Ep. 255: The Failure Of Cybernetic Productivity

00:00:00.000 | So that's the deep question I want to tackle today.

00:00:03.080 | Why doesn't cybernetic productivity work?

00:00:06.880 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions,

00:00:15.960 | the show about living and working deeply

00:00:18.280 | in a distracted world.

00:00:19.640 | All right, once again, I am joining the show

00:00:24.460 | from Deep Work HQ North up in Hanover, New Hampshire.

00:00:30.300 | My producer Jesse is joining us

00:00:32.100 | from the original Deep Work HQ in Tacoma Park.

00:00:37.100 | Jesse, hopefully Tacoma Park is doing okay

00:00:40.220 | without me around.

00:00:41.280 | I don't know if you see people wearing black armbands,

00:00:44.620 | mourners, mourners in the streets.

00:00:46.980 | - It's doing great, we're doing okay.

00:00:48.780 | - You're doing okay.

00:00:50.260 | Jesse went to the coffee shop,

00:00:52.180 | I will say frequent, earlier today,

00:00:55.140 | and I asked him, did they have to lay some people off?

00:00:58.140 | Because with me being gone for two weeks,

00:00:59.820 | that's roughly, and I'm just doing the math here,

00:01:02.620 | $700 worth of income that they're not getting per day.

00:01:05.980 | So, you know, it's a big deal when I'm not there,

00:01:07.980 | I drink a lot of coffee.

00:01:09.660 | So hopefully--

00:01:10.500 | - What's your coffee shop up there?

00:01:12.500 | - It's a Keurig machine in my kitchen.

00:01:15.020 | - That's all, really?

00:01:16.300 | - I do, there's a Keurig machine in my kitchen,

00:01:17.900 | I'm gonna make a lot of coffee.

00:01:19.780 | The other coffee, the actual coffee shop around here

00:01:22.780 | that I like is called the Dirt Cowboy,

00:01:25.640 | which was around when I was here going,

00:01:28.040 | to college at Dartmouth.

00:01:29.740 | I like flavored coffee,

00:01:31.960 | because I started drinking coffee in high school.

00:01:34.700 | It's a long story, but the short version of the story was,

00:01:37.020 | I was taking computer science courses at Princeton,

00:01:40.520 | during my senior year of high school,

00:01:41.660 | 'cause I ran out of courses to take at my high school,

00:01:43.660 | and they had an agreement with Princeton,

00:01:45.060 | and somehow that worked out,

00:01:45.900 | and I would stop on the way to Princeton

00:01:47.900 | and take these courses at the Tiger Mart,

00:01:50.740 | at the Exxon on Route 31, in Pittington, New Jersey,

00:01:54.180 | and I would get in a styrofoam cup,

00:01:55.860 | their most flavorful coffee,

00:01:57.700 | 'cause it was terrible coffee,

00:01:58.680 | and so I developed this habit of associated

00:02:01.880 | bad flavored coffee with thinking.

00:02:05.520 | When it was Dirt Cowboy here in Dartmouth,

00:02:07.780 | is the only place I've ever found

00:02:09.360 | that does fancy flavored coffee.

00:02:12.760 | They roast their own beans on site,

00:02:15.620 | they flavor their own beans.

00:02:17.420 | If you order a ridiculous flavor like chocolate mint,

00:02:21.080 | they will grind a fresh batch right there,

00:02:24.720 | and do a pour over for just that cup of coffee,

00:02:28.320 | and yet still has a crazy flavor.

00:02:30.080 | So it's the only place I know

00:02:31.280 | that has fancy flavored coffee, so that's great.

00:02:34.280 | But it's closed on Sunday and Mondays, which is crazy.

00:02:37.200 | So I've been drinking some carrot recently.

00:02:39.480 | That's the way.

00:02:42.200 | Otherwise, things are going well,

00:02:44.360 | and here's the good news,

00:02:45.360 | if my plans hold up as we suspect,

00:02:49.340 | I will be back briefly in the DC area.

00:02:51.380 | So next week's episode, Jesse,

00:02:53.640 | might have us both temporarily back

00:02:56.840 | in the original Deep Work HQ.

00:02:58.520 | So everyone can look forward to seeing that.

00:03:02.000 | - Sounds good.

00:03:02.840 | - One advantage of being up here,

00:03:05.980 | I have been getting a lot of reading done.

00:03:08.080 | It is conducive to reading up here.

00:03:10.200 | And I want to talk about a particular book,

00:03:13.040 | I'm gonna hold it up to the camera here,

00:03:14.440 | for those who are watching,

00:03:15.960 | I guess I should specify this is episode 255.

00:03:19.200 | So if you're watching at youtube.com/calnewportmedia,

00:03:23.600 | or on thedeeplife.com, look for episode 255.

00:03:26.760 | I've been making my way through this beast, Jesse,

00:03:28.640 | this is "Power and Progress" by Darren Acemoglu

00:03:33.640 | and Simon Johnson from MIT.

00:03:35.480 | It's one of these tech impact on economics and society,

00:03:39.840 | sort of pseudo academic book.

00:03:41.880 | I'm really enjoying it.

00:03:42.840 | I'm almost done, I'm really enjoying it.

00:03:44.940 | But there was one piece I came across this morning

00:03:47.720 | that I partially disagreed with,

00:03:50.500 | and I realized in understanding my disagreement,

00:03:53.840 | there's actually an interesting point to be made

00:03:56.480 | about the type of topics we talk about on the show.

00:03:58.640 | So I'm actually gonna read something here, Jesse.

00:04:00.240 | This comes from "Power and Progress."

00:04:04.600 | It's a chapter about artificial intelligence.

00:04:07.280 | And they're talking about,

00:04:09.240 | they're referencing this famous conference

00:04:11.640 | that happened at Dartmouth back in the 1950s,

00:04:13.920 | so where I am right now,

00:04:15.260 | which was a conference organized by Marvin Minsky

00:04:18.840 | where the term artificial intelligence was coined.

00:04:21.740 | All right, so in the section I'm about to read,

00:04:23.580 | they're referencing that conference.

00:04:25.540 | And here's what the authors say.

00:04:27.940 | Even before the Dartmouth conference,

00:04:29.740 | MIT polymath Norbert Wiener

00:04:32.620 | had articulated a different vision,

00:04:35.540 | one that positioned machines as complements to humans.

00:04:38.860 | Although Wiener did not use the term MU,

00:04:42.060 | which they used to mean machine usefulness,

00:04:44.220 | machine usefulness is inspired by his ideas.

00:04:48.260 | What we want from machines

00:04:49.220 | is not some amorphous notion of intelligence

00:04:51.300 | or high level capabilities,

00:04:53.360 | but they're used for human objectives.

00:04:55.180 | Focusing on MU rather than AI

00:04:57.180 | is more likely to get us there.

00:04:59.940 | So what they're referencing here,

00:05:02.940 | if you read this whole chapter,

00:05:04.140 | what they're referencing is a pushback

00:05:08.300 | on what they say is the dominant current model

00:05:11.060 | for thinking about artificial intelligence,

00:05:13.840 | which according to them,

00:05:15.120 | it's being seen as something to automate

00:05:19.500 | or replace flawed humans,

00:05:21.940 | that computers can be more perfect or logical than humans,

00:05:25.740 | and we can use computers to replace flawed humans,

00:05:29.380 | to automate human activity.

00:05:31.180 | And they go back and say,

00:05:32.060 | we have a different idea,

00:05:33.500 | which is instead of AI, MU, machine usefulness.

00:05:38.060 | We should use tools like artificial intelligence

00:05:40.020 | to make individuals more useful,

00:05:42.200 | to expand their capabilities.

00:05:43.280 | And the reason why they're referencing Norbert Wiener

00:05:45.620 | is that in the 1940s,

00:05:47.580 | he wrote this book on the term cybernetics,

00:05:50.140 | which was his term for a symbiosis

00:05:53.980 | between humans and machines.

00:05:55.420 | He had this argument that machines can help humans,

00:05:59.400 | but can't replace humans.

00:06:00.460 | What we should be thinking about as engineers

00:06:01.960 | is how to integrate humans and machines

00:06:05.500 | into a cybernetic relationship.

00:06:07.260 | I actually own a vintage copy of this book

00:06:09.960 | back at my house in Tacoma Park.

00:06:12.220 | Wiener was inspired a lot, if you read that book,

00:06:14.660 | at working in the war efforts for, among other things,

00:06:18.040 | anti-aircraft guns,

00:06:19.240 | where they were trying to build these systems

00:06:22.060 | where the human is aiming the anti-aircraft gun,

00:06:24.540 | and there's a feedback loop,

00:06:25.740 | where the anti-aircraft gun is giving feedback to the human

00:06:28.060 | to help them be more accurate as they aim it,

00:06:29.740 | to extend their capabilities to lead these planes

00:06:32.140 | or predict where they're going.

00:06:33.540 | And that symbiosis between the person

00:06:36.260 | and the anti-aircraft gun

00:06:37.420 | was an early example of cybernetics.

00:06:39.420 | And so these authors are saying, that's what we need.

00:06:42.580 | Not replacing people with technology,

00:06:46.360 | but using technology to extend their capabilities.

00:06:50.160 | Now, here's my critique.

00:06:52.840 | When it comes to the specific slice of the economy

00:06:57.760 | that we so often talk about on this show,

00:06:59.680 | which is knowledge work,

00:07:01.580 | a term I actually learned from Derek Thompson the other day

00:07:04.180 | was laptop workers.

00:07:05.700 | So people who you're on a computer screen

00:07:07.580 | and you're doing email and all sorts of back and forth.

00:07:10.660 | For knowledge workers, I would say,

00:07:12.980 | the fundamental thrust of these new technologies

00:07:15.460 | like artificial intelligence

00:07:16.620 | is exactly a cybernetic vision.

00:07:20.220 | I have been studying and thinking a lot

00:07:22.260 | about the intersection of artificial intelligence

00:07:24.440 | and work recently,

00:07:25.380 | 'cause I'm working on an article on this topic.

00:07:27.100 | And I can tell you most of the visions out there right now

00:07:29.980 | when it comes to these tools and knowledge work

00:07:33.800 | is not how do we replace these workers?

00:07:37.300 | It is instead, how do we give them new capabilities,

00:07:41.140 | simplify things, allow them to do things

00:07:43.760 | they weren't able to do before?

00:07:45.180 | So actually, that mentality is already out there,

00:07:49.060 | at least when it comes to knowledge work.

00:07:51.460 | And if we really look deeper,

00:07:52.660 | we say most of the discussion of productivity,

00:07:56.540 | so that the common public discussions of productivity

00:07:59.640 | as it relates to knowledge workers in particular

00:08:03.420 | has this cybernetic flavor to it.

00:08:06.420 | How do we use tools to speed up or simplify

00:08:09.700 | or expand what humans can do?

00:08:12.400 | So I'm gonna even introduce a term and say,

00:08:15.220 | let's call this cybernetic productivity.

00:08:18.420 | This is a huge topic of the last 20 years.

00:08:21.940 | This intersection of digital technology and productivity

00:08:25.460 | has led to this notion of cyber productivity,

00:08:27.960 | cybernetic productivity,

00:08:28.980 | which is all about how do we use tools

00:08:30.500 | to make certain tasks easier to extend

00:08:32.580 | or speed up the capabilities of human workers.

00:08:34.540 | And the thing that I was realizing

00:08:36.260 | as I was thinking about today

00:08:37.900 | is that cybernetic productivity

00:08:40.580 | has failed to live up to its promise.

00:08:43.040 | And I think if we understand

00:08:45.160 | why it has failed to live up to its promise,

00:08:47.360 | we're gonna learn something about

00:08:48.340 | how we might better organize work.

00:08:49.620 | So that's the deep question I wanna tackle today.

00:08:52.620 | Why doesn't cybernetic productivity work?

