How To Trick Your Brain To Like Doing Hard Things

00:00:00.000 | So I want to talk today about discipline.

00:00:03.360 | I've been thinking a lot about this topic as I work on my new book about cultivating

00:00:07.800 | a deep life in a distracted world.

00:00:11.680 | If you want to succeed with that goal, you need discipline.

00:00:15.400 | So it's worth looking closer at this concept.

00:00:19.420 | So here's my plan for today.

00:00:21.000 | I'll define more specifically what I mean by discipline.

00:00:24.760 | I'll look closer at how it actually works, then we will leverage this understanding to

00:00:30.080 | explore a new strategy, something I call the discipline ladder, for helping you improve

00:00:36.440 | your capacity for discipline in your own life.

00:00:39.480 | All right, so let's start with definitions.

00:00:42.960 | What do we mean when we say discipline?

00:00:44.240 | It has a lot of different meanings.

00:00:46.200 | The way I want to pin it down for our discussion here is the ability to do something that's

00:00:49.880 | hard and important even if you don't want to do it in the moment.

00:00:56.200 | So a big mistake we often make is that we think about discipline as being an abstract

00:01:00.240 | binary trait, something you have or you don't.

00:01:05.840 | In this type of thinking, a "disciplined" person could just go out and do hard things,

00:01:11.160 | and an "undisciplined" person can't do anything hard.

00:01:14.720 | This is not actually how it works.

00:01:17.120 | Discipline is not like eye color.

00:01:19.680 | It's an ascriptive trait that you just have or don't have.

00:01:22.520 | It's a capacity.

00:01:24.040 | It's a capacity that can vary between people, and it can vary with the same person between

00:01:29.560 | different times of their lives.

00:01:31.840 | So to simply say, "I am disciplined," that's way too vague.

00:01:35.480 | It's like saying, "I'm a runner."

00:01:37.620 | That doesn't mean much to me until I know how fast you can actually run.

00:01:41.520 | So the same holds for discipline.

00:01:43.280 | There's many different gradations of discipline capacity, and what matters is where exactly

00:01:48.040 | you are on that scale.

00:01:50.160 | So let's talk today about how we can actually increase your discipline capacity, and to

00:01:55.400 | do so, I want to get technical.

00:01:57.920 | What happens inside your brain and your body when you decide to take on a hard task, something

00:02:04.480 | that requires discipline?

00:02:05.480 | Like, "Okay, I want to write a newsletter essay or go do a hard workout."

00:02:12.560 | There is a strong physiological response to this intention, even as you just begin to

00:02:17.040 | consider doing the task.

00:02:19.640 | Chemicals will spread throughout your body and your brain that will give you potentially

00:02:22.640 | a sense of aversion to that task.

00:02:25.780 | At the same time, easier alternative activities will suddenly emerge in your mind as being

00:02:32.120 | appealing, sort of increasingly appealing.

00:02:37.460 | Think about this, right?

00:02:38.960 | Last time you sat down at your computer to do something hard, while you had that instinct

00:02:43.560 | to rotate through a bunch of news sites or news feeds or social media sites.

00:02:48.860 | Suddenly that became very appealing just as you were considering doing something hard.

00:02:55.280 | Let's give a name to this chemical reaction.

00:02:57.280 | I call it the chemical obstacle to focused reaction.

00:03:00.720 | So it's like this chemical obstacle is something that emerges as you consider doing something

00:03:06.160 | hard and it persists even as you begin that hard action.

00:03:11.760 | Then we could say it requires you to overcome this chemical obstacle and continue through

00:03:15.200 | towards the action that you want to complete.

00:03:18.680 | Therefore your discipline capacity, this is not abstract, it's not a character trait,

00:03:24.280 | it's not mysterious.

00:03:26.720 | We can describe it as a combination of two things.

00:03:30.160 | The magnitude of the chemical obstacle to focused action that you face, so how intense

00:03:34.600 | is that aversion, and the size of such chemical obstacles that you are comfortable overcoming.

00:03:42.000 | The combination of those two things tells you how hard of something you can actually

00:03:47.240 | tackle in your own life.

00:03:49.400 | All right, so how do we improve this capacity?

00:03:52.040 | There's a couple of direct strategies that we already know about, right?

00:03:56.720 | Dedicated locations, so having a location that you only use for working on particular

00:04:03.400 | discipline requiring activities.

00:04:05.860 | That works because it reduces the distraction and therefore reduces the level of the chemical

00:04:10.000 | obstacle to focused reaction.

00:04:12.200 | Action, nootropic drugs, like you would assign to someone who has attention deficit hyperactivity

00:04:18.440 | disorder.

00:04:19.720 | They also directly help discipline capacity by increasing your ability to overcome the

00:04:24.000 | chemical obstacles that are there.

00:04:25.240 | So we have these types of solutions that directly help your discipline capacity that we can

00:04:29.960 | understand now more clearly when we understand what actually determines discipline capacity.

00:04:36.480 | Today I want to give you another technique that can help here, and it's what I call the

00:04:41.000 | discipline ladder.

00:04:43.840 | Now the idea here is that you can practice overcoming these obstacles, that with practice

00:04:52.760 | your discipline capacity can increase, and this comes for two reasons.

00:04:57.040 | As you practice doing hard things and pushing through into those hard things are complete,

00:05:03.800 | two things happen.

00:05:05.000 | One, you become more comfortable with the physiological feeling of the chemical obstacle

00:05:10.680 | to focused activity.

00:05:11.680 | You just are used to it, just like an athlete gets used to the muscle burn of a particular

00:05:16.760 | athletic event.

00:05:17.760 | It doesn't scare them or push them off.

00:05:18.960 | They just know this is part of it, or like, you know, it's baseball season, a relief pitcher

00:05:24.520 | just gets used to the nerves.

00:05:26.360 | I'm going to feel really, really bad as I'm about to walk out in game two of the NLDS.

00:05:34.720 | I'm going to feel really bad anxiety.

00:05:36.520 | It's going to feel really bad.

00:05:37.520 | I'm used to that.

00:05:38.520 | That's what it feels to be a pitcher.

00:05:39.520 | That's the job, is can you throw this ball hard even when your body is in this really

00:05:44.680 | innervated state?

00:05:45.840 | The second thing that comes with practice of discipline activities is you become more familiar

00:05:49.480 | with the rewards of actually completing this work.

00:05:52.520 | Your reward circuits encode this, so your mind now has positive associations with the

00:05:57.760 | hard task you're considering taking on, therefore the size of the chemical obstacle to focused

00:06:02.040 | active activity reduces, right?

00:06:04.960 | So with practice, we become more used to it, and we reduce the obstacle we have to overcome.

00:06:09.720 | Doing hard things, in other words, makes us easier to do hard things.

00:06:14.000 | Now, the problem here is this is circular logic.

00:06:16.920 | I have to finish hard things so that I'll be able to finish hard things.

00:06:22.520 | Circular.

00:06:24.020 | So how do we break that recursion?

00:06:26.920 | We systematically ladder up the difficulty of the hard things we do.

00:06:32.880 | You start with things that are pretty easy but still require discipline, and then as

00:06:37.880 | you get used to completing those, you move up to a slightly more difficult ask.

00:06:43.860 | Slightly more discipline is required.

00:06:45.840 | Once you accomplish those regularly, you move up to the next level.

00:06:48.440 | So you ladder yourself systematically up levels of difficulty, and you're systematic about

00:06:54.840 | this.

00:06:55.840 | Just like if you're a weightlifter, you have to keep increasing the level of weight you're

00:07:00.880 | lifting for your muscle to continue to grow, but you have to be careful about how you do

00:07:04.320 | this.

00:07:05.320 | You can't just jump to the really heavy weight, but you also can't just stay on the weight

00:07:08.320 | that you're comfortable.

00:07:09.520 | You have to systematically and incrementally increase that weight.

00:07:13.220 | A year later, you're now much stronger and much more comfortable with much bigger weights

00:07:17.840 | than you were at the beginning.

00:07:20.300 | So I want to argue that you should do something similar with discipline.

00:07:25.680 | So I'm going to give you here an example ladder, and I'm going to walk you through the different

00:07:31.160 | levels of this ladder.

00:07:35.240 | I recommend starting with a daily metric.

00:07:38.680 | We've talked about this before on the show.

00:07:40.360 | A daily metric is something you can check off every day, for example, in the metric

00:07:46.520 | tracking space if you use a time block planner, saying that you did this activity.

00:07:50.920 | You start with a daily metric.

00:07:51.920 | Now the key thing of a lot of these daily metric activities, especially when you're

00:07:55.840 | getting started with a new pursuit, is that they can be very easy.

00:08:00.840 | What you should be looking for when you're beginning on the discipline ladder is to find

00:08:05.020 | an activity that is not trivial, but still very comfortable in the array of what we would

00:08:12.040 | call the range of what we would call attractable.

00:08:15.200 | These should be activities that don't require, for example, when you're first starting up

00:08:18.480 | the discipline ladder, that shouldn't require that you schedule time in advance.

00:08:21.480 | It's just something you want to get around to doing each day when you can find time.

00:08:26.280 | So for the case of a case study, let's follow a sort of physical getting in better shape

00:08:31.880 | discipline ladder here.

00:08:34.180 | The daily metric you might start with here could be doing 25 push-ups a day.

00:08:39.420 | You don't got to put this on your calendar.

00:08:41.380 | You don't got to make a big production about putting aside a lot of time.

00:08:44.340 | It's just in the morning at lunchtime, "Oh, I didn't get to it.

00:08:47.460 | Let me just knock this off real quick before I get ready for bed."

00:08:50.640 | You can find time to do this.

00:08:52.300 | It's not trivial.

00:08:54.060 | Trivial would be touch your toes once.

00:08:56.620 | You're actually doing something that requires, you know, it's exercise and requires muscles,

00:09:02.580 | but it's tractable.

00:09:04.340 | It doesn't require that much extra planning.

00:09:05.860 | All right.

00:09:06.860 | So you start with a daily metric when you're going up the discipline ladder.

00:09:10.060 | You get used to that.

00:09:11.060 | You check it off.

00:09:12.060 | You do it every day.

00:09:13.060 | You see that you've done it.

00:09:14.060 | And now you kind of feel, "Okay, I can sort of do regular work towards this general initiative.

00:09:18.420 | I can do it regularly even if I don't want to.

00:09:21.560 | This is important to me."

00:09:23.700 | The next step on the ladder, I would suggest, is a 15-minute project.

00:09:29.260 | 15 minutes.

00:09:31.180 | It doesn't have to be every day.

00:09:34.380 | It should be at least three days a week.

00:09:36.980 | This requires a little scheduling.

00:09:38.700 | 15 minutes is enough time that you probably want to mark where you're going to do these

00:09:42.740 | 15 minutes.

00:09:43.740 | "Oh, before I go to work, right after the workday is over, I'm going to take extra time

00:09:46.820 | on my lunch break."

00:09:47.820 | Right?

00:09:48.820 | It's long enough that it requires a little bit of scheduling, but it's not that much

00:09:51.420 | time and you don't have to do that much during this actual period.

