Ep. 209: Reducing Your Email 10X | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, so I promised ITs to have it tune up for a new piece of advice

00:00:03.520 | that if you work in an organization with other people, I said would be one of the

00:00:07.440 | single most effective things you could do to reduce emails in your inbox. So here it is. I call it

00:00:14.240 | docket clearing meetings. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 209.

00:00:26.080 | I'm here at my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Before we get at all into today's episode,

00:00:34.400 | a quick bit of house cleaning. Jesse and I want to hear from you about what's working with this show,

00:00:43.280 | what's not, what you want to hear more of, what you want to hear less of. We're doing a version

00:00:49.120 | 2.0 we're planning for the podcast, just to tighten up what works and maybe batten down what's not. So

00:00:55.520 | with that in mind, we created a quick online survey. Just go to the description of this podcast

00:01:00.960 | episode. There's a link, you click on it, answer a few questions. If you get a chance, it would be

00:01:04.880 | very useful for us. It's a way to help influence the future of this show. So we're serious about

00:01:11.520 | improving. So go to the description, click on that survey link, answer a few questions, and you will

00:01:18.880 | have our great appreciation. I think Jesse, what I'm going to do is have two text boxes on there.

00:01:25.120 | One will be complaints about Jesse, and it'll be like this really big box or whatever. And then

00:01:31.200 | there'll be complaints about Cal, and it'll be a really small box. And then when you click on it,

00:01:34.800 | it'll be inactivated. Like it. Yeah, it'll just make me feel better. Sounds good. Forget the

00:01:38.560 | audience, forget the numbers. We know what this is all about, making Cal feel good. Speaking of good,

00:01:47.600 | we have a good episode. So what I'm doing here, Jesse, I'm theming both parts of the show today.

00:01:55.760 | So we have part one, part two, part one of the show, we're focusing on work, but in particular,

00:02:00.800 | we're going to focus on email. I have a collection of questions about email. So all in the same

00:02:06.880 | theme, I will end part one with a habit tune up where I will be presenting a brand new piece of

00:02:12.560 | advice. It's something I began working on a little while ago. I've been testing it out,

00:02:17.760 | bouncing it off people, but I've never publicly revealed it before. I would argue it is one of

00:02:22.080 | the single most effective things you could do to reduce the number of emails in your inbox.

00:02:28.880 | If you work in an organization with other people, one thing you could start doing tomorrow

00:02:34.240 | that will greatly reduce the number of emails. I'm looking forward to that.

00:02:38.560 | Then part two of the episode, we will get philosophical. I have a call on a collection

00:02:44.320 | of questions all about how do I live a more meaningful, deliberate, deep life? People

00:02:49.360 | who are struggling with the question of being adrift, being unfocused and looking to have

00:02:55.360 | a more steady and clear direction to what they're trying to do with their life. So upfront part one,

00:03:01.840 | pragmatic email ending with a brand new piece of advice I'm excited about part two.

00:03:07.040 | We get philosophical. Now, before we get into those two parts, though, I'd like to start

00:03:12.000 | the shows when possible, reacting to what's going on in the news. In particular, I have an article

00:03:19.840 | I want to talk about that we didn't really get around to talking on the last episode,

00:03:23.040 | but we should have because it's by me. So when I publish new things, especially new things in

00:03:28.800 | the New Yorker, I like to try to discuss them on the show in a little bit more depth, let you know

00:03:34.400 | what I'm thinking, maybe give you some more angles on it. So a couple of weeks ago, I published my

00:03:40.400 | latest for the New Yorker. It's titled Tick Tock and the Fall of the Social Media Giants. If you

00:03:45.280 | are watching this episode instead of just listening. So if you're at YouTube dot com slash

00:03:49.280 | Cal Newport Media, you'll see the article on your screen as well. Now, why I thought it was important

00:03:54.320 | to talk about this topic is not that I haven't talked about it before on the show, but because

00:03:58.000 | of the opposite of that, I've talked about this topic a lot on the show. That's kind of what makes

00:04:02.720 | this cool for us. This is one of the first instances, I would say, of an idea whose birth

00:04:09.520 | was this podcast. I began bouncing these ideas around here with you, my listeners, and it evolved

00:04:16.720 | into a more polished form, the New Yorker. So here we are. Deep Questions podcast impacting

00:04:22.160 | the world of news. So you've heard these ideas before, but they're a lot more polished now. So

00:04:28.000 | let's go through it quickly. So I begin the article quoting Blake Chanley, Tick Tock's president of

00:04:37.600 | Global Business Solutions, talking about competition from Facebook. This is where he said,

00:04:44.160 | look, we're not worried. Facebook is a social platform built on a social graph. Tick Tock is

00:04:48.960 | an entertainment platform. These are two different things. Zuckerberg needs to stay in his lane. We

00:04:53.680 | have our own lane. That name should sound familiar. Blake Chanley, I talked about him on the show,

00:04:57.840 | because I discovered this interview from one of you, my listeners, sent it to me at my interesting

00:05:03.200 | account, Newport.com email address. So then I went deeper into this. So here's the next point

00:05:10.400 | I want to make. So in the article, I make this point that Facebook is trying to shift to be more

00:05:19.280 | like Tick Tock. Instagram, owned by the same company, shifting to be more like Tick Tock.

00:05:26.160 | And the way they are doing this is by moving towards video, moving towards short video,

00:05:31.520 | but most importantly, as I'll soon elaborate, moving towards recommendations that have nothing

00:05:36.720 | to do with the social graph, moving towards feeds that are generated purely by algorithms,

00:05:43.280 | not by who you follow, not by people you know, sharing it. So here's the quote from the article.

00:05:50.160 | "This shift is not surprising given Tick Tock's phenomenal popularity, and it has been very

00:05:56.960 | successful, but it's also short-sighted." So the whole thesis of the article is the following.

00:06:04.800 | I say, "Platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon

00:06:11.760 | which they built their kingdoms." So this is the setup to this whole article. Tick Tock's

00:06:18.080 | really popular. Companies like, platforms like Facebook, I should say, are trying to be more

00:06:22.240 | Tick Tock-like to stave off the competition and try to have faster user growth. This could,

00:06:29.360 | however, doom them. All right, so let me elaborate this argument. What I'm getting at in this,

00:06:37.280 | the original take on this point is there's real advantages to having an online company

00:06:46.560 | like Facebook or Instagram, or as you'll see, Twitter, that relies on a social graph.

00:06:51.200 | And to be clear, by social graph, I mean all of these individual friend requests,

00:06:57.760 | all these individual follow clicks, this topology of connections that human users built up,

00:07:04.400 | click by click, decision by decision, over months and months and years and years of use,

00:07:09.120 | these really rich networks. These give a real advantage to the early mover platforms who have

00:07:15.280 | built them up. One is a network effect advantage. So I'm highlighting these here. So I mentioned,

00:07:20.880 | for example, once Facebook had 100 million followers, active users, I should say, which

00:07:26.880 | it got by 2006, it became hard for anyone else to compete on a model of the people you know are here,

00:07:33.120 | as you can see what the people you know are up to. Once you have 100 million users on one platform,

00:07:37.440 | how do you start from scratch and say, "Well, we only have 10,000, but we're growing."

00:07:41.440 | So that's a huge network effect advantage. There are also other advantages to these topologies.

00:07:46.880 | I talk a little bit in this article about the introduction of the retweet button to Twitter.

00:07:51.520 | I think people don't understand the degree to which the introduction of the retweet button

00:07:55.360 | not only made Twitter into a lasting company of cultural influence, but also

00:08:01.360 | really transformed social media. So here's what happened when they introduced the retweet button.

00:08:06.240 | The friction required to send a link or tweet to your entire follower base went down to almost

00:08:13.760 | nothing. Before we had the retweet button, people in Twitter would have to copy tweets and they

00:08:19.360 | would put RT. So you remember this, if you're old enough, you would put RT in caps colon,

00:08:26.240 | and then you would quote, just copy and paste quote to tweet that you're retweeting. And then

00:08:31.360 | you would put at the original person who retweeted it below it. That's a pain. Retweet button, you see

00:08:36.480 | something you like, click a button and it spreads. That reduction in friction made all of the

00:08:43.040 | difference. It unlocked what I call a fierce viral dynamic. So now a tweet that was catching the

00:08:49.840 | attention of the zeitgeist in the right way could spread through the power law topology

00:08:54.880 | of the Twitter social graph at frightening speed. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions

00:09:01.280 | of people could see something within an hour or two. And this all was based off these individual

00:09:07.200 | user decisions to retweet or not retweet. They see it from a few people, they retweet it.

00:09:11.120 | This turned out to have two hugely powerful effects. One, it attracted more interesting

00:09:16.320 | people to platforms like Twitter, because there's potential here. You had the potential

00:09:20.720 | of reaching millions of people if what you wrote caught on just right. So now more interesting

00:09:26.480 | people came to Twitter. That's another big network effect advantage. If all of the interesting people

00:09:32.240 | are on Twitter, when a competitor came along like Parler or Gab, they didn't do as well

00:09:37.200 | because there wasn't as many interesting people on there saying interesting things.

