A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn & Get Ahead In Life

00:00:00.000 | So to cultivate a deep life, one of the things you have to do is take in a lot of high quality

00:00:06.000 | information. Information relevant to your current work. Information relevant to ideas or projects

00:00:12.960 | you might one day soon do with your work. Information relevant to just making your life

00:00:17.920 | in general more meaningful and satisfying. The problem of course is there's also a lot of noise

00:00:24.800 | surrounding this signal. We live in a distracted world. We're bombarded by information. So we need

00:00:30.880 | some way to efficiently keep track of the information that matters. That's what I want

00:00:36.720 | to talk to you about today. The system I use for keeping notes on information for all parts of my

00:00:43.360 | work and life. Now here's the thing. There's a lot of these types of systems discussed online.

00:00:50.240 | Typically there's complicated software coupled with even more complicated note-taking philosophies

00:00:56.480 | for how to use that software. As you will soon see, my system is the opposite. It is minimalist.

00:01:03.600 | It is as low friction as I can make it while still having it functionally capture notes in a way that

00:01:10.000 | I can one day use. So I'm going to start by explaining why when it comes to note-taking

00:01:16.800 | I lean towards extreme simplicity and then I'll walk you through the three different

00:01:20.480 | types of ways I take notes in my actual life and work. All right, so why don't I use complicated

00:01:27.760 | systems and software? Well, this comes down to friction. Friction is an important concept.

00:01:34.640 | When we're talking about work, friction describes the extra effort or time or complexity that

00:01:40.880 | surrounds the actual task you're trying to accomplish. Right? So that's what we mean by

00:01:46.080 | friction here. In some cases when it comes to work, friction doesn't matter. So I have an example.

00:01:52.880 | This is actually one I go into in detail in my upcoming book, Slow Productivity. It's an example

00:01:58.720 | about how the New Yorker writer John McPhee works on his articles, his famous long-form articles.

00:02:05.440 | TLDR, there's a lot of friction in his approach. It is a very slow, over-complicated approach to

00:02:15.200 | preparing his articles. I won't give the full procedure here, but it involves, among other

00:02:21.360 | things, typing up every single note from every interview that he did, organizing them, cutting

00:02:29.440 | them out with scissors, having these slivers of paper that he moves around in the different piles,

00:02:34.720 | grouping these piles into themes, putting the themes in the folders. And then when it comes

00:02:40.880 | time to write a particular section of his book, taking out a piece of plywood, and he starts

00:02:45.280 | arranging slivers on the plywood in the order that he might want to actually use them so that when he

00:02:50.800 | finally writes, all that information is written. So that's a ton of overhead. It's a ton of friction.

00:02:55.920 | In this case, it doesn't matter. The primary thing John McPhee is trying to do is think deeply and

00:03:03.440 | write really well. So friction in this context slows him down in a way that's actually beneficial.

00:03:10.560 | It allows him to organize his thoughts. It allows him to better recognize what's working and what's

00:03:16.960 | not working. He doesn't want to speed up here. To give John McPhee an app on his phone that allows

00:03:23.280 | him to just tap his Air Bud and immediately start talking, and it will transcribe automatically into

00:03:28.000 | a New Yorker article that a Zapier script will then take and send off to a script that will then

00:03:33.920 | run it through chat GPT to look for errors and then automatically send it to his editor. He

00:03:39.680 | doesn't need that. He needs to take a long time. Friction is fine. In other cases, however,

00:03:43.840 | friction can be a real problem. Note-taking, I think, is one of those cases. When information

00:03:50.800 | is coming at you, your time to act, your energy to think, both are probably pretty limited.

00:03:57.600 | So if I have a relatively complicated system I have to boot up and start using markup code to

00:04:05.280 | take this article I just randomly came across and enter it into my system and cross-reference it

00:04:10.800 | with the right Zettelkasten categorization system so it will semantically link to other related

00:04:15.920 | articles, I'm probably just going to say, "Forget about it." That friction stops me from taking

00:04:20.960 | action. Or if I have friction over something I need to do, like reading a book, I have an

00:04:25.440 | elaborate way of how I'm going to copy every note from this book into my system. I might not just

00:04:30.080 | read that book because I only have so much energy for reading and I might be taxing every last bit

00:04:35.440 | of energy I have just to tackle this book. You make that 20% harder, I might not just read the

00:04:41.280 | book. Or I'll read it and say, "Forget it. I'm not taking notes on everything." And that

00:04:45.680 | information then is lost. So when it comes to actually capturing information from all the

00:04:51.360 | stuff that's out there, unlike, say, writing a long New Yorker piece, friction is a problem.

00:04:58.720 | So you want your note-taking systems to lower that friction so that you can actually

00:05:02.640 | capture effectively as much of the important information as is possible.

00:05:06.960 | Another problem with elaborate systems is that they often aim to take everything out of your

00:05:14.320 | brain. It should be in this external system. The system will organize the information. You don't

00:05:21.440 | have to remember anything. When you want to know about something, the system, you can dive down in

00:05:26.400 | the system and it will unearth for you everything you've encountered that's relevant to it.

00:05:31.440 | I actually think when it comes to the big things in your life, be it big work projects or be it

00:05:37.280 | things about just the way you live, keeping some of this in your brain is not a bad thing.

00:05:43.200 | Because what your brain is doing with this information is updating its internal schemas

00:05:48.720 | that it used to make sense of the world. And if information is useful, if it's in your brain,

00:05:54.320 | it's going to get integrated into these systems. And then when you apply these systems to try to

00:05:58.160 | make decisions, you'll remember this information or at least some of it. Okay, this is relevant

00:06:02.400 | to me. This idea sticks. In other words, when it comes to big ideas and important information,

00:06:06.960 | you want your brain to be part of the curation filtering system. You remember, yeah, this book,

00:06:13.600 | it stuck with me. It had these examples I remember were really important for X.

00:06:19.760 | Now you might have to still go to your notes to see what those examples are.

00:06:23.040 | But the fact that your brain remembered that book was important.

00:06:26.000 | That I think is crucial. We don't want to outsource everything out of our brain.

00:06:32.320 | We want it to be involved in filtering and prioritizing, curating, and trying to make

00:06:35.840 | sense of information in the background. Simple systems allow that because they're not trying to

00:06:42.320 | capture everything relevant to the information you come across.

00:06:46.080 | All right, so let's actually talk about my systems. I'm going to break this up into three sections.

00:06:52.800 | The first, let's deal with books. I read a lot of books. Hopefully you read a fair amount of books

00:06:58.000 | as well. There is information in books as relevant to your work. There's information in books as

00:07:02.880 | relevant to your life. The last episode, we had a big long thing about how to actually encounter

00:07:09.360 | self-help information of various levels of quality. That's important. So how do you take notes on

00:07:15.040 | books? Well, I'm going to show you my method. I'm going to draw here just so you'll bring up for

00:07:19.600 | those who are watching. If you're listening, go to the deeplife.com/listen episode 287. The video

00:07:27.840 | will be at the bottom. I'm going to draw a picture of a book page here, Jesse, so I can show you.

00:07:32.320 | We'll pretend like this is a real book page. And then I'll take some sample notes on it. So I'm

00:07:37.040 | putting some like words on here. The method I use for taking notes on books, I call it the corner

00:07:43.920 | marking method. And it is as low friction as you can possibly make note taking on books while still

00:07:50.800 | actually being useful. Here's what I do. If there's something on this page, like the page you see here

00:07:55.040 | that is interesting to me, or I want to remember, first thing I do is I mark the corner like this.

00:08:01.360 | So just mark a line across the corner. Now I know if I'm flipping through this book that that page

00:08:07.120 | has something important on it. What do I then do with the information on this page

00:08:13.440 | that is actually I want to remember? Simple marks in the margins. Right? So I might, for example,

00:08:22.400 | put a little box. See here. I might put a little bit of a box around text that's important. Or I

00:08:30.480 | might just put a little bit of a checkmark next to a line. Or I might put a curly brace next to

00:08:35.040 | a paragraph that I want to remember. Just small marks in the margins to indicate what lines are

00:08:40.800 | important. Occasionally, I might scribble a little note to myself as well. If there's like a particular

00:08:45.840 | thing that reminds me of. That's it. This barely slows you down as you're going through a book.

00:08:51.520 | Mark, mark, mark. I usually keep, you'll see me, I'll have a pencil in my teeth as I'm reading.

00:08:55.280 | I'll pull it out. Mark, mark, mark. That's all it is. So it barely slows you down. But here's

00:09:01.440 | the reality of the corner marking method. If you go back to that book way later, so it's out of

00:09:07.440 | your working memories a year later, it's five years later. I've done this before. And you start

00:09:11.680 | going through that book, looking for the pages that are marked in the corner, and then reading

00:09:15.680 | the sentences or paragraphs that have been marked in the margins. You will in about five minutes,

00:09:20.640 | reconstitute all the important ideas from that book. So it's a very effective way of capturing

00:09:28.320 | that information. It's not in some fancy system where it'll automatically like show you all the

00:09:32.480 | quotes, but you get to them almost as fast. It takes a little bit longer to go through the book,

00:09:36.960 | but the information is there. So the low friction here is important because it doesn't

00:09:42.480 | prevent you from reading. In other words, if the effort required to read, you're just there

00:09:47.200 | in terms of what you have available. Corner marking note-taking barely changes that effort.