00:09:56.900 | So returning to our case study here of getting in better shape, your 15-minute project might

00:10:01.620 | be you get one of these 10 or 15-minute, I'm going to say 10-minute because it takes time

00:10:05.940 | to get changed or whatever, do one of these 10-minute YouTube bodyweight workouts three

00:10:11.300 | or four times a week, maybe first thing in the morning or right after work.

00:10:14.660 | I throw on my gym clothes at home, load it up on YouTube, "Hey, 10-minute bodyweight

00:10:19.780 | workout."

00:10:20.780 | I do these sometimes when we're on vacation, just want to keep moving.

00:10:22.340 | You're like, "Yeah, it's push-ups, it's squats, it's sit-ups," or whatever.

00:10:26.040 | This is not a huge ask, but now it's getting a little bit less trivial, right?

00:10:31.060 | It's an actual workout.

00:10:33.860 | You don't have to muster massive motivation because it doesn't take a super long time,

00:10:38.420 | but now you actually are doing something on a semi-regular basis that in theory is getting

00:10:42.380 | you in better shape.

00:10:43.380 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:10:44.380 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:10:48.680 | to check out my new book, "Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."

00:10:56.020 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:11:01.580 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:11:06.940 | I know you're going to like it.

00:11:08.740 | Check it out.

00:11:09.740 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:11:10.740 | All right.

00:11:11.740 | Once you're used to that, the next step on the discipline ladder is going to be what

00:11:15.740 | I call the 60-minute easy project.

00:11:18.900 | Now you're putting aside, again, three plus times a week, a non-trivial block of time,

00:11:24.060 | somewhere between 45 to 90 minutes.

00:11:26.940 | You definitely have to schedule this.

00:11:28.020 | In fact, you probably want to autopilot schedule this, have this time on your calendar in advance.

00:11:33.020 | Just these times, these days, this is when I do this.

00:11:36.720 | But keep what you're doing during this time block easy.

00:11:39.980 | All right.

00:11:42.000 | Now you're getting used to putting aside the amount of time required to make serious progress

00:11:46.300 | on something, but you're keeping the actual work in this time block still pretty tractable

00:11:51.900 | because the difficulty you're getting used to here is putting aside the time.

00:11:57.380 | That's what you're getting used to here.

00:12:00.260 | You don't want to compound that with the thing you're doing being really hard as well.

00:12:03.260 | Going back to our workout case study, maybe now you're running a real workout program,

00:12:06.580 | not a hard one, but like an actual 30, 40-minute workout that you're doing three times a week.

00:12:13.300 | It could be on YouTube.

00:12:16.580 | When I was restarting my workout program back, this was back during COVID, I was using the

00:12:21.500 | Get Back Into It.

00:12:23.260 | My wife's Peloton has workouts on it as well.

00:12:26.980 | You're like, "Oh, I want to do a lower body workout.

00:12:29.420 | I want it to be 20 minutes or 30 minutes."

00:12:31.580 | They're not too bad.

00:12:32.580 | They're not that hard.

00:12:33.580 | It's not an intense split program.

00:12:35.820 | It's not really pushing heavy weights.

00:12:38.980 | I didn't have the impediment of like, "Oh my God, this is going to be brutal," but it

00:12:42.460 | just got me back up to speed with like, I put aside time to exercise as non-trivial

00:12:47.580 | time.

00:12:48.580 | All right.

00:12:49.580 | Then finally, the final step up the ladder is not increasing the time, but increasing

00:12:52.780 | the hardness of what you're doing in that time, 60-minute plus projects, successively

00:12:57.100 | harder.

00:12:58.100 | Going to take that same time, but increase the intensity of what you're doing in there.

00:13:02.300 | To our workout example, now you're going to maybe sub in an actual pretty like intense

00:13:06.220 | split workout.

00:13:07.860 | Real weights, maybe doing at a gym now, really kind of trying to push to build muscles.

00:13:15.100 | Or if it's a cardio-oriented thing, I'm really doing real interval training, really trying

00:13:18.700 | to actually increase my capacity here.

00:13:23.100 | And then you can successively increase the hardness of what's in that 60-minute block.

00:13:29.100 | That's an example discipline ladder.

00:13:30.300 | You start with something really easy.

00:13:31.660 | It's a check mark for something that takes three minutes, and you end up with like spending

00:13:35.580 | an hour plus three or four times a week doing something that's really hard.

00:13:40.260 | If you jumped straight to this final step, and you're not used to doing these type of

00:13:45.900 | things, you might struggle.

00:13:49.060 | But if you work your way up the ladder, you'll get there in about six months, and no particular

00:13:54.300 | step will seem all that hard.

00:13:55.900 | Now here's the key part about the discipline ladder.

00:13:58.100 | I think it's something that people get, they often get wrong.

00:14:02.900 | The goal is this is not a technique for everything hard you want to do.

00:14:06.580 | So the way you apply the discipline ladder is you don't say, okay, here's a new thing

00:14:10.380 | I want to do.

00:14:11.380 | I'm going to ladder my way up to doing it at the full level of difficulty.

00:14:15.340 | The discipline ladder is about practice with doing hard things.

00:14:18.700 | So if you complete this ladder here for fitness that we just talked about, now when it comes

00:14:24.180 | time to do something unrelated, you can just jump in at a much harder level and be much

00:14:28.900 | more comfortable because you've gotten practice doing hard things.

00:14:32.380 | The ladder is something you do to get used to doing hard things.

00:14:37.060 | And then going forward, you're more comfortable jumping straight into hard things.

00:14:42.260 | So you don't have to break up every hard thing you do into these multiple different steps.

00:14:47.720 | This is something that you do once or twice to get your capacity increased.

00:14:53.540 | Or if you've gone through a fallow period and you want to restart your energy for like

00:14:56.900 | a new year and I want to tackle hard things, do one ladder to get your comfort with the

00:15:01.500 | chemical obstacle, the focused activity, to get that comfort higher, to reduce those peaks.

00:15:05.960 | And now you're ready to go on lots of different things.

00:15:09.020 | All right.

00:15:10.020 | So that's the discipline ladder.

00:15:11.860 | One way among many to increase your discipline capacity.

00:15:16.060 | So you basically probably did your ladder 20 years ago and now like your writing sessions

00:15:20.340 | are an example of hard things?

00:15:22.180 | Yeah.

00:15:23.180 | I mean, and sometimes I'll do modified ladders just to sort of get back into it, just to

00:15:29.260 | sort of get my energy back into it.

00:15:33.060 | Sometimes if it's a really different domain, you might ladder.

00:15:36.620 | Like I'm very used to writing and the discipline required for writing.

00:15:41.580 | But when I was restarting my physical stuff, like during the pandemic, I felt like I had

00:15:45.420 | to ladder back up there.

00:15:46.860 | It was kind of different enough.

00:15:47.860 | I wanted to get more used to the physical domain.

00:15:50.780 | So you could find yourself laddering to like re-energize yourself, or if there's like a

00:15:54.980 | brand new area that you're not used to acting in, the ladder can help you get used to that

00:16:02.660 | area in your life and doing hard things that area in your life.

00:16:04.540 | And I think the physical intellectual is a kind of a classic split.

00:16:07.580 | If you're not used to physical stuff, you got to get used to it, right?

00:16:11.420 | Or if you're a physical person who isn't used to doing intellectual stuff, you might have

00:16:15.060 | to run a new ladder over there.

00:16:19.540 | There's an idea of modified ladders.

00:16:21.100 | So even if you're used to doing something, if you have like a really hard endeavor to

00:16:26.580 | do a less hard version for a while, and then to take one step up to the full hard version,

00:16:31.740 | that's a good strategy as well.

00:16:32.740 | You can kind of do that whenever you're like, okay, I'm taking on like a really big project.

00:16:38.100 | Why don't I do an easier version of this for a few months just to get like my head space

00:16:42.980 | into this like type of work and to get the time put aside.

00:16:47.540 | And then once I'm used to the time being put aside, let me increase the difficulty.

00:16:52.180 | That I'll sometimes do, like get used to a schedule and then increase the intensity so

00:16:57.100 | I don't have to double up getting used to a new schedule and the increased intensity

00:17:01.260 | all at once.

00:17:02.260 | So laddering in a lot of different ways could be useful, but the full ladder, yeah, you

00:17:06.380 | don't have to do that that often.

00:17:08.220 | All right, we got some good discipline related questions coming up.

00:17:13.460 | But first, let's hear from a sponsor.

00:17:16.380 | Let's talk about our friends here at Cozy Earth.

00:17:20.380 | Longtime listeners know I am a Cozy Earth fanatic.

00:17:24.060 | My wife and I have a lot of Cozy Earth products because we love in particular their fabric,

00:17:30.820 | this sort of bamboo, premium viscose bamboo-based fabric we just love.

00:17:37.540 | So we have the sheets.

00:17:38.540 | We have multiple pairs of the sheets, we've told you this before, so that if one pair

00:17:42.380 | is being washed, we have another pair to be put on.

00:17:46.500 | We have the towels.

00:17:47.580 | My wife has the pajamas.

00:17:49.300 | I have the sweatshirt.

00:17:50.580 | We just put on last week the duvet cover made out of this same material.

00:17:55.300 | So I'm just a big fan of Cozy Earth and the material.

00:17:58.820 | I suggest start with the sheets if you want to get started with the Cozy Earth experience.

00:18:04.020 | That will make you a believer.

00:18:07.260 | It's just very comfortable.

00:18:10.040 | It regulates the temperature.

00:18:11.420 | It's not hot.

00:18:12.420 | It's just we love the comfort of that fabric.

00:18:15.620 | So I'm a big Cozy Earth believer.

00:18:17.300 | If you want to become a Cozy Earth addict like me, start with the sheets and then you'll

00:18:20.100 | be Cozy Earthing everything in your life.

00:18:23.980 | It just feels really good.

00:18:25.880 | So wrap yourself in luxury this fall with Cozy Earth.

00:18:29.160 | Go to CozyEarth.com/Deep and use the code "Deep" for an exclusive discount of up to

00:18:35.100 | 40% off.

00:18:36.100 | You want to get that discount.

00:18:37.840 | So that's CozyEarth.com/Deep and use that code "Deep."

00:18:42.740 | If you get a post-purchase survey, take a moment to say you heard about Cozy Earth from

00:18:48.860 | my podcast, Deep Questions with Cal Newport.

00:18:50.900 | That makes a big difference for us here at the show.

00:18:55.260 | Speaking of comfortable fabric, I also want to talk about our friends at Roan and in particular

00:19:01.980 | their commuter collection.

00:19:03.780 | Here's the thing, men's closets were due for a radical reinvention and Roan stepped up

00:19:08.000 | to the challenge.

00:19:09.560 | The Roan's commuter collection is the most comfortable, breathable and flexible set of

00:19:12.360 | products known to man.

00:19:15.000 | And here's why.

00:19:16.680 | They have a product for every occasion.

00:19:18.560 | So the collection has pants, it has dress shirts, it has quarter zips, it has polos.

00:19:24.280 | You never have to worry about what to wear when you have the commuter collection.

00:19:28.960 | Their four-way stretch fabric is fantastic.

00:19:31.720 | It's lightweight, it's flexible, it stretches and it's breathable.

00:19:34.420 | You don't overheat.

00:19:35.420 | This is what I love about it.

