Full Length Episode | #181 | March 14, 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.520 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 181.

00:00:07.520 | I'm here as always in my Deep Work HQ,

00:00:16.560 | joined by my professor, professor?

00:00:19.280 | That's the second time I've done that.

00:00:21.160 | My producer, Jesse.

00:00:23.420 | I keep trying to promote the professor.

00:00:26.200 | Jesse, we made a mistake last week

00:00:29.680 | that we've been hearing about, haven't we?

00:00:31.760 | Oh yeah, yeah.

00:00:33.720 | We both have been getting emails.

00:00:35.440 | He's been getting emails at his address, mine at mine.

00:00:38.120 | Here's what happened.

00:00:39.800 | I mixed up fantasy writer, Brandon Sanderson,

00:00:44.720 | with writer, Pat Ruthfuss, and I know the difference.

00:00:49.720 | I read a bunch of Pat Ruthfuss, I know Brandon Sanderson.

00:00:54.040 | It's just sometimes when you're recording,

00:00:57.760 | your mind is going to a bunch of different places.

00:00:59.400 | At once, to try to set up what's coming next,

00:01:01.160 | and you can fall into these weird traps,

00:01:03.880 | like me calling Jesse a professor.

00:01:05.640 | And so I was mixing up Pat with Brandon,

00:01:09.280 | and Deep Questions listeners were not happy about that.

00:01:13.600 | We got some emails.

00:01:14.440 | You would think, Jesse, you would think,

00:01:15.640 | based on the number of emails we got,

00:01:18.360 | and their upsetness, that we had announced

00:01:23.280 | that we were starting a new podcast

00:01:25.440 | in which me and Vladimir Putin would try

00:01:28.400 | to encourage parents not to vaccinate their children.

00:01:31.040 | You would think that's what we announced,

00:01:33.200 | based on the volume and negativity of the feedback

00:01:37.080 | for messing up those two authors.

00:01:40.240 | So my apologies to Brandon,

00:01:43.000 | my apologies to Pat for mixing you up.

00:01:46.880 | I don't think Brandon cares.

00:01:48.080 | I think the $21 million Kickstarter that he just did

00:01:52.400 | is probably more on his mind

00:01:53.880 | than Deep Questions mixing up his name.

00:01:56.840 | - I like the passion of your fan base, though.

00:01:58.880 | It's great.

00:02:00.160 | - Yeah, well, okay, here's the telling thing

00:02:02.320 | about my fan base.

00:02:03.400 | So a few weeks ago, when I didn't know the name

00:02:07.440 | of the starting quarterback of the Bengals,

00:02:10.800 | crickets, no one cares.

00:02:13.400 | When I mess up the author of the King Killer series,

00:02:18.400 | and Chronicles, and the author who finished

00:02:22.600 | the Wheel of Time, hundreds of emails.

00:02:25.480 | So I think that tells us something about our fans.

00:02:27.320 | Let's not lean into sports commentary

00:02:30.440 | and ultimate fighting minutia.

00:02:33.600 | I think sticking carefully in the realm of fantasy,

00:02:36.800 | this is probably more our people.

00:02:38.480 | So I think we learned a lot this week, Jesse.

00:02:40.600 | - Yeah, it was good.

00:02:41.920 | - So what I wanna do is a core idea.

00:02:45.920 | I think the series has been going well.

00:02:49.200 | The core idea of videos, which we have been releasing

00:02:51.760 | as standalone videos at youtube.com/calnewportmedia

00:02:55.760 | have been some of the most popular videos

00:02:58.360 | we've been releasing.

00:02:59.760 | When Jesse and I had the original idea

00:03:01.640 | for doing a series of core idea segments, I made a list.

00:03:05.840 | Well, here are top of mind, the core ideas

00:03:08.760 | I come back to again and again in my writing

00:03:10.760 | and on this podcast.

00:03:12.040 | We have almost gotten through that entire list,

00:03:13.880 | but there is one topic left on that original list,

00:03:16.680 | and that is the topic I want to cover today,

00:03:20.880 | which is the case against email.

