What To Do When You Feel Like Doing Nothing (Unmotivated, Burnt Out & Unproductive)

00:00:00.000 | I just got back from a month spent up at my undisclosed location up north.

00:00:06.200 | I went up there in part to cultivate a quieter mind so I could think deeply about the new

00:00:12.400 | book I'm writing and unwind.

00:00:15.920 | Our nation's political news, however, had a different plan for me.

00:00:20.760 | It was early in my trip that we had that fateful Joe Biden debate performance.

00:00:28.160 | My trip ended with the current president bowing out of the ongoing race, and somewhere in

00:00:34.640 | between there was an assassination attempt.

00:00:37.060 | In other words, for a DC resident trying to go get away from distractions, the most distracting

00:00:42.980 | possible stuff was happening, and it all fit exactly within the 25 days that I was up in

00:00:49.400 | my undisclosed location.

00:00:51.780 | So I thought this was a good excuse to talk about a topic that a lot of you have actually

00:00:55.280 | written me about in recent days, which is how do you focus during distracting times?

00:01:03.040 | So that's what I want to do today.

00:01:04.040 | I have six pieces of advice as well as two initial caveats for thinking about the role

00:01:12.260 | of focus and concentration in times where there's distractions that are crossing past

00:01:18.400 | the normal threshold and to a place where they can be almost crippling in their ability

00:01:23.240 | to grab and keep grabbing your attention and drain your energy.

00:01:26.040 | So focus in distracting times.

00:01:28.080 | Let's get concrete about what to do here.

00:01:30.800 | I want to start with a caveat.

00:01:33.400 | So the goal is not to be an automaton grimly working deeply while Rome burns around you,

00:01:42.400 | okay?

00:01:43.560 | During an acute breaking news event, while the event is still unfolding, I think it is

00:01:50.480 | completely fine to say, "I'm not working today," right?

00:01:55.340 | If the event seems highly salient or important or historic, be it something that's happening

00:02:00.760 | in the larger world or an upheaval happening in your own personal life, something is happening

00:02:05.560 | to someone you know or to where you live or it's a weather event or whatever it is, don't

00:02:09.920 | try to work while it's going on.

00:02:12.480 | Don't do like, "I'm kind of working, not very well, but really this other disruptive thing

00:02:16.680 | is going on."

00:02:17.680 | It's completely fine to say, "I am going to figure out what is going on.

00:02:20.920 | I am going to follow the news.

00:02:22.440 | I'm going to spend some time just processing the information," okay?

00:02:27.360 | This is where you might say, "I'm going to rabbit hole on everything I can read online

00:02:30.780 | while this is happening."

00:02:31.840 | This is where you might say, "I'm just going to disappear for a few hours to go for a walk

00:02:35.200 | and process my emotions based on some big disruptive news I just got."

00:02:39.160 | That is all fine.

00:02:40.160 | And in fact, the very reason why we have a hard time with this notion of like, "Hey,

00:02:44.480 | if something huge is happening, don't work that day," the very reason we have a hard

00:02:48.560 | time with that idea comes back to a concept from my book, Slow Productivity, the concept

00:02:54.360 | that I call pseudo productivity.

00:02:56.640 | This is actually an indicator of pseudo productivity's insidious grip.

00:03:02.720 | What is pseudo productivity?

00:03:04.080 | It is the idea that we use visible activity as our primary proxy for useful effort.

00:03:10.540 | It's endemic throughout office and knowledge style work.

00:03:13.840 | It is exactly that mindset that troubles us with the idea of, "I'm going to take a break

00:03:19.600 | from work because something big is happening."

00:03:21.400 | Because in a pseudo productivity regime, all that matters is visible activity, so it is

00:03:25.960 | very risky and visible to not be doing visible work.

00:03:30.160 | However, if you embrace slow productivity, like I argue in my book, Slow Productivity,

00:03:35.100 | you care much more about quality results over time.

00:03:37.760 | And in that context, you realize, "I can't make any reasonable progress towards anything

00:03:41.480 | quality while this huge breaking news event is happening today, so why would I even bother

00:03:45.920 | trying?"

00:03:46.920 | When you care about productivity at a big time scale, it's not that difficult.

00:03:51.040 | It's not that avant-garde or radical to say, "Something big just happened, so let me focus

00:03:57.320 | on that and not work at all."

00:03:58.960 | All right?

00:03:59.960 | So that's my first caveat.

00:04:01.720 | During the immediate aftermath of a big event or during breaking news itself, slow productivity

00:04:07.160 | says, "It's fine not to work," and in fact, you're just doing a show, you're putting on

00:04:10.360 | a show if you try to.

00:04:12.680 | So all the advice I have going forward is not about when something's acutely happening,

00:04:17.000 | but the days after, right?

00:04:19.700 | It's not like in my example, oh, there's this disastrous debate happening.

00:04:25.640 | It's the three days after, four days after, five days after, where now it's just chatter,

00:04:29.880 | chatter, chatter.

00:04:30.880 | The acute thing's not happening.

00:04:32.240 | Now it's just people making things up, people having ideas, prognostication, rumors, and

00:04:36.840 | leaks, right?

00:04:38.560 | That is where you can have this long-term destabilization of your focus.

00:04:43.760 | That's where I want to focus.

00:04:44.760 | All right.

00:04:45.760 | Now, let me, again, before we get to the six pieces of advice, let me give you a foundation

00:04:49.920 | for the six pieces of advice that are going to follow.

00:04:53.320 | I want to give you two quotes from a book.

00:04:55.320 | It's influential to me.

00:04:57.560 | Winifred Gallagher's 2009 book, Wrapped, R-A-P-T.

00:05:02.200 | Two key quotes from Gallagher that are going to sort of set the foundation for the advice

00:05:05.800 | that follows.

00:05:07.720 | Quote number one, "Life is the sum of what you focus on."

00:05:13.200 | Quote number two, "Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the

00:05:18.080 | time.

00:05:19.080 | Rather, it's about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful

00:05:23.400 | as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there."

00:05:29.040 | Gallagher is hitting the foundation of the advice that follows, which says, "Your experience

00:05:32.200 | of the world is determined by what you pay attention to."

00:05:36.120 | So especially during periods where there are many things to pay attention to that are going

00:05:40.400 | to give you a grim or urgent or anxiety-producing understanding of the world, this is when it's

00:05:45.320 | most important to be very careful about your attention, to treat your mind like a private

00:05:50.000 | garden and not let all of these diversionary weeds take root.

00:05:54.760 | All right.

00:05:55.760 | So with that caveat and foundation in mind, six pieces of advice for focusing during distracted

00:06:01.720 | times.

00:06:03.440 | Tip number one, go into what I call newspaper mode.

00:06:08.840 | And what I mean by newspaper mode is I'm actually imagining, for the sake of an example, earlier

00:06:16.680 | time periods in which the printed newspaper was your only mode of receiving new information

00:06:23.200 | about anything happening outside of your immediate vicinity.

00:06:26.480 | Let's think, for example, like colonial America, 18th century America, Benjamin Franklin times.

00:06:34.480 | There was newspapers, right?

00:06:36.480 | The news would come in, they would print what they had, you could read the paper, whatever

00:06:41.400 | the primary paper, maybe there was two competing papers in your colonial town.

00:06:45.300 | Now you knew everything you could learn that day about what was going on around the country

00:06:48.600 | and the world.

00:06:49.880 | And there was really no new information to get until the next edition of the paper came

00:06:52.680 | out.

00:06:54.680 | That's the mode you should go into during distracting news periods in our modern times

00:07:00.160 | as well.

00:07:01.600 | Here is going to be my sort of daily ingestion of relevant information.

00:07:08.640 | Outside of that, I'll be okay.

00:07:10.920 | I can let everything else aggregate, be filtered and thought about before that, and then the

00:07:15.000 | next day I can check in once again with what's going on.

00:07:19.320 | If that was good enough for Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and Thomas

00:07:27.200 | Jefferson during the ultimate American breaking news event, which was incipient revolution

00:07:34.000 | against the Brits, then it's good enough for you today, trying to know what's going on

00:07:39.960 | with a presidential campaign.

00:07:43.640 | People get nervous about this, but remember, you're not Anderson Cooper.

00:07:47.920 | You don't need to have like this up to the minute breaking news.

00:07:51.360 | I've heard this rumor I'm interviewing.

00:07:53.440 | I think people feel like they're cable news producers when these breaking news events

00:07:57.840 | hold.

00:07:58.840 | They're gathering all this information as if they're in front of an audience trying

00:08:02.240 | to help people make sense of things.

00:08:03.480 | You're not Anderson Cooper.

00:08:05.720 | The world will be okay if you're not completely up to speed on what's going on with a presidential

00:08:11.840 | campaign to which you have no direct impact or control.

00:08:17.000 | So you'll be okay.

00:08:18.480 | Social media makes people feel like they can be breaking news producers.

00:08:20.960 | You don't need to be.

00:08:21.960 | All right.

00:08:22.960 | Tip number two, move up the information food chain.

00:08:27.600 | So remember back in school, they used to talk about the food chain and it was sort of pyramidal.

00:08:32.160 | You had this sort of base of a really big base of algaes and plants that survive off

00:08:39.080 | of sunlight and convert it to energy.

00:08:41.120 | And then you had smaller things like in the ocean, you would have smaller things like

00:08:45.480 | krill, et cetera, that would eat the algaes.

00:08:48.120 | And there's like a lot of them, but less.

00:08:50.000 | And then slightly bigger fish would eat those and a bigger fish would eat those.

00:08:54.240 | And as you moved up the food chain, you got less and less animals.

00:08:56.800 | It was sort of like concentrating the original energy.

00:09:00.200 | I think about online information in the same way.

00:09:03.320 | At the bottom, the digital information equivalent of algae is just chatter on social media.

00:09:09.640 | It's just lots of information, a lot of angling for clout or for attention of all sorts of

00:09:16.080 | like mixed quality, huge amounts of redundancy.