00:08:56.520 | All right, so to tackle this question,

00:08:59.480 | let's get some good definitions going here.

00:09:01.900 | What exactly is meant by cybernetic productivity?

00:09:05.260 | I would define it by four principles,

00:09:07.620 | three that have been around for the last 20 years

00:09:09.980 | and one that's become more popular in recent years.

00:09:12.960 | So the first principle of cybernetic productivity

00:09:15.180 | is that you should attempt to automate

00:09:16.900 | or speed up shallow tasks as much as possible.

00:09:21.240 | So anything that is overhead or logistical or administrative

00:09:25.540 | that you can make faster, make faster.

00:09:27.140 | If you can automate it all together,

00:09:28.940 | automate it all together.

00:09:30.420 | Have this software tool,

00:09:32.540 | be able to speak to that software tool

00:09:34.740 | so you can directly send your data from your browser

00:09:38.740 | over to your Excel spreadsheet

00:09:40.380 | without having to waste a bunch of clicks.

00:09:43.580 | If there is a more advanced command

00:09:46.180 | that can do a few steps for you,

00:09:47.660 | let's try to introduce that

00:09:48.980 | so that you don't have to keep doing

00:09:50.980 | multiple work on its own.

00:09:52.740 | If you can, for example,

00:09:55.220 | fill in while I'm writing in Gmail,

00:09:58.460 | guess what I'm trying to say,

00:10:00.500 | then I can just press tab

00:10:01.600 | and not have to write the whole thing, do that.

00:10:03.380 | So any place you can speed up or automate work

00:10:05.580 | that's not directly just thinking deeply

00:10:08.580 | or producing value,

00:10:09.780 | cybernetic productivity says you should.

00:10:11.780 | The second principle of cybernetic productivity

00:10:15.260 | is to try to keep needed information at your fingertip.

00:10:19.020 | So it's all about making it easy for you to organize

00:10:22.340 | and get access to the information you need.

00:10:26.300 | This particular paradigm of effectiveness

00:10:29.980 | sees humans in part as information processing machines.

00:10:33.500 | So it says, hey, the more we can have

00:10:35.780 | the right information there when you need it,

00:10:38.180 | the more effective knowledge workers are going to be.

00:10:43.020 | So certainly tools like Google, for example,

00:10:46.740 | live out this principle.

00:10:47.920 | I can search for a lot of different types of information.

00:10:51.020 | As why Gmail has sort of advanced search

00:10:53.440 | built right into its email.

00:10:54.660 | So you can go back and find information

00:10:56.300 | that you needed before.

00:10:57.860 | There's all other sorts of information

00:10:59.940 | and knowledge management tools

00:11:01.640 | that all implement this cybernetic productivity principle

00:11:05.180 | of let's make sure information is never too far,

00:11:08.500 | never too far from the person who needs it.

00:11:11.460 | We need to get away from this 1970s era style

00:11:14.100 | of knowledge work where you're walking down

00:11:16.460 | to the central library and you're building

00:11:18.340 | and making a request for information

00:11:19.980 | that comes back on clippings, you know, two hours later,

00:11:23.580 | information at your fingertips.

00:11:25.140 | All right, the third principle of cybernetic productivity

00:11:28.940 | is removing friction from communication.

00:11:32.000 | So again, this view of humans as individuals doing work

00:11:37.940 | is one that is inherently collaborative.

00:11:39.980 | And so cybernetic productivity says

00:11:41.340 | we need to make this communication easy.

00:11:44.700 | If we take friction out of the process,

00:11:46.820 | I can just reach you as quickly and easily as possible,

00:11:50.460 | a higher velocity of collaboration is then enabled.

00:11:54.460 | So this is why we were able to use digital tools

00:11:57.260 | to move past, for example, the slowness

00:11:59.940 | of inter-office memos or having to type a code

00:12:02.380 | into a telephone to see what voicemail messages we had.

00:12:06.260 | Now with email, we could just type in it,

00:12:07.900 | would immediately be sent to you.

00:12:09.900 | I would have a copy.

00:12:11.540 | I can attach files to it.

00:12:13.820 | Slack brought this to a new tempo of speed.

00:12:16.900 | Now we can just be going back and forth,

00:12:18.820 | not have to wait for messages themselves

00:12:20.420 | to arrive and be seen.

00:12:22.220 | And then we get things like the advent of smartphones

00:12:25.740 | and ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet.

00:12:27.700 | So now not only is it low friction to message you,

00:12:30.460 | I can do it anywhere.

00:12:31.820 | I don't even have to wait till I'm back at an office

00:12:34.600 | or at a phone to talk to you.

00:12:35.900 | So that's a key cybernetic productivity,

00:12:37.860 | get rid of that friction.

00:12:39.100 | Communication should be as easy as possible.

00:12:41.100 | This fourth newer principle I alluded to

00:12:43.680 | was to simplify the extraction

00:12:45.220 | of actionable wisdom from data.

00:12:47.180 | So that's another newish aspect of cybernetic productivity.

00:12:50.940 | It thinks the data, the information we need to do things

00:12:55.140 | is often hidden in data.

00:12:56.660 | So we need tools that can find trends.

00:12:59.320 | We need tools that can extract wisdom from data.

00:13:01.980 | So we also have that on our fingertips to act.

00:13:05.800 | All right, so that is the cybernetic productivity vision.

00:13:09.100 | It's one where the human is in the center of this network

00:13:12.500 | of all of this different information

00:13:14.220 | and communication and data.

00:13:15.860 | Meanwhile, all of the literal steps and actions

00:13:19.260 | needed to access this information, to find it,

00:13:21.840 | to analyze it is automated or sped up as much as possible.

00:13:25.300 | That is the cybernetic productivity vision.

00:13:28.340 | It has been dominant since I would say the early 2000s.

00:13:32.620 | And it also, in my opinion, has proven to be a failure.

00:13:36.480 | Cybernetic productivity does not make us

00:13:41.000 | feel more productive.

00:13:41.940 | Cybernetic productivity has not been moving the needle

00:13:45.260 | on actual measurable productivity metrics.

00:13:49.340 | We are not getting more important work done.

00:13:52.700 | And there's a key reason for this.

00:13:54.140 | It's what I call the infinite buffer effect.

00:13:57.120 | In many knowledge work jobs,

00:13:59.720 | the supply of work is essentially infinite.

00:14:04.220 | There's always more things you could be doing.

00:14:06.220 | And this is because there is a key implicit decision made

00:14:09.380 | in many knowledge work organizations,

00:14:11.860 | which is that potential tasks

00:14:13.500 | should be stored at individuals.

00:14:15.540 | You just push things towards people to hold on to

00:14:18.580 | until they're ready to work on it.

00:14:19.500 | So you have this buffer of work that's always growing.

00:14:22.020 | There's always more work in there than you can do.

00:14:24.920 | Having a infinite buffer connected

00:14:27.220 | to cybernetic productivity does not work

00:14:30.260 | because what cybernetic productivity does

00:14:32.060 | is it speeds up all the shallow, the visible shallow tasks,

00:14:35.620 | the overhead surrounding deeper work.

00:14:37.380 | It makes that go faster.

00:14:39.000 | That frees up time.

00:14:40.360 | New work comes in from the buffer to fill it.

00:14:42.840 | So the faster you're able to do this overhead

00:14:44.840 | surrounding your projects,

00:14:46.220 | the more projects are gonna just fall in from your buffer

00:14:48.780 | onto your plate at the same time.

00:14:51.740 | And that's because the deep efforts are less visible

00:14:53.740 | and those are more autonomous.

00:14:54.820 | So we don't imagine those of actually taking up

00:14:56.940 | or requiring time.

00:14:57.820 | The thing that's very visible

00:14:59.220 | is the actual interactive elements,

00:15:00.980 | the talking to people, the finding the data,

00:15:02.940 | the jumping onto the meeting.

00:15:04.140 | So as that gets faster,

00:15:05.700 | more work falls out of this buffer

00:15:07.500 | to fill in the voids this creates.

00:15:09.900 | And so we just actually end up more and more busy.

00:15:12.660 | And if we push this to an extreme,

00:15:14.160 | we get to a place where we're spending all of our time

00:15:16.520 | incredibly efficiently,

00:15:18.440 | jumping from project to project,

00:15:20.320 | barely hitting keystrokes.

00:15:21.760 | Google is finding this information

00:15:23.520 | or maybe if we're more advanced,

00:15:25.280 | chat GPT is grabbing the information for us.

00:15:27.440 | They were automatically sending it over

00:15:29.000 | between different types of tools.

00:15:31.400 | And this data automatically goes over there

00:15:33.200 | and it's the cloud and it syncs on my thing.

00:15:34.800 | We're moving faster and faster and faster

00:15:36.520 | and more and more work comes in to fill that void.

00:15:38.700 | And in the end, there's no time left to actually

00:15:41.160 | do the important stuff all this overhead's

00:15:42.860 | trying to support in the first place.

00:15:45.100 | And so we feel tired, we feel exhausted.

00:15:47.380 | The context switches are making us dumber

00:15:49.460 | and we're spending less time

00:15:50.820 | actually doing the underlying work that creates value,

00:15:54.700 | the actual work that is valued in the marketplace.

00:15:58.100 | I think a great example of this

00:15:59.140 | is to compare me to my grandfather.

00:16:00.980 | We were both professors.

00:16:01.980 | He was a notable professor.

00:16:04.180 | He did not own his first computer until after he retired.

00:16:07.460 | I helped him set it up.

00:16:09.480 | I remember that.

00:16:11.300 | So his overhead, the shallow work

00:16:15.540 | that Cybernetic Productivity deals with,

00:16:17.060 | he was incredibly slow with that

00:16:19.260 | as compared to someone like me

00:16:21.560 | working 30 years later than him.

00:16:23.780 | No computer, no email.

00:16:25.420 | He didn't even have a word processor.

00:16:26.780 | He would write his books and articles longhand

00:16:29.700 | on legal pads and then someone else,

00:16:31.340 | his secretary would take it and a typist would type it up

00:16:34.420 | and he would bring it back and he would mark it up.

00:16:36.980 | He would write letters by hand and memos.

00:16:39.340 | He'd make a lot of phone calls.

00:16:41.000 | All of this stuff was way slower

00:16:43.980 | than what we could do today.

00:16:45.820 | And yet he wrote something like 15 books.

00:16:48.560 | Endowed chair, eventually a provost of a university.

00:16:51.060 | He was an incredibly successful professor.

00:16:52.440 | We had the same job.

00:16:53.520 | He didn't have any of these high-speed

00:16:55.320 | Cybernetic Productivity tools

00:16:56.640 | and yet at the core things that matter,

00:16:58.520 | mentoring students, teaching and research,

00:17:00.040 | he did this at a much higher level

00:17:02.220 | than the average professor,

00:17:03.320 | at a much higher level than even I am able to do today

00:17:06.560 | because actually speeding up that overhead

00:17:09.280 | probably would have just brought more overhead into his life

00:17:11.540 | and as you bring more overhead into your life,

00:17:12.820 | you don't write books faster,

00:17:14.540 | you don't mentor your students better,

00:17:15.780 | you don't teach better.

00:17:17.820 | So this is where I think Cybernetic Productivity failed

00:17:20.000 | is this infinite buffer effect.

00:17:21.760 | You speed up the overhead of work,

00:17:23.160 | we just put more work on our plate,

00:17:24.480 | we put more work on our plate, everything gets worse.

00:17:27.440 | This is why I think it's a key explanation

00:17:30.760 | for some of the antipathy knowledge workers feel

00:17:34.160 | towards notions like productivity

00:17:36.480 | because when they hear that term,

00:17:38.680 | they think about Cybernetic Productivity

00:17:41.120 | and they associate this with exhaustion.

00:17:43.740 | All right, so now that we've named this a philosophy,

00:17:49.280 | we've seen why it's not working well,

00:17:51.880 | we can ask what we can do about it.