00:03:25.000 | Now, this is the ideas that I fully articulated

00:03:30.080 | in my most recent book, "A World Without Email."

00:03:34.080 | I also explored a lot of these ideas

00:03:36.320 | in my New Yorker writing.

00:03:38.040 | So if you look back at my New Yorker archive

00:03:40.120 | from before and even after the publication

00:03:42.680 | of "A World Without Email," I also explored

00:03:44.200 | a lot of these ideas in the pages of the New Yorker as well.

00:03:47.320 | I want to capture them all now in one core idea segment.

00:03:51.660 | There's four parts here that I want to tackle.

00:03:55.040 | One, I'm going to introduce the notion

00:03:56.600 | of the hyperactive hive mind.

00:03:59.560 | It's the most important piece of vocabulary

00:04:02.040 | that you will come away from this segment having learned.

00:04:04.280 | If you listen to one thing, know this term.

00:04:07.380 | Two, I want to get into why the hyperactive hive mind

00:04:10.960 | is such a villain in the context of modern knowledge work.

00:04:15.120 | Three, I'm going to tackle if it's so bad,

00:04:17.480 | why is it so common?

00:04:19.640 | And then four, we will briefly touch on,

00:04:21.260 | so what should we do about it?

00:04:23.600 | All right, so that's my goal.

00:04:25.440 | So let's start with this first point,

00:04:27.760 | the hyperactive hive mind.

00:04:29.680 | So the name of my book was "A World Without Email,"

00:04:32.240 | and I got any number of seemingly clever notes from people,

00:04:37.240 | often in response to, let's say, a mailing list,

00:04:41.920 | mailing from my mailing list, where they would say,

00:04:43.480 | "Ha, I'm reading an email from you,

00:04:46.760 | "and you are saying we should have no email in the world.

00:04:50.360 | "Gotcha," right?

00:04:51.600 | They're joking, but I would get that comment a lot,

00:04:53.600 | like, "How ironic is this?"

00:04:55.120 | And this is where I need to clarify

00:04:56.880 | that the issue that I come after in that book

00:04:59.920 | is not email by itself.

00:05:02.480 | No particular beef with email as a technology.

00:05:06.420 | The actual villain of that book,

00:05:08.200 | the thing I think we should have banished more

00:05:11.140 | from our world is what I dubbed

00:05:12.680 | the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

00:05:16.060 | Now, this is not an elegant title.

00:05:18.600 | I couldn't call the book

00:05:19.700 | "A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow,"

00:05:21.920 | but that's probably what I should have named it

00:05:23.600 | because that is accurately what the book is really about.

00:05:26.320 | So what is this thing, the hyperactive hive mind workflow?

00:05:29.420 | It is a means of collaboration

00:05:31.560 | in which the bulk of your collaboration occurs

00:05:36.160 | with ad hoc, unscheduled digital messages.

00:05:41.160 | So we're trying to figure something out.

00:05:44.940 | I'll send you a message, you'll send me one back,

00:05:46.780 | I'll bounce it back to you.

00:05:48.280 | So maybe it's, you know,

00:05:50.600 | Jesse and I scrambling over the furor created

00:05:54.460 | when we mixed up Brandon Sanderson with Pat Rufus,

00:05:57.500 | and maybe I sent him an email,

00:05:58.580 | "Hey, what should we do about this?"

00:05:59.660 | He sends one back, like,

00:06:00.540 | "Well, maybe we should meet about it."

00:06:01.860 | He's like, "Well, what about these times?"

00:06:03.780 | You're just sending messages back and forth.

00:06:05.220 | They're ad hoc,

00:06:06.060 | so it's not like you had a particular plan.

00:06:07.460 | It's just in the moment,

00:06:08.300 | let me send this message, and they're unscheduled.

00:06:09.940 | So there's not like a particular time

00:06:12.540 | when this communication is going to happen.

00:06:15.000 | Email made the hyperactive hive mind workflow possible,

00:06:19.140 | but two key points here, it doesn't make it inevitable.