00:09:19.280 | It's just sort of these massive proverbial algae mats of just stuff.

00:09:24.700 | And then as you move up the information food chain, this information gets digested and

00:09:29.400 | reconstituted into larger sort of more highly caloric sources, if we're going to be sort

00:09:36.840 | of follow our metaphor here.

00:09:39.800 | So you have like everyone just, I saw this, what about this?

00:09:42.480 | What's going on?

00:09:43.480 | A lot of people's opinions.

00:09:44.480 | And then maybe that gets aggregated in the people of more influence, but are still kind

00:09:47.160 | of making takes based on what they're seeing.

00:09:49.480 | And then that itself gets integrated into news articles to do all sorts of other sorts

00:09:54.800 | of verified fact checking.

00:09:56.360 | And then there's sort of the analysis pieces that are reading those articles and you sort

00:09:59.480 | of move up this food chain and things get more processed and more clarified and more

00:10:03.640 | purified.

00:10:04.720 | Move up the information food chain during these periods of breaking news.

00:10:10.920 | Don't read the algae mass of just nonsense.

00:10:14.600 | That means TikTok, that means Twitter, that's going to be Instagram, that's good.

00:10:19.960 | That you need higher quality, more concentrated calorie sources for what you're going to consume.

00:10:27.000 | All right.

00:10:28.000 | So go higher quality.

00:10:29.000 | So that's probably going to mean major newspapers.

00:10:32.540 | Maybe you have like an independent media source you really trust, like a particular commentator

00:10:35.600 | who has a newsletter or a podcast and you have a relationship with that independent

00:10:40.080 | news source.

00:10:41.080 | So like you have one of those, maybe one or two major newspapers that you're sampling

00:10:45.360 | some articles from.

00:10:46.360 | You want the higher quality stuff during breaking news.

00:10:49.200 | Because it's smaller, it's more self-contained.

00:10:52.000 | You can't follow that like you can the lower quality, lower caloric sources that there's

00:10:56.200 | just endless.

00:10:57.200 | If there's endless mats of this information, you can swim among that algae forever.

00:11:01.480 | There's only so many, you know, your independent news source that you trust.

00:11:04.920 | This is their newsletter they did today.

00:11:06.400 | That's it.

00:11:07.400 | The newspaper you're following, here's their three articles on this.

00:11:10.000 | That's it.

00:11:11.000 | So it's not as conducive to being lost for extended periods of time and consumption.

00:11:15.600 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:11:16.720 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:11:21.220 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:11:28.680 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:11:34.120 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:11:39.480 | I know you're going to like it.

00:11:41.280 | Check it out.

00:11:42.280 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:11:43.280 | All right.

00:11:44.280 | Tip number three, seek out flow states.

00:11:47.360 | What I mean by that is seek out activities, both professional and personal, that you can

00:11:53.120 | get lost in.

00:11:54.120 | Right?

00:11:55.120 | So like creative projects, going out on adventures, getting lost in a movie or a good book, playing

00:12:00.120 | board games with others, athletic pursuits and training, et cetera.

00:12:04.320 | Find ways to get lost in what you're doing, to enter what my Haley Chicks at Mihaly would

00:12:08.240 | call a flow state.

00:12:10.280 | Why is this important?

00:12:11.280 | Well, part of what happens during these breaking news moments is that your mind has a sort

00:12:16.320 | of anxious rumination that creates chemicals.

00:12:19.120 | You feel it as like a background hum of anxiety.

00:12:22.200 | Getting lost in an unrelated activity is like a cleaning pass.

00:12:26.080 | You're cleaning out those chemicals, right?

00:12:30.040 | It's like we're going to come in and power wash the brain here a little bit, reset what

00:12:33.720 | the chemicals are going on.

00:12:35.040 | It's very good for, especially to get out of the cognitive shock of something really

00:12:40.200 | big and anxiety producing happening.

00:12:42.720 | It really helps you keep on top of the negative chemicals that that generates.

00:12:48.160 | All right.

00:12:49.600 | Tip number four, implement a hard day protocol, HDP.

00:12:56.040 | This is something I have used many times for many different occasions in my life.

00:13:00.480 | We've talked about it before on the show, but it's a very pragmatic combination of ideas

00:13:05.320 | from both cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance commitment therapy.

00:13:09.280 | Here's how it works.

00:13:10.280 | So there's a thing that is this acute source of stress for you.

00:13:13.520 | Breaking news event is an acute source of stress for you in your life.

00:13:16.040 | It's the hurricane is moving up the coast and some of the tracks show it coming towards

00:13:21.760 | your city and it's, you know, I am so anxious about this, right?

00:13:25.600 | Or whatever it is.

00:13:27.040 | Hard day protocol says you get two check-ins a day, right?

00:13:30.720 | So first one is earlier in the day.

00:13:32.240 | You do a check-in, you get the information you have, and then you do some cognitive behavioral

00:13:36.240 | therapy.

00:13:37.240 | So you go through and you actually identify what you would call the biggest distortions

00:13:43.800 | in your thinking.

00:13:44.800 | Well, you know, you're predicting the future here.

00:13:47.000 | You're exaggerating.

00:13:48.000 | You're looking at the worst case scenarios.

00:13:49.520 | You're being black and white in your thinking.

00:13:51.120 | So you actually push back against your thinking, point out the distortions.

00:13:55.320 | You sort of end the session with like, here's the reality for better, for worse.

00:13:58.240 | Here's what happening.

00:13:59.240 | This might, this might.

00:14:00.240 | If this happens, it's no problem.

00:14:01.400 | If this happens, here's what we would do.

00:14:02.840 | You sort of think it through in a non-distorted, calm way.

00:14:06.520 | And then you shut down the thoughts on it.

00:14:09.800 | Your next session will be later in the day where you can open back up, check back in

00:14:14.080 | and do similar thoughts, pointing out distortions and ending with like, here's where I stand

00:14:17.760 | on this.

00:14:18.760 | Right.

00:14:19.760 | In between those two sessions.

00:14:20.760 | And here's the magic.

00:14:22.760 | When your mind ramps up chemical induced rumination, let's think about this.

00:14:28.600 | Let's go back through what might happen with a hurricane.

00:14:31.480 | Let's go back through with what's happening politically.

00:14:33.880 | You say, I feel that.

00:14:35.640 | I hear you.

00:14:37.240 | But we went through this during the morning session and we ended that morning session

00:14:40.680 | shutting things down, pretty okay with the way things stood.

00:14:44.200 | Like we had a good plan and we're going to check back in this evening.

00:14:47.080 | So like, even if I got something wrong in that morning session, we should be more worried

00:14:50.400 | than we really are.

00:14:51.520 | We'll figure that out in our pre-scheduled evening check-in, but right now I'm not going

00:14:56.200 | back to it.

00:14:57.560 | This is for five o'clock whenever I've scheduled my evening check-in.

00:15:01.100 | And so you're able to respond to the urge to ruminate without actually ruminating on

00:15:06.880 | the substantive details of the thing causing anxiety.

00:15:10.680 | This is highly effective, especially if you're doing this for an extended period of time

00:15:15.020 | because it allows you to get out of the ruminative grooves getting deeper and deeper.

00:15:20.600 | It confines your thinking to smaller points of time.

00:15:23.960 | The urge to ruminate is past quicker and it can really get you out of a cycle, this sort

00:15:28.680 | of cognitive cycle of like, I can't escape thinking about it.

00:15:32.480 | I call that the HDP or hard day protocol and I deploy it when there's particular acute

00:15:36.680 | sources of stress.

00:15:37.680 | But it's perfect for this breaking news, persistent distraction type setting that we're talking

00:15:43.400 | about here.

00:15:44.400 | If you're having a hard time turning your attention from it, HDP it.

00:15:47.720 | All right, tip number five, take a break from your phone.

00:15:54.120 | Clearly in these breaking news moments, it's that ability to kind of keep coming back to

00:15:57.320 | your phone and feeding the itch to get more information that really draws out the attention

00:16:04.360 | to stabilizing full impact of these situations.

00:16:10.240 | So this is a time if there's any to say, I need to temporarily but drastically change

00:16:15.960 | my relationship with my phone.

00:16:18.000 | At work and at home, you need to go hardcore on the phone for your method.

00:16:21.120 | There's a place where your phone is plugged in.

00:16:23.520 | If you need to use it to text someone or check messages, you go to where it's plugged in.

00:16:27.160 | You need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in.

00:16:30.440 | This doesn't prevent you from using your phone, but it prevents you from having it next to

00:16:34.200 | you.

00:16:35.200 | So you can't do the knee jerk check.

00:16:36.200 | Ooh, I'm a little anxious.

00:16:37.200 | Bored.

00:16:38.200 | Boom.

00:16:39.200 | I want to search.

00:16:40.200 | What's going on with Biden?

00:16:41.200 | Where's the hurricane?

00:16:42.200 | What happened?

00:16:43.200 | Any more rumors about Trump?

00:16:44.880 | It's not right there for the knee jerk.

00:16:46.280 | You have to get up and go somewhere else to do it.

00:16:49.080 | Just that friction is going to greatly reduce the amount of times you're actually on that

00:16:52.560 | phone.

00:16:53.780 | During these periods of breaking news, you're having a hard time focusing.

00:16:56.840 | Take all your social media apps off of your phone.

00:16:59.600 | Make sure that you are not logged in on Safari on your phone's browser.

00:17:05.240 | If you are, log out and do not click save password when you log back in.

00:17:12.060 | So you really want to put a lot of friction in terms of a phone-based check-in on social

00:17:16.520 | media.

00:17:17.520 | You would have to go to the website and remember your password.

00:17:20.060 | If your password is easy, make it a pain and write it down somewhere that's like up in

00:17:23.800 | your room somewhere.

