms of social media, which has given me so much more mental clarity than

01:06:15.600 | I ever could have imagined and I think has increased my overall productivity just as

01:06:19.480 | much as time blocking and office hours.

01:06:23.080 | Since going freelance, I have raised my rates twice without losing any clients.

01:06:26.840 | Right now I am on retainer with two different agencies for a total of 40 hours.

01:06:32.120 | But since implementing your practices has allowed me to work so much, much quicker,

01:06:36.080 | I often complete my work in half that time.

01:06:39.960 | I spend this extra time picking up odd freelance jobs for extra income, reading books, or going

01:06:45.080 | on phone-free walks.

01:06:47.400 | I also stop work at 3pm every day to be with my older son when he gets home from preschool.

01:06:51.780 | It's exactly the lifestyle I had imagined with going freelance and I couldn't have done

01:06:55.280 | it without you.

01:06:56.720 | Thank you.

01:06:57.720 | So, Jesse, I love this case study for multiple reasons, because it has multiple ideas we

01:07:05.200 | talk about working.

01:07:07.960 | And so I'm looking at my notes here about this case study.

01:07:11.320 | First, is this the career capital framework?

01:07:15.680 | I think that was absolutely the right framework for Liz to think about her career.

01:07:19.440 | So her ultimate goal was to be freelance with flexible hours with good compensation, but

01:07:25.800 | I'm done with work by 3.

01:07:28.100 | And so she got enough career capital to go freelance by being so good she couldn't be

01:07:32.120 | ignored.

01:07:33.120 | She had some ad campaigns that won awards, got national recognition, but it wasn't yet

01:07:36.480 | enough to get her to the schedule she wanted.

01:07:39.300 | And so there she threw in, she had the capital for it, then she threw in tactics.

01:07:43.160 | So it's this combination of career capital and tactics aimed at the particular vision

01:07:48.720 | you have of your lifestyle.

01:07:49.720 | So she put that together really nicely.

01:07:52.440 | If she had only done one and not the other, it would have been a problem.

01:07:54.980 | If she had only focused on career capital, as we saw, she was still crazy busy even after

01:08:00.700 | she was nationally recognized.

01:08:02.280 | And if she had only focused on strategies, she would have had trouble because if she

01:08:07.520 | wasn't doing work that was being nationally recognized, no one cares what your time management

01:08:11.400 | strategies are, they're not going to hire you.

01:08:13.200 | And so I thought that combination was very powerful.

01:08:16.720 | Second thing I noticed here was this notion, and I talk about this in a world without email,

01:08:22.680 | people are afraid of if I put structure to communication with clients, they will not

01:08:27.040 | tolerate it.

01:08:28.040 | They demand accessibility.

01:08:29.600 | I always argue that's not true.

01:08:31.920 | Clients don't need accessibility.

01:08:33.980 | They need consistency.

01:08:36.160 | They need to understand if I need to contact you, how does that work?

01:08:41.300 | And if they understand how that works, the accessibility is not so important.

01:08:45.120 | Accessibility is only important if there's no other system.

01:08:47.280 | So if it's just, I don't know, we just slack back and forth, then I really need you to

01:08:50.760 | answer my slack right away because otherwise I have to like sit around and wait and I don't

01:08:54.320 | know what I'm going to get an answer.

01:08:55.760 | But if you have something that's consistent and clear, like office hours every day, that's

01:09:00.200 | when I will answer you.

01:09:02.380 | That's completely fine because what you're providing for the client is clarity.

01:09:07.280 | Oh, okay.

01:09:08.280 | So Liz, I can't just slack her right now, but at three o'clock or two o'clock or whatever,

01:09:13.840 | I can and she'll answer.

01:09:14.960 | Or I can send this to her now and expect an answer at two.

01:09:17.760 | Great.

01:09:18.760 | I have clarity here.

01:09:19.760 | It's consistent and clear.

01:09:20.760 | I don't have to worry about this.