00:09:52.160 | So it's not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Hey there, I want to take a quick

00:09:56.720 | moment to tell you about my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment

00:10:02.880 | Without Burnout. If you like the type of things I talk about on this channel, you're really going

00:10:09.040 | to like this book. It distills all of my ideas into a clear philosophy combined with step-by-step

00:10:16.560 | instructions for putting it into action. Now, if you pre-ordered this book before it comes out on

00:10:22.400 | March 5th, I have some bonuses I want to offer you as my way of saying thanks. These include a

00:10:30.160 | chapter-by-chapter audio commentary from me, the author, and a crash course that will teach you

00:10:36.400 | how to put the ideas of slow productivity into action in your own life right away. So to find

00:10:43.120 | out more about the book and how to redeem your pre-order bonuses, check out calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:51.200 | Everything you need, you can find there. All right, thanks. Let's get back to it.

00:10:55.200 | You'll still read that book. On the other hand, it is still going to be effective for getting

00:10:59.680 | the information you need. The one shortcoming, which I don't think is really a shortcoming at

00:11:04.080 | all, is that you still have to remember, "Oh, that book, vaguely speaking, had some important

00:11:09.600 | ideas about X." So later, when you need some important ideas about X, you do have to remember

00:11:14.480 | to go back to that book and then use the corner marking to very quickly hone in on where those

00:11:18.560 | ideas are. But as I mentioned before, that's not a problem. I want you to have to try to remember

00:11:24.800 | that book is useful. If you don't, it probably wasn't that useful. And remembering that book

00:11:30.640 | is useful allows you to then, and I do this all the time, even without remembering the specific

00:11:35.120 | quotes, use the gist of what I learned from that book in the schemas of knowledge that I'm

00:11:40.400 | constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that's not really a bug, but a feature.

00:11:45.280 | You do have to remember some about what's in what book, but you can do that. You'll become a better

00:11:50.880 | reader. You'll become better at remembering and connecting books without having to reference

00:11:54.560 | your system. And when you need the specific examples, this very simple system will get

00:11:58.480 | you there very fast. All right. So that's the part one. Part two, projects. Now, typically,

00:12:08.480 | what I'm thinking here is professional projects, but we'll see this can apply to

00:12:12.000 | personal projects as well. So think about my life. I write books. I write articles

00:12:18.800 | for popular press, like magazines. I write academic articles. All right.

00:12:24.320 | Where do I keep notes relevant to these things? It's like I have a book that maybe

00:12:29.600 | is due in three years. I'm not going to start writing it for another year.

00:12:34.480 | I come across a podcast interview and I'm like, "Ah, this is relevant to that book." Where do I

00:12:40.640 | put this? Where is my magic system that I put it? My approach is to store notes relevant to projects

00:12:48.640 | in the location where you will one day work on that project.

00:12:50.880 | So for example, I write my popular press articles using Scrivener.

00:12:56.320 | So if I have an idea for an article, I'll create a Scrivener document for it. If I come across an

00:13:02.160 | article or a link or even just a brainstorm that is relevant to that article, I will go to the

00:13:08.560 | Scrivener project for that article. I will go to the research folder for that particular article.

00:13:13.760 | I will add it right there. I write my books in Scrivener. So I'll have a Scrivener

00:13:20.000 | project for a book, be it a book that I've already been paid to write or a book I haven't even

00:13:25.360 | pitched yet, but I'm thinking I might one day want to write. And as I have ideas, I go to the

00:13:29.760 | research folder in the Scrivener project for that book. That's where I put it. And then when it

00:13:34.480 | finally comes time to work more seriously on an article or a book, everything potentially relevant

00:13:39.200 | that I've come across is right there, ready for me to use it. Low friction. I'm not gathering it.

00:13:44.160 | I'm not navigating a system and hoping to encounter interesting ideas. I'm not hoping my system is

00:13:49.520 | going to write the book for me. Hey, just give me all the ideas. No, no, no. Ideas are hard.

00:13:53.920 | You have to think really hard about what's going to make sense. The information needs going to be

00:13:58.320 | there when you get there. All right. It's not an elegant system. An article might find its way to

00:14:04.240 | a couple of different projects, but it works. Same thing for my academic articles. So as a

00:14:09.200 | theoretical computer scientist, my papers are largely mathematical. So we write them using a

00:14:14.560 | rendering engine called LaTeX. Any scientist knows about this. I use software for it called

00:14:22.720 | Overleaf. It's web-based software for writing these articles because it's collaborative. So

00:14:26.160 | my collaborators and I can write at the same time. I just put relevant notes for potential papers,

00:14:32.320 | create an Overleaf project, start adding sections and subsections.

00:14:35.920 | Any ideas or notes I have about that project goes right into the document.

00:14:40.000 | And then when it comes time to write that paper, we start adding sections to the beginning of this

00:14:44.560 | document, pulling stuff from later on. And at some point when the paper takes shape,

00:14:48.400 | we hide all the notes and we're left with just the polished paper.

00:14:51.280 | You can do the same thing for personal projects. Wherever you plan a project, and this could be

00:14:57.920 | just like a folder in Google Drive, that's where you should go and put the inspiration pictures,

00:15:03.360 | the ideas, the recommendations for contractors. Put the notes immediately into the place where

00:15:08.640 | you're going to one day do the work. Big believer in that for making effective use. And bonus,

00:15:15.920 | there's always a bonus to all these approaches. The bonus here is that every time you come across

00:15:23.280 | something new for one of these projects, I come across a link that's relevant for an article.

00:15:28.320 | When I go to add it to the Scrivener research folder for that article,

00:15:32.640 | I encounter again and again, everything else I've already found.

00:15:36.160 | And that refreshes a mental picture of that project in my head and my head can do

00:15:41.680 | some more background processing. You know when some of the best ideas for my books or articles

00:15:45.600 | come? Like six hours after I add something new to the research folder, because it loaded all that

00:15:51.520 | stuff up again, my mind was like, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that." And then it's thinking about

00:15:56.080 | it and some new cool angle comes up and now you're rock and rolling and you get a real insight. So I

00:16:00.400 | think it's an effective system, but minimal friction. It's the easiest possible thing.

00:16:04.160 | Load, type it in, out. All right, final thing. What about ideas about your life?

00:16:10.240 | Big ideas about living a more meaningful, sustainable, deep life.

00:16:15.680 | I'm inspired by what I saw in this movie. Maybe I should get really into this particular hobby.

00:16:22.160 | Where do you store ideas not connected to work or projects, but to your own life?

00:16:26.800 | Here, I think you should have an awesome notebook. This is where having a notebook

00:16:32.320 | that's actual form is cool and aspirational and just interesting to you is, I think,

00:16:38.400 | important. This is where having a really cool pen is really important. So all of that fetish

00:16:44.000 | that surrounds note-taking and systems, most of that is not applicable to your work. It can't

00:16:49.040 | keep up with the volume of stuff relevant in your work. You can bullet journal until your fingers

00:16:53.760 | bleed. You're not going to keep up with working on six New Yorker articles and three academic

00:17:00.240 | articles in a book per year. There's probably 400 or 500, maybe 1,000 different notes to get

00:17:05.520 | taken for that. You're not going to keep up in your paper notebook with that. But your life,

00:17:09.840 | you can. Ideas about your life, you can keep up with in a physical notebook.

00:17:15.280 | That's where you want the cool one. That's where you want the form of the notebook to matter.

00:17:20.160 | For a long time, I used Moleskine. Long-time listeners know this. Earlier this year,

00:17:25.280 | I switched over to a Remarkable. So it's a digital notebook, which I really love.

00:17:30.560 | Again, it's ridiculous because it's like $500 or something, right? It's stupid. But I love it

00:17:37.520 | because I have like 15 different digital notebooks in there now, and I could just go to any of them

00:17:41.360 | at any time. And I really love the technology. We did a whole thing about it on the show.

00:17:44.480 | But whatever, the point is, it's cool and aspirational. To me, it's interesting.

00:17:49.040 | That's where you have your cool notebook for keeping track of ideas about your life.

00:17:52.960 | And all you need there is some sort of semi-regular process of reading through these.

00:17:59.040 | The very simplest thing you can do if you're using a physical notebook

00:18:02.560 | is when you fill it, put aside an hour to review it, and to only copy into your new notebook,

00:18:09.920 | short summaries of the most important or lasting ideas from your previous notebook. So there's a

00:18:15.760 | very natural triage you can do that way. See what sticks and what you lose interest in over time.

00:18:23.680 | So that's my approach. It is low friction. It is simple. Very little custom software is required.

00:18:32.240 | One cool notebook and whatever else you're already using for your work.

00:18:35.680 | But because you're adding very little friction, you can keep up. And the stuff that matters will

00:18:41.760 | get captured and put to the place where it matters. And then, of course, you get all the bonuses.

00:18:45.840 | So again, for books, the bonus is having to remember which book had what is a feature,

00:18:51.360 | not a bug. It allows you to continue to work with and build on these ideas after you first

00:18:55.840 | encounter them. When it comes to your projects, having your notes where you want to actually do

00:19:01.040 | the work is not just efficient, but it allows you to re-encounter the gestalt of what you know about

00:19:06.400 | that project again and again as you grow those notes, allowing your mind to work more with it.

00:19:11.440 | And cool notebooks put you into that mindset of a cultivator or crafter of your own life.