00:19:36.420 | If I'm spending a day on campus giving meetings and speaking in panels or I'm going on a speaking

00:19:41.620 | event, I generate a lot of heat and I want lightweight, flexible fabric.

00:19:46.800 | It has wrinkle release, which I love.

00:19:49.020 | You can travel with this.

00:19:50.100 | You put it on, the wrinkles disappear as you wear it so you don't have to worry about trying

00:19:53.380 | to iron your clothes.

00:19:54.380 | You're going to look neat.

00:19:56.140 | It even has Goldfusion anti-odor technology, so you'll be smelling fresh and clean all

00:20:01.060 | day long.

00:20:02.240 | I'm a big fan of the commuter collection.

00:20:04.820 | It is the right clothes if you want to look good, but you're getting after it and you

00:20:09.220 | want to be comfortable as well.

00:20:11.740 | Now the commuter collection could get you through any workday and straight into whatever

00:20:15.580 | comes next and to rhone.com/cal and use the promo code CAL to save 20% off your entire

00:20:23.220 | order.

00:20:24.220 | That's 20% off your entire order when you head to rhone.com/cal and use code CAL.

00:20:33.820 | It's time to find your corner office comfort.

00:20:36.880 | All right, Jesse, let's get some questions.

00:20:39.740 | Who do we got first?

00:20:42.140 | First question's from Sully.

00:20:43.940 | When I twinge of procrastination strikes, I distract myself away from the hard things

00:20:48.720 | I'm working on.

00:20:50.220 | Sometimes I can fight off the urge by pausing and recognizing the urge, but often I lose

00:20:54.020 | and end up distracting myself with useless websites and other easier tasks instead of

00:20:58.460 | just doing the hard thing.

00:21:00.180 | All right, well, this is a discipline question, right?

00:21:04.020 | I mean, this was our definition of discipline from the deep dive, the ability to do something

00:21:09.620 | hard that is important, but not like absolutely urgent, even when you don't want to do it

00:21:15.020 | in the moment.

00:21:16.020 | All right, there's two things that helps with discipline, what we talked about today and

00:21:20.180 | what we talked about a few weeks ago in earlier episodes.

00:21:23.180 | So the thing we talked about a few weeks ago, and I'll just remind you of this, is that

00:21:27.420 | it really helps if your mind has a plan it believes on for what you're trying to do and

00:21:32.100 | is on board about the potential rewards, right?

00:21:35.140 | Our mind is very good at simulating the future.

00:21:38.380 | If it does not have a clear simulation about what you're trying to do and where it's going

00:21:42.240 | to lead you, a simulation at trust, it's less likely to generate a sense of motivation.

00:21:47.020 | So if you're just coming at one of these hard things you're talking about here somewhat

00:21:50.860 | blindly, I don't know, let's just write, let's just like go to the gym with quotation marks

00:21:56.820 | and get in shape.

00:21:58.820 | Your mind is going to say, wait, what's the plan here?

00:22:00.500 | I don't see a clear plan with which I have experience that's going to lead us likely

00:22:03.860 | to an outcome that I'm excited about.

00:22:05.940 | You don't get motivation and those potential distractions are going to emerge as being

00:22:10.820 | much more appealing.

00:22:12.480 | So you want to make sure, first of all, that you really understand what it is you're trying

00:22:15.460 | to do and how it is that people actually succeed at what you're trying to do.

00:22:19.120 | Your mind has to trust your plan.

00:22:20.800 | You also need to expose yourself constantly to the rewards at stake here so that your

00:22:26.740 | mind has a very vivid encoding of the rewards in your hippocampus.

00:22:31.820 | That's going to play a big role when the planning system is trying to figure out whether or

00:22:34.660 | not it bestows to you motivation, right?

00:22:38.740 | Now the second thing that matters is what we just talked about in the deep dive.

00:22:43.180 | Are you comfortable with this level of discipline?

00:22:46.240 | That is, is your mind comfortable with facing the chemical obstacle to focused activity

00:22:52.040 | that you're facing with this particular work?

00:22:53.640 | And if it's not, if that chemical obstacle is too large or it's too scary for you, try

00:22:59.900 | a discipline ladder.

00:23:01.900 | Start on easier things and work your way up to get yourself more used to tackling things

00:23:06.000 | of that level of difficulty.

00:23:08.440 | Discipline does practice and you might need to practice discipline a little bit more.

00:23:12.760 | All right, what do we got next?

00:23:15.440 | Next question is from Jess.

00:23:17.080 | How can I pick daily metrics that really move my life values forward?

00:23:20.600 | I have a toddler, so implementing my daily metrics is tough.

00:23:24.080 | The different routines of Ferris and Huberman, like looking at the sun in the first hour,

00:23:28.920 | five-minute journal, phone off for the first hour, cold plunge, they seem generic and not

00:23:34.120 | personal.

00:23:35.120 | Well, look, keep in mind, caring for a toddler is just as difficult as any of the routines

00:23:42.780 | that Andrew Huberman does, right?

00:23:44.120 | There's just different routines for different people, different routines for different life

00:23:49.840 | circumstances.

00:23:51.260 | And I agree with you.

00:23:52.260 | You want to find the things that really matter for you, that are personal for you, that are

00:23:56.720 | important for the things that you value.

00:23:59.140 | And it's perfectly fine if the things that really get you motivated are not the same

00:24:03.280 | things that get Andrew Huberman motivated.

00:24:05.240 | All right, so let's think about it.

00:24:09.000 | Daily metrics, let's define this for the audience first.

00:24:12.240 | So I talk about this, that it's important that the things that are important to you,

00:24:15.520 | that you have something you do on them regularly.

00:24:18.920 | When you're working on making your life deeper, I suggest keystone habits.

00:24:23.080 | So these are daily metrics that are not hard, not trivial, but not tractable in the areas

00:24:30.280 | of your life that are important, just so that you signal to yourself that you're willing

00:24:32.960 | to do non-urgent things on different areas of your life that are important.

00:24:36.920 | It's a good self-signaling mechanism.

00:24:39.260 | And seeking these out, custom fit them to what matters to you in your life right now.

00:24:45.460 | Reading a book every day to your toddler.

00:24:48.620 | I definitely did this when my kids were babies, maybe toddler age as well.

00:24:52.380 | Not long books, like we're talking Blue Truck, which, by the way, I could probably still

00:24:56.580 | recite word for word if I needed to right now.

00:25:02.100 | I know more about Blue Truck than I know about almost any other topic.

00:25:07.220 | That's a really good daily metric.

00:25:08.220 | It's like, yeah, I want to read, it's a connection.

00:25:10.140 | I want to just establish that I'm exposing my kid to words.

00:25:13.900 | When you have young kids, you yourself reading a chapter of an interesting book about an

00:25:19.900 | idea that's interesting every day, that could be a very interesting daily metric, right?

00:25:24.600 | Because it's not about, oh, I want to finish a book every week.

00:25:29.220 | It's I want to make sure that even amidst all these other pulls on my life, I'm still

00:25:34.420 | engaging in the world of ideas, even if it's minimal right now, right?

00:25:38.500 | Like, that could be a very meaningful daily metric.

00:25:42.060 | Getting outside, being outside and running a gratitude exercise.

00:25:44.940 | I used to do this a lot when my kids were young.

00:25:46.940 | It would be with the kid.

00:25:47.940 | I'd be pushing someone in a stroller or someone would be strapped on, like, you got to get

00:25:50.940 | outside and you got to go.

00:25:52.340 | I had a particular gratitude exercise I would do where I would look into the future and

00:25:57.620 | think about some of the things that are hard right now with young kid childcare will be

00:26:01.740 | easier at this point in the future and I'm really looking forward to that.

00:26:05.100 | And I want to do it outside.

00:26:06.100 | I want to do it with sunlight.

00:26:07.420 | And that was really important.

00:26:08.660 | And that was a really important daily metric that I would do.

00:26:12.480 | If you're working right now as well, outside of the home, you might want to have a really

00:26:16.600 | clear metric about, I'm tracking deep work hours to make sure that whatever windows of

00:26:22.380 | time I have in which I'm not involved in childcare.

00:26:25.460 | So if my kid is at daycare or something like this and I have, here's my day when I can

00:26:31.360 | just be working at the office or at home and I'm not taking care of a kid, I want to make

00:26:34.180 | sure that I am getting in some protected hours and I'm insisting on that every day.

00:26:39.220 | Even if it's small, it's again signaling to yourself, I'm not just an email answering

00:26:44.780 | machine.

00:26:45.780 | I'm not just a meeting attending machine.

00:26:47.820 | I'm a mind that can produce original value and I'm going to protect it even if it's just

00:26:51.220 | an hour a day and I'm going to mark it every day so I remember to do that.

00:26:55.380 | So like what your daily metrics look like at this stage of life is going to be different

00:26:59.380 | than what it looked like 10 years ago.

00:27:01.620 | I can tell you on the other end of it, all my kids are elementary, middle school age.

00:27:04.580 | It'll look different then and it'll look very different than what Angie Huberman or Tim

00:27:08.640 | Ferriss care about and they're all fine.

00:27:11.700 | Let me give you one extra hack to do, the sick day hack.

00:27:15.500 | So if I'm sick, I write on my metric tracking space in my time block planner, SICK, capital

00:27:22.020 | letters.

00:27:23.020 | I don't put any metrics down.

00:27:24.020 | It's like, yeah, look, I'm sick.

00:27:26.720 | I'm not going to care about doing the metrics.

00:27:29.020 | Maybe I'll do some of them, but I'm not going to prioritize them.

00:27:32.660 | You can have a couple outs like that, right?

00:27:35.740 | If you have young kids, you can have an out that just says chaos.

00:27:39.580 | You don't want to be using this all the time, but it's like, oh my God, my kid's daycare

00:27:45.660 | is closed and I have to do these important meetings and there's a new deadline that popped

00:27:53.180 | up.

00:27:54.540 | We're not worrying about our daily metrics, like making sure you do this, this, and this

00:27:57.620 | each day, reading this chapter, doing this, whatever.

00:27:59.620 | I'm going to write chaos in my metric tracking space and just give myself permission to survive.

00:28:05.500 | And that's absolutely fine.

00:28:07.540 | Now if you find yourself writing chaos again and again and again, week after week, month

00:28:11.420 | after month, that's a useful signal that your life is too chaotic.

00:28:14.220 | It's not sustainable what you're doing, but I think it's like a great way of not feeling

00:28:19.820 | guilty about, I can't do this every time.

00:28:23.260 | Some days just get away from me.

00:28:24.940 | It's a way of just declaring metric bankruptcy for that day.

00:28:27.900 | It's like, it's okay.

00:28:28.900 | I'll be back at it tomorrow.

00:28:29.900 | All right.

00:28:30.900 | So Jesse, I think you're doing great.

00:28:32.780 | Make the metrics work for you or alternatively bring that toddler into the cold plunge with

00:28:38.660 | you because it's never too early to get hard.

00:28:42.340 | Gotta get hard, like David Goggin says.

00:28:43.820 | So there we go.

00:28:44.820 | All right.

00:28:45.820 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:28:46.820 | Next question's from Virtue.

00:28:48.500 | I can work consistently and disciplined without relying on external motivations towards a

00:28:52.860 | goal.

