The Surprising Math of Doing Less | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | I'll tell you though that is relevant to the deep dive I want to do

00:00:04.360 | So we're talking about me doing less as a writer

00:00:09.220 | so the deep dive I wanted to do today was on the topic of the surprising math of

00:00:14.680 | doing less

00:00:17.560 | Because when you hear something like I was just talking about

00:00:20.520 | My dream schedule as a writer the thing that probably hits

00:00:26.580 | The attention of the listener first is like well that doesn't seem like you're doing that much stuff

00:00:31.220 | That doesn't seem like it's that much work

00:00:33.220 | My argument and this is something I've been thinking through especially as I've been

00:00:37.160 | developing my thoughts around my philosophy of slow productivity is

00:00:42.040 | that

00:00:44.560 | We do too much and we do too much for no good reason

00:00:48.560 | Because if we are careful in thinking about the mathematics of value production

00:00:56.120 | Doing less is often the optimal strategy

00:00:58.480 | That's what I want to argue that doing less can be the optimal strategy now

00:01:04.000 | We need some context like what type of thing do we talk about what type of work are we talking about so to be clear?

00:01:08.880 | I'm talking about here. Let's say you're in a job where you create things of

00:01:12.920 | Value that is what you do for your job

00:01:16.040 | So I don't know if it's computer code or if it's articles or consulting reports or artwork

00:01:23.600 | Whatever, but if you're in a job where ultimately

00:01:25.800 | You create something that did not exist before

00:01:29.080 | Be it digital be it physical and that thing has value that wasn't there before so you're constructing value by creating things

00:01:36.080 | Which is a lot of people and a lot of people who listen to this podcast if you're in that context. I want to argue a

00:01:41.840 | scheduling approach that

00:01:44.960 | Reduces the amount of things on your plate will actually increase

00:01:48.240 | The total amount of value you produce over time

00:01:53.200 | If anything we can actually trace a curve we can try to capture these dynamics with a curve what I think about is what I sometimes

00:01:59.600 | Call the productivity versus load curve, but imagine for a second that we have some sort of plot

00:02:05.880 | Around the x-axis along the bottom we have the amount of things on your plate

00:02:11.440 | obligations projects etc tasks and

00:02:15.040 | Imagine on the y-axis the vertical axis we have

00:02:18.200 | total value you are producing

00:02:21.960 | I argue what you're gonna see is pretty soon that curve is going to peak up and reach a maximum

00:02:28.520 | Pretty far to the left pretty far to the not that many things to do and as you keep

00:02:33.000 | Moving towards the right towards more and more things on your plate that curve is going to come back down

00:02:37.400 | And then it'll be a plateau for a while

00:02:39.720 | And then it'll once you get to enough stuff on your plate. It'll actually plummet down to almost no value produced

00:02:44.240 | This is the productivity versus load curve

00:02:47.520 | It is not like a lot of people suspect something that just keeps going up do more things you you're finishing more things each thing brings

00:02:53.520 | Value more things completed means more value you produce more and more values do more things

00:02:57.480 | I'm saying no no you actually reach your peak of value production potential pretty early in the potential scale of how many things you're actually doing

00:03:04.480 | Now why would that be the case well I'm going to give two categories of explanation

00:03:10.680 | The one category I'm going to call negative reasons and the other I'm going to call positive reasons

00:03:17.120 | So the the negative reasons why

00:03:19.520 | Continuing to add more to your plate actually reduces your total value production has to do with some things

00:03:25.680 | We've already talked about on this show negative things that happen

00:03:29.880 | Negative things that happen when you add more and more work on your plate and the two big ones we've talked about before I

00:03:35.880 | Talked about this in our core idea video about slow productivity. I talked about this on my appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast

00:03:43.560 | the two things that really get

00:03:45.560 | bad as you get more and more stuff on your plate is the

00:03:50.680 | anxiety of overload and

00:03:54.120 | the overhead of

00:03:57.080 | overload

00:03:58.800 | So we've talked about this before the anxiety piece is that we as human beings have this really neat

00:04:03.980 | Center in our brain as far as we know it is unique to humans

00:04:10.120 | We've looked at our close primate relatives that have not found it at least in the same configuration

00:04:14.220 | But we have this portion in our brain that is good at making long-term plans for the accomplishment of important goals

00:04:20.560 | This separates us from a lot of other animals. How does our brain get us to do things?