01:09:21.760 | Let me move on with all these other things I care about in my life.

01:09:23.360 | I don't care that she answers my slack right now.

01:09:25.520 | I care that I know and can trust when she will.

01:09:29.120 | And so this clarity over accessibility is a theme that comes up often.

01:09:32.480 | Liz lived that out.

01:09:34.040 | Her clients were fine.

01:09:35.040 | Yeah, okay.

01:09:36.040 | I can wait until office hours.

01:09:37.040 | I don't care.

01:09:38.040 | I don't care.

01:09:39.040 | It's great.

01:09:40.040 | Office hours.

01:09:41.040 | Good.

01:09:42.040 | Let's roll.

01:09:43.040 | And so she lost no clients doing that.

01:09:44.040 | I also like she quit social media.

01:09:46.340 | We often see this as two different magisteria.

01:09:49.520 | There's your personal life being on your phone.

01:09:52.480 | This is like digital minimalism applies.

01:09:54.760 | And then you have your professional life.

01:09:57.200 | It's about email and slack.

01:09:58.520 | And that's where books like Deep Work and A World Without Email apply.

01:10:02.040 | They're not so separate.

01:10:03.040 | And as Liz learned, especially as a freelancer, what she was looking at at her phone, the

01:10:08.800 | distraction that engendered, though not coming from clients and not directly related to work,

01:10:14.240 | distracted her from her work.

01:10:16.680 | And it was taking her much more time to get things done.

01:10:18.520 | So when she got rid of social media, she's locked in.

01:10:21.500 | When I'm working, I'm working.

01:10:22.500 | And you don't have this back and forth.

01:10:23.920 | I think that's a big part of my own success is my lack of social media use.

01:10:29.440 | Means when I'm working, I'm working.

01:10:30.440 | This is why a lot gets produced, even though I work a very standard number of hours.

01:10:36.640 | And the final thing I'll say I really liked about Liz's case study is that it is lifestyle

01:10:40.080 | centric career planning.

01:10:43.400 | She was a copywriter working big hours.

01:10:46.280 | Instead of just saying, I just want to quit or I want to make more money, she said, what

01:10:49.400 | lifestyle do I want?

01:10:51.600 | She wanted autonomy.

01:10:52.960 | She wanted to be done by work by three to spend time with her kids and have similar

01:10:58.340 | compensation to what she was getting for working 60 plus hours.

01:11:02.040 | And there wasn't a switch she could flick that meant tomorrow I'm going to have that.

01:11:05.520 | But she knew what she was working backwards from.

01:11:08.560 | And she change after change.

01:11:10.080 | Let me get really good.

01:11:11.160 | So good I can't ignore you.

01:11:12.160 | Let me go freelance.

01:11:13.160 | Now that I'm freelance, let me throw in tactics.

01:11:14.520 | Let me tame the way I deal with clients.

01:11:16.000 | Let me work with distractions.

01:11:17.000 | Work, work, work, work all towards this eventual goal.

01:11:19.840 | And then she hit it.

01:11:20.840 | So she started with the lifestyle and that drove all of these decisions.

01:11:24.440 | And she finally got there.

01:11:25.440 | And as she says, it's exactly the lifestyle she had imagined.

01:11:28.980 | So Liz, I really like that case study.

01:11:32.360 | This is my advice and action for crafting a deep life.

01:11:35.780 | Making double the money to.

01:11:37.340 | Oh yeah.

01:11:38.500 | So I had that wrong.

01:11:39.500 | Yeah.

01:11:40.500 | She's doubling.

01:11:41.500 | Yeah.

01:11:42.500 | She's raised her weight rates twice and she's on a 40 hour a week retainer.

01:11:45.220 | Yeah.

01:11:46.220 | So she's probably making more bank.

01:11:47.220 | Yeah.

01:11:48.220 | Than she was doing 60 hour weeks.

01:11:49.220 | I like it.

01:11:50.220 | Yeah.

01:11:51.220 | All right.