00:17:54.580 | What are some solutions to the shortcomings

00:17:56.960 | of Cybernetic Productivity?

00:17:57.920 | I have three quick ideas to mention.

00:18:00.520 | Number one would be managing workloads centrally.

00:18:04.340 | So Cybernetic Productivity failed

00:18:07.000 | because of the infinite buffer effect.

00:18:08.720 | The infinite buffer effect is created

00:18:10.160 | because individuals typically are in charge

00:18:13.800 | of managing the organization's work.

00:18:16.040 | Everything that exists that needs to be done

00:18:17.760 | is on somebody's plate, existing in a message

00:18:20.560 | in their inbox or a comment that was made after a meeting

00:18:23.440 | where someone said, "Hey, can you handle this?"

00:18:25.880 | If you wanna get rid of the infinite buffers,

00:18:27.680 | have an alternative system in which the potential work

00:18:31.200 | is not stored by individuals, but is stored centrally.

00:18:36.200 | And that the individuals only work

00:18:37.480 | on a small number of things at a time.

00:18:38.920 | And when they're done, they can then pull new work

00:18:40.940 | from this central system.

00:18:43.400 | Now, some people who have an optimization mindset say,

00:18:46.920 | well, what's the difference if it's on my plate

00:18:49.280 | or a central system, you work on what you work on,

00:18:51.840 | but it's not how things work.

00:18:53.080 | When you have five projects on your plate,

00:18:55.560 | you're gonna start working on them

00:18:56.580 | if you have the time to do it.

00:18:58.480 | If on the other hand, there's four projects

00:18:59.920 | in a central system that you'll go back to

00:19:01.680 | and get a new one when you're done,

00:19:02.680 | you're just gonna be stuck with the one.

00:19:04.160 | Cybernetic Productivity is actually quite useful

00:19:06.140 | if you're only working on a small number of things.

00:19:08.040 | If you have nothing else to fill the time,

00:19:10.040 | speeding up the shallow work and the overhead

00:19:12.240 | really does just give you more time to work

00:19:14.120 | on the main deep meat of the project.

00:19:16.540 | So actually having a small buffer works well

00:19:20.160 | if you have Cybernetic Productivity implemented.

00:19:23.440 | All these tools that we're investing in,

00:19:24.860 | all these tools that people talk about

00:19:26.480 | and talk endlessly about on YouTube,

00:19:27.720 | actually are pretty useful if your work buffer's not too big

00:19:31.880 | so manage it centrally.

00:19:33.320 | This is hard to do in big organizations.

00:19:35.080 | It requires a central reorg, but if you work for yourself,

00:19:37.500 | you can simulate this.

00:19:38.900 | Have a clear distinction.

00:19:40.740 | These are things I'm going to work on.

00:19:42.860 | I can store information about them.

00:19:44.620 | If I have ideas about them, I can update them in the system.

00:19:46.980 | If someone sends a message relevant to a pending project,

00:19:49.360 | I can put them on there, but there's a firewall

00:19:51.300 | between those and what I'm working on now.

00:19:53.460 | And the things I'm actually working on is limited.

00:19:56.520 | You can make that clear distinction

00:19:59.020 | and psychologically it's gonna make a difference

00:20:00.800 | 'cause it will get rid of the infinite buffer effect.

00:20:04.620 | All right, the second solution here,

00:20:07.200 | reintroduce some friction.

00:20:08.520 | Sometimes this is what you have to do

00:20:10.820 | if you can't get around the infinite buffers,

00:20:12.660 | is say, "Actually, I don't want all of this overhead

00:20:14.860 | "and shallow work to be faster.

00:20:16.520 | "I want it to be enough of a pain

00:20:19.240 | "that I'm not going to bring more projects

00:20:21.620 | "into my active purview because my mental association

00:20:24.780 | "about what they take up is gonna be differing.

00:20:28.300 | "Like, it's a pain to work on projects.

00:20:30.220 | "I can't move through things very quickly."

00:20:32.120 | This might mean, for example, I don't know,

00:20:34.000 | you can't email me.

00:20:35.260 | Here's my office hours, we have a weekly meeting.

00:20:40.440 | This is how we talk.

00:20:41.920 | You have to wait for that to talk to me.

00:20:43.720 | I'm a pain to work with.

00:20:45.360 | That slows down how many projects

00:20:47.280 | can be going on at the same time.

00:20:48.880 | Maybe you use on purpose old tools.

00:20:51.240 | You might not go back as far as my grandfather did it

00:20:53.840 | and write on yellow legal pads,

00:20:56.480 | but maybe you're not trying to get

00:20:57.760 | the very latest information organizational tools.

00:21:00.800 | You print things and put them in files and it takes time

00:21:03.680 | and you might have to spend the whole morning

00:21:05.120 | to significantly upgrade your research files.

00:21:08.040 | You can't just clip things with plugins

00:21:10.000 | that you browser extensions you click in Chrome

00:21:11.880 | that automatically put a copy over in Evernote

00:21:14.660 | and syncs it up with your Obsidian setup.

00:21:16.600 | Maybe you want it to be older and more creaky

00:21:20.200 | so that when you think about doing research for something,

00:21:22.360 | you're thinking about spending hours and hours

00:21:24.480 | or putting days aside to do it.

00:21:26.720 | This might seem like you're losing time,

00:21:28.080 | but that might stop you from starting another project.

00:21:30.320 | It might help keep you focused.

00:21:32.840 | So keep these types of things in mind.

00:21:35.360 | Don't necessarily make yourself faster.

00:21:36.920 | Being too fast might make you work on too much.

00:21:39.440 | And of course the final solution,

00:21:40.760 | which is the big solution we talk about a lot on this show

00:21:44.480 | is to stop caring so much about cybernetic productivity

00:21:49.480 | and spend more time caring about

00:21:52.220 | the type of attention citric productivity

00:21:55.080 | that we talk about here.

00:21:57.120 | So attention citric productivity,

00:21:59.700 | which we also call multi-scale productivity

00:22:02.940 | has nothing to do with how fast you execute things

00:22:06.560 | and everything to do with how you allocate

00:22:10.280 | your limited time and attention.

00:22:12.660 | There's different scales this can execute on.

00:22:15.680 | So in the short term attention citric productivity

00:22:18.080 | might mean you're being careful about

00:22:20.360 | how do I decide what to work on next?

00:22:22.500 | How do I set things up so once I choose to do something,

00:22:25.840 | I've made my environment such that I have a,

00:22:28.720 | made conditions well to actually accomplish it

00:22:31.040 | at a high level.

00:22:32.120 | I'm not distracted on the deep things.

00:22:33.960 | The shallow things are batched, et cetera.

00:22:36.560 | On the medium term attention citric productivity

00:22:40.560 | is about well how do you organize

00:22:41.720 | and control the things that are on your plate

00:22:43.120 | to make sure you're not forgetting about things,

00:22:44.960 | that it's simplified for you to make decisions

00:22:46.800 | about what should be worked on when.

00:22:48.980 | And at the long term attention citric productivity

00:22:51.000 | is about how do you decide what comes onto your plate

00:22:52.900 | in the first place.

00:22:53.920 | Here you might even change your job

00:22:55.760 | or how your organization runs.

00:22:57.080 | It makes major changes to make sure that

00:22:59.560 | what you're expected to do is reasonable.

00:23:02.700 | Attention citric productivity doesn't particularly

00:23:05.920 | care about speed.

00:23:06.800 | It's not against it.

00:23:08.640 | If you have particular tools that speed up certain things

00:23:11.360 | or eliminate certain annoying activities you don't like,

00:23:13.920 | great, but it sees that as a personal preference

00:23:18.920 | and not critical to actually producing important work

00:23:21.840 | in a sustainable way.

00:23:22.800 | Attention citric productivity says what really matters

00:23:24.760 | is how you figure out what to do with your time.

00:23:27.760 | What's a reasonable load,

00:23:29.360 | how to succeed with what you're doing,

00:23:30.560 | how to keep tabs on what you're doing,

00:23:32.640 | how to make smart decisions about what to work on when.

00:23:35.480 | This is typically what I think about

00:23:37.040 | when I think about productivity.

00:23:38.400 | And it's why there's often a gap between me

00:23:40.600 | and say YouTube productivity people

00:23:42.840 | who love cybernet productivity.

00:23:44.160 | It's why there's often a gap between me

00:23:46.580 | and the anti productivity crowd

00:23:49.040 | desperately trying to get you to subscribe

00:23:50.800 | to their sub stack while they're writing sub stack articles

00:23:53.800 | about why capitalism is bad

00:23:55.340 | and you shouldn't try to make money,

00:23:56.320 | but give me money because I need money

00:23:58.200 | to talk about why capitalism is bad

00:23:59.640 | because this crowd is thinking

00:24:00.680 | about cybernetic productivity.

00:24:03.000 | I'm thinking about attention centric productivity.

00:24:04.680 | So we get down to the bottom here,

00:24:07.200 | a core distinction between productivity

00:24:11.440 | based on using tools to speed us up

00:24:14.080 | and productivity based on using our own minds and intuition

00:24:18.720 | to be intentional about how we approach our work.

00:24:22.040 | This ladder is not as interesting or as sexy.

00:24:24.720 | AI is not gonna have a big impact here.

00:24:27.240 | There's no note taking software

00:24:28.560 | that's gonna have a big impact here.

00:24:30.200 | There's no particular app

00:24:31.440 | that's gonna have a big impact here.

00:24:33.560 | A lot of it's gonna be Google Docs and Trello

00:24:36.020 | and just careful reflection

00:24:38.120 | on the different elements of your jobs,

00:24:40.720 | but it tends to work a lot better.

00:24:41.940 | So anyways, this is just a riff.

00:24:44.060 | Jesse, I just was reading about Norbert Wiener

00:24:47.600 | and artificial intelligence.

00:24:49.100 | I just had this riff of like, wait a second,

00:24:51.300 | whatever they call it here, machine usefulness.

00:24:54.000 | That's all we do in knowledge work

00:24:55.320 | and it's still not working.

00:24:56.200 | It's because we don't know what's useful

00:24:57.880 | and speed itself is not useful.

00:25:00.600 | So there we go.

00:25:01.560 | Cybernetic productivity, I shrug my shoulders.

00:25:04.320 | I think there's better ways to organize

00:25:06.640 | what we need to get done.

00:25:07.880 | - That's good stuff.

00:25:10.200 | I never knew your grandfather wrote 15 books.

00:25:12.360 | - Well, it's something like that.

00:25:14.680 | I mean, I might be making up that particular number,

00:25:18.340 | but it's something like that.

00:25:19.180 | He was a very productive scholar.

00:25:20.200 | He wrote a lot of books,

00:25:21.040 | wrote a lot of articles, multiple doctorates,

00:25:24.160 | spent time with a lot of cool people.

00:25:26.360 | He spent, there's a biography of him,

00:25:28.520 | but he spent time,

00:25:29.440 | so I learned some of this more recently,

00:25:32.140 | but he spent time at Union Seminary

00:25:33.800 | and he would walk Central Park with Heschel.

00:25:36.520 | He spent a little bit of time out in Switzerland

00:25:38.880 | and got to know Carl Jung later in his life,

00:25:42.680 | was a big admirer of Niebuhr

00:25:47.040 | when he spent some time at Harvard.

00:25:49.320 | He spent a lot of time at a lot of universities,

00:25:52.200 | a lot of sabbaticals and off years.

00:25:54.240 | But I just remember that, notepads.

00:25:56.240 | He wrote everything on notepads and had a lot of books.

00:25:58.800 | He didn't really understand the internet.

00:25:59.760 | He had a lot of books,

00:26:01.220 | which is slower than being able to look something up.

00:26:04.560 | But I don't know that slow was bad.

00:26:06.480 | Slow was not bad.