00:06:24.700 | So having email around makes it possible

00:06:26.840 | for you to do ad hoc back and forth messaging

00:06:28.600 | as the main way that you coordinate,

00:06:29.700 | but it doesn't mean that's the way you have to.

00:06:31.320 | And two, once that became dominant,

00:06:33.820 | other tools came along that made it even easier

00:06:36.620 | to engage in the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

00:06:38.580 | So you got, for example, instant messenger tools

00:06:41.020 | like Slack, like WhatsApp,

00:06:43.660 | they all are enabling the same workflow.

00:06:45.860 | And it's this hyperactive hive mind workflow

00:06:47.700 | that I want to put our attention on.

00:06:50.160 | So this brings us to the second point,

00:06:52.880 | what's wrong with the hyperactive hive mind workflow?

00:06:55.300 | Well, let me start by saying in the abstract, nothing.

00:07:00.420 | It's actually a very natural way to coordinate.

00:07:04.060 | It is in a pre-digital age,

00:07:07.540 | the primary way that human beings work together.

00:07:10.800 | If there was three of you out hunting a mastodon,

00:07:15.920 | it's a hundred thousand years ago,

00:07:18.880 | you would coordinate using the hyperactive hive mind workflow

00:07:21.060 | it'd be ad hoc back and forth, unscheduled messages.

00:07:23.180 | Hey, you come over here, stop there.

00:07:24.660 | I think he's over here.

00:07:25.500 | You go around that way.

00:07:26.700 | It's a natural way to human beings collaborate.

00:07:28.860 | So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

00:07:30.300 | It's very natural.

00:07:31.540 | It's also quite flexible, right?

00:07:32.980 | You have one tool, one communication tool.

00:07:34.940 | You figure things out on the fly.

00:07:36.580 | There's very little overhead,

00:07:38.260 | very little predetermination required

00:07:40.740 | to figure out how to get things done.

00:07:41.620 | We'd sort of rock and roll and get things done.

00:07:43.140 | So abstractly speaking, there's nothing particularly wrong

00:07:46.080 | with this mode of collaboration.

00:07:47.760 | The issue is that it doesn't scale.

00:07:51.960 | So email, the arrival of email made it possible,

00:07:56.360 | made it possible for very large groups of people

00:07:59.980 | to coordinate with each other on a large number of things,

00:08:02.380 | all using this hyperactive hive mind.

00:08:04.420 | Because now with almost no friction,

00:08:06.260 | I can shoot off a message to almost anyone in my organization

00:08:08.860 | almost any of our clients, any of our contractors.

00:08:11.220 | We have this very low friction simplified

00:08:14.180 | way of communicating.

00:08:15.840 | It is in the scaling that the hyperactive hive mind

00:08:18.720 | began to weave its web of negative implications

00:08:23.460 | in the modern office.

00:08:24.340 | And here's why.

00:08:25.660 | Let's walk through this thought experiment.

00:08:28.300 | If I work with one other person

00:08:30.620 | and we're working on one thing

00:08:32.700 | and we're not in the same room,

00:08:34.220 | going back and forth with unscheduled email messages

00:08:37.540 | is a perfectly reasonable way for us to coordinate.

00:08:40.260 | All right, well, did you get this?

00:08:41.380 | Should we meet?

00:08:42.220 | Well, when can you meet?

00:08:43.040 | What do you think about this?

00:08:43.880 | We could go back and forth.

00:08:44.700 | It's a perfectly reasonable way for us to coordinate.

00:08:48.100 | So let's say a typical thing,

00:08:50.980 | just so we can use round numbers.

00:08:52.020 | So we want to coordinate about,

00:08:53.060 | it's going to require about 10 back and forth messages.

00:08:56.160 | That's fine.

00:08:57.000 | 10 back and forth messages over the course of a day or two,

00:08:58.700 | no big deal.

00:08:59.860 | Now imagine like the typical knowledge worker,

00:09:01.540 | we've now scaled up the number of people we work with

00:09:04.420 | and the number of things we work on.