01:11:52.220 | Well, good work, Liz.

01:11:53.220 | All right.

01:11:55.220 | Well, we have one more segment in the show.

01:11:58.940 | There is some recent news about teenagers and smartphones, including a story that might

01:12:03.700 | surprise you.

01:12:05.540 | Before we get there, let me just briefly mention another sponsor that makes the podcast possible.

01:12:09.580 | That's our long time friends and our longtime partners at Blinkist.

01:12:15.540 | As I often say on this show, in our current culture, ideas are power.

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01:16:52.820 | All right, Jesse, got one more segment today.

01:16:56.700 | A quick news reaction segment.

01:17:00.340 | I want to start with this article from the Wall Street Journal.

01:17:04.220 | This was published on November 5th.

01:17:06.940 | It's written by Julie Jargon.

01:17:08.780 | She's an awesome name, by the way.

01:17:11.980 | The name of this article is "This school took away smartphones.

01:17:16.540 | The kids don't mind."

01:17:18.580 | It's a very interesting natural experiment.

01:17:21.540 | If you're watching on YouTube, I have this up on the screen, but I'll narrate what I'm

01:17:24.060 | doing here.

01:17:25.380 | Here's the setting.

01:17:26.380 | There's a school called Buxton.

01:17:28.500 | It's a very small 57 student high school in Williamstown in Northwest Massachusetts.

01:17:35.380 | It's a small school that had prided itself on its sense of community.

01:17:39.360 | They began to worry, the students and the staff began to worry about the impact of phones

01:17:46.120 | on their students.

01:17:48.280 | They saw their students retreating more to their screens, not socializing.

01:17:53.460 | The brief closure for the pandemic seemed to make this even worse.

01:17:56.780 | They had a couple really negative events happen where someone was live streaming a fight and

01:18:01.900 | they said, "Okay, enough.

01:18:04.100 | We are going to take the phones away."

01:18:06.140 | Now keep in mind, this is a boarding school.

01:18:08.780 | These students live at the school.

01:18:10.140 | When we say we're going to take their phones away, they don't mean no phones in class.

01:18:14.580 | It's no, your phones are back at your house in California.

01:18:19.060 | You don't have a phone with you where you live on this campus.

01:18:21.680 | You literally don't have a phone with you.

01:18:24.100 | As the article says, many students thought that the school wouldn't actually do that,

01:18:28.620 | but it happened.

01:18:29.620 | All right, so let's see what happened.

01:18:32.620 | This fall, students were not permitted to have smartphones on campus of the Buxton schools

01:18:38.600 | and the teachers also agreed not to use their smartphones while in the classroom or while

01:18:44.680 | on campus.

01:18:46.480 | What the school did instead is they gave all the students light phones, LIGHT phones.

01:18:53.040 | And if you're watching on YouTube, I'll show you a picture of a light phone right here.

01:18:56.820 | So that's what it looks like.

01:18:57.820 | I wrote about these in Digital Minimalism.

01:19:00.420 | It's just a very simple phone, well-designed, but very simple phone.

01:19:04.220 | You can call and you can do simple text messaging and that's it.

01:19:09.220 | No internet browser, no social media, no YouTube.

01:19:13.540 | All right, so now it's been two months.

01:19:16.960 | So we want to check in on what happened at the schools.

01:19:18.980 | November, they tried this this fall.

01:19:20.580 | And you should know, I should emphasize this, not surprisingly, when they made this announcement

01:19:24.560 | at the beginning of the school year, it resulted in chaos.

01:19:28.500 | The principal said everyone was crying.

01:19:31.500 | Kids were yelling at us.

01:19:33.180 | Student feedback was really mixed.

01:19:35.060 | So now that we're two months into this experiment, let us see what happened.

01:19:39.780 | I'll scroll down here a little bit.

01:19:41.820 | All right, so I numbered a few observations about what happened, reported in this article.

01:19:47.320 | Number one, students have gotten used to not being glued to their screens all the time.