00:26:07.520 | He produced a lot of things and was pretty successful.

00:26:11.000 | So anyways, what I've done is I've gathered

00:26:12.520 | a collection of questions to do next

00:26:13.920 | that all roughly sort of touch on cybernetic productivity

00:26:17.240 | or the alternatives to cybernetic productivity.

00:26:20.080 | And so I wanna get to those in a second,

00:26:21.560 | but before we do, I wanna talk about

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00:28:28.760 | I would have killed to have something like Shopify back then

00:28:30.840 | because you have a professional, fully featured storefront

00:28:34.120 | that looks great and works great,

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00:29:11.000 | I also wanna talk about our friends

00:29:14.720 | and longtime sponsor, Grammarly.

00:29:18.440 | So as you know, we've been talking about

00:29:20.540 | new artificial intelligence technologies on this show often

00:29:24.360 | as I've been reporting on this topic.

00:29:26.360 | And one of the points I've been making

00:29:28.360 | is I'm not very sympathetic to these arguments

00:29:31.840 | about new artificial intelligence technologies

00:29:34.080 | about to have these mammoth impacts.

00:29:37.640 | It's gonna be intelligent.

00:29:39.120 | It's gonna send the terminators after you.

00:29:40.920 | All jobs are about to disappear.

00:29:42.400 | I think the really interesting stories

00:29:43.920 | are about focused applications.

00:29:46.720 | Putting in particular generative AI technologies

00:29:50.600 | to use in very focused applications

00:29:52.920 | where they support something that a tool was already doing.

00:29:56.640 | Grammarly is a great example of this

00:29:58.840 | because of their new product Grammarly Go,

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00:30:42.320 | And it uses the power of generative AI

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00:30:50.720 | You can write something kind of boring

00:30:52.160 | and then say to Grammarly Go, make this more exciting.

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00:31:04.680 | and yet spend less time word smithing.

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00:31:10.960 | that you can start working with,

00:31:12.120 | such as, hey, compose me a paragraph

00:31:13.760 | about how TikTok works.

00:31:15.840 | Then you work on that and integrate into what you're doing,

00:31:17.680 | but it saved you there some steps.

00:31:21.280 | So anyways, I think Grammarly Go

00:31:22.640 | is a exciting new step forward for Grammarly.

00:31:26.520 | It applies generative AI in a nicely focused way

00:31:31.200 | to help solve a very specific problem

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00:31:34.060 | If you work in knowledge work in any way,

00:31:36.720 | clarity of communication is critical.

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00:31:51.760 | That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/go.

00:31:56.760 | All right, Jesse, speaking of go,

00:32:00.560 | let us go on to the next segment of the show

00:32:03.520 | and answer some questions.

00:32:04.720 | Who do we have first?

00:32:05.760 | - All right, first question's from Jeff from Toronto.

00:32:10.480 | Every interview I've ever been in

00:32:12.000 | has some question about time management or prioritization.

00:32:16.160 | What's the right way for me to ask about this

00:32:18.000 | when I'm trying to hire somebody?

00:32:19.720 | Should I ask the potential hire about their systems?

00:32:23.080 | - Well, Jeff, it's an interesting question.

00:32:24.960 | As someone who hasn't really done a lot of job interviews,

00:32:28.440 | at least not since I interviewed for Microsoft in college,

00:32:33.440 | that might've been the last job interview.

00:32:36.920 | Well, I guess I interviewed for it to be a professor.

00:32:38.760 | So that's like a job interview,

00:32:39.960 | but that's different because it takes all day

00:32:41.880 | and it's a stylized thing where you're giving talks

00:32:44.040 | and you have this CV.

00:32:45.440 | But the last sort of corporate job interview I ever did

00:32:48.380 | was Microsoft and Jesse,

00:32:50.360 | I don't know if I've told you this story,

00:32:51.440 | but the way they did it back then,

00:32:52.680 | this would have been 2004, was kind of brutal, right?

00:32:56.320 | So if you made it to the stage

00:32:57.960 | where they were gonna fly you out to Redmond

00:32:59.840 | to interview for this position,

00:33:02.080 | you started in a conference room

00:33:04.120 | with all of the other people they flew out,

00:33:06.680 | there'd be 10 people in the conference room.

00:33:08.800 | And you knew you were all interviewing

00:33:10.080 | for the same position.

00:33:11.240 | In this case, it was this project manager program

00:33:14.280 | that Steve Ballmer had created

00:33:15.480 | where they took computer scientists

00:33:16.600 | and they send you to business school

00:33:17.760 | and this was a competitive position.

00:33:19.600 | As the day goes on,

00:33:21.320 | you would interview with more and more people.

00:33:22.680 | And as the day goes on,

00:33:23.520 | they'd move you to more and more senior people.

00:33:25.360 | But here was the catch.

00:33:27.500 | They started sending people home as the day progressed.

00:33:32.160 | - Really?

00:33:33.000 | - Yeah, so as the day progressed,

00:33:34.320 | you would come back to the conference room,

00:33:35.800 | there'd be less people.

00:33:37.720 | And you'd get the lunch, there'd be less people.

00:33:39.780 | You'd get through the afternoon.

00:33:40.620 | So they were weeding people out, right?

00:33:41.880 | 'Cause they didn't wanna waste the time

00:33:43.020 | of the higher up people.

00:33:44.260 | Because they're engineers and they're being very optimal.

00:33:46.200 | And engineers don't always understand things,

00:33:48.200 | for example, like how the human emotions work.

00:33:50.920 | So in the engineer's mind, they were thinking,

00:33:53.280 | well, we don't want,

00:33:54.540 | when we get up to a senior vice president,

00:33:56.960 | we don't want them talking to people.

00:33:58.240 | So they started, so you come back.

00:33:59.760 | And I guess they were just telling people like,

00:34:02.600 | okay, you're done, you can go home.

00:34:04.160 | And so there was less and less of us until,

00:34:06.280 | and spoiler alert and not the humble brag,

00:34:08.820 | but I was the last one left and got the job offer.

00:34:11.200 | By the end of the day,

00:34:12.080 | it was like me and one other guy that were left.

00:34:15.120 | And then the final people we were interviewing with,

00:34:17.480 | the final guy, I don't know who it was,

00:34:19.000 | but I remember him talking about,

00:34:20.760 | oh, I was just over at Bill's house last night

00:34:22.920 | and we were blah, blah, blah.

00:34:24.040 | It was going on about how he was like close with Bill Gates.

00:34:26.360 | So this must have been someone who was really high up.

00:34:29.440 | Anyways, that was my experience

00:34:30.880 | with corporate job interviews.

00:34:31.880 | It was basically survivor.

00:34:34.900 | If you got rid of all the attractive people

00:34:37.340 | and replaced them with nerds,

00:34:39.880 | and then put them in a context

00:34:41.400 | where no one understood like basic human emotions.

00:34:44.040 | So it was like, that was it.

00:34:45.320 | It was like unattractive nerd survivor, basically.

00:34:48.240 | But I don't remember them talking about time management.

00:34:52.200 | So that's why I was interested in this question

00:34:54.160 | is Jeff is saying this is common now,

00:34:56.360 | which I kind of like.

00:34:58.000 | They'll ask you in a job interview about time management.

00:35:02.240 | So Jeff's asking,

00:35:04.000 | what should he ask his potential interviewees?

00:35:06.840 | I have some ideas, but let me just preface this

00:35:08.800 | with my core answer here is I don't care.

00:35:13.100 | Almost no one is good at this.

00:35:15.400 | And it's not too hard to create a culture

00:35:18.220 | or teach people how to have attention centric productivity.

00:35:23.220 | If people don't listen to my show,

00:35:24.800 | or I've read like two or three other similar books,

00:35:27.020 | they're gonna be terrible at this.

00:35:28.240 | And I don't think that should be disqualifying to hire them

00:35:30.300 | because you're never gonna find someone.

00:35:32.060 | Or if you do find someone,

00:35:33.160 | it's someone who spends too much time

00:35:34.240 | listening to productivity podcasts.

00:35:35.600 | You don't wanna hire them in the first place.

00:35:36.840 | So I definitely have a mindset of,

00:35:38.560 | it is your job as an employer to create a culture

00:35:41.840 | in which good time management.

00:35:44.560 | And by that, I really do mean this sort of multi-scale

00:35:46.840 | or attention centric productivity is taught.

00:35:49.120 | Here's how we do it here.

00:35:50.980 | We respect this is what we want you to do.

00:35:53.820 | Let me tell you about how I do it.

00:35:55.040 | So I think this is more easily taught than it is sought out.

00:35:59.120 | That being said, if I was gonna ask someone

00:36:01.480 | for a high level position, let's say,

00:36:02.800 | and I cared how much do they think

00:36:05.400 | about productivity and time management?

00:36:07.680 | I would probably get to the key question.

00:36:09.580 | On a typical day,

00:36:11.080 | how do you decide what to work on next?

00:36:13.040 | 'Cause that's really gonna sort of cut

00:36:15.560 | to the quick a little bit.

00:36:17.080 | If they don't think at all about organization

00:36:19.560 | or time management, then they'll say,

00:36:21.200 | well, they'll just think about,

00:36:22.760 | they'll give some answer about,

00:36:23.820 | I'll think about in the moment my priorities

00:36:25.560 | and try to choose something important.

00:36:27.280 | If they're a cybernetic productivity type geek,

00:36:31.000 | they'll go on and on about different tech systems,

00:36:32.780 | which is also a warning like, oh man,

00:36:35.040 | this guy is gonna be one of those guys

00:36:37.400 | who puts a complex little code words

00:36:40.740 | in their email subject line to try to simplify the time

00:36:43.800 | so you don't have to click on the email to read.

00:36:45.880 | Maybe they have these acronyms and brackets in there,

00:36:48.040 | you know, like, oh my God, it's gonna be annoying.

00:36:49.760 | So that's a warning sign too.

00:36:51.560 | But if they're actually a sort of a Cal Newport type,

00:36:54.280 | they might talk about, well, you know,

00:36:55.520 | here's how I decide how to spend my time.

00:36:57.160 | You know, I time block my day

00:36:58.600 | and the time block for my day is really,

00:37:01.120 | you know, when doing so, I keep tasks over here

00:37:03.560 | and I have a weekly plan

00:37:04.680 | and here's how I keep on track for the vision

00:37:06.680 | and how to make sure I have enough time.

00:37:08.800 | You'll hear about this sort of

00:37:09.960 | attention allocation type decisions.

00:37:12.400 | You'll hear them talking about,

00:37:13.520 | well, if I schedule a meeting,

00:37:14.880 | I make sure to schedule other time,

00:37:16.260 | the process, the meeting,

00:37:17.240 | I wanna give myself time to think.

00:37:18.900 | So if they're using the lingo of attention

00:37:20.920 | as a commodity to be deployed carefully

00:37:23.520 | and to be used with respect,

00:37:25.120 | if they have some awareness of human psychology

00:37:28.080 | and human neurology about how slow the mind is

00:37:31.040 | to shift context and how it burns out,

00:37:33.400 | that would be a really good sign.

00:37:35.440 | If you're really wanting to try to find that,

00:37:36.840 | you know, in someone,

00:37:38.240 | I guess you could ask them that

00:37:40.720 | or just make a veiled Cal Newport reference,

00:37:44.140 | like one of the geeky things we talk about.

00:37:45.680 | And if they know what that is,

00:37:47.880 | then they're good.

00:37:49.600 | Then they definitely know this stuff.

00:37:54.360 | I would say, Jesse,

00:37:55.200 | I'm trying to think what the code word would be.

00:37:57.320 | I think here's the question.

00:37:59.640 | Here's the question.

00:38:00.460 | You say, well, let me just one more question.

00:38:01.600 | Let me ask you before we complete this interview.

00:38:04.760 | Do you agree that "Name of the Wind"

00:38:07.760 | is Brandon Sanderson's best book?