00:19:18.160 | So we're sort of hacking the brain here. We want the brain to be involved in the process of dealing

00:19:23.840 | with information, but in ways that doesn't overload it or overtax it. So that's my system.

00:19:30.080 | It's not as exciting as other systems. Some other systems, people actually,

00:19:34.000 | make this clear disclaimer, like building systems. And that's fine. I mean, if that's like your hobby,

00:19:40.720 | I think that's fine. If you like building the complicated system because you get enjoyment in

00:19:45.280 | the system, you might actually take more notes because you really love the use this cool system

00:19:49.680 | you built. It's like when you build a pool and you customize it, you really want to have a lot

00:19:55.040 | of pool parties. So I get that. But if that doesn't appeal to you, don't worry. You do not

00:20:00.720 | need a super complicated system, but you do need something. So this is my suggestion. At least

00:20:05.520 | that's one place to start. It doesn't really give us, Jesse, like a complicated software package we

00:20:09.520 | can sell. That's the only problem. - On our new Shopify store?

00:20:12.240 | - Yeah. Our new Shopify store is going to have like a Moleskine, a Uniball micro pen for marking

00:20:18.240 | like the corners of book pages and like a Scrivener subscription. I don't know. It's not as fun.

00:20:25.840 | I could rabbit hole on that stuff pretty hard if I wanted to. Like note-taking systems,

00:20:32.240 | I could get going down there, but I resist. All right. So there you go. That's what I had to say.

00:20:41.040 | All right. So we have some cool questions coming up roughly on this topic and some related. First,

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00:25:23.760 | extra three months free, but only when you go to ExpressVPN.com/deep. All right, let's move on to

00:25:33.120 | some questions. What do we got first today, Jesse? First question is from Margo. I'm a mother to a

00:25:40.240 | nine month old, and also work as a professor at R1 University. Right now I have a lot of time when

00:25:45.600 | I'm doing something that engages my hands or body, but not my mind, often at least five hours a day

00:25:50.560 | between mother and house duties. I have good and bad days on what I do at this time. Any

00:25:55.280 | suggestions on how best to use it? Well, I'd be careful about this idea

00:26:00.480 | of best using it. Because what we're talking about is just time you're not working.

00:26:08.080 | So another word for that is your life outside of work. So when you say, "How do I best

00:26:14.240 | use my time outside of work?" You're really asking, "How do I live well?" In some sense,

00:26:20.960 | it's a huge question. And what I'm worried about here is that the type of organizational

00:26:27.760 | productivity thinking we might apply to your work as a professor is going to bleed into this work

00:26:32.880 | outside of your job as a professor. But life outside of work is about a lot of different things,

00:26:39.440 | many of which have very little to do with the efficient use of your time and resources.

00:26:45.920 | So I don't want you to think about optimizing your time outside of work. I don't even want

00:26:50.080 | you to evaluate your time outside of work. And what I'm trying to do here is not critique,

00:26:56.320 | but give you an excuse to relax about this. That's saying it's okay. Not excuse, permission,

00:27:04.560 | let's say, giving you permission. You say you have good or bad days with what you do with this time

00:27:08.640 | outside of work. I don't want you to think about any of these days as good or bad. I want you to

00:27:12.800 | think about them as days that interesting stuff happened. You had a good moment with your kid.

00:27:20.640 | You blew off the whatever chore you were going to do because it was sunny and you went for a long

00:27:26.560 | walk with a friend. That's a good day. You read an interesting book. This is the permission I want

00:27:33.120 | to give you, Margo, is work is hard. So be organized so you can get as much done as possible

00:27:39.520 | in a small amount of time and have flexibility, not be stressed out outside of work. We just

00:27:44.480 | roll with it. It's not good days. It's not bad days. It's intentional days. And sometimes

00:27:49.760 | intentional is like, I am going to get after, we got to get the cars oil changed and I got to get

00:27:57.440 | the forms in for the kids' camps. And maybe it's a day where you're really getting through a lot

00:28:01.520 | of stuff. Intentional might be, I'm not touching the thing of chores. Like me, I'm taking the baby

00:28:08.960 | and we're using the ergo and we're going hiking. So it's not good. It's not bad because it's not

00:28:14.960 | work. So let's think about it in a different way. And I'm basically talking to myself, Margo. So

00:28:19.600 | I'm using you as an excuse. It's not good days or bad days outside of work. They're just days.

00:28:24.240 | So you and I together, Margo, can make a pact that we're going to relax. And dare I use a word,

00:28:30.160 | oh, I'm going to hold up my book here. Go slower. So those who are watching or seeing me holding up

00:28:36.560 | slow productivity to the camera, they're slow down in our time outside of work.

00:28:41.600 | All right. What do we got? Should I, by the way, Jesse, I'm doing a bunch of

00:28:47.360 | podcasts, you know, the promote the book. Yeah. Like I'm traveling out, uh, out West to do a

00:28:52.960 | bunch of stuff. I got to think of a way to subtly have slow productivity on the screen all the time

00:28:59.040 | when I'm on these shows. Just talk really slowly. Well, but I mean, I'm thinking like physically,

00:29:03.760 | so like, like a necklace around my neck and the book is just hanging.

00:29:07.840 | And then like, if I use a little, uh, motor, like a servo motor, I can have the book kind of shake

00:29:13.840 | a little bit every once in a while because that draws the eyes. So that's what I'm thinking is

00:29:16.880 | like when I'm on like Andrew Huberman show, I got slow productivity hanging around my neck

00:29:21.760 | and like every minute it like shakes a little bit and maybe like there's like a red chase light that

00:29:27.360 | goes around it. That way I don't have to be, you know, talking about my book all the time.

00:29:32.320 | It'll just sort of be there. Or here's my other idea for people who are watching. You'll see this.

00:29:36.640 | I want to have like an articulated arm. And so behind me, it's on a backpack and battery

00:29:41.760 | powered backpack. So while I'm talking every once in a while, the book just kind of comes up from

00:29:46.880 | behind my back, kind of like on like an articulated arm kind of waves a little bit and then just

00:29:52.800 | descends back behind. That's what I'm thinking that way. I don't have to be like a self promoter.

00:29:57.520 | It also needs to get on a Pat McAfee's bookshelf on his desk. Oh, is that the key? He's is he,

00:30:05.680 | who's the guy who stands up? That's Pat. That's Pat. Okay. Yeah.

00:30:09.920 | Because he has books up there when he's reading a new one or whatever. And that gets a lot of eyes.

00:30:15.440 | I worry if I was on that show, he would crush me on the head.

00:30:19.520 | He just seems like a guy who could just be like, boom, and just like crush you on the head.

00:30:24.560 | Well, he's a kicker. I don't think he's like that big of a guy. He's probably pretty big.

00:30:27.920 | He's like a strong guy. Yeah. I mean, you go sleeveless on your national show,

00:30:32.480 | your televised national show. There's some confidence there. I don't do a lot of sleeveless.

00:30:38.640 | Maybe I will. No sleeves, fully articulated robotic arm that just raises the book behind my head.

00:30:46.480 | All right. Enough nonsense. What do we got next? Next question from Pineapple. Can people with

00:30:51.680 | ADHD really improve their ability to learn new things and actually remember it?

00:30:55.280 | A hundred percent. Yes. So Pineapple, I want you to keep this in mind. If anything,

00:31:03.360 | and what I'm basing this on is earlier in my career, giving advice when I focused mainly on

00:31:08.640 | student advice. There's a lot of the themes you hear today from me were back in the advice back

00:31:14.000 | then. I had an audience size and time back then that I interacted more deeply with my readers.

00:31:20.640 | I would spend an hour to a day actually just helping students who would email me and I would

00:31:26.400 | help them apply their advice. A lot of students I heard from, it was non-trivial percentage,

00:31:31.760 | had ADHD or some other type of neurodivergence. And what I heard from them is it is more important

00:31:38.400 | for us to be thinking intentionally about these things than other people. And in particular,

00:31:43.520 | the general approach of being more structured about your time makes a big difference,

00:31:48.000 | especially with ADHD. Very intentional and structured about when I work on this,

00:31:54.720 | how I work on this, what systems I use to work on this. That is very important because you're

00:31:59.760 | minimizing the need for you to have to latch your attention onto the objective

00:32:04.560 | in an ad hoc fashion, bypass other distracting influences and focus on it.

00:32:10.560 | And sometimes what I've heard from the, again, these same students is having that structure

00:32:16.080 | that worked well with ADHD turned it into more of a superpower because now what it allowed them to

00:32:22.080 | do was to activate hyper-focus on a regular basis. When you have the structure, I'm going to work on

00:32:26.560 | this. Here's how, when I work on it, the distractions are out of here. You could turn on

00:32:30.320 | the flip side of some of the ADHD is the flip side is the ability to focus incredibly intensely.

00:32:37.680 | And then you would get these super deep work sessions. So you could unlock almost like a

00:32:42.880 | cheat code that other people didn't have. Now, I want to condition this by saying the other thing

00:32:47.520 | I learned working with students who had ADHD or similar neurodivergences is there was also very

00:32:53.040 | specific things they had to do. Very specific ways they modify, for example, my study advice

00:32:59.280 | to fit better with the best practices for ADHD. And typically this was working with

00:33:05.280 | the counselors or doctors that were already helping them with ADHD.

00:33:08.720 | So you have to sort of customize this advice with best practices for this particular context.