01:19:53.060 | The one student they profiled said it's nice to see other students walking around campus

01:19:55.880 | without looking down at their phones.

01:19:58.180 | Number two, here's a senior at the school says it has been a relief.

01:20:04.580 | Now she can go on strolls or study without being bombarded by notifications and the pressure

01:20:08.140 | to respond to text.

01:20:10.660 | Number three, the teachers say they had to adjust and they realized this adjustment has

01:20:16.260 | been for the better.

01:20:17.260 | So here's a math teacher talking.

01:20:19.820 | I used to have my smartphone on my desk when I was teaching and there were moments of checking

01:20:24.180 | in with the outside world.

01:20:25.520 | Now there's nothing that brings me out of the classroom.

01:20:28.980 | Number four, the first assessment to the school conducted about how this experiment was going

01:20:37.440 | led to them discovering that the ban hasn't been as bad as the students feared.

01:20:43.820 | Teachers are reporting that students are more engaged in class.

01:20:49.760 | Number five, there's a quote here from Anne Lemke who wrote Dopamine Nation.

01:20:57.300 | She's been on a lot of the big podcasts.

01:20:59.840 | You maybe have heard her on Huberman.

01:21:01.360 | I think she went on Joe Rogan.

01:21:03.540 | She has been encouraging for a long time that schools adopt similar bans.

01:21:09.000 | It is unrealistic and unfair to expect students to police themselves without help.

01:21:12.200 | And so I put that as number five because I think it sums up what we're seeing at the

01:21:16.520 | Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

01:21:20.900 | When you remove phones from these teenagers' lives, they get better in almost all the ways.

01:21:27.740 | If you expect the teenagers to have to do this unilaterally, good luck.

01:21:32.780 | You are in an unstable suboptimal Nash equilibrium when we're talking about the social dynamics

01:21:37.120 | of a high school.

01:21:38.120 | I can't be the only kid who is not using my phone, who's not on whatever social media

01:21:43.940 | kids use these days, who's not on the group text.

01:21:45.940 | If I'm the only kid not using this, there's huge negative externalities because that applies

01:21:50.080 | to each individual student.

01:21:51.460 | The equilibrium here in a game theoretic sense is we all just have to keep using this.

01:21:56.120 | But if the school comes in and say none of you can use it, they're free.

01:22:00.980 | And they can all exist in a state that has all of these other advantages.

01:22:04.500 | Now I definitely picked up this vibe three years ago when I was on the road doing the

01:22:09.880 | book tour for digital minimalism.

01:22:12.780 | Time and again I would hear from teenagers or from the parents of teenagers who are talking

01:22:16.100 | about there is this exhaustion with all these tools.

01:22:19.140 | 15 year olds, 16 year olds, 17 year olds, 18 year olds, they're tired of it.

01:22:22.820 | They're tired of having to be on Snapchat.

01:22:24.060 | That was the thing back then.

01:22:26.180 | And all these group texts, the exhaustion of trying to keep up with what's going on,

01:22:30.780 | having to TikTok and keep track of the, you know, did you see this TikTok?

01:22:34.060 | What's happening with this TikTok I was doing there?

01:22:35.900 | This is exhausting to them.

01:22:36.900 | They feel like they're trapped.

01:22:39.420 | So kids are very culturally savvy.

01:22:42.900 | They're very attuned.

01:22:43.900 | And so they're no fans of the titans of Silicon Valley.

01:22:49.020 | They don't love this idea that their time is essentially monetizing Mark Zuckerberg's

01:22:54.340 | fortune, that their time is monetizing Elon Musk.

01:22:57.900 | It's not like they're big fans of these companies.

01:23:00.060 | So we have this perfect mixture for trying to break free from this situation of teenage

01:23:06.980 | phone and social media overuse, which is they're exhausted by it and they don't even really

01:23:10.660 | like the companies in the first place, but they're trapped because it's hard to unilaterally

01:23:15.100 | move out of this by yourself.