00:28:53.860 | If something negative happens, like a rejection, my discipline starts to break down and I begin

00:28:57.740 | to focus more on the negative.

00:29:00.060 | In this situation, what would you recommend I do to get back to my routines?

00:29:04.140 | That's a great question.

00:29:05.780 | And it's something I've thought a lot about.

00:29:08.260 | I mean, I face this a lot in my own life.

00:29:10.980 | I would say that the period of my life where I really began facing this consistently for

00:29:15.620 | the first time, where I actually had to think about systematically how do I deal with a

00:29:21.180 | focused effort leading to a bad outcome.

00:29:22.820 | The time when I first started systematically thinking about this was actually as a graduate

00:29:26.420 | student.

00:29:27.420 | And the event would be papers being rejected.

00:29:30.080 | I need to publish papers, right, to get a job.

00:29:33.600 | I thought this was a good paper.

00:29:35.180 | It got rejected.

00:29:37.040 | Because in the life of a computer scientist, a theoretical computer scientist, you submit

00:29:41.280 | a lot of papers to its conferences and they're incredibly competitive and they have low acceptance

00:29:45.060 | rates, 20%, 15% acceptance rates, and you're trying to be good enough to get accepted.

00:29:50.140 | So I developed some ideas and I want to share some of these ideas with you as well.

00:29:55.340 | If it's a serious negative event, and I'm assuming right now we're talking about something

00:29:58.460 | big enough to really throw you for a loop, not someone said something mean to you in

00:30:04.740 | passing, but like a real rejection or a failure of a project or not getting a promotion or

00:30:10.180 | not getting a job, right, more major things, it's OK to give it a day or so to fester.

00:30:17.260 | Don't immediately pretend like it doesn't exist.

00:30:21.100 | Be upset, commiserate, talk to friends or family, you know, you have a drink that night.

00:30:28.540 | That's OK.

00:30:29.700 | Like lean into the emotion a little bit.

00:30:31.100 | Like I really wanted this to go well and it didn't.

00:30:36.940 | And I'm kind of upset and worried that it didn't.

00:30:39.940 | Part of the advantage of doing this, especially around other people, is that it removes or

00:30:45.580 | reduces the ego defense, right?

00:30:48.340 | You might have this initial reaction of like, man, this looks negative for me and I want

00:30:52.180 | to kind of try to hide this and I want to try to convince everyone that I'm perfect

00:30:55.620 | and I only ever succeed.

00:30:57.500 | If you start commiserating, it's like a relief.

00:30:59.540 | You've taken down the ego defense like, OK, I can just admit like this.

00:31:02.420 | I wanted this to go well and it didn't.

00:31:04.980 | And I'm embarrassed it didn't go well.

00:31:07.540 | It takes that ego wall out of there and this is going to make it much easier for you to

00:31:10.620 | actually move on.

00:31:12.820 | You're going to be much less defensive about the whole situation.

00:31:15.220 | So take a day or two and let it fester.

00:31:18.500 | Next you need to figure out a plan for what comes next.

00:31:21.740 | This means you're going to have to do somewhat of a postmortem.

00:31:25.380 | What went wrong here?

00:31:26.380 | And it's got to be an honest postmortem.

00:31:27.900 | You really want the real answer and this might mean actually talking, getting an unvarnished

00:31:31.380 | opinion from someone else, talking to someone else.

00:31:34.940 | Why do you think I didn't get this or why was this paper rejected, right?

00:31:39.220 | Or it's just an honest self-assessment.

00:31:40.420 | Like, let's say you had a big exam and you did really poor on it, right?

00:31:45.140 | You want to go back and say, what went wrong here?

00:31:49.060 | Like, how did I prepare for this?

00:31:51.620 | What worked?

00:31:52.620 | What didn't?

00:31:53.620 | What did I do too much of?

00:31:54.700 | What did I not do enough of, right?

00:31:56.060 | So you really want to understand what went wrong and then make decisions.

00:32:00.180 | Is there an adjustment needed?

00:32:02.460 | And sometimes the answer will be yes, right?

00:32:05.080 | If it's like a test you did really bad on and you do a postmortem, you'll probably figure

00:32:10.200 | out, oh, there was a much better way I should have studied for this.

00:32:12.900 | So going forward, this is how I'm going to study for future tests like this.

00:32:16.580 | I learned from that failure.

00:32:19.900 | Or if it was an academic paper that got rejected, you're like, okay, the quality is just not

00:32:24.220 | there.

00:32:25.220 | I need more results.

00:32:26.220 | The results have to be harder.

00:32:29.980 | Whatever it is, you're figuring out, okay, I know what I need, right?

00:32:33.180 | I know what I need to succeed at this the next time.

00:32:36.180 | Sometimes, however, it might be there's nothing you did.

00:32:38.780 | It's just the way it works.

00:32:39.780 | It's like, hey, I'm doing something competitive.

00:32:42.180 | Sometimes it's going to work.

00:32:43.180 | Sometimes it's not.

00:32:44.180 | I threw my hat in the ring.

00:32:45.180 | It didn't work out.

00:32:46.380 | It was a long shot anyways.

00:32:48.060 | There's nothing really to change.

00:32:49.240 | It just depends.

00:32:50.240 | But you want to figure out what went wrong, what adjustments need to be made, what's your

00:32:53.940 | plan going forward?

00:32:55.820 | Am I going to try again in this thing?

00:32:57.380 | Am I going to try to fix this paper?

00:32:58.940 | Am I going to overhaul the way I do my work?

00:33:02.460 | Am I going to take a corner of career capital and I'm really going to try to amplify it

00:33:06.980 | very systematically?

00:33:08.460 | Make a plan going forward based on what you learned.

00:33:12.060 | Write that plan down.

00:33:13.060 | Make sure it's in whatever systems you use.

00:33:16.380 | And now you were done thinking about the failure.

00:33:20.460 | You festered, you analyzed, you adjusted, you made a plan, now you move on.

00:33:28.080 | If you find yourself having a hard time not snapping your attention back, which will happen

00:33:33.280 | especially if the thing was public or embarrassing.

00:33:36.820 | If you have a hard time not preventing your attention from continually snapping back to

00:33:41.180 | ruminating on the failure, you're going to deploy a modified version of cognitive behavioral

00:33:48.500 | therapy.

00:33:50.580 | You'll have a brief session in the morning before work and at the end of the workday

00:33:56.300 | where you will confront the rumination, the thinking about the thing that went wrong.

00:34:02.720 | You will point out where in that thinking there is distortions, like, "Okay, here is

00:34:08.700 | the negative thought I'm coming back to.

00:34:11.540 | Here are the distortions in that thinking."

00:34:13.380 | And you can just Google cognitive behavioral therapy distortions and you'll see a whole

00:34:16.900 | list.

00:34:17.900 | And they have names.

00:34:18.900 | You want to use the name when you're doing this.

00:34:19.900 | It's black and white thinking.

00:34:21.140 | It's predicting the future.

00:34:22.260 | It's catastrophizing.

00:34:23.740 | You point out, "Here's the thought that's really bothering me.

00:34:26.340 | Here are the distortions.

00:34:27.340 | Here are their names.

00:34:28.780 | I have a plan for how to deal with this.

00:34:30.540 | I trust my plan.

00:34:33.420 | And now I will shut down confronting this rumination until the next session, the end

00:34:37.660 | of the workday or the next morning."

00:34:40.740 | When the thoughts come up again, you say, "No, no, no, no, no.

00:34:42.740 | I did a CBT session on this this morning.

00:34:44.580 | I have one coming up in a few hours.

00:34:46.580 | I'll get back to you, brain, when we get to that next session."

00:34:49.260 | And you consolidate your rumination to a couple times a day.

00:34:53.140 | During that time, you systematically point out distortions and confirm to yourself you

00:34:56.580 | have a plan.

00:34:58.500 | This works.

00:35:00.280 | Do this for a few days.

00:35:01.940 | If it's a really bad event, do it for a couple weeks.

00:35:06.540 | The urge to ruminate will dissipate.

00:35:08.340 | You'll be executing your plan, and you'll move on.

00:35:12.380 | What's important is you can't just ignore rejection.

00:35:15.200 | The negative feelings that rejection or a negative event create, they're real.

00:35:19.340 | If you pretend like they don't exist, your mind's not going to believe you because you're

00:35:22.740 | wrong.

00:35:23.740 | They matter.

00:35:24.740 | You need to do something with it.

00:35:25.780 | But if you give yourself some time to revel in it, to fester, and really make a good plan

00:35:30.660 | going forward, your mind will then be ready to move on.

00:35:34.320 | Okay, we do have a plan.

00:35:35.620 | We got into this.

00:35:36.620 | What's next?

00:35:37.620 | And you can use CBT to help yourself get there a little bit quicker.

00:35:41.120 | I do that all the time with various things I face.

00:35:44.320 | It works like a charm.

00:35:46.120 | All right, what do we got?

00:35:49.200 | Next question is from Anonymous.

00:35:51.500 | You often talk about how you allocate a half day per week to your podcast.

00:35:56.360 | I'm in a similar situation with my own part-time project.

00:35:58.840 | I can't seem to find the discipline to consistently find time to work on it every week.

00:36:03.320 | In weeks that you have lots going on, how do you still find time to fit in that half

00:36:06.520 | day per week?

00:36:07.520 | Well, I mean, I think your answer is you just got to get Jesse to show up, right?

00:36:14.040 | I got to come do this because Jesse's going to be here, and he would be here all alone,

00:36:19.480 | and that makes me sad.

00:36:21.000 | So then that motivates me, like, okay, I guess I got to come do this podcast.

00:36:25.720 | If I don't, we're going to find Jesse here in a long conversation with Jesse Skeleton,

00:36:31.200 | just trying to stave off the loneliness, the boredom of being here all by myself.

00:36:35.800 | All right, no, seriously, okay, you want to put regular work in on something.

00:36:41.160 | Logistically speaking, have a set time put on your calendar.

00:36:44.440 | Treat it like any other appointment.

00:36:45.600 | So it's a big deal for you not to do it.

00:36:47.320 | Like, if you have an appointment on your calendar, dentist, and you don't go, that's a big deal.

00:36:54.040 | You're saying, I am choosing not to do, I'm choosing to reject this appointment.

00:36:57.840 | So do that.

00:36:59.120 | Schedule regular time so that if you're just trying to figure out, like, when do I want

00:37:04.600 | to do it this week?

00:37:05.600 | How do I feel?

00:37:06.600 | Do I want to do it now?

00:37:07.600 | If you're giving yourself a choice, it's easier for your mind to talk yourself out of it.

00:37:09.900 | So that's step one.

00:37:13.000 | Step two, make sure what you're doing makes sense, like your mind is on board.

00:37:19.520 | It's easy to jump into the big, I want to put a lot of time aside.

00:37:23.840 | Let's just get into this.

00:37:25.560 | I want to be a writer.

00:37:26.560 | So let's put aside, let's write all day Friday.

00:37:29.240 | But if you don't know what that means, your mind doesn't trust you have a plan to become

00:37:32.600 | a successful writer.

00:37:33.600 | It knows you don't know very much about it.

00:37:35.560 | It knows you don't even know what you're going to do on those days.

00:37:37.480 | You just want to put your earthenware coffee cup and Instagram it and write in your bullet

00:37:42.000 | journal or whatever.