00:17:24.800 | Like it really is difficult for you to log in to these services on your phone, at least

00:17:28.720 | during these periods.

00:17:30.760 | And spend more time purposely without your phone accessible at all.

00:17:35.040 | Drive to go somewhere for a hike and leave the phone in your glove compartment.

00:17:38.860 | If your car breaks down, you still have your phone, but you don't have it with you while

00:17:41.800 | you're on your hike.

00:17:43.080 | Go work at a coffee shop and leave your phone at home.

00:17:47.460 | It's very unlikely.

00:17:48.460 | Again, this goes back to my prior warning.

00:17:50.320 | You're not Anderson Cooper.

00:17:52.020 | People don't need you to jump onto the camera because of breaking news.

00:17:55.120 | You will be okay if people can't reach you for 60 to 90 minutes.

00:17:59.320 | All right.

00:18:00.320 | So this is a time to drastically reduce your relationship with your phone.

00:18:05.600 | Tip number six, work on something delightful.

00:18:10.340 | This is a perfect time to begin work on a new project.

00:18:14.220 | It could be personal or it could be professional.

00:18:16.600 | That's just exciting.

00:18:17.600 | Like, I just love this.

00:18:19.720 | This is fun.

00:18:20.720 | It's sort of delightful to work on.

00:18:23.440 | Starting a project is great because that's like the fun part, the particularly fun part.

00:18:26.840 | You're just planning and reading and researching.

00:18:29.120 | You know, you're thinking through like, what if I started, maybe you have some sort of

00:18:33.160 | fun professional idea.

00:18:34.160 | What if I made like a, had some sort of online portfolio of like the art I'm doing.

00:18:39.720 | In fact, is there a way to set up something on my tablet so that I could draw each day

00:18:44.040 | in this program and maybe I could use something like Zapier so that I just like press a button

00:18:49.680 | and that gets uploaded and automatically goes and then I could have this cool portfolio

00:18:53.680 | that's updated automatically or you have some personal project you're really interested

00:18:57.720 | in.

00:18:58.720 | You're like, what if I built this like really elaborate type of animatronic for Halloween?

00:19:01.400 | Like, well, let me start thinking about what I would need and you can go down these rabbit

00:19:04.560 | holes, just have something that's delightful that is completely unrelated to the breaking

00:19:08.820 | news that's going on and is unrelated to any other sort of urgent or stress producing part

00:19:13.920 | of your life.

00:19:14.960 | It just gives your mind again, a cleansing state to go into.

00:19:19.600 | The more of these cleansing states you get into in the day, the least you let these negative

00:19:24.760 | chemicals sit around and stagnate and cause larger corrosion within your sort of persistent

00:19:30.080 | cognitive state.

00:19:31.440 | All right.

00:19:32.520 | So those are my six tips.

00:19:33.520 | I'll read all six real briefly here again for how to maintain some notion of focus and

00:19:38.960 | cognitive health during distracting periods of sort of distracting news periods.

00:19:43.160 | One, go in the newspaper mode to move up the information food chain, three, seek flow states,

00:19:51.440 | four, implement a hard day protocol, five, take breaks from your phone and six, start

00:19:58.760 | working on something delightful.

00:20:03.480 | So I'm sure Jesse, now that I'm home from trying to quiet my mind up north, all breaking

00:20:09.560 | news is going to stop and we'll enter just an extended period.

00:20:13.120 | You know what?

00:20:14.120 | For like the last few years, it just happened year after year, just happened to time with

00:20:19.120 | when we'd go up north.

00:20:20.240 | What consistently was the thing that would inject distracted into my life?

00:20:24.080 | It was always the baseball trade deadline.

00:20:27.360 | Like for the last three years, it's been the sort of dismantling of the Washington Nationals

00:20:32.800 | and the big trades that were going on.

00:20:35.280 | And for multiple years, it was like this major injection of distraction.

00:20:39.520 | I'd be like, okay, I'm up here, I'm just thinking, I'm relaxed, I'm away from it all.

00:20:44.080 | And then boom, we're trading Juan Soto or boom, Scherzer and Trey Turner are gone.

00:20:49.360 | It was like years after years, that was my main source of distraction.

00:20:52.960 | And this year finally, I was like, we're well along in the rebuild.

00:20:58.400 | There's no like tear down blockbuster trades going to happen.

00:21:01.040 | Like this will finally be a calm few weeks while I'm up there and in the political universe

00:21:07.400 | exploded.

00:21:08.400 | So it's impossible.

00:21:09.400 | It's impossible to get away.

00:21:11.720 | I think one of these vacations, it was like the Delta variant of COVID.

00:21:15.040 | There's always something.

00:21:16.040 | There's something about the mid-summer.

00:21:18.340 | So these are well-worn tips for me.

00:21:21.520 | With the hikes, as you talked about in a previous episode as well, can you bring like a pet

00:21:26.400 | like your dog?

00:21:27.400 | Yeah.

00:21:28.400 | That'd be great.

00:21:29.400 | Okay.

00:21:30.400 | Yeah.

00:21:31.400 | Or I didn't add this tip, but another tip is like, hang out with people who just like

00:21:35.480 | are completely disconnected from the thing you're trying to get away from like, yeah,

00:21:40.000 | here's my mountain biking buddies.

00:21:41.320 | Like what are they?

00:21:42.320 | Well, they want to talk about mountain biking and like what's going to, you're going mountain

00:21:45.040 | biking with them.

00:21:46.040 | That's all they want to talk about.

00:21:47.040 | That's all they want to do.

00:21:48.040 | That's good.

00:21:49.040 | Like unrelated socialization.

00:21:50.360 | That's difficult in Tacoma Park, DC.

00:21:52.400 | If you're trying to get away from political news, because everyone here is like involved

00:21:55.680 | in politics, you know?

00:21:57.400 | I mean, it's like all around this are people who work at the white house.

00:22:01.840 | You have like Jamie Raskin lives down the street.

00:22:04.840 | The Obama's former chief of staff is the other way down the street.

00:22:08.560 | The head of the DNC is in the same town.

00:22:11.920 | It's very difficult to get away from politics in this town.

00:22:17.680 | So you got to find people that's, I think that's another good idea.

00:22:20.800 | Yeah.

00:22:21.800 | So hopefully that's useful.

00:22:22.800 | A lot of people were writing me about this.

00:22:24.200 | Like I'm caught up in this political stuff and there's so much news and it seems really

00:22:27.760 | disruptive and, and I'll tell you the more time they spend in it, the more apocalyptic

00:22:32.240 | they get.

00:22:33.240 | I think that's just the way these information sources go.

00:22:35.400 | And the people who manage their attention, Winifred Gallagher style during these times,

00:22:39.440 | they know what's going on, but they make it through this, like it'll be okay.

00:22:43.640 | And so why like waste those whole periods?

00:22:45.840 | It was like during the pandemic, the people who were like, I'll hear what I need to hear,

00:22:51.400 | but I'm not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it outside of that.

00:22:54.160 | Like let me just focus on the things I can control.

00:22:56.760 | Like okay, my business has changed, so let me focus on like this new pivot that can work

00:23:00.460 | during this period.

00:23:01.460 | I mean, I want to know vaguely what's going on with like restrictions, but I'm not following

00:23:05.000 | it beyond that.

00:23:06.000 | I'm working on this project.

00:23:07.000 | I got a dog and you know what, they were way less anxiety ridden and they, and in the end

00:23:13.200 | things were fine.

00:23:14.200 | They came out of it like nothing would have been gained for them to have been like completely

00:23:16.840 | lost in this like information echo chamber.

00:23:19.520 | They hear the information they needed was like an hour a week.

00:23:24.120 | What's going on now?

00:23:25.120 | This is what we're doing.

00:23:26.120 | There's a thing.

00:23:27.120 | Okay, great.

00:23:28.120 | And then let me get back to like whatever.

00:23:29.120 | So, you know, controlling your attention has never been more important than this digital

00:23:32.840 | age where it is so easy to be completely hijacked.

00:23:36.560 | All right.

00:23:37.560 | So we've got some cool questions coming up, but before we do, let's hear from a sponsor.

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00:25:13.380 | It's a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired, right?

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00:25:24.240 | Meetings have summaries, docs find themselves, and every question has an answer.

00:25:28.360 | Notion has long been used by fans of the show as a place to build sort of custom web-based

00:25:33.320 | tools for managing information.

00:25:36.360 | You can have the information that's vital for whatever you do.

00:25:40.600 | You can build these really intuitive, useful, different views for the data, different ways

00:25:44.740 | to find or manipulate the data.

00:25:47.040 | I have seen everything from really big companies using Notion to build out tools for like their

00:25:52.480 | mission critical information to, and I get a lot of emails from people that do this,

00:25:56.680 | people's just building their own sort of geeked out custom task management systems using it.

00:26:02.560 | Notion played a big role in our relationship with our ad agency here at DeepQuestions.

00:26:06.640 | They built out this great tool with it for tracking ad reads, or we could see, for example,

00:26:12.240 | what ad reads are coming up week by week, or we could change the view and say, give

00:26:16.680 | me all of the ad reads for this particular company.

00:26:20.200 | It gave us, we could jump to an interface then to enter in the timestamps and downloads

00:26:24.080 | for that particular episode.

00:26:25.380 | It just was a tool that super simplified dealing with all the data surrounding our ad reads.

00:26:30.480 | So Notion is like incredibly versatile, but what I really like what they're doing is integrating

00:26:34.760 | AI increasingly native to the tool, which really makes it fun to use and it upgrades

00:26:41.520 | its ability.

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00:27:18.040 | So make sure you go to notion.com/cal.

00:27:19.520 | All right, Jesse, let's get on to some questions.

00:27:25.080 | Who do we got first?

00:27:27.480 | First question is from Krishna.

00:27:28.680 | I'm a copywriter and work remotely.

00:27:31.760 | My boss demands that I be constantly available during work.