00:09:05.760 | And now we have 10 different things that are going on.

00:09:08.140 | A big project over here,

00:09:09.220 | a report that has to get to a client,

00:09:11.060 | trying to reschedule a visit with a candidate

00:09:13.220 | that's coming in to interview.

00:09:14.940 | We're trying to figure out a problem,

00:09:16.780 | working back and forth with facilities

00:09:18.620 | because there's something that has to be repaired.

00:09:20.780 | So we have like 10 different things going on.

00:09:22.660 | Each of them are being worked out

00:09:23.900 | with the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

00:09:25.820 | Each of them on average,

00:09:27.040 | maybe it's going to require about 10 back and forth messages

00:09:29.400 | to figure out.

00:09:30.380 | Each of them on average is relatively time sensitive.

00:09:33.400 | We need to get a resolution in the next day or two.

00:09:36.320 | So we have 10 messages for each of these things,

00:09:38.800 | each of which needs to be seen, processed,

00:09:41.320 | and replied to within the next day or two.

00:09:43.540 | Let's multiply these numbers through.

00:09:46.720 | 10 things, 10 messages,

00:09:47.920 | that's a hundred total messages that have to be seen,

00:09:50.800 | received, and replied to all within a day or two.

00:09:54.800 | This is where we begin to get into trouble

00:09:57.500 | in the modern workplace,

00:09:58.700 | because now if there's going to be a hundred messages,

00:10:01.440 | I'm going to have to get through each of them

00:10:03.340 | in a relatively timely fashion.

00:10:05.140 | In the next day or so, there is no alternative for me,

00:10:08.180 | but to constantly check

00:10:09.880 | whatever communication channel we're using.

00:10:12.040 | If it's an email firm, I'm always in my inbox.

00:10:14.820 | If we're a Slack firm, I have to keep checking Slack.

00:10:17.420 | And the reason why I have to do this

00:10:18.620 | is not because I'm lazy, not because I'm bad at tools,

00:10:20.780 | but because there's a hundred messages

00:10:22.600 | that are going to have to be hit back

00:10:23.920 | over that virtual ping pong net

00:10:25.620 | pretty quickly after they arrive.

00:10:26.940 | So I have to check constantly.

00:10:28.880 | And the data on this shows this is exactly what we do.

00:10:33.480 | In my book, I talk about a really good comprehensive dataset

00:10:36.540 | from the software company RescueTime.

00:10:39.140 | They studied tens of thousands of knowledge workers

00:10:41.580 | and found that they were checking inboxes on average

00:10:44.140 | once every six minutes.

00:10:46.860 | It's required.

00:10:48.120 | If you have hundreds of messages

00:10:49.500 | that are going to have to be seen,

00:10:50.560 | each of which is going to have to be responded to

00:10:51.940 | relatively quickly, just so progress can be made

00:10:55.940 | on the various projects you're working on.

00:10:58.460 | All right, so now we have a situation

00:11:00.100 | where we have to check an inbox or a chat channel

00:11:02.660 | once every six minutes,

00:11:04.700 | because this is the only way now work is going to unfold.

00:11:07.460 | Every one of those checks induces a cognitive context shift.

00:11:12.460 | You see an inbox full of information,

00:11:16.540 | different than what you're primarily working on,

00:11:18.780 | a lot of which is urgent,

00:11:20.100 | all of which is tied to specific individuals

00:11:22.220 | that need things from you.

00:11:23.660 | That is a arresting context shift.

00:11:26.660 | Your brain begins to immediately shift over its context

00:11:30.300 | to those things you see in your inbox.

00:11:32.740 | Now, the issue is you're just checking your inbox

00:11:34.220 | real quick because you're seeing,

00:11:35.380 | hey, did the reply come back yet from Jesse

00:11:37.540 | about when we're going to set up our next meeting?

00:11:39.380 | So you pretty quickly try to bring your attention back

00:11:41.460 | to what you're doing,

00:11:42.300 | but you've already induced that context shift.

00:11:44.780 | That has a cost.