00:37:43.520 | If it knows you don't really have a good plan, it's like, come on, buddy, what are we doing

00:37:47.440 | here?

00:37:48.680 | So make sure you know, like, the time you're putting aside is serving a plan that you understand

00:37:54.480 | and trust.

00:37:55.480 | Don't start with the time and then say, if I put aside this time, this will somehow induce

00:37:59.600 | me to make progress.

00:38:00.600 | Your mind's not going to buy that plan.

00:38:02.880 | And then three, you might need to ladder up.

00:38:04.600 | So go back to the discipline ladder that we talked about during the deep dive.

00:38:09.100 | If you're going from zero to five hours a week on some big ambition, your mind might

00:38:15.620 | be like, I'm not used to doing something so hard that's optional and urgent, and this

00:38:19.380 | is weird, and it feels indulgent, and let's not do it.

00:38:23.140 | So you might need to be laddering here, right?

00:38:25.140 | You might need to be starting with, every day I'm doing a little thing relevant to this

00:38:28.860 | project.

00:38:29.860 | And then I move up to, like, the 15-minute projects.

00:38:33.120 | And then at 60 minutes, three times a week, I start with, like, an easy thing, then a

00:38:37.700 | harder thing.

00:38:38.700 | So now this thing, this type of work I'm not used to doing, optional side hustle work,

00:38:43.420 | is now something I'm doing regular time on, and the effort I'm giving to it's very hard.

00:38:47.980 | I'm very comfortable with the chemical obstacles to focused activity now in this particular

00:38:51.820 | type of pursuit.

00:38:54.420 | Now I think I'm ready to consolidate this on, like, Friday mornings.

00:38:57.380 | So you might also need to ladder up if your mind is not used to giving really serious

00:39:03.120 | attention to something that is, like, not part of your job or something that someone

00:39:06.220 | is demanding that you actually do.

00:39:09.500 | Or you just hire Jesse.

00:39:10.500 | Jesse, you're available for, like, anyone who wants you just to come to their house,

00:39:14.860 | just so they'll be motivated.

00:39:15.860 | Just drive my truck there.

00:39:17.100 | Just drive your truck there.

00:39:18.340 | You'll hear him coming.

00:39:19.340 | All right.

00:39:20.340 | Oh, we got a Slow Productivity Corner question?

00:39:22.460 | Yes, we do.

00:39:23.460 | All right.

00:39:24.460 | For those who aren't familiar, every week we like to do one question that's relevant

00:39:27.700 | to my new book, "Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."

00:39:33.300 | About half of what we talk about on the show is directly or indirectly related to this

00:39:37.020 | book.

00:39:38.020 | So if you haven't bought it yet, you need to.

00:39:39.100 | It's like the Bible for the Deep Questions podcast.

00:39:41.380 | But the real reason we do the Slow Productivity Corner question is so we can hear the segment

00:39:45.820 | theme music.

00:39:46.820 | Let's hear that music, Jesse.

00:39:51.060 | All right.

00:39:55.100 | What's our question today?

00:39:56.100 | All right.

00:39:57.100 | Today's question is from JR.

00:39:59.460 | How can an organization adopt slow productivity principles?

00:40:02.940 | For example, how can an academic department or college do fewer things, work at a natural

00:40:07.140 | pace, and obsess over quality?

00:40:09.500 | There's often a fixed number of non-negotiable projects, service, teaching, with set deadlines

00:40:14.780 | that detract from deep work in other areas, like research.

00:40:19.740 | So the reality about projects and obligations in most workplaces is that there are vastly

00:40:26.180 | more things that you could be doing than there is time to do them.

00:40:32.700 | We often tell ourselves a story.

00:40:34.580 | The story we tell ourselves is there's some ideal set of things that people want us to

00:40:41.020 | do or that we want to do.

00:40:43.260 | And if we can just accomplish this collection, then we're doing our job and be successful.

00:40:50.620 | And if we don't do everything in this collection, we're not going to do our job or be successful.

00:40:54.460 | And so in this way, we imagine we feel very bad saying no to things you're trying to reduce

00:41:00.420 | because these are the things that need to be done.

00:41:02.500 | But the reality is, no, no, there's not some set of things that you need to do to be successful.

00:41:06.700 | There is a massive collection of things from which you are actually, whether you know it

00:41:10.320 | or not, sampling what can actually fit into your schedule.

00:41:14.820 | And so what people do, they're implicitly saying no all the time, because again, there's

00:41:18.540 | way more stuff than you could be doing.

00:41:20.540 | So what people do is they basically bring things into their professional life until

00:41:24.660 | they get sufficiently stressed that they have psychological cover to start saying no.

00:41:30.520 | But here's the thing, the difference between having enough stuff that it makes you stressed

00:41:35.300 | and pulling that back 20% so that you're not so stressed by the overhead of all you have

00:41:40.140 | to do, to the outside world, that difference is very small.

00:41:43.500 | No one knows the difference.

00:41:45.340 | But to your psychological reality, it makes a huge difference.

00:41:49.620 | So our workloads are arbitrary.

00:41:51.060 | That's what I want to say.

00:41:52.060 | Our workloads are arbitrary.

00:41:53.420 | We do 20% too much just because it's our heuristic for how we manage our load.

00:41:57.100 | When I'm stressed, I'll start saying no.

00:41:59.360 | This holds for professors as well.

00:42:00.540 | Yes, there are things you need to do.

00:42:01.740 | You have to teach your classes.

00:42:02.740 | You have to work on your research.

00:42:05.380 | That does not take up all your time.

00:42:07.620 | The amount of service you take on, that is highly malleable.

00:42:12.100 | The amount of overhead you take on surrounding your research and your classes is often also

00:42:17.220 | highly malleable.

00:42:19.280 | Most professors, contrary to the article we're going to read in the third segment, just kind

00:42:22.940 | of pile this stuff on until they're stressed and they start saying no.

00:42:26.740 | So what would an academic institution do, for example, to make workloads more reasonable?

00:42:32.820 | Here are some very specific ideas.

00:42:34.980 | I think there should be service budgets.

00:42:37.340 | Here's how many hours you can spend maximum working on service as a professor of a given

00:42:42.680 | rank at our university.

00:42:44.920 | We track it, and you can't go above it.

00:42:46.680 | So yeah, there's more service than you could possibly ever fit into your day.

00:42:50.000 | So we might as well be clear about how much you should do instead of it being 20% too

00:42:53.180 | much.

00:42:54.180 | Let's make it a reasonable number.

00:42:55.180 | I think universities should have service days.

00:42:57.740 | This day of the week, and in particular, this half of this day of the week is when all meetings

00:43:03.580 | and calls, et cetera, related to service happen.

00:43:06.820 | It's got to fit in there.

00:43:08.220 | It doesn't just happen randomly throughout the week.

00:43:10.420 | This is when this stuff happens.

00:43:12.740 | Service should be something you're working on like one day a week, and only maybe half

00:43:15.540 | of that day actually gets used up by calls.

00:43:17.620 | The university would still function if you did this, but we don't.

00:43:22.380 | I think individuals in the university setting should have quotas for important but unbounded

00:43:25.900 | request types, stuff they need to do, but there's an unbounded number of requests coming

00:43:29.580 | in.

00:43:30.580 | You need strict quotas.

00:43:31.580 | Here's how many peer reviews I do per semester.

00:43:34.020 | Here's how many non-departmental committees I sit on.

00:43:38.500 | If I'm being a journal area editor, here's what I take off of my plate to compensate.

00:43:44.600 | So it's not about not doing things.

00:43:46.940 | It's about having a reasonable quota for the number of important things that you do.

00:43:51.100 | I want to do reviews.

00:43:52.180 | I want to sit on committees.

00:43:53.460 | I want to take my turn as a journal editor, but I don't want to do too many reviews.

00:43:58.500 | I don't want to be on too many committees.

00:44:00.060 | I don't want to be an editor while I'm trying to do three other major things.

00:44:03.100 | So quotas, I think, make a really big difference.

00:44:05.140 | I also think academic institutions could do a good job of putting in more administrative

00:44:11.020 | support.

00:44:12.020 | We'll get into this more in the final segment.

00:44:16.340 | Universities are happy to bring in more administrators, but they don't invest as much in administrative

00:44:21.740 | support.

00:44:23.740 | So everything you take on your plate brings with it overhead, administrative overhead.

00:44:28.320 | It is the increase of that overhead past a certain point that makes work very unsustainable

00:44:32.740 | and stressful.

00:44:33.740 | So if you can reduce the overhead that comes with obligations, you increase the sustainability

00:44:39.100 | of professors' workloads.

00:44:41.540 | In general, if we move beyond academia, the thing organizations should care about is the

00:44:48.140 | ratio of administrative overhead to actual execution.

00:44:52.900 | Time spent supporting work, emails, meetings, discussions, versus time spent actually doing

00:44:59.240 | the work that has a clear value for the organization.

00:45:03.380 | If the ratio of overhead to work gets too high, your employees become much less useful.

00:45:09.820 | They also burn out.

00:45:10.820 | They also get exhausted.

00:45:12.980 | It is not the case.

00:45:13.980 | This is not a linear dose function.

00:45:15.740 | You cannot just keep increasing the amount of things you ask people to do and have an

00:45:20.940 | increase in the amount of work that they produce.

00:45:24.860 | It's a nonlinear equation.

00:45:26.100 | What actually happens here is that—think of it as like, if we're going to be nerdy,

00:45:29.060 | it's probably more like a quadratic shape going on here.

00:45:32.140 | As you get past a certain amount of work, the ratio of overhead to work gets high enough

00:45:35.580 | that there's not enough time left to actually make consistent progress on work, and the

00:45:39.420 | amount of work accomplished starts to go back down.

00:45:43.060 | So this is how institutions more generally can support slow productivity, is recognizing

00:45:48.340 | this reality.

00:45:50.420 | You cannot just endlessly give more work to people.

00:45:52.260 | It does not give you more and more actual work done.

00:45:54.940 | There's a sweet spot of overhead to execution in that ratio, and to hit that sweet spot,

00:45:59.980 | you got to be explicit about workload management.

00:46:02.900 | So I just don't like this idea that we're like, "Look, this is somehow like the happiness

00:46:08.920 | of employees versus work getting done."

00:46:11.460 | No, no.

00:46:12.460 | This is about, "Is work getting done or not?"

00:46:15.300 | You put too much work on people's plates, less gets done.

00:46:18.500 | So I think the slow productivity principles are not just possible in organizations, they're

00:46:22.020 | imperative if you want to do better as an organization, be it academic or otherwise.

00:46:25.620 | All right, I feel like, Jesse, that means we should get a little bit more theme music.

00:46:32.300 | All right, do we have a call this week?

00:46:41.220 | We do.

00:46:42.220 | All right.

00:46:43.220 | We'll hear it.

00:46:44.220 | Okay.

00:46:45.220 | Hi, Cal.

00:46:46.220 | This is Jonathan from Winnipeg.

00:46:48.580 | You talk a lot about process-centered emails, and it's all great, I love it.

00:46:54.580 | But here's the problem.

00:46:56.660 | Nobody reads their email.

00:46:57.660 | I've been sending these emails.