01:23:16.220 | So we need to find ways like the Buxton School did to normalize this.

01:23:20.900 | We cannot take so seriously the argument of like, well, everyone else is doing it.

01:23:24.460 | Kids these days, what can we do?

01:23:26.260 | What can we do?

01:23:27.620 | We can actually step in and say, let me make your life easier.

01:23:30.420 | And there might be crying and yelling up front.

01:23:33.180 | We're not using phones in this house until you go to college.

01:23:35.980 | We're not using phones at the school at all.

01:23:37.540 | You can't even bring it into the school.

01:23:39.780 | We have a whole wall of white phones.

01:23:41.140 | If you need to call your parents, don't worry about it.

01:23:43.860 | The parents have to get more involved here.

01:23:45.940 | The educators have to get more involved here.

01:23:47.940 | So I want to jump to one other article to help motivate this.

01:23:52.780 | Why this is so important.

01:23:55.220 | This is a new paper, and I'll just briefly mention the abstract here.

01:23:58.540 | This is a economist, Elaine Gao.

01:24:01.900 | It's a working paper that she wrote.

01:24:03.540 | So this is not yet peer reviewed.

01:24:05.220 | It's a job market paper.

01:24:07.940 | So it's a work she wrote as part of her process of applying for professorships.

01:24:14.460 | And the article is called Social Media and Teenage Mental Health Quasi-Experimental Evidence.

01:24:20.060 | So Elaine did a really cool study here.

01:24:23.460 | She correlated in British Columbia, particular towns, looking at a couple different towns

01:24:27.300 | in British Columbia, a couple of different pieces of evidence to try to get at the impact

01:24:31.700 | of social media on teenagers.

01:24:33.860 | Now, the hard part about doing these type of studies, of course, is confounding factors.

01:24:38.260 | This has been the big issue with these giant social science databases where you have all

01:24:44.300 | this information, demographic and answers to questions about mental health from a lot

01:24:47.820 | of different kids.

01:24:48.820 | You try to go through and find these correlations.

01:24:51.100 | I wrote a New Yorker piece about this a year or two ago.

01:24:54.420 | It's complicated.

01:24:55.420 | If you're just trying to find correlations, like the people who said yes to social media

01:24:58.740 | are also more likely to say yes to having issues with mental health is a lot of confounding

01:25:04.700 | variables.

01:25:06.140 | And so there's more effort in the field now to find ways to pull apart these variables

01:25:09.580 | and get a cleaner look at we isolate everything but social media in a way that lets us see

01:25:15.100 | more clearly what his impact is free from confounding variables.

01:25:19.100 | OK.

01:25:20.100 | Elaine found a way to do this.

01:25:22.580 | So what she was looking at was the arrival of high speed wireless Internet in different

01:25:28.900 | neighborhoods of this region in British Columbia.

01:25:34.260 | Because she had shown it's easy to see that when high speed wireless Internet shows up,

01:25:39.220 | social media use becomes much higher in those areas.

01:25:40.860 | All right.

01:25:41.860 | That's an easy mechanistic explanation.

01:25:43.140 | If I have high speed wireless Internet, I could use social media on my phone.

01:25:46.700 | There's gonna be a lot more social media use.

01:25:48.180 | So she could look at the arrival of high speed Internet in these neighborhoods and basically

01:25:52.160 | have that be a pretty good proxy for the arrival of heavy social media use.

01:25:57.940 | She then used 20 years of student records from these neighborhoods to get at specifically

01:26:04.220 | student mental health issues.

01:26:07.220 | So now she could look at in these different areas what was happening with student social

01:26:11.420 | mental health and what was happening with high speed Internet arriving or not.

01:26:16.980 | So as a proxy for social media.

01:26:19.020 | All right.

01:26:20.380 | So she built a complicated model.

01:26:21.740 | It's called a triple difference model.

01:26:24.100 | And here's what she found.

01:26:28.340 | Estimates indicate, I'll highlight this here.