00:27:35.800 | This interrupts my deep work sessions as I'm constantly getting interrupted with notifications.

00:27:40.200 | How can I deal with this?

00:27:41.480 | It'd be funny if it turned out that Krishna works for me.

00:27:44.880 | Krishna, Krishna, are you doing deep work right now?

00:27:49.160 | Why aren't you answering me if you're doing deep work right now?

00:27:51.320 | You need to answer me immediately to let me know if you're doing deep work.

00:27:55.000 | You know what, we're going to put a standing Zoom meeting so we can talk about why you

00:27:58.080 | need to check in with me about whether you're doing deep work right now.

00:28:01.280 | Okay, Krishna, first of all, my condolences, man, I hate that.

00:28:05.560 | I hate that type of management.

00:28:07.420 | Anyone who has read any of my books on digital knowledge work knows that that type of management

00:28:12.220 | is annoying and counterproductive.

00:28:15.560 | I'm going to give you three ideas, Krishna, just like a menu.

00:28:19.440 | So depending on the reality of your work and the particular psychological makeup of this

00:28:24.800 | particular boss, you can see which of these options seems more realistic.

00:28:29.820 | One of course is the long discussed deep to shallow work ratio conversation.

00:28:35.320 | This goes all the way back to my book, Deep Work, where you sit down with your boss and

00:28:39.400 | say, hey, here's what deep work is.

00:28:41.820 | Here's what shallow work is.

00:28:43.160 | Both of these are important.

00:28:44.200 | Deep work is where I do the actual copywriting, but shallow work is where you and I can discuss

00:28:50.000 | and we coordinate what I should be working on and I get updates and there's other administration

00:28:55.480 | stuff that happens.

00:28:56.480 | Both are important.

00:28:58.640 | What's the ideal ratio of deep to shallow work for me for my job that produced the most

00:29:01.600 | possible value for you and the company?

00:29:03.480 | Let's be positive here.

00:29:05.760 | What's critical when you're talking about deep to shallow work ratios is that you make

00:29:11.480 | it clear that a session does not count as a deep work session if there's context switched

00:29:17.240 | in the middle of it.

00:29:19.200 | So for an hour to count as an hour of deep work, it really has to be an hour of you working

00:29:23.480 | without also answering slacks or emails or calls.

00:29:26.880 | You got to kind of make that clear.

00:29:29.360 | The right way to talk about this, and this is drawing more from a world without email

00:29:33.120 | and slow productivity to get more into this, the right way to talk about this is cognitive

00:29:36.760 | state.

00:29:38.240 | So the deep work cognitive state is defined in part by sustained focus, which allows the

00:29:45.320 | relevant neural networks within your brain to be activated and unrelated networks to

00:29:49.600 | be inhibited.

00:29:50.600 | And this is when you produce good work.

00:29:53.440 | So if you're in a state where you're checking things or responding to things, you don't

00:29:57.600 | have that purity of focus within your brain.

00:30:00.320 | So that's not deep work session.

00:30:01.400 | So deep work is not determined.

00:30:03.120 | This is key for this discussion.

00:30:04.800 | It's not determined by the primary activity that you're doing during that time period.

00:30:09.280 | It's determined by the cognitive state during that time period.

00:30:12.200 | So it's got to be uninterrupted.

00:30:14.560 | A lot of people have reported to me that they went into having this conversation with their

00:30:20.600 | bosses convinced that it would be a no go because they were in an office where it was

00:30:25.240 | just insisted upon that you're accessible.

00:30:29.080 | Like I can't see this possibly changing.

00:30:30.600 | It's in the DNA of my boss.

00:30:32.720 | And then they have this conversation and the boss is like, oh, 50/50 would be good.

00:30:37.080 | And they immediately accommodate you being able to work when you work deeply and not

00:30:41.600 | be interrupted.

00:30:42.600 | That people are often surprised by the magnitude of changes that happen.

00:30:46.400 | These cultures that you think are entrenched in your workplaces are often arbitrary, more

00:30:51.120 | malleable than you think if you have the right tool for dislodging them, which is something

00:30:55.200 | like this, a positive metric that's about optimizing value for the company and not about

00:30:59.880 | you just complaining about distraction.

00:31:03.240 | Second idea, suggest structured check-ins.

00:31:05.760 | Like, hey, I do a lot of copywriting, but there's often updates and stuff that happens.

00:31:10.700 | There's a lot of interaction I need to do with you, boss.

00:31:13.600 | So here's what we should do.

00:31:14.600 | We should have beginning of the day and at two o'clock these pre-scheduled real-time

00:31:19.520 | check-ins on the phone.

00:31:21.240 | So Krishna works remotely, so it'd be on the phone or on Zoom or something.

00:31:24.960 | We always check in.

00:31:25.960 | Here's what I'm working on today.

00:31:27.040 | What else do I need to know?

00:31:28.040 | Okay, great, let's check in back again at one-thirty or two.

00:31:31.080 | Hey, what updates do you have for me?

00:31:32.480 | Let's talk them through.

00:31:33.480 | Let me talk to you about what just happened.

00:31:34.480 | And you can make the argument that these twice-a-day check-ins are going to very efficiently keep

00:31:40.040 | you coordinated and actually free the boss from the burden of having these ongoing back-and-forth

00:31:47.880 | email-based or Slack conversations that he or she has to keep track of and they're bouncing

00:31:53.560 | back and forth at random times.

00:31:55.800 | Remember, from the point of view of the person talking to you, from the point of view of

00:31:58.960 | your boss, they probably dislike these drawn-out back-and-forth conversations as much as you

00:32:03.680 | do because they have to keep track of it.

00:32:06.520 | So it might be more attractive.

00:32:07.520 | Like we have this very concentrated check-ins.

00:32:09.320 | If I have issues, I know exactly when we're going to talk and that I can get you.

00:32:12.840 | I don't have to just send it off in an email and just I don't know when the response is

00:32:16.000 | going to come.

00:32:17.080 | So twice-a-day check-ins might be a solution for both parties here.

00:32:21.200 | The third idea, and you can actually add this idea onto the first two.

00:32:25.320 | This comes from my book, A World Without Email, add a safety valve.

00:32:30.360 | So for almost any type of more structured communication process that you suggest, it's

00:32:36.620 | often useful if you think there's going to be some resistance from other people involved

00:32:41.620 | to put in what I call a safety valve, a way they can always reach you if they need to

00:32:45.240 | outside of the system's rules.

00:32:48.320 | The key is to add enough friction to this that it's not something that you would easily

00:32:53.200 | do.

00:32:54.200 | For instance, here is my personal cell phone number.

00:32:58.880 | Now, this is really critical.

00:33:01.280 | I have it in do not disturb mode when I work.

00:33:03.840 | So I don't see text messages, but calls come through.

00:33:08.400 | So if, for example, there is something really urgent that comes up before our next scheduled

00:33:15.440 | check-in or when I'm in the middle of a deep work session, you can just call me on my personal

00:33:19.280 | number.

00:33:20.280 | The call will come through.

00:33:22.680 | It's not impossible, right?

00:33:25.200 | So it destabilizes the fears, right?

00:33:28.000 | So often it's fears of particular rare outcomes that prevent bosses from agreeing to new communication

00:33:33.880 | processes.

00:33:34.880 | What if there's emergency X?

00:33:36.960 | It alleviates those fears.

00:33:39.060 | If there was emergency X, I could call you, right?

00:33:42.560 | But it's high enough friction that they're not going to do it unless it's a true emergency.

00:33:47.140 | If you let it be text messaging, too low friction.

00:33:50.440 | Bosses will be like, "Let me just text you.

00:33:52.840 | That's low friction.

00:33:53.920 | There's no social capital costs for me.

00:33:55.320 | I can just do it and move on with my day."

00:33:57.120 | But a call is high enough friction that it has to be sort of more of a legitimate emergency.

00:34:01.040 | So the safety valve method works well because it's what finally helps convince like your

00:34:05.960 | boss or your team we can do this more structured communication because the worst case scenarios

00:34:10.240 | can actually happen.

00:34:11.240 | You can always just call me.

00:34:12.280 | But the friction is high enough that they basically won't.

00:34:15.280 | So it's like a trick.

00:34:16.760 | It's a trick to get the system you want.

00:34:18.880 | Your boss is thinking like, "Oh, I can get them whenever I need to.

00:34:21.440 | It won't be a problem."

00:34:22.440 | But no one wants to call people.

00:34:24.280 | And so you end up actually getting the system for the cost of like once a week you get a

00:34:29.400 | call.

00:34:30.400 | All right.

00:34:31.400 | So safety valves is the third thing to suggest.

00:34:32.400 | All right.

00:34:33.400 | Who do we got next, Jesse?

00:34:34.960 | Next question is from Tian.

00:34:36.240 | "I'm comfortable with my current job, but it's risky.

00:34:39.640 | It's a startup and it might not make it.

00:34:41.760 | Should I change jobs?"

00:34:44.280 | I would say don't change jobs now, right?

00:34:47.840 | Because actually the best way from a career evolution perspective to leave a startup to

00:34:55.320 | go to something else is actually the startup failing because that's not on you and it makes

00:35:01.120 | you very attractive.

00:35:02.120 | You're like, "Oh, this is someone who has been in other startups and has had this role

00:35:05.760 | before.

00:35:06.760 | Yeah, most startups don't work, but now they're available.

00:35:09.720 | Let's grab them."

00:35:10.720 | So you actually have more, I think it looks better and you have more leverage in the technology

00:35:16.320 | startup world if you came out of a startup that didn't make it as opposed to, "I left

00:35:23.280 | a startup when it was still rock and rolling."

00:35:25.760 | Then people are like, "What's going on there?

00:35:27.320 | Were you not cutting it?"

00:35:28.800 | They're like, "We need to get someone better in here."

00:35:31.160 | So I would ride it out.