00:47:00.580 | I send long, detailed, very specific, very precise emails.

00:47:06.580 | Not necessarily overlong, but it's got the information that people need.

00:47:10.980 | But they don't read them, Cal, they don't read them.

00:47:13.340 | What am I going to do?

00:47:14.340 | What do I do about this?

00:47:15.820 | Oh, yeah, it's a real problem, especially, I'll tell you this.

00:47:21.260 | That problem has gotten worse since I first introduced the idea of process-centric emails

00:47:26.820 | in my book, Deep Work.

00:47:28.140 | All right, so for the listener who doesn't know what we're talking about here, a process-centric

00:47:33.300 | email is a method for reducing the number of unscheduled back-and-forth messaging required

00:47:39.380 | to accomplish a project or objective, right?

00:47:41.900 | So the default way people get things done in the knowledge work context is we just sort

00:47:45.100 | of shoot emails back and forth or Slack messages, and we kind of figure it out on the fly.

00:47:50.020 | This is a problem, because if completing an objective requires that we get through an

00:47:55.940 | unscheduled back-and-forth interaction, I have to parry those messages back to you pretty

00:48:01.260 | quickly, right?

00:48:02.260 | Like, if we're going to figure this out, it's going to take 10 back-and-forth messages,

00:48:05.100 | and we're going to figure it out today, I got to see your next message probably within

00:48:09.860 | like 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving, just so that we have time for this conversation

00:48:13.540 | to play out.

00:48:14.540 | Now, the problem with this is if I have to see your message within the next 10 or 15

00:48:20.380 | minutes, I have to keep checking my inbox.

00:48:23.340 | This is where the bulk of chronic inbox checking comes from.

00:48:27.660 | Not a failure of will or bad productivity habits, but because we have these ongoing

00:48:32.380 | unscheduled conversations we have to service.

00:48:34.320 | So with process-centric emailing, what you do is when you initiate via email one of these

00:48:40.380 | projects, we need to work on this together, you describe in your first email the process

00:48:46.940 | by which you're going to collaborate on this project to get it done, and the process you

00:48:51.200 | describe should hopefully prevent for you to have to use unscheduled messaging.

00:48:56.780 | So like the classic example here is where you say like, "Okay, here's what we're going

00:48:59.460 | to do.

00:49:00.460 | We got to get this report back to the client by Thursday," and you lay out the process.

00:49:03.820 | You say, "Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk to the team during our status

00:49:09.140 | meeting today, and then I'll edit this document, and I will put my edits into this shared folder

00:49:14.180 | by the end of business today.

00:49:16.700 | Please look at it at some point tomorrow.

00:49:19.660 | I'm going to take it back, annotate it with any questions, make any edits you want.

00:49:24.920 | I have that done by 3 o'clock tomorrow and put the new version in the shared folder.

00:49:30.620 | I'm going to pick it up and do a final edit and send it to the designer tomorrow afternoon.

00:49:37.480 | The designer will have this done by noon the next day.

00:49:41.920 | Any final comments have to me by like 3 o'clock.

00:49:45.540 | You just annotate the document, and I'll do the final submittal that afternoon."

00:49:50.860 | That's a process-centric email because you've described using shared locations and time

00:49:55.220 | deadlines how the collaboration is going to happen.

00:49:58.980 | No more emails need to be sent.

00:50:02.440 | This project will now get executed without you having to receive a single unscheduled

00:50:06.140 | message and reply to it.

00:50:08.900 | The caller is pointing out correctly that increasingly people don't read those emails.

00:50:12.940 | They don't read those emails because this hyperactive hive mind, we're constantly communicating

00:50:17.580 | mode of work has gotten worse since 2016 when I first published that book.

00:50:24.180 | We have a lot more slack than we had back then.

00:50:27.020 | Slack wasn't even around.

00:50:28.020 | I think I talked about in Deep Work, and we'll have to check this, Jesse, but I think the

00:50:32.040 | instant messenger service I talked about was HipChat.

00:50:34.260 | I don't know if you remember HipChat, but like, yeah, it was like one of the early instant

00:50:39.140 | messengers.

00:50:40.140 | It was mainly used among developers.

00:50:42.020 | Okay.

00:50:43.020 | Yeah.

00:50:44.020 | It was even before Slack.

00:50:45.020 | We're so hyperactive now that, yeah, people don't even read the emails because they have

00:50:49.820 | so much messaging that now it's like they are being bombarded, and you're just trying

00:50:57.740 | to knock these things back as quick as possible.

00:51:01.540 | You're just typing as fast as you can type to get a message temporarily off of your plate.

00:51:08.420 | Me like talk soon singe, right?

00:51:10.300 | It's like just caveman emailing, just trying to get things off your plate as quickly as

00:51:14.300 | possible.

00:51:15.300 | No one's reading them.

00:51:16.300 | So it is a problem.

00:51:17.300 | The solution is to walk through the process real-time, right?

00:51:22.900 | I think that tends to work better.

00:51:26.380 | Let me just talk to you about how we should do this.

00:51:29.340 | And when you're talking to someone real-time, they actually have to listen.

00:51:31.260 | They're going to hear it.

00:51:32.260 | So if you're at the office, grab them in the hallway.

00:51:34.260 | Grab them in their office.

00:51:36.340 | Grab them at the end of a meeting.

00:51:37.460 | Hey, let me just talk to you for five minutes.

00:51:40.780 | You can do, if your relative ranks make this possible, you could just tell them in your

00:51:48.380 | response to the email like, yeah, let's make a plan for this.

00:51:50.700 | I have some ideas.

00:51:52.980 | Stop by my next office hours when you can.

00:51:55.380 | Do you have office hours?

00:51:56.380 | Or if you don't, just say, yeah, give me a call when you can, and we'll walk through

00:52:01.020 | a process for this.

00:52:02.020 | You probably just have to move the process description to synchronous.

00:52:06.980 | It has to be real-time conversation.

00:52:09.420 | And then they'll get on board with it.

00:52:11.340 | Hidden benefit, 50% of the things will disappear because people don't want to do that little

00:52:16.500 | bit of friction.

00:52:18.300 | It's not an urgent project, but they want to get it out of their inbox like, we do this

00:52:22.580 | good, right?

00:52:23.580 | Question mark, emoji, send, right?

00:52:25.300 | Just trying to get it off their plate.

00:52:26.300 | Like, yeah, we should do this.

00:52:27.300 | Like, technically, I've made progress on this.

00:52:29.540 | And when they get called back with an actual friction point, like, oh, I have to actually

00:52:32.740 | call this person or stop by their office at some point and talk about this, you're like,

00:52:37.460 | you know what?

00:52:38.460 | I like option B, which is we don't really need to do this.

00:52:41.340 | So 50% of your projects will go away.

00:52:45.140 | My old department chair was really good at this.

00:52:46.820 | He'd say, call me.

00:52:47.820 | We'll talk about it.

00:52:48.820 | And he would filter out.

00:52:51.620 | That would filter out a lot of things.

00:52:52.900 | I think his other trick, which I really liked, was like, if you just blurted out a complaint

00:52:57.700 | at a faculty meeting, just like, this is terrible, faculty meeting stuff, he'd be like, yeah,

00:53:03.420 | we have a very simple process.

00:53:05.140 | We're happy to talk about any topic.

00:53:06.540 | You just have to submit it in writing two weeks before the next faculty meeting.

00:53:09.420 | I'll disseminate it for comment, and then we'll put it on the agenda for the faculty

00:53:13.860 | meeting.

00:53:14.860 | 95% of things that people are complaining about, they're not going to do that for.

00:53:19.860 | And it really cut down.

00:53:20.860 | So give people a little bit of friction, and you'll be surprised by.

00:53:26.180 | You can reverse this.

00:53:27.180 | So if they're at a higher rank, offer to do more work.

00:53:32.020 | It's like, yeah, I think we should talk this through briefly, how best to do it.

00:53:40.620 | Let me know when I can call you or stop by your office, and I'll come find you and figure

00:53:43.300 | this out.

00:53:45.060 | That'll work as well.

00:53:46.820 | You're working the relative ranks well.

00:53:48.580 | You're not trying to give work.

00:53:49.580 | You're actually saying, I'm willing to do work on your behalf.

00:53:51.700 | I will come find you.

00:53:52.700 | I will call you.

00:53:54.860 | Bosses are so busy that, again, like five times out of 10, they'll just not respond

00:53:57.660 | to that and the thing's off your plate.

00:53:59.660 | Friction's great.

00:54:00.660 | All right.

00:54:01.660 | I believe we have a case study here.

00:54:04.020 | This is where people write in with examples of putting the type of things we talk about

00:54:07.260 | on this show in the action in their own life.

00:54:10.140 | Good way to see what this advice looks like in the wild.

00:54:14.500 | Today's case study comes from Mike.

00:54:18.220 | Mike says, "Recently, I leveraged my career capital completely by accident.

00:54:23.660 | I was a freelancer at a small professional services firm working in a role I already

00:54:27.500 | had 10 years of experience in.

00:54:29.620 | Things were going great until they were purchased by a large conglomerate.

00:54:33.540 | The new conglomerate offered to keep me as a freelancer on the condition that I transition

00:54:36.900 | to a different role.

00:54:38.340 | I gave the new role a good try for six months, but I just couldn't get the hang of it.

00:54:42.620 | Plus, I was wanting to take a break from work altogether to focus on some personal things.

00:54:48.060 | My spouse and I both have aging parents.

00:54:49.780 | We have a ton of renovations we need to do to our house.

00:54:51.860 | My plan was to take a year off work to focus on those things and then come back and find

00:54:55.180 | work in my original specialization.

00:54:58.660 | So I put in my notice, but I was surprised by the reaction.

00:55:02.260 | They said they loved my work in the original position, and if I was willing, they would

00:55:06.300 | switch me back to that.

00:55:08.400 | They knew I wanted to focus on my personal life, but they still didn't want to lose me

00:55:11.780 | altogether.

00:55:12.780 | So they offered to increase my hourly rate and let me focus only on projects I specialized

00:55:18.100 | in, all on a part-time basis.

00:55:20.380 | I didn't ask for this flexibility, but they recognized my career capital better than I

00:55:24.380 | did.

00:55:25.380 | As a result, I now work three days a week in the role I specialize in, and I have nothing

00:55:29.420 | to do with a task that I was bad at.

00:55:31.500 | I make almost as much money as I previously did.

00:55:33.780 | I use my extra time to take care of my parents and my spouse's parents, work on house repairs,

00:55:38.300 | and I've even joined an adult sports league.

00:55:41.580 | From time to time, I have taken on an extra short-term consulting client for some extra

00:55:45.380 | money if it fits my schedule.

00:55:48.240 | My life is deeper.

00:55:49.720 | My work hours are spent where I provide the most value, and I have more non-work hours

00:55:53.380 | devoted to things that are important for my marriage and family.

00:55:56.780 | My only regret is not taking the lessons of career capital sooner."

00:56:00.620 | Mike, that's a great case study.

00:56:04.780 | Here's the thing about career capital, which is our term for your rare and valuable skills,

00:56:09.980 | the main leverage you have for shaping your career.

00:56:13.700 | One of the most important types of career capital you can build is just be someone who

00:56:18.260 | is reliable and gets things done.