00:09:41.680 | Perhaps more important, these fierce viral dynamics also gave way to a frighteningly effective

00:09:49.520 | distributed curation mechanism. So what happened is all these individual decisions to tweet and

00:09:55.680 | retweet created this human powered curation algorithm that was really, really good at

00:10:03.280 | figuring out what's the most interesting, controversial, outrageous, funny, off the wall,

00:10:08.320 | but perfect meme, whatever it was. It did a really good job of selecting for these things

00:10:13.280 | and amplifying it so millions of people could see. So that was very effective. So suddenly,

00:10:18.480 | Twitter not only had interesting people on there, but it had this really good human powered

00:10:22.800 | curation, distributed curation algorithm that meant when you went on Twitter, you were going

00:10:26.320 | to see interesting things or funny things or outrageous things. And again, this is not

00:10:29.920 | sophisticated machine learning algorithms at play here. This is just the epiphenomenon of a lot of

00:10:36.240 | individuals clicking retweet or not. That's very powerful. So then as I get into it, Facebook

00:10:42.400 | noticed this retweet thing is working. So then by 2012, we get a share button added to the mobile

00:10:50.560 | app of Facebook. It's exactly retweet. They too wanted to take advantage of that distributed

00:10:55.840 | curation. All right, so here's my summary. Both Facebook and Twitter are built on the same general

00:11:00.960 | model of leveraging hard to replicate large social graphs to generate a never ending stream of

00:11:06.160 | engaging content, a strategy that proved to be robust in the face of new competition and incredibly

00:11:12.640 | lucrative. So it's the social graphs and those three advantages I just summarized,

00:11:18.160 | the people you know are on there, the interesting people are on there, and you have the distributed

00:11:21.680 | curation effect of the share and retweets. That made the small number of companies who got there

00:11:27.200 | first, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram, I took this out of the article, but I had a piece in there

00:11:33.360 | before about how Instagram basically, they were able to make a run at the castle that Facebook

00:11:39.280 | was building, because Facebook didn't understand image. And Instagram made it much easier to have

00:11:44.480 | these beautiful images, filtered, perfectly sized for iPhones. That was so powerful, that media that

00:11:50.560 | they were able to build a new audience from scratch before Facebook squashed that by buying them. So

00:11:54.640 | you have Facebook, you have Instagram, you have Twitter, these big social graphs, they can produce

00:11:59.280 | a nonstop stream of engaging content of a style that no one else can compete with. So if I want

00:12:05.840 | to go start my own social network tomorrow, to compete with those giants doing their same game,

00:12:12.800 | as many pretenders to the throne have encountered in the past five to 10 years, good luck. Because

00:12:19.680 | until I can get 100 million people, including a lot of people you know, and a lot of really

00:12:24.000 | interesting people with all these intricate friend and follower connections that allow

00:12:27.360 | retweets and shares to become a really effective distributed curation mechanism, until that's all

00:12:31.920 | there, this is useless. It's not that interesting. I'd rather just go on Twitter. I'd rather go on

00:12:37.280 | Facebook. I'd rather go on Instagram. So they had this, this readout, this digital readout that was

00:12:43.200 | almost impossible for anyone to raid. And so that's why these pseudo monopolies grew bigger.

00:12:50.240 | It's why their influence on our culture became stronger. It's why we began to get really worried

00:12:56.320 | starting around 2016, 2017, about just how much power these small number of companies had,

00:13:01.040 | because they were immune to competition. And in my opinion, were strangling the potential

00:13:07.440 | of the interactive web 2.0 by taking the democratic weirdness of the internet, the distributed

00:13:14.080 | homespun eccentricities of the internet and capturing it all into a small number of walled

00:13:19.920 | gardens. All right. Then you get TikTok. And TikTok is the, is the weird night that came out

00:13:29.440 | of the bog that suddenly threatening all the castles. It's the, I don't know Game of Thrones

00:13:34.800 | well, but the the woman with the dragons who comes out of nowhere and suddenly the Lannisters.

00:13:42.400 | Do I have that right? I don't know. I don't know Game of Thrones. I don't know, but there's,

00:13:47.360 | you know, there's these people in charge and then there's this, this woman who had dragons and kind

00:13:50.960 | of came out of nowhere and TikTok was TikTok is that. Okay. So why is this the second part of my

00:13:57.760 | article? So what I, the case I make is the effectiveness of the TikTok experience is found

00:14:02.960 | in what it doesn't require. So TikTok's brilliance is it's the same sort of user generated content

00:14:09.360 | distraction experience, but it does not leverage a social graph. And this was the point that Blake

00:14:13.920 | Shanley was making in that very important interview. It, TikTok does not care if people,

00:14:18.480 | you know, are on TikTok. TikTok does not care if famous people are on TikTok. TikTok does not care

00:14:24.160 | who you follow or what you can share. There are some social features in TikTok. No one uses them.

00:14:29.760 | It is purely algorithmic. It looks at the total pool of available videos. And by they, I mean,

00:14:36.400 | this brutally effective machine learning loop and says, what should I show you next? What should I

00:14:42.480 | show you next? And as far as I can tell, I really went deep into this. I tried to understand what

00:14:46.320 | was happening with this algorithm. It's all proprietary, but there is some hints. I think

00:14:50.000 | the best hints probably come from the wall street journal, which did a big study where they created

00:14:55.440 | hundreds. Well, I should speak the New York New York New Yorker fact checker corrected on the,

00:15:00.880 | on this more than a hundred fake accounts, which they, they tweaked very carefully and observed

00:15:07.680 | to try to understand how the recommendations were happening. And what, what seems to be happening

00:15:11.040 | with the, the TikTok algorithm is that it's, it's a, for you statistical optimizational people,

00:15:16.720 | it's essentially a stochastic multi-arm bandit reinforcement optimization, machine learning loop.

00:15:24.480 | So go look that up if you want to bore yourself. But what it does is it's showing you a lot of

00:15:28.160 | different things at first, somewhat randomly. And the main thing it looks at is how long did

00:15:33.440 | you watch the video before you swiped up to the next one? That is its best indication of the

00:15:38.560 | rewards you got from that video. It then uses statistically shows you statistically similar

00:15:44.480 | videos to that one. And again, it's trying to optimize, Hey, this one that's in the same

00:15:49.760 | universe, you watched even longer. So let's, let's focus in on this as a constellation of type of

00:15:54.320 | videos you like. That's basically it. Plus some careful tuning about novelty to make sure that,

00:15:59.680 | you know, you're, you're being exposed to different things. You have a chance for your interest to

00:16:03.360 | wander. It's not super complicated, but within as short as 40 minutes, this is what the wall street

00:16:08.400 | journey found. It took about 40 minutes until the experience was almost eerie. How well this machine

00:16:16.480 | learning loop had honed in on a small number of types of videos that really push your proverbial

00:16:21.760 | buttons. So it's not evil genius. You know, how from the movie 2001 is sitting in a hollowed out

00:16:30.080 | volcano somewhere where we're light years ahead. It's actually a pretty simple machine learning

00:16:34.480 | loop, but no social graph. Just, we need a bunch of videos. Anyone can create videos. It doesn't

00:16:39.920 | matter if they're famous. It doesn't matter if you know them just get enough people creating

00:16:43.600 | videos that our algorithm can go to work. And so tick-tock can make a move at Facebook and Twitter

00:16:50.000 | because their castle walls are built around their social graph. And everyone who was trying to

00:16:54.960 | attack their castle with a similar strategy, couldn't get over those walls. Tick-tock was

00:16:59.520 | the woman with the dragons and they flew over. They didn't use the social graph. Okay. So what's

00:17:06.080 | going to happen? Well, here's the key. I think the key thing going on in social media, digital news

00:17:12.560 | is that tick-tock success. These developments put traditional social media companies like Facebook

00:17:18.400 | in a perilous bind. They're losing users right now to tick-tock because tick-tock again is in

00:17:25.600 | the same cognitive space. As far as a user is concerned, user created content. I want distraction

00:17:30.960 | on my phone and they're doing a better job of it. So people are going over to tick-tock and what

00:17:34.640 | happened? Meta found that their new user growth slowed and they lost over $200 billion in

00:17:42.320 | market capitalization in a single day when they released that report. So this is public companies,

00:17:47.520 | there's huge investor pressure. We can't lose, we can't have our revenue go down. We can't lose this

00:17:53.680 | many users to tick-tock, which got to a billion users in just a couple of years. It's just really

00:17:57.600 | exploding. So they have to do something. So what are they doing? They're trying to be more like

00:18:02.160 | tick-tock, which may be in the short term makes sense. They're like, okay, if this is what people

00:18:06.080 | like, we need to do the same thing. But this is where I think they accidentally destabilized their

00:18:10.640 | entire foundation of all of their protection. So here's what I wrote. If companies like Facebook,

00:18:15.680 | so if they instead move away from their social graph foundations to concentrate on optimizing

00:18:21.200 | in the moment engagement, they'll enter a competitive landscape that pits them directly

00:18:26.320 | against the many other existing sources of mobile distraction, not just tick-tock, but also more

00:18:31.840 | bespoke and specialized social networks, streaming services, et cetera, et cetera.