00:33:17.760 | But I've heard a lot that, yes, you do want to worry concerns about distraction and a bias

00:33:24.640 | towards structure and intentional systems for your attention. This is like really powerful.

00:33:32.080 | If you have ADHD, even if you have to modify the types of things I talk about, the more

00:33:36.560 | realistically fit your triggers and what works with you, it's worth going down that path.

00:33:41.920 | You don't want to just open yourself. Like I'll just figure it out.

00:33:46.240 | Right. You don't want to abandon having structure or advice when it comes to your attention,

00:33:51.920 | because that's when things get hard. I remember, Jesse, when I had to finally make the decision,

00:33:57.120 | I can't answer these emails anymore. It's kind of traumatic. It just, there are so many,

00:34:02.000 | it just grew as the books grew and it became too many. And I was trying to answer some,

00:34:07.520 | but that was hard. And finally I had to just not answer any. Yeah. Yeah. I remember it was

00:34:12.320 | traumatic. It was nice. There was like kind of a glory period where my audience, I could like fit

00:34:17.040 | my audience into an auditorium. Like we knew each other and I really could. And I learned a lot,

00:34:22.640 | you know, doing like this one-on-one, a lot of one-on-one work is really useful.

00:34:27.360 | So I sort of missed that. All right. What do we got next?

00:34:30.720 | Next question is from Jason. There's been a lot of talk lately about declining attention spans

00:34:36.240 | and the dwindling ability to actually learn things. I recently read Gloria Mark's book,

00:34:40.960 | Attention Span. I'm interested to know your thoughts on Gloria's four myths of attention span.

00:34:46.160 | I like Gloria's book. I blurbed her book. I think my blurb is on the cover of that book.

00:34:52.720 | I have them here. So you can find her four myths of attention span at her website,

00:34:59.760 | GloriaMark.com/attention-span. So the book has four myths of attention span. So four things that

00:35:10.560 | we think is true about attention, but are not. That's what Jason's asking. So let's go through

00:35:16.000 | these one by one. And then I'll tell you whether or not I agree or not that this is a myth.

00:35:20.960 | All right. Gloria's first myth, we should always strive to be focused and should feel guilty if we

00:35:28.560 | can't or can't be. Yeah, I completely agree with that. That's a myth. To strive to always be

00:35:36.640 | focused is absurd. It's like talking to someone who wants to get stronger or an athlete and be

00:35:43.520 | like, you should strive to always have your muscles in a state of load bearing strain.

00:35:49.120 | That's crazy, right? There's only so much load bearing strain you can do. Like modern

00:35:54.800 | bodybuilding orthodoxy says, really, you want to have eight to 10 sets per week per muscle group,

00:36:00.240 | right? Like otherwise it's overload. So just because you need to know how to put hard strain

00:36:05.600 | on your muscle and do it on a regular basis to get stronger, it is obviously a reducto ad absurdum

00:36:11.600 | to then say, therefore it is good to always have your muscles under strain. Same thing with

00:36:16.160 | attention. Focus is important. You need the focus to produce things of true value using your brain,

00:36:21.520 | but to then extrapolate from that to say you should always be in a state of focus is absurd

00:36:27.280 | because that's impossible. So I agree. That's definitely a myth. All right. Gloria's second

00:36:32.640 | myth, mindless activity that we do on our computers and phones is wasteful of our time.

00:36:39.120 | Now I agree here as well. I'm going to draw from my book, Digital Minimalism to tell you what I

00:36:45.360 | believe. So the whole premise of that book, like why did I write that book? Not because I believe

00:36:51.840 | there is some intrinsic evil in particular activities, but because my readers and

00:36:58.560 | listeners were reporting to me, I am spending more time on these activities that I know is

00:37:04.960 | useful or healthy. This is when distractions become a problem. When you know they are keeping

00:37:13.200 | you away from things that are more important, that they are lowering the quality of your life.

00:37:16.880 | That's when you say this is a problem. And that was the problem people began feeling around 2016,

00:37:22.400 | 2017, this tipping point where more and more people who bought their iPhone in 2010, because

00:37:28.560 | they saw the Steve Jobs speech about having your iPod and your phone combined, like that's awesome.

00:37:32.800 | Woke up seven years later and said, I'd checked as 150 times a day. I'm not paying attention to my

00:37:38.240 | kids. I'm not socializing anymore. I feel strung out and anxious. I'm not doing the activities

00:37:43.680 | that used to matter. That's the problem. So there's nothing intrinsic. This is evil to look at it.

00:37:50.720 | It's I can't help but look at this when I'm trying to do bath time with my kids.

00:37:54.400 | That's when it becomes a problem. Good analogy here would be something like alcohol,

00:37:58.960 | right? Same thing. It's not, Hey, you should never touch alcohol. That's bad.

00:38:03.520 | But what's the cliche about it? When does it become a problem when it's messing up your life?

00:38:07.840 | And I think that's what happened for a lot of people with their relationship with their phone.

00:38:13.120 | So yes, you want to measure technology from your values. Is it helping or preventing me

00:38:18.560 | from doing the things I care about? So it's perfectly fine to have perfectly distracting,

00:38:23.120 | low quality things in your life. As long as it's not having a footprint that keeps you away from

00:38:28.560 | things that you value promise for a lot of people they do. And then the real problem becomes when

00:38:33.680 | we look at kids because they can't help it. I'm yet to find a 13 year old who you give

00:38:40.720 | unrestricted access to the internet with on their phone. And they're like, I use this a little bit.

00:38:45.520 | You know, I want to go outside and play. Nah, you're a kid. That thing is going to brain worm

00:38:50.800 | in there. So we got it there. We have to have some more protection. All right. But so far I'm on

00:38:55.040 | track here with Gloria. All right. Myth number three, the inability to focus on our devices

00:39:01.200 | are due primarily to notifications and our lack of discipline. That's an interesting one.

00:39:08.800 | I agree with the notifications piece. That's like 2003 thinking notifications are the problem.

00:39:15.760 | I get the notification that I have a new email and that's the problem. And if I just turn off

00:39:22.400 | my notifications, I'll be fine. No, that's crazy. We come back to these things again and again,

00:39:29.120 | not because we were notified, but because what they're offering us, whether we were notified or

00:39:33.920 | not. And it is a complicated picture when it comes to work. You can turn off your email notifications,

00:39:40.800 | but you're still going to check that inbox once every six minutes. Why? Because of the hyperactive

00:39:45.200 | hive mind mode of collaboration. This is the core of my book, A World Without Email.

00:39:49.200 | We work out so much of our collaboration through asynchronous back and forth messaging.

00:39:54.240 | These conversations required many back and forth messages. They're timely. So now I have to keep

00:40:00.880 | checking my inbox so that I can see your most recent message and bounce it back to you. So you

00:40:05.520 | can bounce it back to me and I can bounce it back to you and get an answer before lunchtime.

00:40:08.480 | So we check our work email all the time in this example, not because of notifications,

00:40:13.760 | but because we have a collaboration method that requires us to constantly check this work email,

00:40:17.760 | because that's how we keep these asynchronous conversations going.

00:40:20.160 | On our phones, it's more complicated. I don't go back to Twitter compulsively if I have a

00:40:26.960 | problem with Twitter because of a notification, but because of what it gives me. It presses these

00:40:33.120 | emotional buttons. There's an addictive design element to it. I don't need a notification to

00:40:37.520 | grab a cigarette if I'm addicted to smoking. It's already wormed its way into my rhythms of the day.

00:40:43.760 | So yeah, notifications have nothing to do with it. Discipline is complicated.

00:40:48.640 | Often directly speaking, it's not discipline. I can't just fix my email problem by being

00:40:53.680 | disciplined. I'm not going to check my email. The whole structure of my work requires me to do it.

00:40:57.440 | So I have to put in place an alternative structure collaboration that does not require email.

00:41:02.480 | A little bit harder when it comes to your phone and in some ways a little bit easier.

00:41:05.360 | Yes, I agree. Just white knuckling it. I don't want to look at these digital cigarettes is hard

00:41:10.400 | because they're helping you paper over voyage in your life. They're giving you emotional stimulation.

00:41:15.040 | They're scratching deeply human urges you have in a very superficial way,

00:41:18.640 | but you need to scratch those urges and it's easier to be seeing something on social media

00:41:24.160 | or pornography than it is to actually fulfill those human urges with real relationships with

00:41:29.680 | real people. But there is a discipline aspect to that as well, but it's just indirect.

00:41:36.240 | It's the disciplined construction of a more intentional cultivated deep life

00:41:41.360 | that begins to make the superficial pleasures of the attention economy superficial and

00:41:48.880 | optional. It's that disciplined effort to actually build into your life. What really matters

00:41:53.680 | to get a taste for it that makes the digitized junk food no longer appealing. So ultimately

00:42:00.320 | discipline will be involved, especially with the non-work digital life, but it's not the obvious

00:42:07.360 | discipline of just avert my eyes and grip my knuckles. It's a more indirectly subtle,

00:42:13.920 | relentlessly applied discipline to build a life where you don't just avoid those things,

00:42:18.880 | but you find them increasingly intolerable. So look at that like I 80% agree.

00:42:23.840 | Number four, fourth myth, flow is the ideal state we should strive for when using our technologies.