00:56:19.780 | That's why I tell young people all the time, I know it's not sexy, but the thing you need

00:56:26.100 | to care about, especially early in your job, is you're organized, you do the things you're

00:56:31.260 | going to do, you say you're going to do, and you get them done on time.

00:56:35.380 | Everything falls through the cracks, and you do work at a reasonable level of quality.

00:56:40.220 | Okay, there's an issue here, I'm going to solve this issue.

00:56:43.340 | If people trust you're going to do work, you're going to get it done on time, you're not going

00:56:47.420 | to be a problem, and the work's going to be good quality, you don't have to be a superstar.

00:56:53.460 | That is incredibly valuable.

00:56:54.820 | Now here's the thing.

00:56:55.820 | From the employer perspective, they are desperate to find people who meet those traits.

00:57:01.900 | They're reliable.

00:57:02.900 | They get things done.

00:57:03.900 | They do it well.

00:57:04.900 | They're desperate for people like that, and they do not want to see people like that go.

00:57:10.580 | It is the easiest, most powerful type of career capital that you can build.

00:57:14.020 | So yeah, sometimes when we talk about career capital, we kind of get into the exciting

00:57:18.460 | territory of you're deliberately practicing some sort of 10x skill that makes you such

00:57:22.900 | a superstar that you can just say, "I'm going to work from a boat, and I'm going to work

00:57:26.740 | one day a week, three weeks a year, and you're going to pay me a million dollars."

00:57:31.340 | It's like the exciting scenarios of becoming like the superstar.

00:57:34.700 | You don't have to become a superstar like Mike showed.

00:57:37.620 | To gain the leverage needed to craft a really deep life.

00:57:41.240 | He was good at what he did.

00:57:42.240 | He did it well.

00:57:43.240 | He was reliable.

00:57:44.240 | He was dependable.

00:57:45.240 | His employer's like, "We don't want you to go, and when you're in that situation, you

00:57:50.380 | can craft really interesting things."

00:57:52.300 | From their point of view, him working three days a week versus five, it's fine.

00:57:55.420 | It's all pretty similar to them, but for Mike, it makes a really big difference, so I like

00:57:59.100 | it.

00:58:00.100 | That's a great example of career capital in action.

00:58:03.700 | You don't have to become LeBron James.

00:58:05.500 | If you're someone who can just consistently guard against a jump start and get a good

00:58:09.940 | number of boards per game, team's happy to keep you on the floor.

00:58:13.420 | How'd my basketball analogy go there, Jesse?

00:58:16.620 | Not bad.

00:58:17.620 | Not bad?

00:58:18.620 | I was kind of stretching there.

00:58:20.460 | Yesterday, LeBron and his son played in a preseason game together.

00:58:24.700 | Oh, yeah?

00:58:25.700 | Okay, here's a naive question.

00:58:27.820 | Does LeBron's son play professional basketball?

00:58:31.140 | Who is he?

00:58:32.140 | Yeah.

00:58:33.140 | He was drafted by the Lakers, but there he is.

00:58:36.140 | Was he the same age as his dad when he got drafted?

00:58:37.820 | I remember his dad got drafted.

00:58:38.820 | No, he's a little bit older, but there was a little bit of...

00:58:41.100 | Did he play college ball?

00:58:42.580 | Yeah.

00:58:43.580 | Okay.

00:58:44.580 | Was he one of the best players in college basketball?

00:58:45.860 | No.

00:58:46.860 | I mean, LeBron got drafted at 16, out of high school, right?

00:58:50.900 | Right, out of high school, yeah.

00:58:51.900 | Yeah.

00:58:52.900 | See, I know a lot about basketball.

00:58:55.740 | If anybody has any case studies, they can email me at jesse@calnewport.com.

00:58:58.780 | Yes, we love them, so jesse@calnewport.com.

00:59:02.220 | Send them in.

00:59:03.220 | All right, we got a cool final segment here.

00:59:05.260 | I'm going to put myself on trial, but first, let's hear from another sponsor.

00:59:10.620 | Going online without ExpressVPN is like driving a car without car insurance.

00:59:15.940 | You might be a great driver, and a lot of times, you'll get away with it, but there's

00:59:20.220 | a lot of crazy people on the road these days.

00:59:22.660 | It's eventually going to catch up with you, so why take that risk?

00:59:26.920 | That's what it's like going online without a VPN.

00:59:29.420 | All right, so here's the issue.

00:59:31.980 | When you connect to the internet, you might think you're safe because you're using a quote

00:59:37.180 | unquote encrypted connection.

00:59:39.380 | The nerds know this as the SSL protocol.

00:59:41.820 | The problem is that just encrypts the body of your packet, but the header, which says

00:59:46.460 | who you are and who you're talking to, that remains plain, open to the public.

00:59:52.500 | So if I'm sitting next to you at a coffee shop, I could have a special radio card.

00:59:56.980 | I could see exactly what sites and services you're using.

00:59:59.460 | If I'm your internet service provider at home, your home internet service provider, I can

01:00:03.700 | see exactly what sites and services you're using, and I can collect that information.

01:00:06.780 | I can sell that information, and they do that.

01:00:08.900 | When you use a VPN, you get rid of the ability to snoop on you in that way, because with

01:00:13.500 | a VPN, you take the site or service you want to talk to, you take the message, you encrypt

01:00:18.420 | the whole message, and you send it to a VPN server.

01:00:23.060 | So all the person sniffing your packets or the internet service provider sees is that

01:00:26.540 | you're talking to a VPN server.

01:00:27.860 | That's all they learn.

01:00:29.740 | Then the VPN server unencrypts your original message and talks to the site and service

01:00:32.820 | on your behalf, encrypts the response, and sends it back.

01:00:36.580 | You now have complete privacy about what you are doing online, all right?

01:00:42.580 | So you need a VPN.

01:00:44.100 | If you're going to use a VPN, I suggest ExpressVPN.

01:00:49.160 | The encryption they use is super secure.

01:00:51.180 | The number of bits that they're using in their encryption configuration would require a supercomputer

01:00:55.420 | over a billion years to crack.

01:00:58.060 | So it's not going to be broken into.

01:00:59.860 | It's very easy to use.

01:01:00.860 | It's one of the things I like best about ExpressVPN is press a button on whatever device you're

01:01:05.140 | using that you've set this up on.

01:01:06.780 | And now all the internet stuff you do is protected.

01:01:09.980 | Use your apps, use your browser, you don't even know it, it's all transparent.

01:01:14.220 | Your phone, your laptop, your tablet, it'll work.

01:01:16.620 | ExpressVPN is rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

01:01:21.300 | All right, so you need a VPN, you're going to use a VPN.

01:01:24.900 | I recommend using ExpressVPN.

01:01:27.560 | Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com/deep.

01:01:32.300 | That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com/deep.

01:01:37.060 | You can get an extra three months free, but only when you go to ExpressVPN.com/deep.

01:01:41.220 | I also want to talk about our friends at MyBodyTutor.

01:01:48.540 | I've known Adam Gilbert, MyBodyTutor's founder for many years.

01:01:53.460 | He used to be the fitness advice calmness for my blog back in the early days.

01:01:58.900 | His company MyBodyTutor has been a big success because it solves the number one problem in

01:02:02.980 | getting healthy, which is consistency.

01:02:06.420 | It's not hard to figure out what you should be doing.

01:02:10.300 | It's hard to actually do it.

01:02:12.500 | And so what MyBodyTutor offers is a online coach who works with you to develop your plan

01:02:17.960 | about nutrition and exercise.

01:02:19.980 | And then you check in with this coach every day using the MyBodyTutor app.

01:02:24.460 | And that gives you that accountability, is what gives you consistency.

01:02:30.000 | Knowing you need to talk to your coach every day and report how it went is what gives you

01:02:33.220 | that extra push you need to actually follow through on the plan you put together.

01:02:38.700 | In addition, having a coach means you have someone who's on your team when you need to

01:02:42.900 | make changes or adjust.

01:02:44.380 | Maybe you have like a holiday coming up and you want to change, like, how am I going to

01:02:47.740 | exercise?

01:02:48.740 | We're going to be traveling.

01:02:49.740 | What's going to happen with my diet?

01:02:50.740 | The coach can work with you to make a plan for your specific needs.

01:02:54.460 | So if you want to get in better shape, I suggest MyBodyTutor.

01:02:58.620 | If you mention deep questions when you sign up, you will get $50 off your first month.

01:03:03.460 | So please remember to do that.

01:03:05.820 | So go to MyBodyTutor.com, that's T-U-T-O-R, MyBodyTutor.com, and mention deep questions

01:03:11.680 | when you sign up to get $50 off.

01:03:13.660 | All right, let's do our final segment.

01:03:16.900 | All right, we haven't done a good reaction segment in a while.

01:03:21.800 | This is where we react to something that has been sent to us from the internet.

01:03:25.260 | I got an article right now from City Journal.

01:03:28.340 | I'm going to load this up on the screen for people who are watching instead of listening.

01:03:33.140 | All right, the headline is "Professor M.I.A."

01:03:40.260 | And it shows someone reading a book.

01:03:42.060 | I don't know, it looks like the Caribbean, overlooking the water.

01:03:47.460 | There's a problem, Jesse, that immediately on seeing that picture, my reaction is like,

01:03:51.500 | "Oh, I want to do that.

01:03:53.840 | That guy's got to figure it out."

01:03:56.560 | I'm going to read a little bit about this.

01:03:59.740 | The article starts...

01:04:00.740 | I mean, I could really read the whole article.

01:04:01.740 | I could try to be selective here.

01:04:05.100 | It starts by saying, "It's no secret that a lot of students are coming to campus unfamiliars

01:04:08.180 | with skills, habits, and behaviors that are necessary to succeed at college-level work.

01:04:14.620 | Basic things like..."

01:04:15.620 | I'm eliding some of the article here.

01:04:17.500 | "Basic things like the importance of meeting deadlines, paying attention, being respectful

01:04:20.780 | in the classroom, and more complicated skills like knowing how to annotate readings and

01:04:24.360 | cope with time management problems.

01:04:27.660 | Many of the faculty..."

01:04:28.660 | It's kind of quoting someone here.

01:04:31.780 | I'm sorry.

01:04:32.780 | I'm kind of eliding this.

01:04:33.780 | "Many faculty are uninterested in this kind of instruction because it departs sharply

01:04:38.500 | from the role many instructors prefer, that of a knowledge expert who leads learners through

01:04:42.060 | the course content."

01:04:46.100 | As this goes on, "At more elite schools, these issues are also evident.

01:04:51.320 | Faculty devote less and less time to teaching, leaving students to fend for themselves."

01:04:54.480 | They're talking about how students are just doing less stuff in the classroom and more

01:05:05.280 | stuff on their own.

01:05:08.040 | The conclusion here is professors aren't doing enough.

01:05:12.040 | So the article person does some math here, the author.

01:05:15.120 | "A three-course load over the span of a year is the maximum required for faculty members

01:05:18.880 | at these institutions, with a total of 28 weeks of classes, and each class requiring

01:05:24.160 | two hours of classroom instruction, the third hour is often conducted by a teaching assistant.

01:05:27.540 | That amounts to about 125 hours of classroom time, or about 15 to 16 eight-hour days.