00:18:36.560 | So as soon as you are offering entertainment that's not based on the social graph,

00:18:40.080 | you are competing with every other source of entertainment and distraction on the phone.

00:18:44.560 | I don't think that's a battle that Facebook or Instagram or Twitter can win long-term. Once they

00:18:50.560 | leave the protection of their social graph, they will be chipped away from by this other competition

00:18:55.520 | until eventually their role of dominance is going to wane. And that's my conclusion. This all points

00:19:04.240 | to a possible future in which social media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch

00:19:09.680 | of dominance. They'll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection

00:19:14.160 | of their social graphs, and in doing so, eventually succumb to the new competitive

00:19:17.680 | pressures this introduces. Now, last time I talked about this idea on this show,

00:19:23.840 | some of my listeners, some of you wrote back to me and said, "Oh, so you're saying like

00:19:28.960 | TikTok is better or like it's somehow we're in a better world if TikTok just dominates everything?

00:19:34.320 | Isn't that just as bad?" So here's the key nuance, which by the way, based on your feedback

00:19:39.520 | as listeners, I knew to really hit this point in my New Yorker piece. TikTok, of course,

00:19:46.160 | is subject to the same pressures. So in this future, it too will eventually fade. So no,

00:19:50.880 | I do not think TikTok is going to be some 20 year long cultural force. I don't think TikTok is going

00:19:54.800 | to be a four year from now be a cultural force. It's entirely shallow in the sense that it has no

00:20:00.400 | network effect foundation. It's just purified distraction. It's incredibly shallow foundation.

00:20:07.360 | The Zeitgeist can change on TikTok like that in a way that it couldn't on Facebook and it couldn't

00:20:12.000 | on Twitter because all your friends were already on Facebook and all the interesting people were

00:20:15.520 | on Twitter and all of these connections and those social graphs were there. And even if you soured

00:20:19.840 | on Facebook because you didn't like their role in the presidential election, or even if you soured

00:20:23.600 | on Twitter because you don't like Elon Musk, there really was no other game in town that could offer

00:20:27.600 | you that. TikTok has none of those advantages. It's just me look pretty screen, me like, me swipe.

00:20:36.000 | Other things can serve that purpose. So if the Zeitgeist changes against TikTok,

00:20:40.160 | it could just fall out of people's favor almost immediately. So no, I don't think TikTok is going

00:20:43.680 | to last as some replacement force of dominance. I think it's going to it's coming in hot.

00:20:49.200 | Twitter, maybe, but definitely Facebook, definitely Instagram chases it,

00:20:55.280 | destabilizes their competitive advantage, leads to their downfall. The only reason why I say maybe

00:21:00.800 | with Twitter is it has investor pressure. But as we saw with the Elon Musk bid, they're small enough

00:21:06.960 | they could be taken private. So if Musk had taken them private and you got rid of that investor

00:21:12.880 | pressure, he could have just said, and someone else could still do this. Let's just lean into

00:21:16.560 | what we do well. I don't care if we lose users in the short term. No one else can do what we do.

00:21:20.560 | At this distributed curation of interesting things said by interesting people. So let's

00:21:24.640 | just keep doing that. We're not going to disappear. Let's just fire a bunch of people,

00:21:28.320 | focus, become profitable. Maybe that's a way to stick around. Facebook, Instagram, way too big.

00:21:34.720 | When you're a $600 billion company, you can't go private. You can't let users fall. So I think

00:21:40.080 | they're, they're essentially doomed. So that's the future I see. And that's how I summarize this

00:21:44.000 | article. I think the social media giants, their dominance is going to wane. I think TikTok is

00:21:50.400 | going to come and go. Its main point will be it helped to stabilize those. And all of this could

00:21:55.200 | be good because it opens up the territory. You get rid of the warlords who were keeping everyone

00:22:00.560 | else down. It opens up the territory for more innovation, more interesting services, bespoke

00:22:04.480 | services, more fragmented services, more distributed or nonprofit services, crazy services that are

00:22:10.880 | homespun and eccentric. And only so many people use them, but they love them. There's more room

00:22:14.560 | for all of this. When you get rid of these giant a hundred billion dollar BMS that had these pseudo

00:22:20.080 | monopolies. And so that is the conclusion, how I conclude the article in the end, TikTok's biggest

00:22:25.200 | legacy might be less about its current moment of world conquering success, which will pass

00:22:30.960 | and more about how by forcing social media giants like Facebook to chase its model,

00:22:37.440 | it will end up liberating the social internet. So that is the polished form of my thoughts about

00:22:44.240 | TikTok and its impact on the internet. I think I've now talked about this enough so we can retire

00:22:50.480 | the topic for more, read the article at the New Yorker. You can just find my contributor page.

00:22:57.040 | You'll find it. It's called TikTok in the fall of the social media giants. If you don't subscribe

00:23:00.880 | to the New Yorker, well, you should, but if you don't, I also wrote about the article and added

00:23:06.800 | some extra points in my newsletter. So go to calnewport.com/blog. And you can see the article

00:23:12.080 | I wrote about this. And while there, you should sign up for that newsletter so you can get

00:23:15.280 | sent straight to your inbox, uh, this type of thinking. So there we go.

00:23:21.360 | Good summary.

00:23:24.320 | The, uh, podcast, man, podcast made without the podcast, this idea might not have existed. It was

00:23:29.200 | riffing on the news stuff that listeners sent me that I would not have seen. I would not have seen

00:23:35.200 | that article about Blake Chan, Lee and CNBC, et cetera. Uh, if a listener had sent it to us and

00:23:41.360 | then since it, so I wouldn't have seen it and then we were riffing on it, you and I on the show.

00:23:44.400 | And that sort of set the wheels in motion. So that's cool. Yeah. It's podcast. There was some

00:23:49.200 | vocabulary in there that I didn't even know. So I learned something for sure. Welcome to the New

00:23:54.320 | Yorker world. Yeah. You got out with the doors. You got to have a source handy, by the way,

00:24:01.200 | speaking of New Yorker and then we'll move on. But I read the, you told me about the article from

00:24:05.840 | last week, Ted Friends article about the door to door salesman. Oh yeah. I haven't finished that.

00:24:09.840 | Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Jesse told me, I always, if people, people ask me,

00:24:14.160 | how do I read, what's my New Yorker reading habits with the magazine? Um, because it's hard,

00:24:19.760 | it's long and it comes every week. So here it is. So here's my New Yorker reading habits. So you can,

00:24:23.920 | you can follow suit if you subscribe. So you get the daily email and that points out like what's

00:24:29.840 | going on, what was posted on the web that day. What's interesting. So I would say 50% of the

00:24:35.280 | daily emails will point out an article that I ended up reading on the web because they published

00:24:40.080 | like a new article every day on the web, uh, for the magazine. My rule is like, you always have to

00:24:44.720 | read one. And if there's sometimes we'll read more than one, but you always have to read one.

00:24:49.520 | And so that forces you, even if it's a day where the five articles, none of them are right in your

00:24:53.520 | sweet spot, you read about door to door salesman or something else. It's really interesting. And

00:24:56.880 | so that's my role. Read the daily email to see what catches your attention. That's where a lot

00:25:01.840 | of my stuff is featured. So definitely read that. And then you got to read one, one per week,

00:25:05.920 | at least I have a similar rule to look at the table of contents and then circle two. And then

00:25:12.080 | if there's two, I like, then I read them. And then it breaks the seal and then you end up reading

00:25:16.240 | more a lot of times, but like, you always have to read at least one. Oh, and then the third rule

00:25:20.720 | is you have to leave the magazine out kind of prominently in your house or apartment.

00:25:24.240 | And like, Oh, when people come over, Oh, sorry, let me just clean this up over here. I just was,

00:25:29.360 | you got to put it next to your copy of the Harper's in the Paris.

00:25:33.680 | You recycle them a lot quickly thereafter.

00:25:36.080 | Yeah. It was just when the pile grows, I suppose. All right. So anyways, as mentioned, two parts to

00:25:42.880 | the show, the follow part one, email part two, a bunch of questions about living the deep life.

00:25:48.400 | Before we get to that first part though, let me talk briefly about a brand new sponsor of this

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00:26:46.960 | Ferris' show among other shows. It's about doing evidence-based numbers driven altruism. That's

00:26:52.640 | the effective altruism movement. How do I make the most difference with what I have to give?

00:26:57.680 | He helped found this nonprofit 80,000 hours that helps people make the most out of their careers.