00:11:46.980 | Your cognitive capacity is going to be reduced

00:11:50.060 | and for a while after that check,

00:11:53.060 | 10, 15 minutes after that check,

00:11:54.740 | you're still going to have a reduced cognitive capacity

00:11:57.700 | as your brain is now in this intermediate state

00:12:00.620 | between what you were focusing on before

00:12:02.100 | and what you just saw, and then you stopped looking at that.

00:12:03.780 | You tried to go back to the main thing.

00:12:05.440 | You have what's called attention residue.

00:12:07.740 | Cognitive capacity is reduced.

00:12:10.340 | Not only that,

00:12:12.180 | but you're going to get a low grade sense of anxiety

00:12:13.820 | because you see all of these unresolved tasks

00:12:17.260 | in that inbox, all tied to people.

00:12:19.020 | We take seriously requests from people

00:12:20.980 | and you get an overall fatigue.

00:12:23.860 | This is this burnout effect that office workers feel

00:12:26.020 | whereby two in the afternoon,

00:12:27.300 | they're just done trying to do anything hard

00:12:30.260 | because they burnt out their brain,

00:12:31.460 | shifting those contexts back and forth.

00:12:32.980 | It's the shifts that kill you, the shifts that kill you.

00:12:36.160 | So we've created a hyperactive hive mind scaled up,

00:12:40.320 | creates this need to have to check inboxes or channels

00:12:42.900 | all the time because you have a hundred messages a day

00:12:45.140 | that you have to hit back over the ping pong fence.

00:12:46.980 | You can't wait four hours to do that.

00:12:49.460 | And all those context shifts completely fry our brain.

00:12:52.660 | And so it's misery making, it's fatiguing,

00:12:55.620 | it's anxiety producing, and we get a lot less done.

00:12:57.860 | So it's a huge problem that we try to coordinate

00:13:00.740 | so much work with the hyperactive hive mind workflow,

00:13:03.460 | not because it doesn't make sense, it's very flexible,

00:13:05.300 | but because it doesn't scale.

00:13:07.140 | At scale, it requires constant shifts

00:13:09.740 | and our brains simply can't do that.

00:13:12.780 | So if the hyperactive hive mind is so bad,

00:13:16.020 | this brings us to our third point, why is it so common?

00:13:18.820 | Well, I looked into this in my book

00:13:21.340 | and in my New Yorker reporting,

00:13:23.380 | and here's the story I uncovered.

00:13:25.100 | It is largely accidental.

00:13:28.460 | No one ever said coordinating all of our work

00:13:32.960 | with these rapid back and forth unscheduled messages

00:13:34.940 | is going to make us more productive.

00:13:36.820 | No one ever said, look, there's going to be

00:13:38.140 | some sacrifices to this,

00:13:40.320 | but it's going to be the right way to work.

00:13:41.620 | It's going to unlock new levels of production.

00:13:43.660 | No one ever thought that or said that.

00:13:45.380 | We stumbled into this way of working

00:13:47.460 | and here's how it largely unfolded.

00:13:49.820 | In the 1990s, email made a rapid move

00:13:53.580 | through the front office.

00:13:54.720 | That is when most businesses that have standard

00:13:58.180 | computer cubicle style knowledge work,

00:14:00.700 | adopted email and began to use it extensively.

00:14:04.220 | And the reason they did, again, I went back to the archives,

00:14:08.620 | I was looking at the New York Times business section,

00:14:10.420 | I was looking at articles in other technology magazines,

00:14:12.560 | trying to document, look at the documents

00:14:15.180 | of how people were talking about email

00:14:17.100 | when it first spread in the 90s.

00:14:18.940 | The reason why email spread is not because they said,

00:14:21.420 | we will have this utopia where we can communicate

00:14:23.420 | with each other all the time.

00:14:25.300 | It was because it was replacing three existing tools,

00:14:30.060 | fax machines, voicemails, and interoffice memos.

00:14:33.800 | It was a better version of those three tools,

00:14:37.480 | which were very popularly used in the decades

00:14:40.680 | leading up to the arrival of email.