00:42:30.320 | Yeah, I agree. Flow state, be wary. It's overrated. We have this argument a lot. Flow state feels

00:42:37.120 | great. And there are certain times in work where a flow state feels great, for example,

00:42:41.920 | but also there's a lot of important work activities that are not a flow state. It's pulling teeth. Why?

00:42:46.640 | Because you're straining your brain to do something that is past your comfortable ability, which is

00:42:52.000 | critical. If you want to get better, produce your best work flow state requires that you get,

00:42:56.800 | you fall into a zone, which requires that you're like right in the sweet spot of like, I have to

00:43:01.280 | focus, but I can do this pretty well for the guitar player. Flow state is when you're playing a hard

00:43:06.480 | song. You can play well, it's great. You get lost in it. Your fingers are doing it. Deliberate

00:43:11.200 | practice is when you were learning that song in the first place and you couldn't play it fast

00:43:14.800 | enough. And that feels like the opposite of flow. You feel every second when you're trying to,

00:43:20.240 | with your full concentration, do something you cannot yet do comfortably. So flow state's great,

00:43:25.360 | but it's not the be all end all goal. When it comes to technologies, Gloria's right.

00:43:30.640 | Be very wary, especially addictive video games want you to get into a flow state because you

00:43:36.560 | look up seven hours later and you've been focusing on that thing all day long. They want to just pull

00:43:42.560 | you from one experience to another. There's no more purified example of a flow state than the

00:43:47.040 | TikTok interface. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. You know, just, oh, here's something, here's

00:43:52.240 | something that's not good. Oh, that was really good. This one wasn't, but if I swipe some more,

00:43:56.080 | I should get some more. They get you lost in this flow state. So there you go. They've just gathered

00:43:59.920 | three hours of data on you. So Gloria's right. In technology use, flow state's not the goal.

00:44:05.760 | In work in general, flow states are great, but they're not the only thing that's good. So I think

00:44:09.840 | we sometimes, we probably sometimes put too much popular emphasis on them. And by the way, Mahaly

00:44:16.800 | Chaksetmehy would agree with this, right? I mean, he, he, he studied these very specifically,

00:44:21.920 | the context of psychology. He wasn't saying you should be in a flow state all the time. He,

00:44:27.360 | he said, there's a very observable thing that's important and we can measure it and we should

00:44:30.240 | understand it. But people took it and said, flow state's all that matters. So some wisdom in those

00:44:36.560 | So thank you. Who asked this question? Jason. Good question. It was a chance to go over Gloria's

00:44:41.920 | four myths. And I recommend that book attention span. If you read my book, World Without Email,

00:44:47.920 | I have a whole long section on Gloria Mark. I talked about her, her whole story. I've interviewed

00:44:52.240 | her on multiple occasions, really one of the top thinkers on attention and distraction. So

00:44:56.960 | definitely check out that book. If you're a fan of what we talk about here. All right. What do

00:45:02.400 | we got next? Jesse. Next question is from Ramiro. I'm working on my dissertation with a full-time

00:45:08.160 | job and need help on my reading and writing. Some days it's almost impossible for me to be able to

00:45:13.040 | concentrate. I read and reread to no avail. Time-blocking has helped, but I still get

00:45:17.520 | distracted. How can I concentrate better? Well, first of all, Ramiro, don't feel bad.

00:45:22.480 | This is hard. You're doing something that's like very difficult. Now, because of my line of work,

00:45:28.320 | I encounter more people who write dissertations under unusual circumstances than the average

00:45:33.680 | person. So I sort of hear a lot about this and it's really hard. And I want you to think about

00:45:37.120 | this like, I don't know, you're training for a marathon while you also have a busy executive

00:45:42.320 | job, right? It's hard to do and it's not always going to go well. So first thing I want to do is

00:45:48.960 | just tell you you're doing well and not every day is going to be great. And actually what you're

00:45:54.800 | doing is really hard and you can't just expect I have my system and every day is good. So we're

00:46:00.560 | okay. Now, beyond that, what tends to help? Well, if you're going to tackle this really hard thing,

00:46:06.560 | I think my marathon example is a great one because how do people who are busy,

00:46:10.560 | who train for marathons, and I know people like this, I've got friends who do this. My sister's

00:46:15.520 | a big marathon runner. They do it in the morning. It's the only thing that works. It's the only time

00:46:20.720 | they get up early. It sucks though running in January at like five in the morning is a great

00:46:26.080 | alarm clock. So keep that in mind, but it's the only time that they can consistently,

00:46:30.480 | they know consistently how they're going to feel like kind of tired, but they haven't used their

00:46:34.240 | brain at all. There's no decision to be made. There's no work to do yet. They just go out and

00:46:38.160 | they do it. That's how people train for marathons. This is what I see for dissertations and full-time

00:46:42.960 | jobs. If it's a busy job, you got to get up earlier and have like a 90 minutes, a two hour block in

00:46:48.640 | the morning, full ritual locked in, then you're done. That you can be consistently successful with

00:46:54.480 | probably 80% of the time. It's going to be a much higher hit rate than trying to fit dissertation

00:46:59.600 | work into your day later in the evening or try to make time for it after your brain is exhausted

00:47:04.400 | from everyday work. Here's the thing. If you have an office job, for example,

00:47:08.080 | one hour of the avalanche of context switching caused by the hyperactive hive mind workflow,

00:47:14.880 | the having to check your inbox once every six minutes, one hour of that is going to torch your

00:47:20.160 | brain. Like try to work on a dissertation. Here's my experiment at 8am first thing you do, or at 10am

00:47:28.240 | after an hour of hyperactive hive mind, you are going to feel about 50 IQ points dumber

00:47:32.880 | in that second scenario. If you're doing this at the end of your day, after hyperactive hive

00:47:37.920 | minding all day long, sending and receiving 126 emails, pretty soon your dissertation is going to

00:47:44.000 | start to read like a third grader wrote it. Pretty soon your reappraisal of Thomas Aquinas's just war

00:47:52.560 | policy is going to have a whole long section where you're just transcribing the lyrics from that song

00:47:58.160 | war. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. It'll just be that for a few pages.

00:48:04.560 | Then your advisor will be like, "Ramiro, this appendix here full of pictures of tanks you drew."

00:48:13.440 | You'll be like, "Yeah, I did a different camo pattern." This is nice, but I don't understand

00:48:18.640 | how the enlightenment reappraisal of Thomas, Thomastic scholarship on just war really plays

00:48:23.920 | in here. That's what it's going to be like. You got to get to this before work melts your brain.

00:48:28.080 | You got to do it in the morning. That'll actually work, but you need ritual, you need structure.

00:48:32.160 | I'm going to give you a reading assignment here, Ramiro. Get my book, Deep Work,

00:48:36.080 | searching the appendix for Brian Chappell. You're going to find a story in there about Brian

00:48:43.600 | writing his dissertation while having a full-time job. I did in the morning, but I want you to focus

00:48:49.280 | on the specificity of his rituals. He had it dialed in to the point of when he went to the bathroom.

00:48:57.760 | Having that ritual, here's where I work. I do this and I make this one cup of coffee,

00:49:03.440 | then I work this long. That allowed him to just make constant progress,

00:49:07.120 | no matter what else happened in the day. It's like running a marathon, Ramiro. You got to get up and

00:49:12.000 | lace up your shoes before the sun comes up. It's the only way to do it. All right. Let's do one

00:49:16.960 | more question here. >> I was dying about your

00:49:19.360 | description of John Hicks. >> That's where you end up, man. Where

00:49:23.120 | are you after five hours? We're podcasting today at the end of the day, and the only thing that's

00:49:29.680 | saving us is it was a teaching day. On teaching day, it's like I'm in front of the class and I'm

00:49:34.880 | not doing email and stuff like that. It's the only thing saving us from this turning into like

00:49:40.560 | a Joe Rogan type podcast. I'm not sure. He's a good interviewer, but you know what I mean. I'll

00:49:46.320 | just start going off my gut and talking about kettlebells or whatever. The only thing saving us

00:49:50.640 | is I didn't do a lot of email today. >> You also have your strategies in place

00:49:56.080 | where you don't fall victim to the hyperactive high of mind, right?

00:49:59.280 | >> Well, that's true too. That's right. That's right. What I'll usually do is just consolidate,

00:50:04.960 | and it can be a beast because I have a lot going on during book launch time. It's like a two-hour

00:50:09.680 | block where it's just like, "Rah." I get on top of everything and then I ignore everyone for another

00:50:14.960 | week. You don't want to talk to me after that two-hour block. I usually just go exercise after

00:50:19.840 | that. But yeah, that's how I do it. I'll do these mega blocks and then just be a bad emailer for

00:50:25.360 | four days. >> Have you still been doing the

00:50:27.200 | labeling technique that we talked about on a prior show?

00:50:31.520 | >> Right now, it's just like the water's coming to the ship and I'm just down there with the

00:50:35.680 | bilge pump. Because book publicity is like everyone needs everything at the same time that your normal

00:50:40.640 | job's going on. And everything else normally is happening in your life, and it's all happening

00:50:45.040 | at the same time. The good thing is, because it's my eighth book, I've done this before,

00:50:52.560 | I've designed these systems for my publicity teams, these interactive protocols, how we

00:50:56.480 | interact and do all the work. So I have it dialed in. So I've really minimized the urgent

00:51:03.520 | communication and how I do it. That'd be a very narrow book. I should one day write a book about

00:51:08.240 | the systems I use to help publicize books without burning out. That's a small audience book, Jesse,

00:51:13.520 | but I've given that a lot of thought. All right, what's our final question?