00:27:03.680 | I've known them for a long time. I've known the guys involved with this since they were just

00:27:07.840 | getting off the ground because obviously I wrote a book about career advice so good they can't

00:27:11.920 | ignore you. And so they borrowed, they liked those ideas and elaborated them into their own ideas.

00:27:16.480 | And I've known these guys and talked about them for a long time. I think it's so cool that it's a

00:27:19.520 | nonprofit that's just focused on evidence-based approaches to figuring out how to make the most

00:27:25.040 | of your career. If you like my style of advice, you're going to like what they offer over at

00:27:33.280 | 80,000 hours. So what can you do? What do they offer? Well, you can join the free newsletter.

00:27:38.080 | And if you do, they will send you an in-depth guide that helps you identify the problems that

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00:27:47.600 | get ideas, new ideas for high impact careers or directions that will help you tackle those issues.

00:27:53.360 | They have this really well-known job board that has over 800 plus and counting opportunities to

00:28:00.960 | work on problems or offer one-on-one advice to help you switch paths. The job board is great

00:28:04.720 | for people who want to make more out of their working life. Also check out their excellent

00:28:08.800 | 80,000 hours podcast, which has in-depth conversations with experts about how best to

00:28:14.880 | tackle pressing global problems. And the one I heard that I really liked was episode number 94

00:28:21.440 | with my friend Ezra Klein. That was a good episode. So you can sign up at 80,000 hours.org/deep.

00:28:34.240 | That's 8000 hours, H-O-U-R-S.org/deep. So check it out. I really encourage you to check out the

00:28:43.440 | site. I've known them forever. It's cool. And I really want to emphasize again, it's a nonprofit.

00:28:48.160 | Everything you provide is free, right? They're out there just trying to improve the world,

00:28:54.080 | help more and more people make a difference with their career. So that's 80,000 hours.org/deep,

00:28:59.280 | 80,000 hours.org/deep. I'll tell you something else. You're going to have a hard time changing

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00:30:01.680 | those of us who cannot have a live-in personal trainer. So if you're serious about getting fit,

00:30:08.800 | Adam is giving Deep Questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention

00:30:14.320 | this podcast when you join. So go to mybodytutor.com, mention Deep Questions when you join to

00:30:23.520 | get $50 off. You know what I heard Jesse, speaking of My Body Tutor. So I went to see Top Gun Maverick

00:30:35.600 | with Julie the other night. A lot of fun. Yeah, people liked it.

00:30:39.840 | Did you see it? No, but.

00:30:41.520 | You know the original though? Yeah.

00:30:42.880 | Yeah. Cause they have one of these beach,

00:30:45.040 | shirtless beach sports scenes. So in the original it was beach volleyball.

00:30:49.200 | Yeah.

00:30:50.000 | In which, and I really implore people just to ponder this, ponder this reality.

00:30:54.320 | The original movie, Tom Cruise, San Diego, hot sunny day, shirtless volleyball, wearing blue jeans.

00:31:02.480 | Wearing blue jeans. I mean, it's, it's the, the most random worst thing you could possibly wear

00:31:09.280 | to play beach volleyball in the sand on a sunny day.

00:31:12.720 | Well, it's cause he's on his motorcycle, right?

00:31:14.480 | Yeah. But.

00:31:15.360 | Yeah.

00:31:15.600 | Yeah. And then he goes to a date. Anyways, so they do a new scene in this one. Uh,

00:31:19.760 | is they're playing like football on the beach or whatever. One's shirtless and Tom Cruise looks.

00:31:24.080 | Crazily yoked for someone who was like 57 when he filmed it. Uh, but what I, I, I heard on a

00:31:30.320 | rewatchables episode about Top Gun Maverick is that the Tom Cruise, like a couple of weeks after

00:31:35.520 | they filmed that, it's like, I don't like the footage. We need to go back and refilm it.

00:31:39.680 | And it. Pissed off everybody on the crew because they had taper. They had built out these whole

00:31:45.120 | programs. So this is like a little peek behind the curtain, these whole fitness and eating

00:31:49.040 | programs to peak right at the film this, because you have to, the whole point of those scenes is

00:31:53.040 | to be like doing, pretending like you're not flexing, but you're flexing as hard as you can.

00:31:57.120 | And they had all like, let themselves go in two weeks is enough time. So they were all having to

00:32:00.800 | like desperately go back and try to like start cut weight and dehydrate themselves and get, you know,

00:32:05.120 | um, so anyways, I thought it was funny. That's a peak behind the curtain. So when you see the

00:32:08.560 | shirtless guys on whatever these movies, it's like, there's a lot of work that goes into that.

00:32:16.240 | So maybe they got their, my body tutor accounts going again. All right. Let's do some questions.

00:32:20.400 | Got a bunch of questions here in a row, go through quick, all in the same topic, email.

00:32:26.240 | Let's get our email going here. The first comes from Zach. Zach says, although my reliance

00:32:33.520 | on email is slowly dwindling, it is still rampant in my organization.

00:32:39.360 | So I remain reliant on it to a decent extent. How long do you give someone in 2022?

00:32:46.320 | To respond to a non-emergency email before you ping them again.

00:32:51.440 | All right, Zach, here's my tough love contrarian take on this question.

00:32:57.680 | If someone's not responding to your email, it's because you wrote a bad email.

00:33:04.480 | So I am less interested in etiquette for pinging people and more interested in getting you to a

00:33:11.840 | place where you don't have to ping people at all. Right. Why don't people respond to emails? It's

00:33:17.760 | typically because what you sent arrived in their inbox, like an ambiguous obligation grenade.

00:33:24.960 | They're just like, I don't know what to do with this thing. It's it, you threw it off the top

00:33:29.920 | of your mind. You're playing obligation, hot potato, where this was an open loop for you.

00:33:34.320 | And if you send it to someone else, it's off your mind, at least for now. And it's, Hey,

00:33:37.600 | what's your thoughts on the clients coming next week or something like just like weird and vague

00:33:41.760 | and ambiguous. And what you're really doing is just saying, tag, you're it. You have the hot

00:33:45.680 | potato. You have to keep track of this for now. I get a moment to a moment of relief when those

00:33:50.240 | obligation hand grenades arrived. Like, I don't even know exactly how to answer this. There's a

00:33:54.400 | piece to it that doesn't make sense to me. I don't want to do that work. I'm going to ignore it if I

00:33:59.760 | all at all can. And that's mainly why emails get ignored. They freeze people. So what you need to

00:34:06.400 | do, Zach is provide structure in your email about exactly what you need for them to answer. They

00:34:12.160 | need to see exactly what is required in them to respond. And if you can't pin that down, you're

00:34:18.560 | not ready to send them that email. You either need to get more clear, just thinking about it yourself.

00:34:24.320 | Okay. If I really think about this, there's three options here. These two options, I don't need your

00:34:29.280 | help. This option, I would need this piece of information from you. So I'm going to ask you

00:34:32.160 | for this. So either you have to think about this more yourself, or you need to talk to that person.

00:34:36.400 | Right. You need to real time. So be it on the phone or in their office or at the tail end of a

00:34:40.800 | zoom meeting, be like, look, I can't quite get my arms around this, but we got to figure out what

00:34:44.720 | to do about this client meeting. What's going on? What do you think? Like what? And just give

00:34:48.400 | a couple minutes. And in that quick back and forth, you can actually take this ambiguous thing

00:34:53.120 | and figure out a couple of concrete things that need to happen. So the emails, if an email leaves

00:34:58.800 | your inbox and arrives in someone else's, there has to be absolute clarity for that person about

00:35:04.560 | what you need from them. And they know what to do. You need this answer. You need this question.

00:35:08.560 | You need to decide between these three things. You need to send me this document. You need me

00:35:12.240 | to choose from this list of things, make that crystal clear, and they'll love to answer it.

00:35:16.400 | Say thoughts, question mark, and they're going to run away from that grenade so that the resulting

00:35:21.520 | productivity shrapnel doesn't shred their schedule. All right. Ricardo email question number two.

00:35:30.480 | Ricardo says, do you recommend having multiple email accounts for someone who works at different

00:35:39.200 | institutions, but does more or less the same work? Ricardo, the answer is yes.