00:14:42.980 | And email was unquestionably a better way

00:14:46.260 | of implementing that communication.

00:14:48.260 | Attaching a file is much better than faxing,

00:14:50.940 | sending an email is almost always much better

00:14:52.700 | than leaving a voicemail that requires someone

00:14:54.340 | to type in a code and listen to you actually talking.

00:14:57.520 | Sending a CC message about the new parking policy

00:15:00.700 | to the whole office is clearly much more efficient

00:15:04.780 | than having to print that out

00:15:06.020 | and put it in everyone's mailboxes.

00:15:08.520 | So it was solving a real problem,

00:15:09.760 | which was there is asynchronous communication that existed.

00:15:12.520 | Those three tools implemented it.

00:15:13.980 | Email was cheaper, had more features, and was faster.

00:15:16.840 | That's why it spread.

00:15:17.900 | Once it was in people's offices though,

00:15:21.460 | once people had those addresses,

00:15:23.160 | once the friction was removed

00:15:24.680 | for any interpersonal communication,

00:15:27.160 | the hyperactive Hivemind workflow emerged naturally,

00:15:31.700 | not by choice, but naturally.

00:15:33.540 | And why did it emerge?

00:15:34.660 | Well, this gets complicated,

00:15:35.700 | but here's just a summary of it.

00:15:36.900 | It emerged because we had an ethic of autonomy

00:15:41.380 | in the context of knowledge work.

00:15:43.240 | We had an ethic that in knowledge work,

00:15:44.920 | it's up to individuals to figure out

00:15:47.040 | how to organize their work.

00:15:48.460 | Productivity is personal, we said.

00:15:51.960 | How you keep track of things,

00:15:53.400 | how you choose what you say yes to, no to,

00:15:55.520 | how you manage your time during the day,

00:15:57.240 | how you manage your tasks,

00:15:59.020 | that's up to you as the individual.

00:16:00.860 | Buy a Cal Newport book, buy a Stephen Covey book,

00:16:04.800 | buy a David Allen book, that's none of our business.

00:16:06.540 | We give you objectives and we motivate you,

00:16:09.880 | but you figure out how to do your work.

00:16:11.280 | That is the dominant ethic in knowledge work

00:16:13.120 | for various reasons.

00:16:13.980 | In that context where we leave the organization

00:16:17.400 | and execution work up to the individuals.

00:16:19.600 | It is not surprising that when this new tool emerged,

00:16:23.960 | we began to use it in the most flexible,

00:16:26.280 | easiest way possible.

00:16:28.360 | The hyperactive Hivemind was convenient and flexible,

00:16:31.960 | so we all sort of fell into it

00:16:33.480 | because there was no one looking down

00:16:35.120 | at the organization as a whole

00:16:36.280 | and saying, "What's the best way to do this work?"

00:16:37.760 | When we make our own decisions,

00:16:38.840 | we end up with whatever is easiest in the moment.

00:16:42.840 | And so we stumble backwards in this swamp of autonomy

00:16:46.960 | towards a world in which the hyperactive Hivemind

00:16:48.880 | was dominant.

00:16:49.700 | And we look up and by the early 2000s,

00:16:51.760 | found ourselves context shifting every five to six minutes,

00:16:54.520 | miserable, barely able to get any real work done.

00:16:58.340 | So that brings us to the final point,

00:17:00.940 | which is what should we do about this situation?

00:17:03.360 | Well, now that we know that it's largely accidental

00:17:05.240 | that we arrived here,

00:17:06.480 | now that we know that there's more damage

00:17:07.920 | than we may have expected occurring

00:17:10.040 | because of all these context shifts,

00:17:11.420 | this should embolden us to seek solutions.

00:17:14.560 | And in seeking these solutions,

00:17:16.720 | I think the first point we have to make

00:17:18.460 | is that this is not a game

00:17:20.520 | that is going to be one with individual habits.