00:38:09.440 | And if they say, yes, that is Sanderson's best book,

00:38:16.160 | then you know, they know us,

00:38:19.160 | and they've listened to us way too long,

00:38:20.640 | and they're on the ball.

00:38:22.760 | So that would be my suggestion.

00:38:24.360 | - That's so good.

00:38:27.000 | - All right, what do we got next?

00:38:28.480 | - All right, next question's from Marie from New York City.

00:38:33.560 | I work in leadership development

00:38:35.040 | for a large healthcare institution.

00:38:37.020 | I think your ideas on work processes

00:38:39.000 | are potentially game-changing

00:38:40.280 | for many of the leaders I work with,

00:38:41.800 | but I'm struggling with how to share it with them.

00:38:44.320 | - This is difficult.

00:38:48.720 | It is difficult.

00:38:49.600 | I have done some of these events before.

00:38:51.660 | I have worked with C-suite types.

00:38:54.720 | I've worked with boards of directors.

00:38:57.240 | I've worked with the executive cores

00:38:59.320 | of Fortune 50 companies.

00:39:02.440 | It's not always my favorite thing

00:39:03.680 | because the corporate world is complicated.

00:39:06.300 | It's more complicated than I understand,

00:39:10.160 | is often more complicated than my ideas fully appreciate

00:39:13.560 | because in addition to just producing work,

00:39:16.720 | there's all of these other constraints,

00:39:18.460 | these social and political constraints of, you know,

00:39:21.440 | this division traditionally has had this power,

00:39:24.400 | and they gave it up, and this executive VP,

00:39:26.080 | and it is a really complicated,

00:39:28.080 | it is a complicated world.

00:39:30.340 | But I will say what seems to help, Mary,

00:39:33.720 | more so than particular examples,

00:39:36.960 | more so than particular tactics,

00:39:39.100 | which might seem at first what you need.

00:39:41.760 | Can I be more specific?

00:39:42.720 | Can you give me more specifics?

00:39:44.200 | You don't really wanna be specific

00:39:45.700 | when talking with leaders

00:39:46.720 | because leaders will hear specifics.

00:39:48.800 | Oh, I used office hours plus shared documents

00:39:52.960 | plus whatever, docket clearing meetings.

00:39:56.080 | You give specifics, and what they hear is,

00:39:58.680 | where is there a problem with this?

00:40:00.160 | Where is there a potential danger with this?

00:40:01.940 | Where might this ruffle someone's feathers

00:40:03.680 | or get me in trouble?

00:40:04.520 | It is always easier not to do something new.

00:40:06.560 | Something new introduces the possibility of problems.

00:40:10.280 | So I always say with leaders, we're very aware,

00:40:14.320 | if I don't wanna do something

00:40:15.240 | that's gonna create new problems,

00:40:16.580 | you wanna get the core principles.

00:40:18.760 | And I think the core principles you wanna get to

00:40:20.560 | when you're talking to a leader

00:40:22.000 | is to push them away

00:40:23.120 | from a cybernetic definition of productivity,

00:40:25.640 | get them away from what IT system can we buy

00:40:28.900 | that's gonna generate more analytic insights from our data

00:40:32.000 | and ensure that we get data sharing

00:40:34.160 | at a higher velocity of information accessibility.

00:40:37.800 | Get them away from that.

00:40:39.820 | They love that world because there's vendors

00:40:41.840 | and you spend money and they have slick slideshows,

00:40:44.080 | you feel like you're doing something.

00:40:45.120 | You gotta say that doesn't really matter.

00:40:46.560 | Yeah, you can speed stuff up, have more information, great,

00:40:48.800 | but this is who cares.

00:40:50.700 | What matters is the brain.

00:40:52.040 | The human brain can only focus on one thing at a time

00:40:56.420 | and needs relatively long refactoring periods

00:40:59.200 | to switch from one target to another.

00:41:03.420 | This is what we should care about.

00:41:05.840 | We have a bunch of human brains,

00:41:07.000 | we wanna think about things and produce value,

00:41:08.880 | they need time to do it.

00:41:10.440 | They need the ability to do things one at a time.

00:41:14.240 | And once we realize that, I would say,

00:41:16.700 | we then realize that context shifts

00:41:21.240 | are like productivity poison.

00:41:23.040 | That's the thing we're trying to minimize.

00:41:25.520 | We don't need IT systems that makes the velocity

00:41:28.000 | of information transfer higher

00:41:30.220 | or the depth of analytical insights sharper.

00:41:32.960 | We need less context shifts.

00:41:34.320 | You want these leaders to be going through their day

00:41:38.320 | after talking to you mentally in their mind,

00:41:41.040 | keeping a counter of how many times

00:41:43.840 | they have to switch my attention to something else

00:41:45.520 | and back to something else.

00:41:46.600 | You want them to slowly become sort of disgusted

00:41:48.820 | with the reality that they discover.

00:41:50.240 | My God, every time I'm doing this, I can feel it now.

00:41:52.840 | I can almost feel the cerebral sludge that's building up

00:41:57.840 | as I keep switching back and forth.

00:42:00.200 | I can see my concentration fading,

00:42:03.480 | I can see my energy dissipating.

00:42:06.440 | And then they start to think,

00:42:07.440 | okay, so when we think about productivity,

00:42:10.040 | what we think about is minimizing doses of this poison.

00:42:14.440 | Even if this slows us down,

00:42:16.040 | even if it introduces friction,

00:42:17.620 | even if that executive VP over there

00:42:19.200 | that has bad blood with me is gonna get mad about it,

00:42:21.240 | even if it is a pain in the moment,

00:42:23.800 | now I realize this is what we have to do

00:42:25.760 | is stop the context shift.

00:42:26.820 | So we have to rethink everything.

00:42:28.320 | How do we allocate work?

00:42:29.400 | How do we talk about work?

00:42:31.320 | How do we collaborate?

00:42:32.280 | What are our processes for moving information around?

00:42:34.840 | We are ready to go through the pain

00:42:37.120 | of building an attention-centric productivity environment,

00:42:42.120 | a workplace that actually respects

00:42:44.200 | how the human brain functions.

00:42:46.540 | And then they can come up with the very specific things

00:42:48.560 | that make sense for their work, for their tools,

00:42:50.520 | for the people they work with.

00:42:51.520 | Then they can figure that out.

00:42:53.440 | So anyways, Murray,

00:42:54.280 | that's what I've increasingly come to realize.

00:42:56.840 | Forget examples and get the principles.

00:43:00.480 | Because if they're a leader at a big company

00:43:02.440 | or a large healthcare institution, they're smart.

00:43:04.980 | They're very smart.

00:43:06.320 | They notice the issues.

00:43:07.440 | They know what's not working.

00:43:08.880 | They can understand deep principles.

00:43:10.200 | They can generate tactics out of it.

00:43:11.600 | So anyways, I've been big about that recently.

00:43:13.600 | The weeds are too messy in corporate America.

00:43:16.220 | It's why I don't go around and try to consult for companies

00:43:19.240 | and say, "Let me help you rebuild

00:43:21.720 | "your communication protocols," or something like this.

00:43:25.120 | Because the weeds are so thick and bespoke,

00:43:27.160 | and every company has their own very specific issues.

00:43:29.960 | And it's very difficult for an outsider to move through.

00:43:33.000 | And an outsider can only do so much anyways.

00:43:35.340 | You need the people right there

00:43:36.480 | that are stuck in these weeds to recognize

00:43:38.000 | that a better plant needs to grow there.

00:43:39.560 | You need them to realize what the problem is.

00:43:41.720 | And then they can generate the solutions.

00:43:43.620 | They know more about their company than I do.

00:43:45.720 | They know more about their group

00:43:47.600 | than a leadership development executive does.

00:43:50.280 | So the best thing we can do is teach them what the issue is

00:43:52.840 | and then let them actually come up with problems.

00:43:56.100 | - That was a good analogy with the plant.

00:44:00.120 | - Plants and weeds, yeah.

00:44:02.340 | You know, I could do that, Jesse.

00:44:03.500 | I could be.

00:44:04.620 | This is my problem, is I'll write about

00:44:08.300 | all the stuff I write about since 2015, basically.

00:44:13.300 | Everything I write about it, in some ways,

00:44:16.220 | about technology intersecting

00:44:17.680 | with different parts of our life.

00:44:19.040 | So technology intersecting with work, of course,

00:44:21.040 | is a big thing.

00:44:21.880 | All this productivity talk is about work

00:44:23.920 | in an age of digital distraction

00:44:26.860 | and high velocity cybernetic productivity notions.

00:44:29.120 | It's all about technology intersecting work.

00:44:31.400 | Digital minimalism is about technology

00:44:33.100 | intersecting our personal lives.

00:44:35.140 | This is what I care about, right?

00:44:36.940 | But the issue is I'll deal with a particular topic

00:44:39.680 | and I'll think about it deeply and produce some big ideas.

00:44:41.780 | And then I move on.

00:44:42.680 | But the problem is the ideas are still out there.

00:44:44.400 | So, you know, Deep Work had a bunch of ideas

00:44:48.080 | that I thought were very important.

00:44:49.520 | But then I went on and wrote a bunch of other books.

00:44:52.700 | And yet there's a lot of people who say,

00:44:53.680 | well, can't you just come and help us do Deep Work?

00:44:56.860 | That's the issue.

00:44:57.700 | It's not my instinct of let me just stick with a topic

00:45:01.620 | and really keep pushing it and promoting it.

00:45:04.040 | I like the idea.

00:45:05.080 | I wanna understand.

00:45:06.340 | I get the pleasure out of understanding something new.

00:45:08.680 | And by the time people are catching on with something,

00:45:11.080 | a lot of times I've moved on to sort of the next topic

00:45:13.420 | I'm trying to understand.

00:45:14.260 | So this is why I don't travel the world,

00:45:17.340 | you know, running workshops.

00:45:19.800 | This is probably pretty lucrative actually,

00:45:21.140 | but running workshops about, you know,

00:45:23.720 | how to make your team deeper, building processes.

00:45:26.920 | I don't know, just actually,

00:45:27.760 | we could probably make a lot of money.

00:45:28.580 | Maybe you and I should just fly around the world

00:45:29.980 | and have people cancel their Slack accounts

00:45:33.160 | and do office hours, clear meetings.

00:45:35.720 | We could wear suits.

00:45:37.640 | - But then you wouldn't be able to read books in the woods

00:45:39.200 | like you're doing right now.

00:45:40.040 | So that wouldn't be as fun. - Yeah, that's the problem.

00:45:41.740 | Yeah, that's the problem.

00:45:42.580 | Yeah.

00:45:43.400 | Here's what we'll do like in Goodwill Hunting

00:45:46.680 | when Ben Affleck went to the meeting with the NSA

00:45:48.920 | instead of Matt Damon,

00:45:49.880 | I'm gonna send you and you're gonna give like

00:45:52.480 | very bombastic speeches on my behalf

00:45:56.900 | that like involve for whatever reason,

00:45:59.060 | like a lot of sort of onstage flexing and weightlifting.

00:46:02.560 | I don't know why, I just think this would be great.

00:46:04.740 | Just to mystify people,

00:46:07.220 | just to have you run out and be like,

00:46:10.220 | focus is like-- - The correct form

00:46:11.060 | to deadlift is this.

00:46:12.960 | - Exactly.

00:46:13.800 | Now I don't know why I would want you

00:46:14.800 | having doing deadlifts.

00:46:15.640 | I just have this vision of you in like gym pants

00:46:19.240 | and like a muscle shirt.

00:46:20.720 | Like, okay, deep work is like lifting heavy weights.

00:46:23.800 | Every rep.

00:46:25.520 | - I can't even lift that heavy weights.

00:46:27.080 | - No, I know.

00:46:27.920 | And it's not like this is something you do.

00:46:29.340 | I just thought it'd be funny.