00:35:44.400 | And the idea you need to really digest here is that the cost of context shifting

00:35:56.080 | far outweighs any of the advantages of having minor technologically enhanced efficiencies by,

00:36:03.440 | well, everything's in the same inbox. So I can just log in once and everything's there and I

00:36:07.040 | can type really fast. Technological efficiencies like saving keystrokes, saving clicking on things,

00:36:12.560 | saving having to log into places, like all those technological efficiencies, those are minor,

00:36:16.720 | minor advantages, and they are swamped by the advantage of not switching the cognitive context

00:36:23.120 | in which you're operating from one to another, one to another. So imagine you work for two

00:36:27.600 | organizations. And in scenario A, you have an email account for this organization, there's five

00:36:35.040 | messages in there, and you have a separate account. You have to log out and log into this other one

00:36:39.520 | for the other organization. You have five messages in there. So you log into the first one, you go

00:36:43.680 | through those messages, you log out, you load up the website, the Google workspace for the other

00:36:48.320 | one, you log into that one, you answer those five messages. That's scenario A. Scenario B is you

00:36:52.640 | have these all come into one inbox, you can see them all together. It's open, you don't have to

00:36:57.200 | log in, log out. Scenario A is significantly better. You will get those emails answered

00:37:02.640 | significantly faster and with much less cognitive friction. Why? Because when you're in the first

00:37:08.240 | institution's inbox, that's your cognitive context. You load up everything relevant to

00:37:12.160 | that institution. So now you can rock and roll as you move through those emails. Then you spend a

00:37:16.960 | minute to log into the other one. And you get into the cognitive context of that other institution,

00:37:20.880 | then you get a rock and roll and go faster. Switching back and forth between those two

00:37:24.720 | contexts in scenario B where they're all in the same inbox, that switching back and forth is going

00:37:28.480 | to slow you and slow you and slow you, increase the friction, increase your quality of thought,

00:37:34.240 | make the task more difficult. So yes, keep separate inboxes. I have

00:37:41.040 | four or five inboxes, I'm trying to think. I have a Georgetown address with its own inbox.

00:37:50.400 | I have a personal Gmail inbox address with its own inbox. I have the calnewpork.com addresses go into

00:38:01.920 | their own inbox of which there's a few. There's the interesting and there's author, there's a few.

00:38:07.360 | And then I have a New Yorker email address that goes into its own inbox. So I have four distinct

00:38:14.000 | inboxes, four distinct logins. And I wouldn't do it any other way. Multiple email addresses.

00:38:21.360 | All right, Chris, moving on. Chris asks, "Do you think there's a place for inbox zero

00:38:30.480 | in your productivity system? If yes, how do you manage to keep up with your inbox without spending

00:38:37.520 | hours on reading, classifying, answering mails, even if you only spend that time in specific time

00:38:43.040 | blocks?" So I think, Chris, yes. Inbox zero, by which I mean an inbox that on a regular basis

00:38:51.280 | goes down to having no messages in it. Yes, is a good goal. And two, this should not require

00:38:58.640 | hours of reading, classifying, and answering emails. Now, I don't mean to say it doesn't

00:39:04.320 | require that right now. I think for most people, the way they use their email, the way they use

00:39:08.320 | their inboxes to get it down to zero would require hours of them going through this. It would be a

00:39:12.960 | Herculean task. But if you update and improve your relationship with this tool, getting down to inbox

00:39:21.360 | zero becomes much more tractable. And it's what you want to do, because getting down to inbox zero

00:39:26.080 | means you have a pipeline of incoming and outcoming information that you're keeping up with.

00:39:31.040 | I mean, the only thing it means if your inbox is getting bigger and bigger is that the pipeline

00:39:34.800 | of stuff coming in, you can't keep up with it. You don't have other systems for it. And you have

00:39:39.120 | this default spillover. Let's just keep stuff in our inbox. So let me give you four things you can

00:39:44.240 | do, Chris, or things you can do to improve your relationship with inbox that with your inbox,

00:39:50.720 | that will make inbox zero much more tractable. All right, number one, don't use email for back

00:39:57.760 | and forth conversation. Don't I got to figure something out, we got to go back and forth about

00:40:02.880 | it. Don't do that with email. That generates a huge amount of email. It's a huge pain.

00:40:07.680 | Back and forth conversation should be synchronous. There's a lot of ways to do this. There's office

00:40:12.720 | hours, there's calls, they're tacking on conversations to the end of pre existing

00:40:16.160 | meetings, however you want to do it. If it requires back and forth, you should be talking

00:40:21.040 | to a person, two minutes can accomplish what 20 back and forth emails would otherwise be required

00:40:26.160 | to do. Number two, don't store information in your inbox. This is a child's way of doing

00:40:32.640 | knowledge work information management. You're a grown up, you need something more sophisticated.

00:40:37.520 | You have to have places where you store relevant information, you have to have places where you

00:40:41.440 | keep track of what you're working on, what you're waiting for, and what you know about it.

00:40:44.480 | I personally recommend something like a Trello board, one for each of your different professional

00:40:50.240 | roles, where you can keep track of what's in progress, what you know about it, what you're

00:40:55.840 | waiting to hear back on. So if in one of your roles as a professor, you are the head of the

00:41:02.400 | faculty advisory committee, I say this from experience, I'm about to take on that role as

00:41:07.760 | the head of the faculty advisory committee in September, have a board for that. If there's

00:41:12.560 | things you're waiting to hear back from, you're trying to talk to your committee members about

00:41:15.120 | when to meet, or you're waiting to hear someone is taking a stab at writing up the report that

00:41:20.320 | you're going to bring to the faculty meeting, you should have a column in your Trello board for that

00:41:23.760 | role that says waiting to hear back from, and that's where those are, not an email in your

00:41:28.080 | inbox that you hope you just see and say, oh yeah, that's right. I'm waiting for someone to respond

00:41:32.080 | to that email. Let's say you're working on something in one of your roles, have a projects

00:41:36.480 | column and there's a card for it on your Trello board, and you're attaching the relevant files

00:41:41.120 | to it, and right at the top of the card, you say capital letters, status, colon, quick update on

00:41:45.440 | that status. You look at the board for that role, you get the whole just stalled to what's going on

00:41:49.840 | in five minutes. None of this needs to be in your inbox. So again, keeping track of what's going on

00:41:56.480 | in your inbox is a child's way of managing information. Be an adult, be more sophisticated.

00:42:00.560 | Three, use process centric emails. Now I talked about this in a habit tune up. I think Jesse

00:42:10.000 | would have to go back to the archives, but I think in the last couple of months, I did a habit tune

00:42:16.720 | up on process centric emails. There's probably a YouTube video on that at youtube.com/calendarmedia.

00:42:22.720 | But here's the brief summary. When you send an email to someone to initiate something that needs

00:42:28.480 | to get done, this meeting has to get set up, this client visit needs to be arranged. First, figure

00:42:35.440 | out the entire process for how you're going to get to completion. I will put up some ideas by this

00:42:40.720 | date. You will look at those ideas and mark the ones that work best. I'll then send a complete

00:42:45.680 | list once you've marked that on Wednesday morning to the client, and then I'll update you on our

00:42:50.400 | staff meeting on Friday, what we're going to do. Come up with the process for how you're going to

00:42:54.160 | get from here to completion and explain that process in the very first email you send about

00:42:59.920 | that obligation. Significantly reduces the number of back and forth messages that follow because you

00:43:06.320 | have a clear process about what you guys are going to do. Number four, things that are informational

00:43:13.280 | newsletters, like my newsletter, calnewport.com, broadcast of deals, whatever it is that you get

00:43:21.920 | just informationally through your inbox where you never know which ones are going to be interesting,

00:43:26.000 | what won't. You might want to save things for a while to see if you want to read it.

00:43:29.360 | Have a separate account for that. And if it's too late to have a separate account, then set up a

00:43:34.480 | filter to a separate label or folder, and you can update what gets filtered and treat that differently.

00:43:39.840 | Oh, here's my informational account. Here's my informational label or folder. And that's different.

00:43:45.120 | That's outside of your inbox, your worldview, because there's no stress captured by those

00:43:49.280 | messages. None of them make any demands of you or your time. It's a digital library for you to

00:43:55.840 | browse at your leisure. So separate that from the rest of your inbox. Then you can inbox zero what

00:44:01.760 | remains. All right, Chris, so there you go. The backstory on inbox zero, I wrote about this,

00:44:08.720 | that term in a piece I wrote a few years ago for the New Yorker called the rise and fall of getting

00:44:14.400 | things done. Merlin Mann, the productivity guru Merlin Mann, it was his book contract to write

00:44:19.120 | a book titled Inbox Zero that essentially broke him and his interest in productivity.

00:44:24.720 | He struggled so philosophically about what's the point of getting super fiddly about processing

00:44:32.320 | emails in your inbox. It's actually what broke him. And he just couldn't write the book. He was

00:44:36.000 | on the contract, couldn't do it. And so it was like the Inbox Zero book was what broke. Inbox

00:44:41.280 | Zero broke Merlin Mann's productivity standing or interest in his interesting little tidbit from the

00:44:49.440 | history of productivity. All right, so I promised ITs to have it tune up for a new piece of advice

00:44:55.760 | that if you work in an organization with other people, I said would be one of the single most

00:45:00.240 | effective things you could do to reduce emails in your inbox. So here it is, I call it

00:45:08.160 | docket clearing meetings. This is a phrase I'm stealing shamelessly from the Judge John Hodgman

00:45:18.320 | podcast. They have the docket clearing episodes where they go through a bunch of cases.