00:17:23.840 | This has been, up until most recently,

00:17:28.800 | the most common way we've tried to deal

00:17:31.540 | with the email problem, which is say,

00:17:32.800 | "Well, people are just using email wrong.

00:17:34.840 | "Don't check it so much.

00:17:37.000 | "You're addicted to it."

00:17:38.280 | We introduced that terminology of addiction.

00:17:40.700 | Remember when the hyperactive hive mind

00:17:43.200 | first began to emerge,

00:17:44.440 | and we first noticed it when people

00:17:46.080 | were using early generation blackberries all the time

00:17:49.040 | to keep up with the hyperactive hive mind,

00:17:51.140 | we introduced the term crackberries

00:17:54.080 | and tried to make it seem like these people

00:17:55.820 | had some sort of weird addiction to this thing.

00:17:58.720 | They need to get rid of that addiction.

00:18:00.000 | It's orthogonal to their actual work, but it wasn't.

00:18:02.680 | They're checking the blackberries all the time

00:18:04.200 | because there was more work being worked through

00:18:06.520 | with ad hoc unscheduled messages,

00:18:07.980 | and they had to respond to those messages

00:18:10.200 | for work to unfold.

00:18:11.800 | It was required, not a flaw.

00:18:14.580 | So we're not gonna solve this problem

00:18:16.200 | by saying just check your email less often,

00:18:18.480 | or write better subject lines, or have better filters,

00:18:21.640 | or if you move from Gmail to superhuman

00:18:24.560 | or from superhuman to hey,

00:18:26.000 | that if you just have enough automatic filters and features,

00:18:29.120 | you can tame this problem.

00:18:30.560 | You're just not handling email well.

00:18:32.580 | But when we recognize that the problem

00:18:34.000 | is actually the hyperactive hive mind,

00:18:35.880 | we know none of these individual habit fixes will be enough.

00:18:39.160 | The reason why we have to keep checking our email,

00:18:41.160 | we have to keep checking Slack,

00:18:42.480 | is not because we have bad habits or bad setups,

00:18:45.400 | but because we have 10 different things

00:18:47.960 | that are being organized with unscheduled messages,

00:18:50.800 | and we can't ignore those messages.

00:18:53.160 | Each of these things has 10 messages

00:18:54.680 | that has to get sent back and forth today

00:18:56.640 | because we need to finish this by the end of the day.

00:18:58.700 | So I have to keep checking,

00:19:00.880 | 'cause if I wait four hours

00:19:02.120 | before I answer message number two,

00:19:03.520 | we're not gonna get the message number 10

00:19:04.920 | before the day is done,

00:19:05.760 | and it's a problem.

00:19:06.580 | We check email all the time

00:19:07.600 | because the hyperactive hive mind demands it.

00:19:09.640 | If that is the way we coordinate our work,

00:19:11.720 | there is no alternative

00:19:13.660 | to constantly checking in on these channels

00:19:15.960 | and keeping these messages bouncing back and forth.

00:19:19.240 | Can't solve it by checking email less often.

00:19:21.080 | We can't solve it with better inboxes.

00:19:23.240 | We can't solve it by changing norms.

00:19:25.220 | We can't solve it with response time expectations changing.

00:19:29.200 | You can say what you want

00:19:30.020 | about response time expectations.

00:19:31.320 | We have 10 messages that have to get back and forth

00:19:33.240 | to schedule this visit tomorrow.

00:19:35.800 | That has to happen.

00:19:37.340 | Don't tell me our norm is

00:19:38.400 | don't expect an answer within 24 hours.

00:19:40.160 | These 10 messages have to finish today

00:19:41.740 | because that person's coming tomorrow

00:19:43.080 | and we have to tell them what time their meeting is.

00:19:45.280 | So how do we solve this problem?

00:19:48.600 | You replace the hyperactive hive mind.

00:19:50.840 | We need alternative ways of collaborating

00:19:55.240 | that do not depend on unscheduled messages

00:19:57.640 | that require a response relatively quickly

00:20:02.640 | after they arrive in your inbox.

00:20:04.560 | That is the only way to solve this problem.