00:46:30.520 | I'm just thinking like what the opposite would be.

00:46:33.240 | And then to flip it around,

00:46:35.380 | then you should have me take over some of your coaching,

00:46:38.680 | sports coaching responsibilities.

00:46:40.480 | And then I would just be terrible at that.

00:46:41.960 | And I'd be like, well, the lacrosse ball,

00:46:44.520 | we have to think about it like an idea

00:46:47.380 | that is evolving through a network of competing ideas.

00:46:52.380 | And then so is it really, are you catching the ball

00:46:56.080 | or is it an idea that we're formulating?

00:47:00.340 | And so that's what we'll do.

00:47:02.020 | I'm actually going to an event right after this.

00:47:05.160 | This is why I'm wearing a nicer shirt

00:47:07.520 | is right after we get off the air here,

00:47:09.080 | I'm going over to the Rockefeller Center,

00:47:11.500 | which is the School of Public Policy

00:47:13.640 | and Social Sciences here at Dartmouth.

00:47:16.080 | And I'm doing a fireside chat.

00:47:19.040 | I'm going to sit in a chair

00:47:21.000 | and be interviewed by another professor.

00:47:23.080 | In theory for an audience, we'll see.

00:47:26.640 | - That's cool.

00:47:28.400 | You had the fireside chats in your courses back in the day.

00:47:31.640 | I took those before I even knew you.

00:47:33.440 | - Didn't, I know exactly what you're talking about.

00:47:36.120 | Scott and I, Scott Young and I had fireside chats.

00:47:40.600 | Was this in--

00:47:41.440 | - You can hear the fire crackling in the background.

00:47:42.620 | - Yeah, so the VAT put in the fire crackling sound?

00:47:45.420 | - Yeah.

00:47:46.260 | - That's great, I love it, I love it.

00:47:47.500 | Yeah, yeah, we did these fireside chats.

00:47:49.500 | So this would have been for, was it Life of Focus?

00:47:52.220 | - I think it was Focus, yeah.

00:47:53.500 | - Yeah, yeah, so we did these fireside chats

00:47:57.100 | where we would talk about what had happened

00:47:59.780 | in that week of the course.

00:48:00.820 | And then yeah, shout out to VAT,

00:48:03.740 | Scott's longtime producer, I think added fire sounds.

00:48:06.020 | I'm actually talking to Scott, I think tomorrow, so.

00:48:08.660 | How much, all right, anyway, speaking of,

00:48:10.060 | I have to do an event, let's keep rolling here

00:48:12.780 | because I'm about to go on stage.

00:48:15.120 | All right, so let's get to another question.

00:48:18.120 | - All right, next question's from Ben.

00:48:20.340 | You seem to have a strong ability

00:48:21.700 | to break down phenomena around you

00:48:23.420 | into systems and processes.

00:48:25.920 | How much of this is a systematic approach

00:48:27.900 | on your part versus intuition?

00:48:29.860 | - Well, Ben, that's all training.

00:48:32.640 | I have been thinking about things in terms of systems.

00:48:38.260 | So breaking down behaviors or goals or hidden processes,

00:48:42.700 | breaking down and clarifying them,

00:48:44.300 | and then using that clarification

00:48:45.940 | to either better understand or direct your decisions in life.

00:48:48.540 | I was doing this at a very unusually young age.

00:48:53.340 | I mean, I guess college is when I did my first sort of,

00:48:56.660 | early in college, my first paid writing.

00:48:59.080 | There's a piece I did, and God, I don't know where this is,

00:49:02.740 | but I remember including this piece as a writing sample

00:49:06.700 | for my agent.

00:49:07.740 | At the time, I was trying to convince her

00:49:10.020 | to represent me for my first book, "How to Win at College."

00:49:12.820 | And I was 20.

00:49:14.260 | She's like, "Okay, I need writing samples.

00:49:16.540 | I don't know if you can even write."

00:49:17.700 | And I remember one of the articles I had written

00:49:20.380 | when I was 19 or 18, I forgot where I published it,

00:49:22.740 | but I remember the title was

00:49:24.060 | the ABCs of something productivity.

00:49:28.720 | And I'd broken it down into ABC or whatever.

00:49:31.220 | So anyways, I always thought that way

00:49:32.340 | because as a teenager, I read a lot of self-help,

00:49:34.920 | I read a lot of time management,

00:49:36.140 | I read a lot of pragmatic nonfiction

00:49:37.780 | and business advice books.

00:49:38.840 | I read all these books

00:49:40.020 | because I had my dot-com company back then.

00:49:42.260 | And so during that formative part of my brain's development,

00:49:46.640 | it developed listening to David Allen recordings,

00:49:50.900 | listening to business books,

00:49:52.380 | listening to the 1990s era

00:49:56.100 | of New York-based big idea writers

00:49:58.020 | like Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Johnson and Clive Thompson.

00:50:00.900 | And so I just, I grew up, my brain developed around that

00:50:03.460 | and I spent my entire life doing it.

00:50:04.800 | So that also, that comes easier for me.

00:50:06.980 | I like to think of myself as the Bryce Harper

00:50:11.300 | of coming up with systems in the sense that,

00:50:14.980 | Bryce Harper was a precociously young hitter.

00:50:17.980 | He spent his entire childhood hitting.

00:50:19.800 | I spent my entire childhood doing something

00:50:21.460 | that turned out to be multiple orders

00:50:24.380 | of magnitude less lucrative,

00:50:25.940 | which was coming up with ideas.

00:50:29.060 | And there's no $330 million contract for idea writing.

00:50:31.980 | But anyway, so Bend-S practice.

00:50:34.380 | If you do more of it, you get better,

00:50:36.060 | but it's sort of a parlor trick.

00:50:37.400 | And it's good to recognize this type of writing

00:50:40.540 | when you see it.

00:50:41.380 | I don't know how important it is

00:50:42.200 | for other people to develop it though.

00:50:43.180 | It's, I don't know.

00:50:45.700 | It's its own thing, Jesse.

00:50:47.820 | I can, in any situation, I can come up with a theory

00:50:52.060 | or system about what's happening,

00:50:54.260 | about some sort of dynamic that's kind of interesting.

00:50:56.880 | And 90% of the time it's empty underneath,

00:50:58.620 | but I can come up with something in the moment

00:51:00.180 | that sounds good.

00:51:03.260 | - Yeah, you give everything really good names still.

00:51:06.180 | - I know, it's what I do.

00:51:07.900 | Again, it's like Bryce Harper, but a lot less lucrative.

00:51:11.340 | All right, let's do one more question.

00:51:16.660 | - All right, next question is from Clemens from Vancouver.

00:51:21.740 | "I'm a big fan of the philosophy

00:51:23.320 | "behind your productivity system,

00:51:25.280 | "especially time blocking.

00:51:27.180 | "Where I'm struggling is to incorporate

00:51:28.860 | "your role-based task boards into my approach.

00:51:31.320 | "As a manager, what's important to me

00:51:33.360 | "is often time sensitive of something.

00:51:35.900 | "How should I build my task boards?"

00:51:38.020 | - All right, so, I mean, Clemens,

00:51:40.560 | I know that time sensitivity is this urgent

00:51:43.460 | or is it not urgent.

00:51:44.300 | I know that that is important,

00:51:45.880 | and you can capture that in your task boards,

00:51:48.140 | but you can tackle that at a smaller scope.

00:51:51.820 | So my argument with my various attention-centric

00:51:55.760 | productivity ideas, one of the ideas about tasks

00:51:59.520 | are that you should organize like tasks in the same place.

00:52:03.860 | And I think role is the right way to organize it,

00:52:07.080 | not sensitivity.

00:52:09.060 | So you should have a task board for different roles

00:52:11.700 | or major projects, for example.

00:52:13.380 | Now what this means can be different depending on your job,

00:52:15.460 | but it's content specific.

00:52:18.700 | The content is similar of the tasks of the same board.

00:52:23.100 | The reason why that's similar is because

00:52:26.860 | when we think about a particular role of this type

00:52:29.880 | where all the tasks you're seeing all sort of

00:52:32.360 | are involving the same type of activities or information

00:52:35.320 | or the same type of project,

00:52:36.800 | that means everything you're looking at

00:52:38.360 | is pulling from the same semantic context inside your brain.

00:52:41.920 | And that is much more easy to work with.

00:52:44.560 | It's much easier to work with.

00:52:45.640 | So if I confront, okay, here's a board

00:52:47.720 | of all the stuff related to my teaching,

00:52:50.020 | I can now have my mind load up the teaching networks,

00:52:54.920 | thinking about courses and my students

00:52:57.260 | and what needs to be done.

00:52:58.340 | And once it's loaded up that network,

00:53:00.000 | I can now work with all the stuff on this board

00:53:01.680 | and think about it and organize it and work on it

00:53:03.900 | and tackle some things.

00:53:04.740 | That's all gonna come relatively easily

00:53:06.240 | because I have the right,

00:53:07.540 | I mean the same cognitive context

00:53:09.900 | as I move from task to task.

00:53:11.740 | If I instead tried to organize my tasks

00:53:14.180 | by let's say time sensitivity,

00:53:16.240 | so now I have a board of here's everything

00:53:17.960 | that is due in a week versus due in a month,

00:53:20.620 | the content of these tasks could vary wildly.

00:53:24.060 | So now it's much harder for my brain to deal with

00:53:26.720 | because here is a task about teaching,

00:53:29.240 | here's a task about research,

00:53:30.300 | here's a task about an upcoming trip.

00:53:31.860 | Those are all completely semantically separate context

00:53:36.060 | and it's gonna be much harder for my brain

00:53:38.000 | to make use of that.

00:53:39.180 | So what I suggest is organizing your tasks

00:53:40.780 | by similar content.

00:53:42.300 | Then within each of these boards,

00:53:43.560 | you can organize by time sensitivity.

00:53:45.540 | And you can say, this is due this week,

00:53:47.020 | what I'm working on this week,

00:53:47.960 | what I need to think about coming up for the next week.

00:53:49.660 | You can organize them that way.

00:53:51.700 | And so when you're trying to figure out then,

00:53:53.940 | you're doing weekly planning

00:53:55.300 | and you're looking at your task boards,

00:53:56.380 | what do I need to make time on?

00:53:57.740 | Okay, so you're gonna have multiple boards

00:53:59.420 | that maybe each have urgent stuff on it.

00:54:03.060 | That's fine.

00:54:04.520 | All right, you have multiple boards

00:54:05.360 | with urgent stuff on it.

00:54:06.200 | You can look at them all and figure out,

00:54:08.140 | right, here's the things I'm working on this week.

00:54:10.020 | That's not that big of a deal.

00:54:11.100 | But anyways, that's why I organize,

00:54:12.380 | my main level of organization is content.

00:54:15.060 | And then I organize within the content.

00:54:16.540 | It's all about setting up a context

00:54:18.900 | that your brain can work with more easily.

00:54:22.820 | You know what, Jesse, we have one more question here.

00:54:24.100 | I'm gonna answer fast.

00:54:24.940 | Let's just do it.

00:54:25.760 | Let's do the last question.

00:54:27.100 | I'm feeling fast.

00:54:29.060 | - Yeah, I'm actually excited

00:54:30.020 | 'cause I wanted to hear your riff on this.

00:54:32.420 | All right, it's from Jeremy.

00:54:34.060 | I'm a legislative consultant,

00:54:35.860 | so deep work and distractions

00:54:37.380 | are both key elements of my job.

00:54:39.500 | My time is consumed by entertaining,

00:54:41.460 | attending, and preparing for meetings,

00:54:43.420 | tracking legislation and current events,

00:54:45.340 | and conducting borderline admin tasks.

00:54:48.700 | I currently am finding it difficult

00:54:50.020 | to find time for deep work,

00:54:51.340 | such as learning and writing about policy ideas,

00:54:53.620 | studying legislative history.