00:51:19.120 | >> All right, we have Caitlin. I always have more work than can fit into the two to four hours I'm

00:51:25.200 | comfortable working. I'm seriously struggling. I'm pretty good at time blocking my mornings and

00:51:29.280 | get a minimum of one to two deep work hours in every weekday. But once I take a break,

00:51:34.480 | I find it nearly impossible to get back to work. Even when I try to regulate simple tasks such as

00:51:39.520 | admin work and grading to the afternoons, I struggle. How can I turn my afternoon time

00:51:45.280 | blocks from 100% wasted time to time I'm actually accomplishing something?

00:51:49.360 | >> I'm thinking math. What's going to sharpen your mind and get you that energy you need?

00:51:56.320 | Good afternoon, hit a math. No, Caitlin, I've got a good answer. And in fact, you're lucky

00:52:00.480 | because I'm going to label this question, our slow productivity corner question of the day.

00:52:12.080 | This is the segment where I answer a question where the answer can come from my

00:52:15.440 | upcoming book, Slow Productivity, which you should preorder. Find out more at calnewport.com/slow.

00:52:21.680 | So why am I going to treat this as the slow productivity corner question? Because I'm going

00:52:28.640 | to give you some nonstandard productivity advice here, Caitlin. Right. So what I'm seeing here

00:52:34.880 | is you're exhausted. You're getting to the afternoons and your mind is saying no mass,

00:52:40.960 | right? I don't want to grade. I can't do any more email. It's exhausted, which I empathize because

00:52:47.040 | I get there a lot as well. We have the same job. Caitlin's a professor. I've been there before.

00:52:51.120 | So I empathize here. This is not something wrong that's happening with you, right? So this is not

00:52:59.360 | a discipline failure or your system being non-optimized. I think this is your body and

00:53:07.840 | in particular, your mind telling you something about the current state of your job. It's like,

00:53:12.640 | this is too much. I'm not liking it. I'm losing that mojo. Now, this is very common. I think this

00:53:20.560 | is a common in academic jobs, a lot of other jobs too, just because you can kind of hit these points

00:53:24.640 | of stagnation where it's no longer fresh and there's nothing. So I think your mind is telling

00:53:29.200 | you something here. So here's my non-traditional productivity advice. Don't tell your chair

00:53:35.840 | and don't tell your Dean. Do less, end your work earlier, spend longer on things, give yourself

00:53:43.760 | longer times to finish things. So basically, and this is why I call it the slow productivity

00:53:48.000 | corner question of the day, let's embrace some slower productivity. You're at a phase of whatever

00:53:54.000 | is going on in your life and your relationship with your work right now, that the pace that

00:53:58.400 | you're going, which was probably the like assistant professor, I'm going for 10 year pace,

00:54:03.760 | isn't working with you anymore. So what would happen if you took some things off your plate?

00:54:07.440 | What would happen if you end your day? I don't have to tell people this, but you're kind of

00:54:12.560 | winding down your day, three o'clock. What would happen if you're taking longer on projects?

00:54:18.800 | So you don't have to work on it as much. You get a few hours in the morning, a long walk,

00:54:25.440 | some admin, you see some students, like you're kind of checking out and getting into other

00:54:32.000 | things by the late afternoon. I think you're going to find a couple of things. A, it's not going to be

00:54:38.640 | as big of a hit to your output as you think. Because I think you're ailing a little bit

00:54:45.680 | right now. So your mind's probably not on board with anything you're doing right now.

00:54:49.120 | And you're going to find, okay, I'm spending more time doing less stuff, but the quality is good.

00:54:53.600 | And overall, actually, like papers are getting published and my class is pretty well organized,

00:54:58.480 | and I'm just giving myself a breather. You might find your output is fine. Second thing you're

00:55:02.720 | going to notice is no one else is going to notice. It's subtle. It's just like you don't set up

00:55:08.400 | meetings in the afternoon. You're saying no to more requests for committees and journal stuff,

00:55:12.240 | but no one knows you're saying no more. Because remember, right now you're saying, no, I'm just

00:55:15.920 | making up a number to like 30% of the requests. It's like 30%. So people have experienced you

00:55:21.600 | saying no, you move that to 50% of your requests. Who's going to know that? They just know that

00:55:26.160 | sometimes you say no to me. Sometimes they don't. That's the way it was before. They're not doing a

00:55:30.080 | hidden Markov chain analysis here to try to understand what's the base rates of assigning

00:55:34.480 | positive or negative responses to my request. They're like, eh, whatever. Oh yeah, Caitlin

00:55:39.200 | can't do this. Let's just ask Jesse. People aren't going to notice. I would also couple this with

00:55:47.760 | a serious new non-work interest. I start spending a lot of time on that.

00:55:53.040 | In the afternoon, kind of surreptitiously, let's reinvigorate your connection to life.

00:56:00.880 | You probably want to, if we're going to throw things out here, if you're too much on your phone

00:56:04.560 | right now, it's a great time for an information diet. It's a great time to do a digital minimalism

00:56:08.880 | style declutter, change your relationship to your tools. That's going to help you, I think,

00:56:13.280 | from a mental health perspective as well. When you are working, look for more adventurous places

00:56:19.120 | to do this. There's some articles I wrote on my newsletter and blog earlier in my Georgetown

00:56:24.240 | career where I spent more time on campus just before we had a bunch of kids at home and I was

00:56:29.280 | like, what else? Where else am I going to go? I would have these rotations of locations on campus

00:56:36.960 | that I'd move through during the day to do my work. Some outside, some inside, some libraries,

00:56:40.960 | some benches. One of them was a picnic table in the woods. I would rotate through these things

00:56:46.640 | to keep work interesting. I was kind of interested and motivated, not just be stuck in my office.

00:56:51.360 | So you're having like a, you know, careers have their equivalent of midlife crises, where

00:56:57.680 | you're past one phase, there's not a clear, exciting next phase, and your mind is like no

00:57:01.520 | moss. So that's what I'm going to say. Do less, end earlier, take longer, get some other

00:57:05.440 | interests you lean into, make the work you do do more exciting and adventurous. No one's going to

00:57:11.680 | notice. You might produce a little less, but just quality be good. It's not going to make a big

00:57:16.000 | impact on your career. And of course, read the book, Slow Productivity to get all of the details

00:57:23.120 | of this advice. You don't have to do that, but I do think you should slow down. All right. Let's

00:57:27.760 | get our theme music, Jesse. He just needs to listen to our theme music every 30 minutes.

00:57:40.160 | Just hard to be stressed. I really like the cover of the book. Yeah. Yeah. The more I look at it,

00:57:46.960 | it was definitely really, I pushed for this. Yeah. I mean, I pushed it. The normal thing you

00:57:54.720 | would do for a Cal Newport book before this would be, it'd be slow productivity and big text,

00:58:00.480 | and it would be single color background. Yeah. Like maybe one little bit of iconography.

00:58:07.280 | Yeah. Like a turtle filling out a to-do list. Just a turtle with glasses on,

00:58:15.440 | filling out a to-do list, like a sketch of that. It's kind of like on the nose. And I said, no,

00:58:22.800 | I was like, I want the cover to capture visually the emotional feeling of encountering slow

00:58:32.000 | productivity as an idea. So I was like, and we went through a lot of things on this and I kept

00:58:36.400 | insisting. And so this cover captures, like it's supposed to create a reaction. So if you're

00:58:42.320 | listing the cover, and you can find this at calnewport.com/slow, it's a path through the

00:58:46.880 | woods. And in the distance, there's a cliff with like a cabin up there and sort of mountains beyond

00:58:51.520 | it. You just imagine like walking through those woods, that cabin, nothing, there's no email in

00:58:56.240 | this world. You know, you're taking your time, but you're probably like writing something awesome in

00:59:00.320 | a field note notebook or something like that. It just captures that feeling of like slowing down,

00:59:05.680 | focusing on what matters, producing stuff that's really cool and giving you an encounter with

00:59:11.920 | productivity as a concept that has almost no overlap with what we think about the term now

00:59:17.760 | in modern knowledge work, which is like email and busyness and to-do list and optimization.

00:59:22.080 | So it's like, how can I give you a picture that makes you think about productivity,

00:59:25.840 | but it's a completely different way, like move your mindset completely different. So I don't

00:59:30.320 | know. We'll see if it works, but I felt good about it. So I'm glad it's working with you.

00:59:35.280 | - Yeah. Yeah. I've been looking at it. There we go. Do we have a call this week?

00:59:39.840 | - We do.

00:59:40.400 | - All right. Let's hear that.

00:59:41.360 | - Hello, Cal. Sean here from Balmy, Miami. I'm finding particular benefit in my nascent

00:59:48.640 | application of the idea notebooks that you have suggested. So far, this approach seems to be the

00:59:53.680 | right way for me to attain what is otherwise an excess of ideas without letting them creep into

00:59:58.560 | my workspaces. My question to you, how do you go through your idea notebooks once you've completed

01:00:03.680 | the notebook? Do you reread page by page? That takes a while. Do you schedule time for it or

01:00:09.120 | does it somehow conveniently happen to you when you have a spare moment? And what does that process

01:00:13.840 | look like? By the way, Moleskine should definitely make a branded Cal Newport idea notebook.

01:00:19.200 | Tropical regards and thank you.