00:35:34.080 | However, take advantage of the flexible or sort of building the plane while it's in the

00:35:40.600 | air nature of startups to max out your career capital acquisition while there.

00:35:45.800 | So career capital, for those who don't know it, is a concept from my book, So Good They

00:35:49.920 | Can't Ignore You.

00:35:51.200 | It is my term for your rare and valuable professional skills.

00:35:55.760 | Career capital is your primary tool for crafting your working life towards things that resonate

00:36:00.120 | and away from things that don't.

00:36:02.520 | Startups give you a lot of flexibility.

00:36:05.220 | Don't squander that flexibility by being Captain Slack.

00:36:09.180 | What I'm offering here is a jack of all trades.

00:36:12.040 | I answer everyone's questions at all hours of the day, and it's all sort of small stuff,

00:36:16.520 | but I'm kind of like this useful glue that kind of helps everyone else do what they're

00:36:20.160 | doing.

00:36:21.160 | No, you want to be building up demonstrative skills.

00:36:24.100 | Hey, why don't I take on our API architecture?

00:36:29.920 | Because that is a really valuable thing to know how to do, and I'm going to dive into

00:36:32.880 | that and know how to do that.

00:36:34.320 | I'm not going to be bothered by a lot of it.

00:36:35.640 | I'm doing the API architecture.

00:36:36.840 | I'm going to learn how to do our digital marketing.

00:36:39.000 | Why don't I take that up?

00:36:40.600 | So use the flexibility and autonomy of startups to build up skills you think are going to

00:36:46.560 | be very valuable with whatever comes next, because the more rare and valuable skills

00:36:51.440 | you have, the more control you're going to have about the nature of your work.

00:36:56.680 | All right, Jesse, who do we got?

00:36:59.920 | Next question is from Brendan.

00:37:01.640 | I'm a journalist working on my second book.

00:37:04.160 | My days are largely time-blocked, and I do stuff like transcribing recordings, phone

00:37:09.000 | interviews, some in person, research, reading, and writing.

00:37:12.800 | My problem is dealing with source phone calls.

00:37:15.240 | How can I prevent unpredictable source phone calls from interrupting my focus on other

00:37:19.680 | tasks?

00:37:20.680 | You know, I've heard this question before.

00:37:22.560 | I have this issue a little bit as well.

00:37:25.880 | Not so much incoming source phone calls, but for a lot of my journalism, I have to set

00:37:30.560 | up calls and interviews, right?

00:37:34.240 | And what happens, this is what this reporter, I believe, is talking about.

00:37:39.120 | What happens is it becomes very disruptive, because your instinct when you're asking someone

00:37:44.660 | to call you or do an interview with you is to be as flexible as possible.

00:37:49.400 | Hey, when can you do this next week?

00:37:51.040 | And just sort of everything that's not currently booked with a meeting or appointment is on

00:37:55.440 | the table.

00:37:56.760 | But then you get this sort of scattershot of meetings and trips that eats up your time

00:38:01.800 | to consistently make deep work.

00:38:03.600 | Like, I can't write every morning because three mornings out of five, I have a call

00:38:06.840 | this morning and I have to go see this source this morning.

00:38:10.080 | The best thing you can do is have what I think of as like very granular ranges for when this

00:38:14.600 | type of stuff happens, both outgoing and ingoing.

00:38:19.040 | So for example, you might say Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, any time in the afternoon is loosely

00:38:26.840 | left open for interviews and calls.

00:38:29.960 | You can tell sources, you're like, "Hey, yeah, just let me know.

00:38:32.960 | In fact, I'm usually always around Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday afternoons.

00:38:36.000 | You can just, here's my personal number.

00:38:37.200 | Call me."

00:38:38.200 | So you're kind of directing the incoming towards those periods.

00:38:40.360 | And when you were scheduling meetings, outgoing meetings, "Hey, when can we talk about this?"

00:38:45.480 | Instead of just saying, "When are you free next week?"

00:38:48.800 | You say, "When are you free Tuesday through Thursday in the afternoon?"

00:38:53.040 | That's when I typically do this type of stuff.

00:38:57.520 | This now constrains the sort of range, the territory within your schedule in which these

00:39:02.080 | type of disruptions happen, which means Monday and Friday, you can really go in an autonomous,

00:39:08.600 | undistracted way.

00:39:09.960 | Every single morning, you can work in an undistracted way pretty predictably.

00:39:14.920 | So it's not a super narrow range, like I do my calls from 3 to 3.43 on Thursdays.

00:39:21.160 | And if you cannot do it then, then we will not talk.

00:39:23.400 | If you get that restrictive, you're going to have no sources.

00:39:25.720 | But if you're talking like half the week, half the days, you would be surprised, right?

00:39:30.680 | And sometimes maybe people have to go forward a couple of weeks for that work, but people

00:39:33.320 | don't care.

00:39:34.320 | In fact, people like having a little bit of constraints, right?

00:39:37.720 | What do we really dread worse from a cognitive effort standpoint than when you get that email

00:39:43.080 | from someone, you're like, "Yeah, we can talk."

00:39:44.800 | And they say, "When is good for you next week?"

00:39:47.480 | You're like, "I don't know."

00:39:49.080 | You're talking to like 40 or 50 possible available hours, like, "Do I just pick a couple?

00:39:54.440 | Do I give you every single hour that's free?"

00:39:56.360 | It's actually nice to have some constraints, like, "Which afternoons, Tuesday through Thursday,

00:40:01.240 | when in that are you free?"

00:40:02.240 | And now you're like, "Oh, there's two times in there I'm free."

00:40:04.160 | You've made my job in answering your question easier.

00:40:09.080 | So have those rough ranges.

00:40:12.120 | That helps.

00:40:13.120 | I mean, I'll be doing something similar with my upcoming temporary administrative role.

00:40:18.560 | I will have these sort of rough ranges where I'm like, "This is when we set up.

00:40:22.560 | Let's meet, pick a time.

00:40:23.800 | When in here works for you.

00:40:24.800 | This is when I normally meet.

00:40:25.800 | You can call me any time during these periods if you have a question."

00:40:28.320 | I'm definitely gonna be trying something similar because I need every morning, I really want

00:40:32.360 | every morning, if I'm not teaching, I want every morning free for writing, and I want

00:40:36.440 | at least one day a week where like I'm gonna get that full day pretty autonomously working

00:40:40.760 | on stuff.

00:40:41.760 | So I'll report back how that works, but that would be my suggestion.

00:40:44.040 | All right, who do we got next?

00:40:47.800 | - Next question's from Carolina.

00:40:49.120 | "At the start of every month, I look forward to your review of the books you read.

00:40:53.200 | I can't come close to reading five books per month, but I do enjoy reading.

00:40:56.840 | My question is about reading difficult and long books.

00:40:59.860 | How do you suggest I read those?

00:41:01.840 | What's the ideal ratio of reading difficult to easy books for someone in my shoes?"

00:41:06.280 | - Well, first of all, Carolina, I think you probably could read five books a month.

00:41:10.520 | You know, again, the easiest thing to do here is stop using your phone so much.

00:41:14.600 | Most people's phone usage is already right there, about five books a month worth of reading.

00:41:18.920 | The second thing you can do is just integrate reading as a default activity to more parts

00:41:22.740 | of your day.

00:41:23.740 | It's like what you do when you eat lunch, it's what you do at the end of the day.

00:41:27.680 | I have a pretty busy schedule, but the books still sort of add up.

00:41:32.440 | All right, but to get to your specific question, long books, we say hard books, I'm thinking

00:41:36.760 | long books.

00:41:37.760 | They can take a lot of time.

00:41:39.360 | A couple things I would suggest is when it comes to difficult books, pick those that

00:41:43.440 | delight you.

00:41:44.780 | If you make it a chore, it's gonna be very hard to get through.

00:41:47.120 | So if you're reading a big book, it's because you're fascinated in what that book is about.

00:41:51.160 | That will really help.

00:41:53.300 | Big books, hard books, it's good to have a regular time for those.

00:41:56.200 | I often do this where, you know, like I need to read a big book on like AI policy or like

00:42:02.560 | right now I'm reading for an intellectual biography of Thoreau, which useful context

00:42:10.320 | for the introduction of my new book, we're gonna be talking about Thoreau.

00:42:13.540 | And like when I was on vacation, it was, that's just what I do first thing in the morning

00:42:17.400 | even before like my kids wake up is like get in a reading session of this book.

00:42:20.960 | And it's like the slow and regular, like now you just do that.

00:42:24.040 | And you got the slow and regular pace.

00:42:26.680 | Combine the big books like shorter, funner stuff.

00:42:28.720 | If you're just only reading the big book and you can't read anything else till it's done,

00:42:33.480 | its footprint is too big and you go too long without being able to read anything else.

00:42:37.040 | And you encounter new books you hear about that seem fun or exciting.

00:42:40.240 | You don't get to them because you're waiting for this big book to end and you're going

00:42:43.080 | to abandon the big book.

00:42:44.320 | So just have that like steady time for reading the difficult book and be okay with it taking

00:42:49.160 | a very long time and then like still have like fun books you're reading outside of that.

00:42:54.440 | And above all, don't sweat the timing.

00:42:56.520 | I mean, unless you have a podcast where you actually have to report on your reading each

00:42:59.960 | month, no one's tracking it.

00:43:01.440 | So what's important is that like you're constantly engaged in books you like.

00:43:05.800 | Sometimes you make more progress than others, but that you're enjoying the time you're spending

00:43:10.080 | doing that intellectual activity as opposed to shallower intellectual activities like

00:43:13.760 | just looking at your phone.

00:43:16.520 | So for that morning session where you read the Thoreau book, how long would, like half

00:43:21.440 | an hour?

00:43:22.440 | Yeah, like 20 minutes, half hour.

00:43:23.440 | Yeah, stuff adds up.