01:05:34.080 | Let's add that to the three hours a week that professors spend in office hours, and let's

01:05:37.200 | add another full day per week that they spend preparing for classes.

01:05:40.960 | Let's also add some time spent grading.

01:05:43.600 | You still wind up with just over 40 full-time days per year.

01:05:47.480 | Even many faculty administrative duties seem to have disappeared.

01:05:51.200 | Professors were once responsible not only for chairing a department and advising students,

01:05:54.060 | but also for running entire programs.

01:05:55.920 | They would advise students about studying abroad, combining majors, or enrolling in

01:05:59.880 | other interdisciplinary initiatives.

01:06:02.040 | Now because of ballooning college administrations, faculty have been relieved of many of these

01:06:06.560 | roles.

01:06:08.080 | This has the effect not only of separating many student programs from intellectual pursuits,

01:06:11.360 | but also of fostering fewer interactions between students and professors.

01:06:15.880 | The decline in faculty classroom student time has coincided with an explosion in academic

01:06:19.000 | publishing.

01:06:20.000 | No matter what the discipline, faculty are expected to publish their research.

01:06:23.140 | Is it more worthwhile to impart knowledge to undergraduates, or to write articles for

01:06:25.940 | sociology and literature journals?

01:06:28.640 | All right, so the idea here is professors are lazy.

01:06:33.900 | That if we add up the time we spend teaching in the classroom, it's not that much compared

01:06:39.600 | to a full-time job.

01:06:40.600 | And so what are we doing?

01:06:42.200 | We must be reading on the beach.

01:06:44.240 | What we should be doing is spending much more time, I guess, teaching more classes and teaching

01:06:47.960 | students the, quote this earlier, "skills like how to read and deal with time management."

01:06:53.960 | Well, first of all, I'll say with this podcast, I think I'm single-handedly taking on for

01:07:00.160 | all of my faculty brethren around the world here the obligation to teach our students

01:07:05.480 | how to do time management and read and organize their lives.

01:07:07.480 | So you can say thank you.

01:07:08.920 | I'm taking on all that time for you.

01:07:11.200 | Let's step out to the bigger question here.

01:07:14.320 | There is a fundamental misunderstanding, I think, in this article about what it is that

01:07:19.160 | professors are meant to do, especially at what she calls or he calls elite institutions

01:07:25.640 | in the US.

01:07:26.640 | I think it's probably worth clarifying here.

01:07:29.680 | Elite institutions in the US follow the German Research University model.

01:07:33.820 | This is something that was kind of innovated in the late 1800s and we picked up here in

01:07:39.680 | the US in the early 20th century and has been at the core of the US's sort of dominant position

01:07:46.360 | in science and technology that we've had over the last 100 years.

01:07:51.160 | The German model is a model in which the professor's goal, broadly speaking, is to advance cutting-edge

01:07:59.420 | knowledge in an area of expertise.

01:08:02.640 | This means research and this means supervising the next generation of scholars to sort of

01:08:08.300 | continue the promulgation of the body of knowledge, an effort that is mainly captured in doctoral

01:08:15.960 | student supervision.

01:08:16.960 | So you're training future professors and researchers and expanding a body of knowledge.

01:08:23.480 | Now in the US system, we marry that research German model.

01:08:29.760 | We marry that with the college model, right?

01:08:32.660 | We have this sort of like classic college model in the US, which is about preparing

01:08:36.300 | undergraduates.

01:08:37.300 | You know, what we should do is these professors, they should also teach a lot of the classes

01:08:45.960 | that the undergraduates are taking so that they can be exposed.

01:08:49.520 | The undergraduates, as part of their broader training and experience, intellectual and

01:08:53.500 | otherwise, can be exposed to like leading minds on things.

01:08:57.320 | They can hear about these topics from the leading subject matter experts and that's

01:09:01.920 | kind of like a more inspiring way of learning it.

01:09:05.160 | It like connects you to the trajectory of the field and that's an important thing.

01:09:09.400 | And so teaching undergraduates is an important piece of academic life at research institutions.

01:09:16.000 | It is far from the core though.

01:09:17.880 | So it is somewhat absurd to be counting the time that like world-class subject matter

01:09:24.480 | experts at research universities spend teaching undergraduates and say somehow that should

01:09:28.420 | be the thing you do that matters.

01:09:31.680 | It's an important piece, like it's a good complement to what a professor does at a research

01:09:36.320 | university.

01:09:37.320 | We take teaching undergraduates seriously.

01:09:39.940 | But the idea that this is what the bulk of our time should be actually is not compatible

01:09:46.060 | with the model of these universities.

01:09:49.640 | The focus on which promotion happens at US research universities, so promotion to associate

01:09:55.280 | professor of tenure and subsequent promotion to full professor.

01:10:00.400 | Those promotions are based almost entirely on intellectual contribution to the world

01:10:04.480 | of ideas.

01:10:06.960 | Teaching is involved in these cases but only as a disqualifier.

01:10:12.600 | If you are bad in the classroom, that can and should hold you back from being promoted.

01:10:16.360 | We do not want a professor at one of these institutions who cannot teach well.

01:10:20.520 | But you cannot get promoted on being a good teacher.

01:10:23.040 | The thing that gets you promoted is confidential letters solicited from subject matter experts

01:10:28.040 | in your field that starkly and frankly assess the intellectual caliber of your work.

01:10:34.840 | How good is his or her work?

01:10:37.580 | What is its impact on the field?

01:10:40.760 | What institutions would this person be promoted at?

01:10:43.520 | What institutions would they not be promoted at?

01:10:45.980 | Who in their similar rank are they comparable to?

01:10:49.000 | Who at their similar rank is better?

01:10:51.240 | These are really kind of frank and somewhat brutal letters.

01:10:55.560 | So the promotion process emphasizes advancing the world of ideas.

01:11:00.280 | And I think this is actually a very good model.

01:11:03.600 | This focus on trying to induce top minds to become subject matter experts does push forward

01:11:09.760 | knowledge.

01:11:10.760 | And again, it's the US's embrace of this research institution model is why on so many different

01:11:15.680 | fields we lead in the world.

01:11:17.480 | And it makes a really big difference.

01:11:19.840 | So it is a good model.

01:11:21.320 | And I like the aspect of the model that says, OK, you should spend time with undergraduates

01:11:24.720 | teaching some classes.

01:11:26.280 | This article says people teach three.

01:11:28.360 | Actually, at the real elite universities, they teach two or less.

01:11:33.200 | That is not a problem.

01:11:35.360 | Having a world-class physicist spend most of their time in the classroom doesn't make

01:11:41.840 | as much sense as having a world-class physicist teaching some of the physics classes so that

01:11:45.920 | students can be exposed and excited, but also spending a lot of time trying to advance their

01:11:50.400 | understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

01:11:54.020 | So whatever.

01:11:55.020 | This is not particularly relevant, I guess, to people's day-to-day here.

01:11:58.180 | But I wanted to give a little bit of defensive professoredom.

01:12:00.620 | We take undergraduate teaching seriously.

01:12:03.980 | We are not primarily teachers.

01:12:07.660 | And it's interesting, I think, for a lot of undergraduates or parents of undergraduates

01:12:13.100 | who are used to having this employer-employee relationship with universities.

01:12:17.020 | Everyone works for me and my kids.

01:12:19.700 | It's a little bit different to see.

01:12:20.700 | Oh, there's a whole model and purpose for these universities that goes beyond just the

01:12:25.540 | experience of the 18 and 22-year-olds who are there, who are the future, and we want

01:12:30.420 | to have a good experience.

01:12:31.420 | But it's not the whole orientation of the university.

01:12:33.900 | It's not just entirely about serving that population.

01:12:37.820 | So I don't know.

01:12:39.500 | There we go.

01:12:40.500 | Professors aren't lazy.

01:12:41.500 | It's a hard job.

01:12:42.500 | It's hard to advance knowledge in your field.

01:12:44.860 | It's hard to have a job where you're fired unless you can prove to experts in your field

01:12:48.780 | that you have significantly moved the needle.

01:12:51.940 | It's one of the few jobs.

01:12:52.980 | You can't just keep it by doing good work and being reliable and getting things done.

01:12:57.380 | It's a job you have to keep earning to keep.

01:12:59.220 | It's a very difficult job, and it's an exciting job.

01:13:01.900 | And I think it's a good system.

01:13:02.900 | And we love undergrads.

01:13:04.500 | But we shouldn't be teaching more.

01:13:06.460 | Are you still writing a lot of papers?

01:13:09.340 | Yeah.

01:13:10.340 | I'm doing more now.

01:13:11.340 | Yes.

01:13:12.340 | Though more-- I'm working on some papers right now that are more in the digital ethics realm

01:13:15.940 | and less in theoretical computer science.

01:13:18.220 | So I'm sort of exploring the academic world surrounding technology and society.

01:13:24.060 | Mm-hmm.

01:13:25.060 | Yeah.

01:13:26.060 | It's a lot of fun.

01:13:27.060 | And I'm teaching.

01:13:28.060 | Teaching math in the spring.

01:13:29.060 | Looking forward to it.

01:13:31.820 | But give me four more classes.

01:13:32.820 | I don't know who that's helping, because I couldn't do anything else.

01:13:36.060 | Any of the research I'm doing, any of the papers, any of the programs-- oh, and by the

01:13:39.260 | way, all the things you say professors don't do anymore, all the things you say you would--

01:13:44.580 | like advising students on majors and study abroad programs.

01:13:47.500 | That's all I do.

01:13:48.500 | I'm the director of undergraduate studies.

01:13:50.640 | That's all we do.

01:13:51.640 | It is true that administrators-- there's many more administrators at college campuses than

01:13:56.860 | before.

01:13:57.860 | Those administrators are not serving professors that take stuff off their plate.

01:14:01.060 | They largely generate new work for the professors.

01:14:03.100 | They're running programs and new initiatives.

01:14:06.940 | The increase in administrators on campuses does not reduce the administrative work that

01:14:12.100 | professors do.

01:14:13.100 | I think it only increases it.

01:14:14.100 | I just want to push back on that.

01:14:15.100 | So there we go.

01:14:16.100 | A little apologia, as they say, for the academic life.

01:14:19.740 | All right.

01:14:20.740 | Well, thank you, everyone, for listening.

01:14:22.300 | I think my voice barely held out.

01:14:24.460 | One day I will have my voice back, but I think we made it through, so I'm happy about that.

01:14:27.780 | We'll be back next week with another episode, and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:14:32.620 | Hey, if you liked today's discussion about the discipline ladder, you should also listen

01:14:36.780 | to episode 310, which is titled "Rethinking Discipline," where I focus on another way

01:14:43.580 | to increase your discipline capacity.

01:14:45.860 | Check it out.

01:14:47.900 | So I've been thinking a lot recently about discipline, and I don't mean punishing other

01:14:54.380 | people.

01:14:55.500 | I also don't mean those performative shows on social media where you brag about how many

01:15:01.460 | miles you can run or how many minutes you can survive a cold plunge.

01:15:06.580 | I mean instead the quiet contentment of consistently making progress on things that are hard right

01:15:13.460 | now, but move you towards meaningful goals in the future.

How To Trick Your Brain To Like Doing Hard Things | Cal Newport

Chapters