00:04:24.920 | well, it makes us feel good when we construct a plan and

00:04:29.760 | Execute that plan and accomplish the goal and it makes us feel bad

00:04:34.600 | If we don't if we don't have a plan or we veer away from our plan

00:04:38.520 | And that's what just steers us evolutionarily speaking towards actually making plans towards long-term goals

00:04:43.000 | the problem is this center of our brain cannot deal with

00:04:45.560 | 600 unread messages and

00:04:48.280 | 75 different open obligations on your task list

00:04:50.820 | When it sees 15 columns on your Trello board and each of them is getting longer and longer

00:04:56.280 | You short-circuit that portion of your brains ability to conceive

00:05:01.720 | Making a plan and executing all these different tasks and when you short-circuit that part of your brain

00:05:06.680 | You flood those negative chemicals. You feel anxious you feel uneasy. You're feeling that reaction. It's like we're not

00:05:13.760 | Sticking with our plans because that brain cannot create plans for that much work. It's a very artificial

00:05:18.760 | It's very unnatural to have a ton of stuff on your plate. It's hard to produce good work in that state

00:05:22.760 | The second issue I mentioned is overhead

00:05:26.300 | This is very pragmatic

00:05:29.560 | Every obligation on your plate will bring with it a fixed amount of overhead

00:05:33.480 | Emails with people checking in on how it's going

00:05:36.920 | Meetings or zoom calls for status updates everything on your plate at least everything beyond the trivial size

00:05:43.200 | Brings with it a fixed amount of overhead

00:05:46.160 | There's nothing wrong with that overhead when you're looking at a particular thing. You're trying to accomplish. It's good

00:05:52.480 | That you can quickly check in with people on email about how it's going

00:05:56.560 | It's good to meet with people on a regular basis to check in but as you increase the number of things on your plate

00:06:03.520 | the amount of overhead being brought by each thing is the same and it adds and it compounds and

00:06:10.560 | now

00:06:12.600 | most of your time

00:06:14.480 | Ends up with this unavoidable fixed overhead

00:06:17.040 | I have to answer the emails about the 20 different things going on each of these 20 different things has its own zoom meeting and it

00:06:23.360 | Toxically or some might say cruelly squeezes away the time required to actually do the work

00:06:28.120 | So just a pragmatic limitation the more things you have the more this overhead which is useful

00:06:33.360 | But does not directly produce value dominates your schedule. So the amount of literal time left to convert in the value is greatly reduced

00:06:40.960 | So those two factors are negative

00:06:43.840 | Negative impacts on your ability to produce value there are also

00:06:49.800 | Positive impacts. So we said here's the negative of doing too much. There's positive impacts on doing

00:06:54.720 | less I

00:06:57.120 | think this is something that

00:06:59.120 | We intuit but we don't often

00:07:01.560 | capture precisely

00:07:04.280 | Which is if you're looking at a particular pursuit project or activity

00:07:09.260 | The value of what you produce is going to grow

00:07:14.720 | Non-linearly with the time you put into it

00:07:19.640 | So, for example

00:07:21.640 | Doubling the time you put into a particular creative project

00:07:24.880 | Doesn't necessarily just double the value produce it might

00:07:28.960 | significantly more increase that value because it turns out there's these

00:07:33.320 | Discontinuous jumps in the value of what you're doing as you cross certain thresholds

00:07:38.680 | There's a discontinuous jump as you move for example past the amateur threshold in almost any creative pursuit

00:07:45.040 | Once what you're producing is no longer just I kind of did something

00:07:48.240 | I kind of just sort of just an amateur effort and actually has a professional polish which takes more time

00:07:52.320 | It significantly jumps up in its potential value to the marketplace

00:07:56.000 | There's another discontinuous jump that happens when you push something to the level that it becomes remarkable

00:08:02.280 | Which I mean in the literal sense that now you've added something that's so novel innovative or well done that it actually leads people to

00:08:10.480 | remark

00:08:12.120 | Look at that. That's interesting. It catches people's attention something with that attribute jumps up to another level in value and

00:08:19.520 | All of that requires time

00:08:21.200 | So the more time you put into things you jump past the amateur level then you jump past to the remarkable level and you get this

00:08:27.320 | Significant profound increase in the value of what you are producing and these effects can also be seen through a market analogy

00:08:35.200 | Essentially the more time you put on something the more aggressively you you essentially pare away

00:08:42.520 | The other people who could produce the same level of quality of what you just produce and as that market gets smaller and smaller your value

00:08:48.280 | Jumps up much higher as well

00:08:50.280 | But what this all comes down to is that if you have less things on your plate