00:45:22.560 | It's a judicial term where a judge has a bunch of cases on their docket that they want to get

00:45:28.320 | through real quick. Your team, whatever team you work with in your knowledge work office organization,

00:45:34.640 | consider once or twice a week having a regularly scheduled docket clearing meeting. Here is how

00:45:40.720 | this meeting works. At all times, there is a shared document accessible by everyone in your team.

00:45:47.360 | As tasks or questions come up that's relevant for the team, someone here needs to work on this,

00:45:53.840 | we need to look into updating the website, we have a client visit coming up, we need to

00:45:58.960 | start the process for getting our next quarterly reports running. Anything that comes up, here's

00:46:03.120 | a new obligation or question that someone or some subset of people on team have to work on,

00:46:09.040 | you put it on the shared doc. And when you get to the docket clearing meeting,

00:46:13.360 | you go through that shared doc all together. So you're all there in the same room or on the same

00:46:17.440 | Zoom conference if it's a distributed remote company, and you go through the things one by

00:46:22.000 | one. Okay, this thing here. Is this important? Okay, who's going to do it? What do we need?

00:46:27.440 | Could we just do it right now? Is it quick? Someone just do it. Oh, you're going to handle

00:46:30.400 | it. So what information do you need from who? Okay, and when are they going to get that to you?

00:46:33.840 | What form? Let me just let's write this down in the shared docs, we have a record of it. Great,

00:46:36.960 | next, next, next. And you go through each of these things and you resolve the questions assigned to

00:46:41.840 | work, do the small things right away. And people come out of the docket clearing meeting, you've

00:46:47.120 | cleared a lot of this work off your team's plate and the stuff that remains has been clarified.

00:46:50.720 | That discussion, couple minutes of discussion that each task gets, gets rid of the need to

00:46:57.760 | have all these ambiguous back and forth emails, you're playing obligation hot potato for a while

00:47:01.840 | until it gets urgent, you're not quite sure what's going to happen. It allows you to just

00:47:05.440 | execute the work. If you have a docket clearing meeting for 30 minutes twice a week,

00:47:10.880 | small footprint, 30 minutes twice a week, same time your whole team,

00:47:15.440 | you will reduce the number of emails each team member receives in their inbox by a factor of

00:47:22.400 | three or four. And not only will you reduce the number of emails by a big factor, but the

00:47:27.600 | type of email you're taking out of their inbox by having these meetings are the type that are

00:47:31.280 | the worst. The ambiguous back and forth the conversations, the like, can you deal with this,

00:47:36.960 | you don't even know what that means the stuff that really gives you the indigestion,

00:47:40.400 | the stuff that causes the anxiety. So it is an incredibly effective tool. If you work in

00:47:45.920 | any sort of team, you should have docket clearing meetings. So there is my new piece of advice.

00:47:53.680 | I like it.

00:47:54.480 | That's actually in a slow productivity, you know, I'm working on the book.

00:47:57.120 | And so I have these principles. And then the principles underneath the principles are

00:48:04.240 | propositions, which are kind of where we get concrete, you know, like, do work on this work

00:48:08.720 | on that, we give some more concrete ideas. And so the propositions have, they come with some like

00:48:14.240 | actual pieces of advice. So some of the book is philosophical and manifesto style, some is idea

00:48:18.560 | writing, some is, let's get concrete. And that came out of me working on a proposition about

00:48:26.080 | containing the small things. So the footprint stays small in your work life. And that's, you

00:48:32.240 | know, I was just working out the the docket clearing meeting idea. It's the I presented

00:48:37.200 | in the book as the team counterpart to office hours for the individual. So, you know, as you

00:48:43.120 | know, I'm a huge believer of you should have office hours three times a week, everyone knows when they

00:48:47.280 | are almost anything smaller conversational or back and forth conversation requiring you to say,

00:48:51.920 | great, grab me at my office hours, grab me at my office hours, you're just defending people off,

00:48:56.160 | we have your shield of your office hours, you're just defending yourself as all these ambiguous

00:48:59.840 | obligation hand grenades come near you, is knock them all away and just make everyone come every

00:49:04.240 | day, there's 30 minutes, they can always come and find you. And that's a huge inbox saver.

00:49:08.960 | But team stuff requires its own type of strategy. So there we go. Docket clearing meetings.

00:49:14.320 | I've been thinking about slow bar activity a lot. Yeah, just done different things I work on,

00:49:19.680 | whether it's like work or even getting better at sports. I think about it all the time.

00:49:24.000 | I finished the chapter, well, the first draft of the chapter on doing fewer things,

00:49:29.200 | principle one. It was a beast. It was 25,000 words, I got it down to 18,000 words

00:49:34.080 | out of my hands. My editor has it took me a long time. So I was trying to figure out the voice.

00:49:39.280 | I think I found the voice for the book, but we'll knock on wood, we'll see.

00:49:42.240 | So I've started now, I'm working on a part one chapter. So part one is more like ideas. So part

00:49:49.600 | one chapter that's, I'm not going to give too many details because it might also be a New Yorker

00:49:53.360 | piece. So I like to keep that kind of secret. And I'm beginning the background research for the next

00:49:58.000 | principle, which is work at a natural pace. And, you know, this, this idea of constant,

00:50:05.520 | like you just work, you know, five days a week, eight hours straight, just again and again, and

00:50:10.240 | again, just going after getting after it, just intense. It's very unnatural. It doesn't really

00:50:16.400 | match the way that really interesting stuff is produced. I'm just getting the weeds there.

00:50:19.760 | And I won't give too many details yet, but, but yesterday I was spending a lot of time reading

00:50:24.240 | about the timelines of famous scientists from the early Renaissance period. And let's just say the

00:50:33.760 | pace at which they developed and published their ideas is anything but fast. Like a year will go by

00:50:41.040 | that's not working on it. And then like the summer they work on it and then they have to send a

00:50:45.440 | letter and it's 15, 57, 67. So it's going to take, you know, three months before they hear back.

00:50:51.120 | It's like a slower pace. They're very productive because they invented, you know, gravity.

00:50:59.200 | That's coming along. All right. Speaking of, I'm going to make this transition land.

00:51:06.960 | Got a lot of really good analogies today.

00:51:10.000 | Yeah. I'm trying to transition to sponsors.

00:51:12.080 | I'm still thinking about the dragon going over the wall.

00:51:14.240 | Yeah. Yeah. It'd be better if I knew the name of that character from game of Thrones.

00:51:18.960 | I wish I knew it too.

00:51:19.840 | It's not Cersei Lannister is the person in power, the wife of the Joffrey. They're the people in

00:51:27.920 | power, the queen of the dragons. I don't know. I don't know the show. The only thing I know about

00:51:32.720 | the show is someone sent me a clip, which I really enjoy. I guess there was an episode in the last

00:51:36.880 | season where it's this dragon woman and they're in a tavern and it's, I don't know, dwarves and

00:51:42.160 | swords and stuff. And someone left the Starbucks cup in there and it made it into the show.

00:51:46.160 | And it's, it's, it's fantastic. They're in this tavern and they're all in there and

00:51:50.000 | there's just a Starbucks cup sitting on the table. I appreciated that. All right. There's

00:51:55.600 | a transition. So speaking of Starbucks, Starbucks, which is a commercial company,

00:51:59.440 | I want to tell you about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. And that is our good

00:52:04.640 | friends at eight sleep. I've been thinking about eight sleep a lot recently because again,

00:52:10.080 | and this is a scientific measurement, the temperature outside here in DC today is

00:52:13.920 | 175 degrees Fahrenheit. I think I'm reading that correct.

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00:53:07.600 | which enables more accurate sleep and health tracking and double the amount of sensors

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00:53:19.360 | You gotta have a pod. So go to eight sleep.com/deep to start sleeping cool this summer and save $150

00:53:28.320 | on the pod. Eight sleep currently ships within USA, Canada and the UK, select countries in the

00:53:33.360 | EU and Australia. Also want to talk about our good friends at Blinkist. Blinkist has been sponsoring

00:53:42.000 | us so long, Jesse, that I feel like we should have a branded studio. It's Cal and Jesse coming to you

00:53:46.800 | from the Blinkist, what do you call it? Blinkist studio. Yeah. Blinkist big idea studio. And they're

00:53:52.880 | right up our alley. You know the drill. You've heard me talk about them. Blinkist is a subscription

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00:54:10.960 | what a book is about. What are the main ideas? Why do you want to do that? So that if there's a topic

00:54:17.520 | you care about, you can get a quick summary. If there's a topic you want to know more about,

00:54:21.120 | you can figure out which book to buy. I always blink a potential nonfiction book before I make

00:54:28.160 | the decision to buy it or not to figure out what's going on here. What are the main ideas? Have I

00:54:31.280 | heard this before? Does this sound original? Is this going to increase what I understand or not?