01:00:20.960 | - All right. Well, I appreciate this question from Miami. Appreciate that as well. So we put

01:00:28.000 | this in the show because this is an evolution of my thinking. Now the idea notebook idea was,

01:00:33.360 | hey, have these different notebooks for different categories of ideas. So you have a place to put

01:00:39.920 | ideas that you don't know what to do with, but you don't want to have to just hold onto it entirely

01:00:45.200 | in your brain. I do a little of this still, but as I talked about in the deep dive earlier in the show,

01:00:50.080 | ideas that are connected at all to an existing project or potential project, I now keep in

01:00:56.320 | whatever tool I use to work on those types of projects, right? So an idea related to a particular

01:01:01.760 | article, I'll just put into the Scrivener document for that article. So much more of my ideas now

01:01:06.880 | are going into the particular tool I'll use to eventually work on it. However, there are still

01:01:14.960 | ideas I have about my life or my business that aren't tied yet to a specific project,

01:01:20.080 | like something I'm writing where I can put it. And there I still have idea notebooks. It's just now

01:01:25.520 | they're all within my remarkable. So if I had it with me, I'd see there's a bunch in there,

01:01:31.360 | but it was like working on ideas for the media business, like the podcast and like video. I have

01:01:37.680 | like a notebook to put ideas there. Parts of my life, I'll have a notebook specific for them. So

01:01:44.400 | I still have idea notebooks for what can't be captured in an existing work tool. So it's less

01:01:51.360 | than I had before. In terms of reviewing those, I review them when I need to. So if I'm thinking

01:01:57.680 | I want to figure out a plan, a new quarter is coming up. I want to figure out what's my plan

01:02:03.840 | for my media business. I'll go back and look at that notebook then. I have another notebook.

01:02:08.000 | Like let's say this is not one I have, but let's just say you're really interested in

01:02:11.600 | owning a cabin. Like this is an idea that's interesting to you. And you might have like

01:02:15.840 | a notebook you've built up for ideas about where that cabin could be or cabin living or what you

01:02:21.280 | would do there. And that might be a notebook you really don't look at. You're just putting stuff in

01:02:25.760 | there until like years later, some sort of opportunity comes up. Like, Hey, we could buy

01:02:30.960 | some land. Someone like a relative is selling. I think we can put a cabin there. Ooh, let me

01:02:35.040 | go look at that notebook now. So I put those two pieces of my answer together. One, if you have

01:02:42.640 | ideas or information relevant to specific work projects or processes where there's like an actual

01:02:47.840 | tool you will eventually use to act on that idea stored in that tool, everything else you can use

01:02:52.480 | idea notebooks for, you can use moleskins, you can use field notes. They're smaller. If you have

01:02:56.960 | a lot of them and less ideas, you can use a remarkable, if you want to do it digitally.

01:03:00.640 | And when it comes to reviewing them, review them when you need to review them. I know that

01:03:05.200 | sounds vague, but it will make sense. It will make sense once you get going.

01:03:08.720 | Notebooks are a hard business I've learned. - Well, because the planner.

01:03:14.240 | - Yeah, it's a hard business. I mean, it's just hard. Like it's, it's hard to make

01:03:18.000 | the details on making a notebooks are hard. Like what paper you use and, um, and it's low margin

01:03:25.200 | too, which is interesting. It's not a way to make a fortune. It's not a software company.

01:03:29.840 | No, it's not an app that a hundred million people can sign up for. Uh, yeah, no, there's no notebook

01:03:36.960 | billionaires. I don't think Charles Moleskin just sitting in a private jet, just bawling out

01:03:43.280 | somewhere. It's all his Moleskin money. Um, let's do a quick case study. So someone writes in to

01:03:51.200 | give a more detailed account about how they put some of the advice we talked about in the practice.

01:03:55.360 | This one's from Jose. Uh, this is a work-related case study. So it's about email in particular.

01:04:01.760 | Jose says last fall, I was in charge of setting up a quarterly project at work.

01:04:06.800 | It required many of our volunteers to input a lot of data and for me to collect and design it.

01:04:12.800 | At first I was acting on the hyperactive hive mind model and sending replies via WhatsApp,

01:04:17.120 | email, et cetera. Many people asked me tons of questions and I was going back and forth with

01:04:21.920 | them. After I realized that was happening, I drafted one super clear email with all of the

01:04:26.640 | information necessary and links to supporting documentation. And I didn't hear from anyone for

01:04:30.720 | a while. They just got their work done. Once they had clear guidelines and step-by-step of what they

01:04:35.440 | needed to do, we were into producing our second quarter content and people have already gotten

01:04:39.520 | used to what they need to do. So no more reminders. I love it, Jose. I call that process-centric

01:04:47.120 | emailing, uh, or in, or without email, I call that smart system design. You will default to just back

01:04:54.080 | and forth messaging. If there's not an alternative way that people can figure out what they need to

01:04:58.160 | do and how to do it. So create the alternative and it can be really easy. And that's why I liked

01:05:03.200 | Jose's example. It doesn't have to be, I coded from scratch, like a distributed system, uh,

01:05:11.440 | virtualized world in which we have AR based group visual collaboration. He just sent an email.

01:05:18.880 | It was like, look, guys, I thought about this. Here's what we have to do to get this content

01:05:23.280 | together. So let's just, I'm going to write through, here's how we do it. Um, here's the

01:05:27.360 | guidelines. Here's the information. Here's where you put it. This is the process. It's all right

01:05:32.000 | here. So we can all kind of go off like adults now, and we have what we need to get it done.

01:05:35.360 | It can be as easy as that. Sometimes just doing a process-centric email. Let me take five minutes

01:05:41.040 | to explain the process for how we're going to do this work. That five minutes can save five weeks

01:05:47.040 | of back and forth messaging. So great example, Jose taming the hyperactive hive mind with some

01:05:52.560 | common sense. All right. Well, I want to get soon to our final segment where I react to something

01:05:58.480 | cool I've seen in the online world, but first let's hear from some advertisers. I want to talk

01:06:05.120 | in particular about our friends at element spelled L M N T element is a zero sugar electrolyte drink

01:06:12.000 | mix born from the growing body of research, revealing that optimal health outcomes occur

01:06:16.880 | at sodium levels, two to three times government recommendations. Each stick pack delivers a

01:06:22.080 | meaningful dose of electrolytes free of sugar, artificial color, or other dodgy ingredients.

01:06:28.560 | Element is formulated for anyone on a mission to restore health through hydration and is perfectly

01:06:33.280 | suited for athletes, folks who are fasting or those following keto low-carb whole food or paleo

01:06:38.240 | diets. I had element the orange flavor, which I like right before I came to the studio today,

01:06:44.400 | I was teaching earlier, which means I'm expelling. You don't realize when you're talking,

01:06:50.400 | you actually get very dehydrated and I wanted to hydrate up. And I really element gets me that

01:06:56.400 | with no sugar. Also, I like to taste. I will. Sometimes this is not the official use of it.

01:07:03.120 | It was like later at night and I'm kind of bored, uh, you're bored in the sense of like,

01:07:08.720 | I'm just gonna start eating some junk. I'll sometimes put a little bit of element in the

01:07:12.080 | water and then it's like, taste it like, Oh, this is good. This is like, I'm drinking something

01:07:15.440 | interesting, you know, uh, but there's no sugar in it. So, so you don't mind it. So I'm a big

01:07:19.120 | element fan and a customer. So I learned about it through years ago. They were a sponsor. Now I buy

01:07:24.960 | it all the time. Uh, it's used by impressive group of people. It's the exclusive hydration

01:07:32.240 | partner to the team USA weightlifting team, many Olympic athletes, professional athletes in the

01:07:36.240 | NFL, NBA, and NHL use it as do Navy seal teams, FBI sniper teams, and Marines. Jesse, I like to

01:07:45.520 | think that when like Jocko Willink does an Ellen element commercial on his podcast, he's saying to

01:07:51.440 | his listeners, like element is used by an exclusive group of communities such as, and then it's all

01:07:56.560 | my world, Peter science professors, productivity scholars, people who think a lot about sustainable

01:08:04.240 | living turtles, making to do lists, turtles, wearing glasses, making to do lists. Maybe we

01:08:09.040 | would have sold a million copies of that book. Turtles wearing glass. We had a lot of merch.

01:08:13.840 | Great. I love on the nose stuff. Um, element also has a new hot version.

01:08:17.280 | They're chocolate medley features, chocolate mint, chocolate, chai, and chocolate raspberry

01:08:22.080 | designed to be enjoyed hot. So you work out like I do in the winter. I mean, I'm a big believer,

01:08:26.480 | Jesse, and I'm proud of this is you should work out year round and whatever the outdoor conditions

01:08:30.560 | are. So I just work out in my unconditioned garage. So when it's summertime, it's hot.

01:08:35.680 | And when it's winter time, the, it's the big, it's so cold and you build up heat when you work out.

01:08:40.960 | Yeah. I'll put on lifting gloves because the metal of the dumbbells are so cold, it hurts your hands.

01:08:46.160 | Sometimes it's so cold that just the fingertips sticking out of the end of the lifting gloves,

01:08:50.320 | they're freezing, you know, but I like it. Like it, it's a way to connect yourself

01:08:55.200 | to what's going on outside. What I'm trying to say here, Jesse is I'm as manly and cool

01:08:59.360 | as the NFL NBA, NHL and Navy seal sniper teams. I'm trying, I'm trying to be as cool. Um, anyways,

01:09:07.040 | elements, great. It's the right thing to do. Don't do sports drinks, do element.