01:26:30.660 | Estimates indicate high speed wireless Internet significantly increased teen girls severe

01:26:35.920 | mental health diagnoses by 90% relative to teen boys over the period when social media

01:26:43.820 | became dominant in teenage Internet use.

01:26:46.660 | I find similar effects across all subgroups.

01:26:49.300 | But applying the same strategy, I find no impacts for placebo health conditions.

01:26:54.540 | And the final check is really important.

01:26:57.140 | You say, let's look at other types of conditions and make sure that we don't see some correlation

01:27:01.300 | that when high speed Internet came that also got worse.

01:27:04.020 | That might point to some sort of other confounding factors like no, no.

01:27:07.120 | When high speed Internet arrived, the main thing that got worse in the student health

01:27:12.100 | records was mental health.

01:27:13.940 | And it was mainly in teen girls.

01:27:16.540 | This tracks completely with the way that John Haidt, for example, summarizes the current

01:27:20.900 | social psychology data on this heavy social media use with teenage girls has a strong,

01:27:26.780 | strong signal in that data.

01:27:28.460 | This is coming at this question from a completely different angle with a quasi experimental

01:27:32.020 | design finding the exact same thing.

01:27:35.180 | But as I always say, forget the data.

01:27:38.460 | Talk to a teenage girl.

01:27:40.580 | We are not trying to isolate a subtle correlation between there's a dioxin chemical in the water

01:27:48.680 | supply here that's creating a 5 percent increase in cancer rates where you really can't figure

01:27:53.080 | out this connection unless you get the data just right.

01:27:55.200 | You can just talk to these people.

01:27:57.500 | Teenage girls, especially heavy social media users, will tell you this thing has taken

01:28:00.920 | over my life.

01:28:01.920 | It's an incredible source of anxiety.

01:28:03.540 | It's sucked in all of my attention.

01:28:04.860 | I can't sleep.

01:28:05.860 | This is all I'm doing.

01:28:07.120 | They will just tell you directly that this is a problem.

01:28:09.560 | So we shouldn't be surprised that as we design these good studies, we find these impacts

01:28:13.580 | again and again.

01:28:14.580 | But I point this out.

01:28:16.940 | One more arrow pointing towards the same conclusion that especially for young girls, social media

01:28:22.200 | use is damaging to their mental health.

01:28:25.900 | I point this out because of the article I talked to you before.

01:28:29.380 | It's a call to action.

01:28:31.280 | We can take action.

01:28:32.620 | We cannot just say kids these days will be kids.

01:28:35.860 | I listened to rock and roll and my parents didn't like it.

01:28:39.680 | This is different.

01:28:41.040 | Rock and roll did not send you to the hospital for self-harm at a unprecedentedly high rate.

01:28:46.380 | Rock and roll did not lead to you having a huge generational spike in mental health disorders.

01:28:53.200 | This is a small number of companies in the pursuit of profits damaging the psychology

01:28:59.060 | of a big segment of American youth.

01:29:01.080 | So I like that Buxton School example.

01:29:03.680 | We should get more involved and we should be more willing to have kids as happened in

01:29:06.520 | Buxton School, cry, scream and yell at us because it was two weeks later that those

01:29:11.480 | kids were all reporting, man, my life is a lot better.

01:29:15.040 | All right, Jesse, it's a long one.

01:29:17.560 | I think that's all we got the energy for today.

01:29:21.280 | So let's wrap things up.

01:29:23.720 | Thank you everyone who sent in your questions and your case studies and your live calls.

01:29:27.200 | Man, there's so much going on.

01:29:28.960 | Thank you also people who sent in these interesting articles.

01:29:31.320 | I love your links and pointers.

01:29:33.960 | Send those in the interesting@calnewport.com.

01:29:36.200 | I'll be back next week with a new full length episode of the show.

01:29:39.840 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:29:42.880 | [Music]

Ep. 222: Caveman And To-Do Lists, Crafting A Deep Life, And A Novel Approach To Smartphones

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