00:43:24.440 | So when I first got up there, I finally finished reading The Coming Wave, which is just like

00:43:30.700 | an AI book that everyone's reading, written by the co-founder of DeepMind.

00:43:36.880 | And then I moved on to Thoreau book, yeah.

00:43:39.240 | And I'll probably ramp it up a little bit, you know, it just depends on the day.

00:43:42.560 | It'll take me a while to read, but I don't really care.

00:43:45.720 | I want that background though, so I can talk with more confidence about Thoreau and just

00:43:49.200 | sort of finishing this whole book is going to give me, give me that confidence.

00:43:53.480 | All right, let's see what we got here.

00:43:56.400 | Oh, is it our next question, our slow productivity corner?

00:43:58.760 | Yes.

00:43:59.760 | All right, let's get some theme music.

00:44:03.160 | So for those who are new, we have one question every week that is relevant to my new book,

00:44:13.280 | Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:44:17.160 | We call this a slow productivity corner.

00:44:19.520 | If you haven't checked out that book, do so.

00:44:22.920 | It's like the source Bible for 60% of what we talk about on this show.

00:44:26.120 | So check out slow productivity if you haven't.

00:44:28.280 | Okay, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week?

00:44:32.200 | Hi, it's from Josh.

00:44:33.840 | I just turned 30 and I'm getting worried.

00:44:36.560 | I feel like my mind doesn't fully trust the slow productivity approach.

00:44:40.080 | I feel like I've started too late and should have adopted these strategies five to 10 years

00:44:43.920 | ago.

00:44:44.920 | I still have high ambitions for my professional and creative life, but deep down I worry that

00:44:48.640 | I'm still not good enough and I'm too late.

00:44:50.760 | Oh my, if 30 is too late, Jesse, we're in trouble.

00:44:53.920 | Yeah, we're dinosaurs.

00:44:55.280 | We're old men.

00:44:56.280 | We're old men.

00:44:57.280 | Look, you're not too late.

00:44:59.800 | The way I think it's useful to think about career and your age is the decade approach.

00:45:05.120 | You've got your 20s, you have your 30s, you have your 40s, you have your 50s, et cetera,

00:45:09.600 | right?

00:45:10.600 | For most people, your 20s is just about getting on your feet, becoming an autonomous adult,

00:45:16.240 | having a job, holding down a job, saving a little money, having a place to live.

00:45:19.920 | You buy your first car, right?

00:45:21.280 | It's just, hey, I want to, while still just like enjoying being an adult for the first

00:45:25.240 | time, your 30s really, especially in like a knowledge work context, right, where jobs

00:45:31.440 | are more fluid and the potential promotion ladders or advancement ladders are long and

00:45:38.200 | go far into the distance.

00:45:40.280 | Your 30s then are about, okay, now I want to like figure out my professional life, figure

00:45:45.120 | out, make my, like this is where I want to live, this is where I want to do, I want to

00:45:50.200 | be able to support myself and support my family.

00:45:52.280 | I want to be sort of like comfortable.

00:45:54.520 | Like this is where I figure out what I want my life to actually be like.

00:45:58.080 | So you're 30.

00:45:59.080 | This is perfect.

00:46:00.600 | Perfect time to start thinking about slow productivity.

00:46:03.800 | New to it, in your young 30s, I'm going to highlight a couple of things to focus on right

00:46:07.800 | off the bat.

00:46:09.560 | I would really start with actually principle three, obsess over quality.

00:46:14.920 | This is the right time to change your mindset towards.

00:46:17.800 | I'm going to figure out something that is really important in like what I do or what

00:46:21.920 | I want to do.

00:46:22.920 | And I'm going to master this like Jiro the Sushi Chef and Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

00:46:29.280 | Reference to those who know that movie.

00:46:31.060 | Like now I'm going to start really caring about mastery because that obsession over

00:46:36.460 | mastery of something that is valuable, it could take one to three years so you really

00:46:41.200 | get the full rewards for that.

00:46:42.360 | But that's perfect timing to start this in your 30s.

00:46:44.840 | That's going to be the engine for everything else.

00:46:47.440 | For one thing, as I talk about in my book, as you really obsess over mastery of something

00:46:51.920 | that's valuable, you're going to find more meaning in your work.

00:46:55.560 | It's a key time to find more meaning in your work because if you don't, the excitement

00:47:00.160 | of just I have a job from your 20s has worn off and you might stumble towards a sort of

00:47:05.440 | nihilistic existentialism.

00:47:06.440 | So this is a good time to find meaning in your work.

00:47:09.480 | Two, it is going to make pseudo productivity, it's going to make this potentially sort of

00:47:15.840 | crippling addiction to activity for the sake of activity seem increasingly absurd.

00:47:21.680 | So it's just going to change your mindset.

00:47:23.360 | So a slower productivity approach is not going to be something you're convincing yourself

00:47:26.760 | to try and you're afraid of.

00:47:28.480 | A slower productivity approach is instead going to become self-evident.

00:47:33.120 | And three, as you get good at things in your early 30s, there's your career capital, there's

00:47:39.240 | your flexibility.

00:47:40.960 | You are now in demand.

00:47:42.800 | Your employer doesn't want to lose you, other employers want you.

00:47:45.820 | Now you can start getting interesting as your 30s go on.

00:47:48.400 | Where do I want to live?

00:47:49.480 | Now I have choices.

00:47:50.480 | I want to be in the countryside.

00:47:53.760 | I want to be, you know what, I want to live up by like the White Mountains in New Hampshire

00:47:57.120 | and do my job remotely and do it at 75% time.

00:48:00.520 | This is where if you've become excellent at what you do, people are like, okay, sure,

00:48:04.880 | that's what we'll do, right?

00:48:05.880 | Like this is where you gain your autonomy.

00:48:08.660 | This is where you gain more options.

00:48:11.320 | So obsess over quality right now is going to give you lots of advantages.

00:48:16.560 | If I was going to point towards a second thing to do right now, I would say this is a great

00:48:20.560 | time to do lifestyle-centric planning.

00:48:22.320 | If you haven't tried this exercise yet, figure out where for like, think of the second half

00:48:27.280 | of your 30s.

00:48:28.280 | Think of the right timeframe if you're 30 even right now.

00:48:32.040 | What do you want your day-to-day life to be like in the second half of your 30s?

00:48:34.840 | All aspects of your life, like where you live, the rhythm of your day, who's around you,

00:48:38.800 | how you're spending your time, the general characteristic of your work as well as the

00:48:42.520 | general characteristic of your time outside of work.

00:48:45.500 | If you have specific examples of real people that you've seen in magazine profiles or documentaries

00:48:50.300 | or videos that resonate, integrate them into this.

00:48:53.040 | Get this really clear vision of your ideal lifestyle for the second half of your 30s.

00:48:57.340 | This is the time to do it and start working backwards from that vision.

00:49:01.400 | All right.

00:49:02.720 | So what different things can I be moving towards now that's going to move me closer to aspects

00:49:06.640 | of this vision?

00:49:07.640 | And that's when you start building up these interesting, nuanced, bespoke, evidence-based

00:49:12.800 | lifestyle plans.

00:49:14.480 | This is a very different approach than what most people in our culture lean towards, which

00:49:17.960 | is working forward to a singular grand goal.

00:49:21.120 | It's our instinct as Americans.

00:49:23.320 | I have a singular grand goal.

00:49:25.040 | If I do this, then my whole life will be better.

00:49:27.280 | And it doesn't work out that way.

00:49:28.360 | You're much better off having your ideal lifestyle in your 30s is the time to figure this out.

00:49:33.680 | And then say, okay, how am I going to work towards the aspects of that lifestyle?

00:49:39.120 | That works hand-in-hand with the career capital you generate by obsessing over quality.

00:49:43.240 | Works hand-in-hand with that, that you begin to have some pretty interesting options that

00:49:47.800 | maybe are very specific to your exact job and situation.

00:49:51.060 | It's not some big thing, like I'm going to write a screenplay or I'm going to sell my

00:49:54.620 | novel.

00:49:55.620 | It's very specific and boring to the outside world.

00:49:57.260 | But for you, it's what allows you to transform these aspects of your life to really get closer

00:50:01.620 | to your ideal lifestyle.

00:50:02.620 | So your 30 is the perfect time to think about this.

00:50:06.000 | But I'm glad you asked.

00:50:07.540 | If you haven't read it yet, though, definitely pick up Slow Productivity.

00:50:12.140 | Also pick up So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:50:15.080 | That will also be really useful to you right now.

00:50:17.820 | And with that, we'll leave it with some more theme music.

00:50:23.860 | All right, now we have a case study.

00:50:32.300 | This is where people write in to talk about them applying the type of advice we do here

00:50:37.860 | on the show to their specific life.

00:50:39.300 | So we can see what do these ideas look like in practice.

00:50:43.180 | This case study comes from Old Coder, who says, "I have two scenarios to share.

00:50:49.420 | First, over the last few years, my job has been transitioning away from coding to management.

00:50:56.140 | There are also changes in the leadership of the company, and I found myself disagreeing

00:50:59.420 | with many of the new directions.

00:51:01.600 | I had a strong urge to resign and search for a perfect job that I would truly enjoy.

00:51:06.860 | However, I resisted this temptation and decided to use the lifestyle-centric career planning

00:51:12.180 | approach instead.

00:51:14.180 | I reflected on my long career at this company and realized that I enjoyed coding more than

00:51:19.100 | management.

00:51:20.580 | I was able to interview for a couple other jobs within my company.

00:51:23.620 | I was selected for one as a remote developer, no more managing the people, and hardly any

00:51:29.020 | direct communication with top tier management, much better work balance to address my priorities

00:51:33.860 | outside of work.

00:51:35.940 | Second, ever since I started listening to your podcast, I have undergone many changes

00:51:41.100 | in how I look at and live my life.

00:51:44.240 | Over the last 10 months, with discipline, I have learned and started progressing in

00:51:48.500 | playing the flute.