00:08:55.040 | You can spend more times on the things that remain

00:08:57.240 | Spending more times on the thing that remain will generate much more value than if you instead spread that same time over many more things

00:09:04.440 | So this is mathematical if value increases nonlinearly

00:09:09.280 | With time spent your best strategy is to put as much time as possible on the fewest number of things. That's just pure mathematics

00:09:16.360 | So let's again, let's make this real concrete

00:09:18.360 | If you're writing something

00:09:20.960 | Spending almost all your time working on making that thing you're writing really well

00:09:25.060 | So, I don't know you have 20 hours to spend the week spending all 20 hours on that

00:09:29.400 | Is in the end probably gonna produce way more value

00:09:33.520 | Than if you instead spend five hours on that five hours on something else five hours on something else and then five individual hours on five

00:09:41.260 | small things

00:09:42.040 | You can't just take the value of these smaller

00:09:44.200 | investments and add them up and get the same as what you would get if you put all that time into the one thing because

00:09:48.480 | When you put all your time to the one thing you leap past the levels you were before

00:09:52.320 | So we got negative and positive

00:09:55.600 | Reasons that tell us less is better you do too much all these negative things happen to drag you down

00:10:01.800 | You do less all these positive impacts happen that push up even more the value you produce

00:10:07.360 | So I think this is the situation we're in right now in our in our current world

00:10:12.620 | Especially in the American economic scene where we have this very large knowledge sector

00:10:18.220 | That emphasizes skilled employees with great autonomy to individually produce

00:10:23.720 | Value there's so many people who now fall within that type of economic context and in that situation

00:10:29.280 | almost certainly doing less is better and no one does and

00:10:32.120 | All of the pressure is towards can't you just do a little more?

00:10:36.120 | Can't you answer one more email? Can't you be on one more zoom call?

00:10:39.740 | It is chaos. It is the Wild West when it comes to how we handle work today and because of that

00:10:45.160 | We're leaving a lot of value on the table

00:10:47.840 | And I I'm gonna leave it there

00:10:50.480 | But it is the point I want to make is that that we can move beyond simply arguing

00:10:56.680 | Doing less is good for the human soul doing more is just the rapacious

00:11:01.220 | Objective of marauding capitalists that might be true

00:11:04.920 | But we have this other piece of ammo to use as well, which is actually doing less also produces more value

00:11:10.100 | So it not just makes us happier not just makes work more sustainable

00:11:14.680 | But it actually increases the value we are able to produce which makes us again happier. It's all a good cycle

00:11:20.520 | So I'm a huge believer in less that's at one of the the three main tenets of my slow productivity

00:11:26.440 | Philosophy which has three pieces do fewer things working at a natural pace obsessing over quality

00:11:31.640 | This is at the beginning of that philosophy do fewer things. That's a big reason why I believe

00:11:36.180 | That's true

00:11:38.840 | Jesse this is all just secretly me trying to speak to like my

00:11:44.620 | academic

00:11:46.720 | My academic peers like the people who are above me giving me things to do is like just let me do less

00:11:51.680 | It's all just a cry all just a cry for help

00:11:55.080 | Like we're trying worse. We're on a tight schedule today because I have to be on zoom

00:11:59.240 | Can't be maximizing the value in the world

00:12:02.800 | Do the people above you work on multiple things? Are they?

00:12:06.080 | It's crazy if you're in an academic administrative position

00:12:10.000 | Every minute of your day is scheduled

00:12:12.760 | At least have people doing it for you, but it's like being the president. Yeah, it's just okay, you know, here's what's next. Here's what's next

00:12:19.440 | And you get a lot of questions like that for managers and stuff who just want to do more deep work

00:12:24.440 | But they don't have any time blocks to put it in. Yeah, it's the problem of the entire economy right now

00:12:29.160 | I mean, whatever. This is the major split

00:12:32.000 | I think I have with a lot of other commentators is that we

00:12:34.600 | Underestimate the degree that these problems come from not knowing how to do this work

00:12:38.880 | It's we're quick to just we want an antagonist. So we have someone to fight

00:12:43.660 | So managers are being evil is the instinct there's a lot of evil managers out there

00:12:48.960 | But even if we had the nicest possible managers who wanted you to thrive

00:12:53.000 | We would still have this overload problem because we don't have the alternatives in place. There's just not enough structure

00:12:57.920 | We just don't think about this stuff. And so I'm doing my

00:13:01.000 | Doing what I can to help that

00:13:03.520 | [MUSIC]

The Surprising Math of Doing Less | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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