01:09:11.440 | The good news is members of our community can receive a free element sample pack with any order.

01:09:16.720 | You just have to go make your purchase through our custom URL, drink element.com/deep.

01:09:24.000 | That's drink element, L N N T.com/deep. Keep in mind, they have no questions asked to refund.

01:09:29.280 | So if you don't like it, they'll give you a full refund. Also want to talk about our friends at

01:09:34.880 | Grammarly. It'd be funny if Grammarly's a copy also said used by Navy seals, Marine sniper teams,

01:09:43.360 | and the U S Olympic weightlifting team. And they probably do. It's a cool product.

01:09:48.880 | Grammarly is actually one of the first sponsors that we had on this show. And for good reason,

01:09:52.720 | because writing is everything. How you communicate is how people perceive you.

01:09:58.480 | It's how clearly you're thinking your thinking is and how clearly people think of your thinking

01:10:03.440 | in knowledge work. In particular, you have to be a clear communicator.

01:10:06.800 | Grammarly helps you do that. It's like having a wisened editor looking over your shoulder

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01:10:22.000 | They have any number of different tools to help you do this, including even AI enhanced tools

01:10:27.760 | that harnesses the power of generative AI to help you brainstorm ideas. But they also have tools to

01:10:32.160 | help you change the tone. Hey, this is a informal. How do I make this more formal to give you

01:10:38.160 | suggestions about how to rewrite things, making sure that you have no mistakes in that grammar

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01:10:59.520 | Keep in mind, it works across 500,000 apps and websites. Any writing you're doing,

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01:11:10.240 | They'll give you personalized suggestions about what you might want to say or how you might want

01:11:15.120 | to say it better. It's very efficient to use. I can't say enough about it.

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01:11:26.160 | So make a bigger impact at work with Grammarly. Sign up and download for free at

01:11:29.760 | grammarly.com/podcast. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/podcast. Easier said, done.

01:11:39.360 | All right, let's do our final segment.

01:11:42.880 | Typically, what we do here is react to something that we have seen online. Today, I want to react

01:11:52.480 | to sort of a funny coincidence that many readers helpfully sent to me. This was the day I sent out

01:12:03.040 | an email to my newsletter, which if you're not signed up to, you should be, calnewport.com.

01:12:08.720 | Join 90,000 subscribers who get my wisdom delivered to their inbox every week.

01:12:13.600 | Anyways, I had an email sent out today. Ryan Holiday had an email sent out to his newsletter

01:12:19.600 | on the same day. A lot of people who subscribe to both of our newsletters, because we have

01:12:25.280 | a lot of readers in common, like to send me our two subject lines, one on top of each other.

01:12:31.120 | I'll load this on the screen now for those who are watching. This is a screenshot from someone's

01:12:37.760 | inbox. All right, so you see my email first says, "Subject line, Heschel on the joys of slowness."

01:12:46.960 | Then below it, you see the daily stoic subject line, "Try not to be so slow."

01:12:51.600 | So a lot of people had those come back to back. I will say, by the way, and I don't want to brag,

01:12:59.120 | Jesse, but at least for this particular user's email inbox, notice the priority tag

01:13:04.880 | is activated for my email, but not for Ryan's email. So I like this reader. I like this reader.

01:13:14.560 | All right, so that's funny, right? Because I'm saying the joys of slowness. It was a post about,

01:13:18.400 | I was actually drawing from A.J. Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel's book, The Sabbath from 1951,

01:13:23.680 | and these sort of interesting ideas about what it means to rest and its relationship to work.

01:13:28.240 | But it's a real slow productivity type idea. And then Ryan's email said, "Try not to be slow."

01:13:33.920 | So let's get into it. I'm going to load up the actual article itself so we can take a look.

01:13:40.160 | All right, here we go. So those who are watching, you'll see it on the screen. I have the actual

01:13:44.400 | email, Ryan's actual email here, "Try not to be slow." It turns out he's not saying

01:13:50.640 | slowing down your work is bad. All right, as we dive deeper, of course, it turns out we're talking

01:13:57.360 | about two separate things. Ryan's email is actually really interesting. He starts with stoicism

01:14:04.080 | talking about how Seneca watched Nero help to break down the Roman Empire with his erratic

01:14:14.080 | activities. And Seneca, for various reasons, just didn't really act on it or talk out about it,

01:14:21.520 | at least not until it was sort of too late. And then he connects that to the more recent book,

01:14:26.000 | Empire of Pain, the Patrick Raitt and Keefe book about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis.

01:14:30.960 | And he talks about the people involved with the production of these opioids,

01:14:36.400 | knowing something bad was happening, but being slow to act on it because, hey,

01:14:41.120 | they were making money and there was other benefits they didn't want to give up.

01:14:44.320 | So Ryan's saying, when it comes to issues of the conscience, don't be slow. When you realize

01:14:53.040 | something that is happening is contrary to your deep values, act. Speak up, act out.

01:14:59.440 | Even if it's inconvenient, you don't want to be slow to act. I agree with that. And it's an

01:15:05.280 | important reminder that slowness as a term is not a talisman. It's not magic. It's not everything

01:15:12.880 | should be slow. Slow is good. There's lots of things where you don't want to be slow.

01:15:15.520 | Driving on the interstate, you don't want to be too slow. That's going to be a problem.

01:15:20.960 | Reacting to a moral crisis, being slow there is going to be a problem.

01:15:25.760 | Being called slow from your teacher, that's probably a problem too, right? That means

01:15:31.360 | that's not good. You don't want to be the slow student. So we should be very specific then when

01:15:36.000 | we talk about slow. We use the term a lot, but we use it here to talk about something very specific,

01:15:40.880 | your pace of work, slowing down your pace of work. And here where we're using slow,

01:15:47.200 | we're not even, we're not even, what would you say, celebrating slowness so much as we are

01:15:54.320 | castigating the fastest that has become the new normal. When I say slow down, I really mean

01:16:01.040 | stopping unreasonably fast. What we call slow in my book, Slow Productivity, is what most people

01:16:07.520 | would call normal work until recently. So slowness here is a reaction to an unnatural fastness.

01:16:14.800 | It's a reaction to pointing out something that is not good, that is not sustainable.

01:16:20.400 | It's burning people out, exhausting them and rupturing their relationship with work.

01:16:23.920 | So we're using slowness in a very specific way, and that's important.

01:16:27.200 | We got to be careful about jargon, especially jargon, where the term has an immediate appeal.

01:16:33.200 | We have to go the layer deeper and ask, what specifically are we saying this word applies to

01:16:38.160 | and why? And do I believe it? Listen to my case for slow productivity before you sign on. Don't

01:16:44.560 | be quick to apply the term slow to other things just because you want to make merchandise with

01:16:49.600 | turtles on it, which I understand because it looks awesome. Looks awesome. But that's not

01:16:55.520 | an excuse to embrace slowness in all things. So actually, Ryan and I are on the same page here.

01:17:00.240 | Conscious, issues of the conscious, don't be slow. Your work, slow the hell down.

01:17:08.240 | So it really depends on the context. I'm actually, you know, Jesse, flying down there

01:17:12.320 | in a couple of weeks, hang out at Ryan's bookstore. We're going to podcast in person

01:17:16.960 | at his new studio he bought. So that's gonna be cool. So maybe we can get into that.

01:17:20.080 | That'd be cool.

01:17:20.720 | Yeah. So that should be, look out for that. I think that'll come out,

01:17:23.920 | I think near the book or something like that, but that's gonna be fun. I haven't seen the store yet.

01:17:27.040 | You have to buy some, you have to bring an extra bag to buy some books.

01:17:30.400 | I will have to, I will definitely have to buy a lot of books. Yeah. And as you know,

01:17:34.640 | Ryan is the one who tricked me into getting the Deep Work HQ because it was his pictures

01:17:40.080 | in March of 2020 of his bookstore. Then it was just an empty building, but his pictures of having

01:17:46.560 | a place to go during the early pandemic, I was like, we got to do the same. So I give him credit

01:17:51.600 | for, I keep giving him credit for the Deep Work HQ because I was so jealous and impressed that he had

01:17:55.920 | a place to go during those months where everything was closed, that it was a few months later where

01:18:01.440 | we signed a lease for this place. So I both tip my cap and shake my fist at you, Ryan, for now,

01:18:09.360 | that the HQ has been great. So it'll be good. I look forward to that. I'll let you know when

01:18:12.720 | I get down there. All right, Jesse, that's all the time we have. Remember questions,

01:18:16.720 | especially calls, the deep life.com/listen, the links are at the top, report a call,

01:18:20.880 | send a question. We want to hear from you. I'll be back next week with another episode.

01:18:26.880 | And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you liked today's discussion

01:18:31.840 | about taking smarter notes, I think you'll also like episode 271, which is about how to play the

01:18:38.720 | long game, not just of tackling the things that are urgent now, but setting yourself up for a

01:18:43.360 | cooler life, five, 10 years in the future. I think you'll like it. Check it out.

01:18:48.400 | So in today's deep dive, I want to talk about the long game, what you can do right now to avoid

01:18:56.880 | five or 10 years in the future, having regrets.

A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn & Get Ahead In Life | Cal Newport

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