00:51:50.820 | For the initial three to four months, there was almost no progress, but I kept at it.

00:51:54.380 | While I'm far from being a musician, I'm also not as bad as I thought I could be.

00:52:00.020 | This gives me a lot of confidence that I could put discipline efforts into a hard thing and

00:52:03.620 | keep doing it."

00:52:04.980 | All right, Old Coder, this is a great example of many ideas from the sort of deep life questions

00:52:10.500 | that we deal with often here on the show.

00:52:12.980 | I'm going to point out two things here for the audience.

00:52:16.820 | Notice lifestyle-centric planning, working backwards from your ideal lifestyle, not forwards

00:52:23.020 | towards a singular grand goal, opens up these really interesting possibilities.

00:52:27.300 | Now, I just talked about this in the question before this, and we're seeing an actual practical

00:52:31.740 | case study of these ideas in action here.

00:52:34.380 | What most people would do in Old Coder situation, where they're like, "Ah, man, I don't like

00:52:39.460 | this job," right, "I'm in management, I don't like the upper-level management, I just don't

00:52:45.140 | like my job," they would try to do a grand singular goal.

00:52:48.140 | Like, "Let me start from scratch and become, you know, a genre book writer."

00:52:54.180 | You have some grand plan for how you're going to change everything and make it better all

00:52:57.500 | at once.

00:52:58.680 | What Old Coder did instead was lifestyle-centric planning, and when thinking about the professional

00:53:03.220 | aspects of their life, he didn't fixate on specific jobs, but on the characteristics

00:53:10.780 | of the work life.

00:53:12.500 | And what he realized was, "I'm solitary, kind of introverted, I do like coding, I don't

00:53:18.500 | really like managing people, and there's a lot of friction when I have to deal with other

00:53:22.500 | like top-tier management people.

00:53:24.020 | I get really caught up on their ideas, whether they're good or not, but I don't actually

00:53:27.260 | have much control over them because they're a higher level.

00:53:29.540 | So really, for me, more ideal work would be something where it's much more solitary and

00:53:33.900 | it's much more sort of focused, intellectually demanding, and sort of flexibility about how

00:53:39.200 | you do that work."

00:53:40.300 | Once he realized that, he's like, "Looking at my options, I see, 'Oh, here's a great

00:53:43.420 | option to move closer to that lifestyle,' I change my job away from management towards

00:53:47.380 | this remote developer position, I see it's available.

00:53:49.900 | This might be less money.

00:53:51.420 | It's probably less prestigious."

00:53:53.820 | So it's not what shows up when you take the grand goal methodology of like, "Well, what's

00:53:57.220 | something cooler or impressive I can go after?"

00:53:59.620 | But it comes up blaring with neon lights around it when you take the lifestyle-centric approach.

00:54:05.220 | The other cool thing I want to point out here, which comes up in almost every discussion

00:54:10.100 | of the deep life, is that discipline, by which we just mean the ability to consistently work

00:54:15.860 | on hard things, things that are hard in the moment, but that deliver important results

00:54:22.620 | down the line.

00:54:24.320 | That type of discipline is to fuel for everything else.

00:54:27.320 | Everything that goes into transforming your life requires as an input to the system that

00:54:31.160 | type of discipline.

00:54:33.080 | It's thing after thing that are kind of hard in the moment, less exciting than your phone,

00:54:38.420 | but you need to do long-term to move towards a deep life.

00:54:42.080 | What we see here is you get better at discipline if you practice it.

00:54:45.180 | What a cool example.

00:54:46.560 | He began playing the flute, and by doing so was like, "Oh, I can learn hard things."

00:54:51.520 | Ten months later, I'm pretty excited where I was, even though in month one, every session

00:54:55.440 | was hard, I could see no results.

00:54:57.600 | He is absolutely right that that translates over.

00:55:01.280 | That translates over to your general sense of what psychologists would call efficacy,

00:55:06.980 | your ability to pursue hard things and accomplish them.

00:55:09.400 | This is like a fantastic case study of ideas of our practical approach to the deep life

00:55:13.840 | in action.

00:55:15.640 | For those who are wondering how do I know it's a he, it's because we have parts of this.

00:55:19.860 | We have correspondence to go along with these case studies and questions often that we don't

00:55:23.040 | read on the air.

00:55:24.040 | I'm not making assumptions, actually, it is a he.

00:55:28.000 | Let's see here.

00:55:29.000 | Now, Jesse, do we have a call or are we going right to the function?

00:55:30.000 | >> Yeah, we do.

00:55:31.000 | >> All right.

00:55:32.000 | Let's hear it.

00:55:33.000 | >> Okay.

00:55:34.000 | >> Hi, Cal.

00:55:35.000 | My name is Justine from Australia, and I'm about to start a new role in a new team, but

00:55:43.540 | in the same company, so doing a similar role as a senior data analytics lead.

00:55:49.200 | I'm moving from a team that is quite structured and follows an agile ways of working with

00:55:56.440 | quarterly planning, two-week sprint planning, and everything's quite methodical in how the

00:56:02.660 | work that we do is planned out.

00:56:04.900 | So I'm moving into a new team that I've heard is reactive, it's frazzled, doesn't have a

00:56:10.620 | structured way of planning future work.

00:56:13.540 | So what advice would you give to someone in my position who wants to find the right balance

00:56:19.460 | between being seen as a strong performer in the new role who delivers high-quality work

00:56:25.300 | within the required time frames without allowing myself to get sucked into the stressed out,

00:56:33.060 | reactive, frazzled, last-minute rush hive mind that I've heard the new team can be like

00:56:40.260 | just due to the lack of overall structure in how they plan their work.

00:56:46.580 | Any advice is much appreciated.

00:56:47.860 | Thanks, Cal.

00:56:48.860 | >> All right, Justine, I like this question.

00:56:51.320 | This is also sort of a stealth, slow productivity corner question because the ideas here come

00:56:56.940 | straight from my book.

00:56:59.180 | The key thing I want you to think about here is that there's two different factors at play.

00:57:04.420 | There's you wanting to produce really high-quality work that you're known for, and then there's

00:57:09.740 | separately from that not being socially difficult in terms of your responsiveness.

00:57:19.140 | These are two unrelated things.

00:57:21.220 | You being super responsive and really leaning into the hyperactive hive mind frazzled workflow

00:57:27.340 | of this team, that might be important from a I don't want to be annoying or difficult

00:57:34.300 | to them perspective, unrelated to whether or not you get known as a top performer that

00:57:37.800 | produces really good work.

00:57:39.300 | So first of all, let's keep that in mind.

00:57:41.340 | As time goes on and you're able to produce really good stuff when you said you're going

00:57:45.620 | to do it, you're going to gain more and more idiosyncrasy credits in terms of how you structure

00:57:51.020 | and approach your work.

00:57:52.020 | So these are two separate things.

00:57:54.180 | So what you do in the meantime to walk this balance between I don't want to be fully frazzled

00:57:58.860 | in the hyperactive hive mind, but I also don't want to be super obnoxious.

00:58:02.460 | This is a social issue, not a productivity issue.

00:58:06.180 | What you can do is a ramp it up over time.

00:58:09.220 | So again, as you produce more, as you finish more and more stuff, that's great.

00:58:13.280 | You get more leeway in how you interact to, and I think this is super detailed in especially

00:58:22.820 | principle one and slow productivity.

00:58:24.580 | But two, you can move a lot of this structure that your team adopted in your last team.

00:58:30.540 | You can move it onto yourself.

00:58:33.460 | And again, I have a whole big long book chapter about this, so I won't get too detailed now,

00:58:39.180 | but there are ways to move a lot of this structure from the team to the individual so you can

00:58:43.380 | gain some of its benefits.

00:58:46.060 | So this is where you get things like, for example, your own work tracking cue.

00:58:52.060 | You're kind of simulating a Kanban board of waiting for working on done within just your

00:58:56.280 | own life and you make it transparent for everyone else.

00:58:58.700 | Well, my WIP, my works in progress limit here, I work on two things at a time and here they

00:59:02.900 | are and here's the other things you guys have brought up and here's where they are and you

00:59:05.540 | can see their order and I'll tell you when I pull them over there and it's transparent

00:59:09.740 | and you can see it so you know what I'm doing.

00:59:12.880 | You can really push a lot of office hours, structure communication, lots of just again

00:59:17.060 | and again you're deflecting like, "Next time you're free, these hours, I'm always here.

00:59:22.540 | Grab me.

00:59:23.540 | We'll talk this through."

00:59:24.540 | Completely deflecting again and again ongoing conversations.

00:59:27.140 | You have meeting planning software where you have a bunch of little short blocks, Tuesday,

00:59:32.180 | Wednesday, Thursday afternoons.

00:59:33.180 | You're like, "And if you need to grab me just individually, boom, grab any time on here

00:59:36.580 | that works, whatever works for your schedule."

00:59:38.180 | So you're just again and again deflecting them away from just, "Can't we just go back

00:59:43.500 | and forth now because in the moment it's easy for me to say, to send this email, then it's

00:59:47.380 | off my plate, obligation, hot potato, you're it."

00:59:49.900 | You again deflect these type of back and forth the real time.

00:59:54.440 | This is not necessarily a bad thing from their perspective.

00:59:57.060 | People just want clarity like, "Okay, whatever.

00:59:59.640 | The thing is I'm stressed because I have this question about this thing we're working on.

01:00:03.220 | And if I send you an email, it's off my plate and that's great until it comes back to me,

01:00:06.540 | then it's on my plate again.

01:00:07.540 | Then I'll send you another email and it's off my plate and I'll be happy again.

01:00:09.900 | That's fine."

01:00:10.900 | Or if they get back from you like, "Talk to me at three."

01:00:13.260 | Or here's a link and click a time and then it's on your calendar.

01:00:15.760 | You've solved the same problem.

01:00:17.520 | They no longer have to keep track of this thing.