00:54:56.620 | How would you go about balancing distractions and deep work?

00:55:00.180 | - Well, Jeremy, I would say you're a consultant.

00:55:04.040 | I think you're probably a solo entrepreneur here,

00:55:07.620 | based on the context of this question.

00:55:09.100 | It's just you run your own consultancy.

00:55:11.060 | You don't work for a big firm.

00:55:12.600 | First two hours of every day, deep work.

00:55:15.220 | That's it.

00:55:16.060 | Work backwards from that.

00:55:18.420 | Not that hard to work backwards from.

00:55:20.680 | It means, okay, I don't schedule meetings before noon

00:55:22.580 | because I want to make sure that I have at least an hour

00:55:24.700 | to prep for a meeting or travel to a meeting if needed.

00:55:28.000 | I might have to move a meeting

00:55:32.020 | or an opportunity to the next week

00:55:33.820 | because I only have so many slots

00:55:34.940 | when the morning's not free, and whatever.

00:55:37.740 | That'll take you a month to get used to.

00:55:40.460 | You'll have maybe 10% of the people you deal with

00:55:42.620 | will have some friction because of this,

00:55:43.900 | and then they'll get over it,

00:55:45.380 | and you only have to think about it again.

00:55:46.580 | Two hours every morning,

00:55:48.140 | focused on learning new skills, developing your business.

00:55:51.440 | It's that simple.

00:55:52.600 | I think sometimes what happens is,

00:55:54.360 | is we get worried about some of the small issues

00:55:56.760 | that will arise, most of those being temporary,

00:55:58.880 | and we let the fear of those small issues

00:56:00.960 | keep us in a state that is incredibly worse.

00:56:03.420 | We're willing to trade.

00:56:05.800 | This client might be annoyed,

00:56:07.800 | and I might not be able to work with that person

00:56:10.800 | because they only like to work in the meetings.

00:56:12.720 | That might happen in the next three weeks.

00:56:14.560 | You're willing to trade that for,

00:56:16.040 | over the next few years, my business stagnates.

00:56:20.000 | My ability to master this new piece of legislation,

00:56:22.480 | which could bring in hundreds of thousands

00:56:23.760 | of new business, goes away.

00:56:24.880 | And when you actually see those trade-offs,

00:56:26.240 | this is crazy.

00:56:27.400 | I annoy this person, I don't work with that person anymore.

00:56:29.160 | Of course I'll make that trade for all these benefits

00:56:31.280 | of being able to systematically work deeply on what matters,

00:56:33.400 | but in the moment, we just see the short-term pain.

00:56:36.480 | So I'm gonna suggest something like that.

00:56:37.720 | It doesn't have to be exactly that,

00:56:38.600 | but honestly, that's the easiest thing.

00:56:40.720 | Start your workday a little early.

00:56:42.900 | Do 8.30 to 10.30.

00:56:44.620 | Deep work with a ritual.

00:56:46.600 | You get the right coffee, you go to a place.

00:56:48.160 | There's no email 'til that's done.

00:56:50.240 | And I'm telling you, it'll take about a month

00:56:51.680 | for you to adjust your habits, make that tractable.

00:56:54.720 | It'll take about a month before your clients

00:56:56.160 | get used to that, and then everyone will be fine with it.

00:56:58.680 | And your trajectory, the compound interest

00:57:01.840 | of what you're gonna be able to grow to and accomplish

00:57:03.400 | is just going to exponentially turn upwards.

00:57:07.500 | Two hours every morning.

00:57:08.700 | All right.

00:57:12.040 | All right, so that's it for questions.

00:57:13.320 | I wanna move on to the final segment of the show.

00:57:16.720 | It's where we talk about something interesting

00:57:19.400 | that you, my listeners, sent in to my interesting

00:57:21.200 | at calnewport.com email address.

00:57:25.040 | Before we do, let me briefly talk about

00:57:26.680 | another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

00:57:28.680 | That's our good friends at Blinkist.

00:57:31.740 | The Blinkist app allows you to understand

00:57:34.680 | the most important points from over 5,500

00:57:37.560 | non-fiction books and podcasts.

00:57:39.680 | It offers you these short summaries called Blinks.

00:57:43.280 | That you can either read or listen to

00:57:45.920 | while you do other things.

00:57:46.800 | They take about 15 minutes.

00:57:48.560 | So in about 15 minutes, you can get the main points

00:57:52.040 | from thousands of popular non-fiction books.

00:57:57.040 | Now, the way that I recommend using this,

00:57:59.640 | the way I use it, the way Jesse uses it,

00:58:02.020 | is as a triage service for your reading habit.

00:58:06.440 | You hear about a book, you're thinking,

00:58:08.760 | should I buy this and add it to my list?

00:58:11.240 | Go listen or read the Blink first.

00:58:13.840 | That almost always will tell you,

00:58:15.880 | oh yes, yes, yes, this will be great.

00:58:17.520 | I really wanna learn more about these points.

00:58:19.320 | Or, this isn't what I thought it was.

00:58:21.520 | Or it is what I thought it was,

00:58:22.800 | but honestly, the Blink was all I needed to know.

00:58:25.600 | I don't think I wanna spend 250 pages with this.

00:58:27.720 | So it's a triage service that makes sure

00:58:29.360 | that the books you actually buy and try to read

00:58:31.760 | are books that you know you're really going to like.

00:58:34.480 | This in turn, not only makes the most of your reading time,

00:58:37.600 | but helps you become a more serious reader.

00:58:39.860 | Because your experience with these books is positive.

00:58:43.960 | You're able to figure out ahead what you wanna read.

00:58:45.940 | The side benefit of this is as you're reading Blinks

00:58:49.680 | for books that you don't end up buying,

00:58:51.720 | you are still getting useful information.

00:58:54.160 | So let's say your hit rate is one book out of every four.

00:58:58.600 | One book out of every four that you read

00:59:00.080 | or listen to the Blink to, you buy that book.

00:59:02.600 | You're still getting four books worth of ideas.

00:59:05.560 | And one of those books,

00:59:06.400 | you're getting a really deep understanding,

00:59:07.440 | but you can draw from the summaries

00:59:09.000 | of those other three books

00:59:10.200 | to help add context to your understanding.

00:59:12.720 | So it really also helps your grasp of complex ideas.

00:59:16.640 | It's again, like an accelerant

00:59:18.000 | for how quickly you can master fields.

00:59:19.680 | 'Cause you're not only reading good books,

00:59:20.920 | but you're at an even higher rate

00:59:22.520 | getting key summaries of related books.

00:59:26.400 | So if you're a serious reader,

00:59:27.560 | and most of my listeners are or aspire to be,

00:59:30.740 | Blinkist is a great sidekick for that endeavor.

00:59:35.120 | We also wanna mention that there is a

00:59:38.240 | temporary service going on right now,

00:59:39.680 | a temporary, I guess we'd call it offer

00:59:42.560 | called Blinkist Connect

00:59:44.000 | that will allow you to share your premium account.

00:59:46.880 | So you in a sense get two premium accounts

00:59:48.600 | for the price of one.

00:59:49.440 | You can share one with a friend.

00:59:50.260 | So I think that's cool.

00:59:51.100 | So anyways, right now Blinkist has a special offer

00:59:53.000 | just for our audience.

00:59:53.960 | Go to blinkist.com/deep

00:59:56.720 | to start your seven day free trial

00:59:58.220 | and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

01:00:01.380 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.

01:00:05.440 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off

01:00:07.720 | on a seven day free trial.

01:00:10.000 | Blinkist.com/deep.

01:00:11.780 | And for a limited time,

01:00:12.640 | you can use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account

01:00:15.520 | and you will get two premium subscriptions

01:00:17.640 | for the price of one.

01:00:19.720 | We also wanna talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

01:00:23.320 | You need to be using a VPN.

01:00:27.280 | And if you're gonna use a VPN, it should be ExpressVPN.

01:00:30.640 | Let me explain what I mean by this.

01:00:32.080 | What does a VPN do?

01:00:34.280 | Well, typically if you connect to the internet,

01:00:37.620 | people can see what websites or services you're talking to.

01:00:42.120 | So if you're connected to a wireless access point,

01:00:44.600 | let's say at a Starbucks,

01:00:46.720 | anyone nearby with the right software

01:00:48.640 | can read your packets out of the air and say,

01:00:51.520 | oh, I see what website Cal is talking to.

01:00:54.840 | Even if you're at home,

01:00:56.920 | connected to the internet through your home,

01:00:59.880 | your internet service provider

01:01:02.420 | sees which websites you're talking to

01:01:04.720 | and they can sell that data.

01:01:06.080 | And guess what?

01:01:06.920 | They often do.

01:01:08.800 | They use it to profile you and say what types of products

01:01:11.680 | it should be served in your direction.

01:01:14.160 | A VPN allows you to avoid that.

01:01:15.840 | Here's the way a VPN works.

01:01:17.040 | If I wanna access a website or a service,

01:01:19.280 | I don't directly talk to that website or service.

01:01:21.480 | I instead talk to a VPN server.

01:01:23.520 | And I tell that VPN server with an encrypted message

01:01:27.200 | that no one listening to me at Starbucks,

01:01:30.480 | no one at my internet service provider can read.

01:01:32.920 | I tell it with an encrypted message,

01:01:34.880 | here's who I really wanna talk to.

01:01:36.640 | And the VPN server talks to that site or service

01:01:39.280 | on my behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back to me.

01:01:42.280 | So now all anyone can see,

01:01:47.280 | whether they're sniffing your packets

01:01:48.480 | or that your internet service providers

01:01:49.600 | that you're talking to a VPN.

01:01:50.840 | They don't know who that VPN is helping you talk to.

01:01:54.080 | Now ExpressVPN is an industry leader in this technology.

01:01:58.160 | You install it on your devices,

01:01:59.500 | you turn it on with a click

01:02:00.640 | and then you use your web browser, your apps,

01:02:02.360 | just like you normally would.

01:02:03.680 | All of this stuff with the encryption

01:02:05.240 | and talking to the server,

01:02:06.080 | all of that happens in the background.

01:02:07.920 | You don't even have to worry about it.

01:02:10.200 | I like ExpressVPN 'cause the software works well.

01:02:12.840 | It's seamless.

01:02:13.680 | I like ExpressVPN because they have servers

01:02:15.480 | all around the world.

01:02:16.580 | So wherever you are in the country or the world,

01:02:19.000 | there's probably a VPN server nearby you can select

01:02:22.480 | to connect to, which means you'll have a very fast connection

01:02:24.320 | and they have good bandwidth for these servers as well.

01:02:26.080 | So you're not even gonna know you're using a VPN,

01:02:28.400 | but you get all those privacy advantages.

01:02:31.800 | So stop allowing anyone who wants to,

01:02:36.000 | to monitor your internet use.

01:02:38.900 | Secure your internet today with the VPN

01:02:41.200 | I trust for online protection, which is ExpressVPN.

01:02:45.080 | So visit expressvpn.com/deep

01:02:48.320 | and they will give you three extra months free.

01:02:50.360 | So that's expressvpn.com/deep, expressvpn.com/deep.

01:02:55.360 | Don't forget the slash deep

01:02:56.880 | to get that three extra months free.

01:03:00.760 | All right, let's do something interesting, Jesse.

01:03:04.080 | Now, typically in the studio,

01:03:05.800 | I'd be able to pull this up on a screen.

01:03:08.400 | Can't do that from here.

01:03:09.520 | Though I'll figure out how to do that going forward.

01:03:12.160 | We're tricking out the HQ North for the rest of the summer.

01:03:14.960 | So don't worry.

01:03:15.800 | Soon I'll be able to pull up an article,

01:03:16.640 | but for now I'm just gonna read the article.

01:03:18.600 | I have it here in front of me.

01:03:21.080 | I will say, I was telling Jesse about this earlier offline.