00:54:36.800 | Blinkist is essential for anyone who embraces the reading life. And I'm hoping most of the

00:54:42.640 | listeners of this show do. All right. So that's 5,000 titles, 27 categories, bestsellers, and

00:54:49.440 | more technical books. I was looking at the blink not long ago of blockchain revolution. Blockchain

00:54:58.880 | is a complicated technology. Is this book technical? Is it big ideas? Is it crypto bros or

00:55:04.560 | more computer science? How do you find out? Give me 15 minutes. I'll put the audio blink on. I'll

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00:55:34.560 | off and a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com/deep. All right. Part two of the show, we're gonna do

00:55:43.040 | some questions about living a deeper life. We haven't had a call yet. So we'll start.

00:55:50.880 | We'll start with a call. We'll kick things off with a call from Michael. All right, here we go.

00:55:56.400 | Hey, Cal and Jesse. First off, thanks for all that you guys do. Big fan of your work.

00:56:01.920 | I recently quit my job as a product manager in tech to find more meaning in my work and really

00:56:08.480 | just become self-employed. I have a few main areas that I want to grow in and would like to know how

00:56:14.720 | you suggest balancing efforts on a macro and micro scale. Just for context, the three areas are,

00:56:22.640 | first off, my main project is a website for runners, training plans and such. I have one business

00:56:27.840 | partner and we plan to launch it soon. I've been working on that for about a year. Secondly, I'm

00:56:33.360 | taking a course to build out a skill set as a UI designer. I want to do UI design for my own

00:56:38.960 | projects and perhaps freelance someday. And then thirdly, I just want to create more online

00:56:44.000 | blogging videos, using social to connect with others and really just make useful content around

00:56:50.800 | my interests. Speaking of my interests, I'm just a super curious person, have a lot of hobbies as it

00:56:56.400 | is. So guitar, action sports, music making, photo video, and all of these interests pull for my time

00:57:02.880 | and attention as well. I have tried to do day theming and use systematic time blocking really

00:57:09.920 | to attack all these different areas and interests, but it just felt too rigid and formulaic to me.

00:57:14.880 | So yeah, my key question is how do you suggest I focus on a macro and micro scale to have progress

00:57:22.000 | in these multiple areas, which all feel important to me? Thanks guys.

00:57:26.000 | Well, the issue is if you're trying to make progress on all of those things at the same time,

00:57:35.200 | you will make meaningful progress on almost none of them, right? And this is a principle

00:57:41.840 | that's on my mind because I write about this actually in the slow productivity book we were

00:57:45.680 | talking about before in my chapter on doing fewer things and not to give away too much, but I, but I

00:57:50.720 | have this, uh, I have a whole chapter section in that chapter about this, this reality that the,

00:57:58.960 | the function that mediates the relationship between effort and reward, we often incorrectly

00:58:08.000 | think about that as a, as a linear function, no matter what we spend our time on. So you sort of

00:58:13.120 | spend 10 hours working on things, you get 10 hours worth of reward, but that's not actually how it

00:58:18.320 | works. It, it, it tends to be more non-linear. So if you spend a lot of time on one thing,

00:58:23.680 | the reward you begin to get for that time takes off and gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.

00:58:29.440 | So you kind of have these moments, these discontinuities where the, the, the rewards

00:58:32.640 | you get after you've really focused on something for a while really jumps up that reward curve

00:58:36.880 | really jumps up. So the reality of this is it is not the same to take a set pool of hours

00:58:44.160 | and split it among multiple things, or put all that time on the one thing. You do not end up

00:58:49.280 | with the same reward in the end. If this function was simply linear, then spending one hour on 10

00:58:56.640 | separate projects would give you the same reward as 10 hours on one project. So you might as well

00:59:00.400 | do the 10 separate projects because it's interesting. It keeps your options open,

00:59:03.760 | et cetera. But if it's not linear, which is what I argue is true, then putting 10 hours on one

00:59:08.480 | project could give you a massive reward. We're putting one hour in each project might not get

00:59:12.640 | you much at all. All right. So that's kind of technical here, but it all leads to, I think the,

00:59:16.560 | the obvious conclusion, which is you need to do less. Now that's scary because you're thinking,

00:59:22.320 | well, these things are important to me. There's different aspects of my life. There's different

00:59:26.320 | options I want to pursue. I can't just stop everything. So I'm going to give you a two-step

00:59:30.240 | process here. One, I do think you need to simplify, especially in that world of hobbies, et cetera.

00:59:36.400 | Like this is what you're going for in your professional life. And maybe

00:59:40.320 | outside of your professional life, you cut this down to a two things, maybe three.

00:59:46.560 | Next, you want to have one point of major focus that is getting most of your time and everything

00:59:52.160 | else you want to baseline. Baseline means you have some sort of maintenance ritual or habit.

00:59:57.040 | So it's not forgotten, but it's not getting much of your time. And most of your time is on one

01:00:02.880 | thing. So like professionally, maybe most of that time is going into the new website, though I might

01:00:10.240 | recommend that sounds like this UX, you need a job, right? You quit your job. So like if UX is

01:00:14.880 | going to be your career, that might be the thing you're really putting your time into. And you're

01:00:17.760 | just baselining the website. Let's put that on hold for now or just make very small progress.

01:00:21.120 | I'm going all in on the UX design. Choose one thing I go all in on. You might, again, with your

01:00:24.960 | hobbies have something similar. You have a background fitness routines. You stay in shape

01:00:29.200 | for various action sports you're interested in, but you're not doing any training for those sports.

01:00:32.800 | And all of your hobby time is going into guitar. So like you baseline almost everything and a very

01:00:38.160 | small number of things you put time into, because again, you put enough time into something.

01:00:42.000 | That's when you get these discontinuity, these discontinuities, these big jumps in the rewards you

01:00:45.920 | get. And then once you focus on something for a while, and have had a big jump in reward,

01:00:50.160 | then you can turn your attention to something else and do something similar for the next six

01:00:54.160 | months, next year, the next two years, whatever it takes. So you have to you have to simplify.

01:00:58.000 | And then even once you simplify, only one or two things should be getting any sort of serious

01:01:02.000 | attention at a time, that in the end is going to unlock way more reward than trying to keep

01:01:07.360 | switching back and forth really quickly. So that's what I recommend. What I'm saying here is

01:01:12.480 | pretty similar to my deep life buckets, Keystone habit type advice, we'll get to that in a second

01:01:17.440 | that sort of more, I would say more philosophical thinking, which covers not just work, but your

01:01:23.040 | whole life, we'll get into that more in a future question. But it is similar. And that's on purpose,

01:01:27.120 | because I think this idea of baselining what's important, but putting huge energy into a small

01:01:31.520 | number of things at a time, that's the right formula. Alright, so speaking of which, this

01:01:36.080 | next question, we'll let us get into that. It comes from beyond hope. Beyond hope says,

01:01:42.400 | I'm in a situation right now where I have no responsibility. I'm living alone,

01:01:47.200 | not with my family. I have no obligations and a good job. Yet I find in myself no motivation

01:01:53.680 | to be productive. I know desperately I want to be productive. But in spite of knowing everything

01:02:00.240 | about it, I don't know how to get my life in order, stop procrastinating and begin living

01:02:04.080 | a deliberate life. Do you have any advice for a person who seems to be beyond hope?

01:02:08.160 | So for longtime listeners, I'm gonna be a broken record here. They know what I'm going to say.

01:02:13.920 | And as the philosophical elaboration of the advice I just gave to that caller,

01:02:18.320 | work the deep life buckets. The reason why you're probably stuck is that you are all over the place

01:02:26.960 | with your efforts to quote unquote, be more productive. I don't know what that means.

01:02:32.800 | And you're quote, to live a more deliberate life. I don't really know what that means. So you just,

01:02:36.080 | it sounds like you're trying things in the elaboration. You sent me to your question.

01:02:38.880 | You were talking about lots of in the weeds type of organizational habits,

01:02:43.120 | like time blocking and planning and all these types of things, how you keep track of your notes.

01:02:47.600 | So the good news is you have this core ambition that you want something more meaningful or deeper

01:02:53.600 | out of your life. The bad news is, is you don't know what to do with that ambition. So you try

01:02:57.120 | lots of things and they kind of fizzle and you feel like you're getting no traction. The deep

01:03:00.320 | life buckets will give you traction. So let's be brief because we talk about this a lot.

01:03:04.800 | You first identify the major areas of your life that are important to you. We call these the deep

01:03:09.600 | life buckets. This might be craft, like your work community, the people you care about,

01:03:14.960 | or the people you're trying to lead. Constitution, which is your health contemplation,

01:03:19.680 | which can cover both theology, ethics, philosophy, that role in your life, et cetera.

01:03:27.120 | Right. So you have these different areas. Great. So now we have a starting point to work from

01:03:30.400 | next. And I'm going to add an update here. So for people who know the bucket system,

01:03:34.960 | I'm adding a little bit of an update here. So breaking news next, have a crystal clear

01:03:39.840 | vision for each of these buckets for what you want that part of your life to be like.

01:03:44.000 | And this should not be entirely high level. It shouldn't just be I am a leader in my community,

01:03:50.320 | have some concrete markers of what it would mean to be successful with that vision.