01:00:19.180 | There's a next step that's scheduled out there.

01:00:22.460 | So you could be structured about how you organize what you're working on and have a work in

01:00:25.640 | progress limit that's constrained and just be super transparent about this with everyone

01:00:30.240 | else.

01:00:31.240 | You can deflect more back and forth asynchronous conversations to more structured real time

01:00:36.280 | sessions.

01:00:37.800 | You can just do that even if your team doesn't like it.

01:00:40.000 | If you're careful about it, they'll be annoyed, but it won't be insufferably annoyed.

01:00:45.040 | And as you deliver again and again, then they'll just be like, "Justine's super organized.

01:00:50.600 | It's really impressive.

01:00:51.600 | She gets stuff done.

01:00:52.600 | She has these cool systems.

01:00:53.880 | How did that work?

01:00:54.880 | What's this work in progress cue?

01:00:56.920 | Tell me about that again."

01:00:57.920 | They'll be kind of impressed by it.

01:01:00.320 | The key is you do have to produce, but you can put some structure on yourself in the

01:01:03.320 | meantime.

01:01:04.320 | All right.

01:01:05.320 | So we have a final segment coming up, but first take a quick break to talk about another

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01:01:48.920 | All right, look, here's the thing.

01:01:52.120 | We talk all the time on here.

01:01:53.160 | We just did a question about this, about like your teams working together, your teams being

01:01:58.400 | able to have good ways of structuring their work and communication.

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01:03:15.680 | cha-ching.

01:03:16.680 | Look, Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your

01:03:20.720 | business.

01:03:21.720 | We're talking from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage

01:03:26.680 | all the way to the, did we just hit a million order stage?

01:03:31.280 | Shopify is there to help you grow.

01:03:33.960 | Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits like the deer outfit we talked

01:03:41.000 | about last week on the show that I like to walk around my vacation home in to upset the

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01:04:17.480 | We don't yet have an online shop here at Deep Questions, but we know when we do, Shopify

01:04:22.400 | is what we're going to use.

01:04:23.400 | In fact, Jesse, we have a Shopify account kind of waiting to go.

01:04:26.000 | We were messing around with it before.

01:04:27.340 | Yes, we were.

01:04:28.340 | Yeah, so we are good to go with Shopify.

01:04:30.560 | All we're missing is something to sell that's not going to terrify or horrify people countrywide.

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01:05:03.180 | All right, Jesse, we're now moving on to our final segment.

01:05:08.920 | Okay.

01:05:09.920 | So we've got two, I just had two sort of fun sightings of the book, Deep Work in Unexpected

01:05:15.920 | Places.

01:05:16.920 | I'm going to bring something up on the screen here.

01:05:19.120 | So if you're watching instead of listening, you can see what we're talking about.

01:05:23.040 | All right, first let's talk about, you know, the New York Times just released their list

01:05:26.680 | of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

01:05:32.400 | Now the way that they generated this list is they sent out surveys to about a thousand

01:05:39.160 | notable people from the world of books and asked them for their 10 best books.

01:05:44.040 | What do you think the 10 best books are of the 21st century?

01:05:46.600 | And then they aggregated those votes and did a little magic and got their list of 100.

01:05:52.600 | They put up here, and I have this on the screen now, a list of some of these ballots.

01:05:56.760 | So some of the people they asked, give us your 10 best books of the 21st century, said,

01:06:01.880 | yeah, you can put my ballot on here, right?

01:06:04.200 | So this list that they have here, they have the ballots of Stephen King, Minjin Lee, you

01:06:10.160 | have R.L.

01:06:11.160 | Stein, Junot Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Stephanie Graham Jones, Annette Gordon-Reed, et cetera.

01:06:18.160 | All right.

01:06:19.160 | So this is a bunch of people, known literary figures saying, here's my thoughts of the

01:06:23.600 | 10 best books of the 21st century.

01:06:26.280 | Here's where we get involved.

01:06:27.600 | One of the people that they asked and who allowed them to put their ballot live was

01:06:31.840 | our good friend Ryan Holiday.

01:06:35.200 | So let me just click on Ryan Holiday here.

01:06:37.120 | Here is his ballot of the 10 best books.

01:06:38.520 | And what do we see?

01:06:40.160 | Deep work is in that list.

01:06:42.800 | So he gave 12 books, his opinion for the 12 best books of the 21st century.

01:06:48.880 | So I think we have to figure out how to state this carefully, Jesse.

01:06:52.440 | But maybe we can say officially nominated as one of the 10 best books of the 21st century.

01:07:01.160 | There was somewhere around 5,000 books that were mentioned.

01:07:03.960 | But I mean, technically, maybe that's true.

01:07:06.240 | Officially nominated.

01:07:07.240 | Or we just be like, potentially one of the 10 best books of the 21st century and attribute

01:07:13.280 | that to the New York Times.

01:07:16.560 | So the problem is, they do give the vote totals on here if more than one person chose it.

01:07:21.360 | So we see in Ryan's choices, he had like Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

01:07:25.360 | And there's an emblem that says 13 people picked that as one of the 10 best books of

01:07:28.920 | the 21st century.

01:07:29.920 | So deep work, he was the only one to actually suggest that.

01:07:33.400 | But I think it counts, Jesse.

01:07:34.920 | It does.

01:07:35.920 | At least in the opinion of some, it is one of the best books of the 21st century.

01:07:39.960 | All right, we have another sighting here I'm going to load up of deep work.

01:07:44.800 | Listener sent this in.

01:07:45.800 | Pretty cool.

01:07:46.800 | It is a license plate.

01:07:48.640 | Here's a picture of his California license plate, vanity license plate.

01:07:52.760 | And his license plate is deep work.

01:07:55.880 | Missing the O. But anyways, he sent that to us.

01:07:58.400 | So there we go.

01:07:59.440 | Our super fan in California has a deep work license plate.

01:08:05.200 | If you see his car on the road, because it has a distinctive license plate.

01:08:09.240 | If you see his car on the road and you see the driver looking at his phone, you need

01:08:15.040 | to ram his car off the road.

01:08:17.040 | Good.

01:08:18.040 | Hit it in the back corner so it spins out and roll.

01:08:20.600 | Because, you know, you got it.

01:08:22.560 | He's representing deep work.

01:08:23.960 | Actually, what I want to see is you see this car on the road.

01:08:28.800 | You know, he's on the 405, 80 miles per hour.

01:08:31.440 | What I want to see is that driver is reading a thick book while he drives.

01:08:35.600 | Because he has a Tesla so I can self drive.

01:08:37.880 | That's what I want to see.

01:08:39.080 | It's a Tesla.

01:08:40.080 | Is that what it is?

01:08:41.080 | Yeah.

01:08:42.080 | Oh, that'd be fantastic.

01:08:43.080 | There's another picture in there.

01:08:44.080 | You can see it.

01:08:45.080 | All right.

01:08:46.080 | Let's see.

01:08:47.080 | Where do I go?

01:08:48.080 | Just in the note in the.

01:08:49.080 | It's another post.

01:08:50.080 | Oh, it's another post.

01:08:51.080 | OK.

01:08:52.080 | I didn't realize.

01:08:53.080 | Oh, there it is.

01:08:54.080 | Oh, it's on a Tesla.

01:08:55.080 | Oh, man.

01:08:56.080 | I want to see a picture of a video.

01:08:59.400 | I want to be a video.

01:09:00.720 | You're pulling up behind the Deep Work Tesla.

01:09:02.840 | Right.

01:09:03.840 | And then you pull off to this.

01:09:04.840 | You kind of come up to its side and you panned the camera over.

01:09:08.420 | And what you see is the driver just with, you know, a thick Thoreau biography with reading

01:09:12.960 | glasses on, just reading in the driver's seat while the Tesla drives.

01:09:18.160 | I feel like our lawyers have to get involved and say disregard everything that Cal just

01:09:21.800 | said.

01:09:22.800 | Be fantastic.

01:09:23.800 | There we go.

01:09:24.800 | So Deep Work is making its impact.

01:09:26.380 | I thought those were both both fun to see.

01:09:29.260 | One other quick note.

01:09:30.260 | We have a fan, Zach, who's sending us some VBLCCP hats.

01:09:34.000 | Oh, he made them.

01:09:36.000 | Yeah.

01:09:37.000 | Oh, fantastic.

01:09:38.000 | Fantastic.

01:09:39.000 | All right.

01:09:40.000 | I'm excited.

01:09:41.000 | I will wear it.

01:09:42.000 | I will wear my VBLCCP hat.

01:09:43.000 | It should be in the mail soon.

01:09:44.000 | I will wear it on air when we get it.

01:09:45.280 | I need a new hat.

01:09:47.880 | My Nationals hat got too beat up.

01:09:49.120 | I had to buy a different hat when I was up north.

01:09:51.720 | But I remember thinking, I wish I just had my own hat.

01:09:55.000 | I was like, I should just design my own hat.

01:09:56.340 | Like why go buy about some Patagonia hat in a outfitter so I had something to wear while

01:10:00.160 | we hiked.

01:10:01.160 | I was like, why not just have my own hat?

01:10:02.160 | So, OK, I'm excited about this VBLCCP.

01:10:05.840 | That's how we'll know who the true fans are, Jesse, if they recognize the hat.

01:10:09.680 | That probably fits on a license plate, too.

01:10:13.160 | All right, everyone.

01:10:14.740 | Well, anyways, thanks for listening.

01:10:16.040 | We'll be back next week with another normal in-person, in-studio episode of the podcast.

01:10:22.400 | But thanks for listening.

01:10:23.400 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:10:25.720 | Hey, if you like today's discussion about finding focus during distracting times, I

01:10:30.520 | think you'll also like Episode 307, where we talk about ultra-processed content and

01:10:35.360 | improving the quality of what you consume online.

01:10:38.720 | Check it out.

01:10:39.720 | So today, I want to talk about digital distraction.

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