01:03:24.760 | There is some studios at Dartmouth that I can rent.

01:03:29.240 | Now, they're not really,

01:03:30.600 | the one I have in mind is not for podcasting.

01:03:32.520 | It's really for doing like book on tape audio recording.

01:03:35.360 | It's a room where every surface is sound baffles.

01:03:38.960 | But what I'm thinking about doing

01:03:41.000 | is bringing in a ring light and a nice camera

01:03:43.280 | and just setting it up on there

01:03:44.880 | and using that for podcasts,

01:03:46.920 | completely soundproof darkened room.

01:03:49.240 | Could be really cool.

01:03:50.080 | So I'm gonna check that out when I,

01:03:51.640 | I'm gonna check that out soon.

01:03:53.200 | It'd be great.

01:03:54.040 | - That's so good.

01:03:55.080 | - They also have a podcast studio,

01:03:57.080 | but it's not for video podcast.

01:03:58.520 | It has all the equipment you need for normal podcasting,

01:04:00.600 | but that might look okay in there.

01:04:01.600 | So I'm gonna check that out too.

01:04:02.760 | So anyways, I have a lot of ideas for,

01:04:04.240 | our tech is gonna grow as I get increasingly bored.

01:04:07.960 | (laughs)

01:04:08.880 | Up North.

01:04:09.720 | Anyways, this is all to say,

01:04:11.000 | I can't show you the article I'm reading today,

01:04:13.880 | but I will tell you about it.

01:04:15.480 | And there's a link in the show notes.

01:04:18.080 | This is an article from the Hollywood Reporter from June.

01:04:23.000 | It's a recent article.

01:04:23.960 | The title is,

01:04:25.600 | Taylor Sheridan does whatever he wants.

01:04:29.560 | So Taylor Sheridan, if you don't know,

01:04:32.520 | was the broke actor turned screenwriter,

01:04:36.960 | turned television hit maker.

01:04:39.640 | He is the showrunner and head writer

01:04:41.760 | behind a lot of hit shows,

01:04:43.160 | including most notably Yellowstone.

01:04:45.840 | He's also written,

01:04:47.000 | he has this great trilogy,

01:04:48.640 | Sicario, Wind River.

01:04:51.880 | I forgot the other one.

01:04:52.720 | He has a good movie trilogy

01:04:53.680 | of these sort of modern gritty Westerns,

01:04:57.240 | Kings of Providence,

01:05:00.040 | 1923, a Yellowstone prequel,

01:05:02.560 | 1883, a Yellowstone prequel.

01:05:04.240 | He's doing all these sorts of shows.

01:05:05.480 | And so there's this big profile about Taylor Sheridan

01:05:09.080 | that's in the Hollywood Reporter.

01:05:10.800 | Now I'll tell you an interesting thing

01:05:12.600 | before I get to the quote I wanna read.

01:05:14.000 | An interesting thing I learned in this profile

01:05:16.360 | is this giant ranch in Texas came up for sale.

01:05:21.560 | So just so we understand Taylor Sheridan's work habits.

01:05:24.120 | A giant ranch, the Four Sixes Ranch in Texas.

01:05:27.840 | As a native Texan myself,

01:05:29.320 | I have heard of the Four Sixes.

01:05:31.240 | It's over kind of West near the Panhandle.

01:05:34.040 | It's roughly the size of Los Angeles.

01:05:35.640 | It's 300,000 acres or something like that.

01:05:39.320 | Some huge amount, some huge amount of land.

01:05:42.360 | Anyways, it came up for sale.

01:05:44.160 | It came up for sale.

01:05:45.240 | And Taylor, he lived on a ranch,

01:05:48.520 | a small ranch of, you know, a thousand acres.

01:05:50.880 | It came for sale.

01:05:52.120 | And Taylor really wanted to buy this ranch.

01:05:54.000 | So he said, it's famous, right?

01:05:56.440 | He's like, this will be great.

01:05:57.360 | It's the most famous ranch in Texas.

01:05:58.520 | Well, the King Ranch is more famous.

01:05:59.640 | It was this famous old ranch.

01:06:01.120 | He said, how much is it gonna be?

01:06:02.920 | And they said $350 million.

01:06:04.960 | And so Taylor was like, I'm $330 million short,

01:06:11.200 | but hold on, hold on, just like don't sell it yet.

01:06:15.000 | And he goes around, because his shows are very successful,

01:06:17.320 | and he signs a $200 million deal with Paramount

01:06:22.320 | for like doing all these sorts of shows.

01:06:24.920 | And basically between that deal

01:06:27.000 | and bringing in a couple of minority investors,

01:06:31.760 | they bought this ranch.

01:06:32.880 | So he's now writing out of his mind,

01:06:35.720 | just writing out of his mind,

01:06:37.120 | because he wanted this ranch.

01:06:39.640 | So he's writing, you know, four shows or something crazy.

01:06:42.320 | Not very slow productivity of him.

01:06:44.600 | Anyways, how is he doing this?

01:06:46.360 | So this brings us up to the quote I liked.

01:06:48.280 | This is from the article.

01:06:50.160 | Sheridan often writes in a one room cabinet

01:06:53.920 | he built in Wyoming.

01:06:56.280 | He's always a fast writer, he says,

01:06:57.680 | but after building this script generating isolation bunker,

01:07:01.880 | he was suddenly able to grind out episodes

01:07:04.320 | of hit TV shows at a phenomenal speed.

01:07:06.680 | I've written many episodes in eight to 10 hours, he claims.

01:07:10.400 | So I like this idea that like, okay,

01:07:12.120 | now he has to write four shows or something

01:07:14.000 | so he can afford this ranch.

01:07:15.440 | And so he built a bunker and built his whole life

01:07:18.360 | around just writing shows and it really worked.

01:07:20.720 | And so when we hear Taylor's story,

01:07:22.200 | we say, well, that's exhausting, all the different,

01:07:23.520 | he's so busy that he has to do this

01:07:25.800 | to even keep up with the work.

01:07:26.960 | But the takeaway I had is, you know,

01:07:29.320 | imagine if you had the isolation bunker

01:07:31.800 | and you didn't have to pay off a $350 million ranch.

01:07:34.720 | And you were just doing a normal type of,

01:07:37.920 | you're writing a book a year or like one television show.

01:07:42.240 | You'd spend two weeks and you'd be done.

01:07:45.720 | I mean, I'm just thinking about the degree to which

01:07:49.000 | we often let time scarcity and busyness

01:07:53.120 | push us into the way we work,

01:07:56.000 | but we never think about taking the things

01:07:58.800 | that really help us work,

01:08:00.520 | to help us deep to sort of emergency measures.

01:08:02.640 | And if we made that sort of core,

01:08:04.080 | we could actually have a lot more time.

01:08:05.480 | So anyways, I just love this thought experiment

01:08:07.880 | of Taylor Sheridan without the $350 million ranch,

01:08:11.800 | but with the isolation writing bunker in Wyoming,

01:08:14.600 | could go up there for a month

01:08:16.600 | and finish an episode of a show

01:08:18.600 | and then spend the other 11 months on his much smaller,

01:08:21.720 | but still serviceable ranch.

01:08:22.920 | So anyways, we see in extreme situations,

01:08:26.800 | the ability to produce great work

01:08:29.520 | through extreme concentration.

01:08:30.760 | And I just wish we had more examples of that

01:08:33.520 | in non-extreme situations,

01:08:35.000 | more examples of that in a slow productivity context of,

01:08:38.400 | I just do this thing all out.

01:08:40.160 | And then when I'm done, I'm done and I rest.

01:08:41.920 | And so there's some inspiration to pull out of there.

01:08:44.560 | There's a lot of stress coming out of this article,

01:08:47.760 | but there's some inspiration to pull out of there,

01:08:50.280 | pull out of there as well.

01:08:51.240 | Jesse, I think we need a deep work ranch, by the way.

01:08:53.320 | This is my new.

01:08:54.160 | (Jesse laughs)

01:08:55.880 | - You're pretty much in one right now.

01:08:57.780 | - Well, okay, this is a good point.

01:09:01.000 | So the house I'm in now is,

01:09:03.040 | it's in town in Hanover, it's on the pond up here.

01:09:06.120 | But my brother-in-law who's staying up in Vermont

01:09:08.160 | this summer sent me a link for a property nearby.

01:09:13.160 | It's in Vermont, near here, I don't know.

01:09:14.680 | I don't know the geography well, 120 acres

01:09:17.640 | and a couple outbuildings, some barns, some agricultural land

01:09:22.640 | and there's a creek and a bond and the whole thing kind of,

01:09:26.160 | at the end of it, I think there's the property

01:09:28.280 | goes all the way down, has frontage on Fairleigh Lake,

01:09:31.960 | Fairleigh Lake or whatever.

01:09:33.480 | And he was like, yeah, this could be like a pizza restaurant

01:09:36.600 | because there's this big pizza oven there.

01:09:38.080 | And like, we could build a deep work cabin.

01:09:39.960 | It's like, yes, that's what we need.

01:09:41.520 | We need this deep work north.

01:09:43.720 | I guess it's not a ranch in New England.

01:09:45.040 | I don't know what you would call it,

01:09:46.400 | a ramble or something like that.

01:09:48.000 | That's what we need.

01:09:48.960 | - 120 acres is a lot of upkeep.

01:09:51.020 | - Well, I didn't wanna broach the topic now,

01:09:55.880 | but I was assuming you could take care of that.

01:09:58.320 | (Jesse laughs)

01:10:00.900 | Run the tractor.

01:10:02.680 | - I'd be more inclined to like rent something

01:10:05.760 | from somebody who has 120 acre ranch.

01:10:09.120 | - See, this is smarter.

01:10:10.160 | This is smarter.

01:10:11.000 | Okay, so what we need is a deep work fan with 120 acres.

01:10:15.080 | He was like not often there.

01:10:16.440 | Okay, that's gonna be the new idea.

01:10:18.640 | All right.

01:10:19.480 | - But you pretty much have that scenario right now,

01:10:20.920 | this summer, so you should, that's gonna be sweet.

01:10:24.000 | - No, it's true, we do, because down the road from here

01:10:26.040 | is the golf course, but they canceled the golf team

01:10:29.960 | and closed the golf course at Dartmouth.

01:10:33.600 | But the golf course is still there.

01:10:35.320 | So they've just temporarily just call it a park

01:10:38.000 | and they're still mowing it and everything.

01:10:39.680 | So there's right down the street is 18 holes

01:10:42.240 | worth of golf course that you can just,

01:10:44.040 | it's just a giant park.

01:10:45.120 | And then it's surrounded by woods that have kilometers

01:10:47.320 | and kilometers of cross country and running trails.

01:10:50.160 | So yeah, you're kind of right.

01:10:51.560 | It's like I have the deep work ranch,

01:10:54.140 | but I don't have to upkeep it.

01:10:56.040 | And also a lot of random people invest

01:10:59.000 | or walk in their dogs on it, but that's okay.

01:11:01.040 | I think it's a fair trade.

01:11:02.520 | - It's like St. Andrews on a Sunday.

01:11:04.960 | - Yep, exactly.

01:11:05.800 | - The old course, they all walk their dogs on that course.

01:11:08.480 | - All right, well, anyway, speaking of,

01:11:10.440 | I don't know, walking places, I'm about to be on stage.

01:11:15.720 | I'm supposed to be on stage in like 10 minutes.

01:11:17.360 | So I gotta go.

01:11:18.440 | Thank you everyone for listening.

01:11:19.760 | We'll be back next week, probably in the standard

01:11:22.840 | Deep Work HQ as I temporarily am coming back to visit DC.

01:11:25.600 | So hopefully I will be seeing you all

01:11:28.880 | sort of in the old studio next week.

01:11:31.920 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:11:34.720 | (upbeat music)

01:11:37.300 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 255: The Failure Of Cybernetic Productivity

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