01:03:56.800 | Right. So when I'm thinking about writing, it's really important to me that my writing is high

01:04:01.920 | impact and respected and really impacts the world. When I was going through this exercise

01:04:06.720 | recently, updating my thoughts about my buckets. Here's the concrete instantiation

01:04:12.320 | of achieving that goal. When I have a new book come out, you will find it in the on a table in

01:04:19.600 | most bookstores in the country. Right. That's a concrete instantiation of this, this bigger

01:04:25.200 | ambition of like you're known as a writer. You have an impact on the culture. People know you,

01:04:29.760 | they know your books, your books have cultural valence. How do you capture that in something

01:04:33.680 | concrete? Well, for me, it's, Hey, I want to be one of those authors. If they have a new book,

01:04:37.600 | come out like bookstores, like, of course, we're going to put this out. Everyone, we know Cal

01:04:40.960 | Newport. People know that author, his book sell well. So that's what I mean by having a crystal

01:04:45.040 | clear vision that has a concrete instantiation of, of this would be an example of something.

01:04:50.960 | If I had done this, I'm living out that vision. All right. Number two. Now we get back to familiar

01:04:55.840 | territory for long time listeners, keystone habit for each bucket. One thing you do on a daily

01:05:02.240 | basis, you track it. It's not trivial, but, but it is tractable just to help convince yourself

01:05:09.840 | that these buckets are important and you're willing to do work towards those buckets every day

01:05:12.720 | to give a rhythm of discipline in your life. That's the foundation. Again, if you try to do

01:05:17.680 | everything at once, nothing fits through the door. You're stuck. Let's start with just,

01:05:21.920 | we have one habit going for each of the buckets. Then you rotate bucket by bucket,

01:05:26.960 | dedicating four to eight weeks to each. And that's where you do the more serious work of how do I

01:05:31.840 | overhaul this part of my life? Really changed my routine and habits, my goals, make big moves,

01:05:37.040 | and just focus on just that you have the keystone habits as the backdrop for all your other buckets.

01:05:40.880 | But for the next two months, all I'm thinking about is constitution, my health, my fitness,

01:05:44.480 | how I eat, working with a trainer, I joined the gym. I let me give myself two months to really

01:05:49.760 | understand this thing. This part, this part of my life is important. What works, what doesn't,

01:05:53.360 | what I really want. Let me get new grooves, new habits, new routines. I don't drink in the week

01:05:57.120 | anymore. I give up junk food. It takes time and focus to finally get there. And only after that

01:06:01.760 | settled, you say, okay, let me take a breather. I'm going to spend two months thinking about

01:06:06.000 | overwork, overhauling my work life craft, right? So you give things time to give it a lot of focus.

01:06:11.440 | And when you're doing this for the first, at least two months per bucket is probably important

01:06:15.760 | going forward. Every couple of years, you probably want to go through this exercise again,

01:06:20.960 | as you get better at it, three, four weeks, you can probably tune up areas of your life. Hey,

01:06:25.040 | where am I lagging? Where could I improve? What's not working anymore? It gets a little bit quicker

01:06:29.040 | after you get more knowledge, more self-knowledge about these parts of your life. So work to bucket

01:06:35.440 | systems, identify the buckets, crystal clear visions with concrete instantiation, keystone

01:06:39.520 | habits, then rotate one by one, giving each bucket soul focus as you upgrade that part of your life

01:06:45.600 | beyond hope. That is a systematic way of building up to a deeper life. And it's better than just

01:06:50.000 | throwing a lot of energy at it. You're not beyond hope because you've already done the hardest and

01:06:54.320 | most important step, which is knowing you want more. The rest is just details. All right, let's

01:07:02.320 | do a one more question here. This one comes from Carl, uh, Karen, who says as an advocate of the

01:07:11.280 | deep life, I live the principles from deep work, digital minimalism, and a world without email.

01:07:17.760 | To me, this is about living a life, focusing deeply on the things that matter

01:07:22.560 | and doing so with intention. That said, we live in a world that's not conducive to the deep life.

01:07:31.040 | What would you say would have to happen at a systems level that changes the cultural norms

01:07:35.920 | of many individuals that steer them towards the deep life and away from the shallow,

01:07:40.720 | hyperactive hive mind? All right, well, Karen, I think your, your summary of the deep life is good,

01:07:47.280 | focusing deeply with intention on things that matter. I would add the corollary and not wasting

01:07:54.480 | time or energy on things that don't really matter. So it's the avoiding the distraction. In addition

01:07:59.200 | to really focusing on the things that matter. So how do we make culture wide changes there?

01:08:04.240 | I think it's a two part process. And I see myself as being involved in the first part,

01:08:11.280 | but I can't do the second part. So I think the first part is just clarity. I'm a big believer

01:08:16.960 | in the power of vocabulary, just having a way of actually describing what you don't like, what you

01:08:23.280 | do like, what you're, you're, what you're going after, what you're trying to avoid. Vocabulary

01:08:28.240 | makes a big difference. Just a simple term like deep work versus shallow work clarified for a lot

01:08:34.320 | of people, these otherwise ambiguous feelings of unease they had about their frenetic knowledge,

01:08:38.800 | work lifestyle, but they couldn't really put their finger on. I just feel like busy and I'm

01:08:41.760 | spinning my wheels and things aren't happening. And, and I don't know, am I just like,

01:08:45.040 | am I being exploited? Do I just not like work? Is it, is it my boss bad as capitalism bad?

01:08:50.240 | They couldn't really put their fingers on what this source of this unease was, but, but deep work,

01:08:54.400 | shallow work, the idea that the mind focusing on one thing at a time that matters is a very

01:08:58.480 | different activity than going back and forth between lots of things. That vocabulary provided

01:09:02.800 | a cognitive scaffolding that clarified a lot of what they're feeling. Digital minimalism, same

01:09:09.040 | thing to hyperactive hive mind, trying to capture what's going on with email and Slack. We know

01:09:12.960 | email is better than a memo. It's convenient, but why do I hate it? Hyperactive hive mind,

01:09:16.800 | we're trying to put a label on the issue. So that's a lot of what I do is trying to bring

01:09:20.720 | clarity to these issues at the intersection of technology, work, and culture, and how that all

01:09:25.680 | surrounds meaning. I like to add clarity. Here's what's going on. Here's the forces at play.

01:09:31.600 | Here's a term for what what's, what's pure that you might be seeking over here. Here's a term for

01:09:35.920 | what's giving us unease, clarify the issues, right? It's like heart attacks go up in the 20th

01:09:42.400 | century in the West. We don't know why or what that means or what causes us. We can't really

01:09:46.560 | do anything until science comes along and tries to tell us about arterial plaque. So same thing

01:09:50.720 | for these other types of issues. Step two, you then need influential people to actually go out

01:09:58.000 | there and personify the alternative. So once we understand the issues, what we don't like and what

01:10:01.840 | we want, you need people who then are using that clear vocabulary or public and people care and

01:10:07.040 | respect about demonstrating publicly. All right, I'm doing, I'm living in this different way.

01:10:13.680 | You have to actually see the change you want in the world. I'm not influential enough to make a

01:10:18.240 | huge difference that way, but if very influential people have these clear stands, here's why I don't

01:10:23.840 | use social media in this way. And I just use this tool and I don't like Tik Tok. And here's what,

01:10:27.760 | I am not on Twitter and I, you know, have a wood shop and I focus or whatever. The Nick Offerman's

01:10:34.160 | to Brene Brown's, the Anthony Bourdain's, the Elizabeth Gilbert's that are living different,

01:10:37.840 | deeper focused lives. You need the people out there showing the alternative. If we really crave

01:10:44.960 | it, we can understand what we crave. We can understand what we're getting away from. And we

01:10:48.320 | see people actually doing what we want. That's how you get wide scale change.

01:10:53.440 | So I'm just defining words and hoping that the type of people that can define culture

01:10:59.520 | pick up on those words and by doing so change a lot of minds.

01:11:06.640 | And that is what we have. So we did part one, email part two, the deep life,

01:11:11.520 | kept it clean, kept it simple. So remember we need your feedback. Go to the survey in the

01:11:19.840 | description of the show and whatever podcast player you use, go to that survey, give us your

01:11:24.560 | feedback about what you like and what you don't like. We're going to keep improving the show,

01:11:27.600 | make it more useful to you. And that's how we're going to do it is by getting your feedback.

01:11:33.520 | And with that, we'll wrap up this week's episode. We'll be back next week. I think I'm solo casting

01:11:38.000 | next week. Jesse is away. So be ready for that. If you like what you saw, you will like what you

01:11:43.520 | see. Go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia for videos of the full episodes and highlighted questions.

01:11:49.280 | You'll also like what you read. Sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com to get

01:11:53.040 | depth sent to your inbox weekly. Till next week, as always, stay deep.

Ep. 209: Reducing Your Email 10X | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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