00:20:08.200 | And that is gonna require hard work.

00:20:10.480 | It means we're gonna have to identify

00:20:12.080 | what are the different things we do again and again

00:20:14.520 | in my job in our office.

00:20:16.240 | And for each of those things actually work out together

00:20:18.940 | alternative systems for collaboration

00:20:22.640 | that don't require unscheduled messages.

00:20:25.200 | And each different type of thing you do

00:20:26.880 | might require a different system.

00:20:29.160 | And each system might require a polishing

00:20:30.680 | and optimization over time to get right.

00:20:33.320 | And it's all a pain, but we have to do it

00:20:36.920 | because the hyperactive hive mind,

00:20:38.440 | the flexible though convenient though cheap,

00:20:40.600 | is not scaling and it's killing us

00:20:43.960 | from a cognitive perspective.

00:20:45.640 | And so that is the main argument I make

00:20:47.180 | in the end of that book, "A World Without Email."

00:20:49.320 | It's we have to start building from the ground up

00:20:52.520 | bespoke, clearly specified systems of collaboration

00:20:57.680 | that talk about when and how we communicate

00:21:00.300 | to get things done.

00:21:02.240 | Unscheduled messages have to play a decreasing role

00:21:07.120 | in coordinating work.

00:21:09.160 | So when I talk about a world without email,

00:21:10.560 | I mean a world in which the hyperactive hive mind

00:21:12.640 | is rarely used.

00:21:14.040 | Regularly occurring work has clear systems

00:21:15.800 | for how we collaborate that don't depend

00:21:17.240 | on unscheduled messages.

00:21:18.480 | I could care less by the way about other uses for email.

00:21:22.080 | Your broadcasting information, great.

00:21:25.000 | I don't want you to mail it to me, that's fine.

00:21:27.320 | You have a non-urgent request or question

00:21:30.160 | I can answer in a sentence or two,

00:21:31.480 | yeah, email that to me and let me get to it

00:21:33.080 | when I wanna get to it.

00:21:33.920 | That's a great use of email.

00:21:35.720 | I'm happy with all of that.

00:21:37.500 | The thing that's gonna kill us is we're going back

00:21:40.640 | and forth about something.

00:21:42.120 | We gotta get that out of email.

00:21:43.520 | We gotta get that out of Slack.

00:21:44.720 | We gotta get that out of WhatsApp.

00:21:45.920 | And we have to put in place bespoke systems

00:21:47.920 | that say here's when and how we communicate.

00:21:50.280 | Now we're not context shifting.

00:21:52.240 | Now we're not exhausted.

00:21:53.780 | Now we're not reducing our cognitive capacity.

00:21:55.560 | Now we can actually produce work without burning out

00:21:57.720 | and be proud of what we produce.

00:21:59.040 | So when I'm making my case against email,

00:22:01.240 | I'm making my case against the hyperactive hive mind.

00:22:03.880 | And when we know that's the villain, we know the solution.

00:22:06.040 | We have to vanquish that particular enemy.

00:22:09.560 | And yes, it's a pain because we have to replace him

00:22:14.040 | with alternative ways of getting things done.

00:22:15.560 | But work is not supposed to be about friction reduction.

00:22:18.340 | Work is not supposed to be about what's easiest.

00:22:20.160 | It's about what works.

00:22:21.240 | By definition, work is resistance against objects at rest.

00:22:25.980 | It's supposed to be hard.

00:22:27.560 | So yeah, it's a pain to figure out.

00:22:29.960 | For this client memo we produce every month,

00:22:32.040 | instead of just rock and rolling on email,

00:22:33.440 | let's have a system where drafts go

00:22:35.600 | to these shared folders at these times.

00:22:37.720 | And we use the comments and the designer knows

00:22:40.200 | that at this point he can grab what's

00:22:41.760 | in the shared document and design it.

00:22:43.520 | And I'll sign off on it virtually.

00:22:45.040 | And I have office hours every day.

00:22:46.640 | And if you have questions, you come to my office hours.

00:22:48.400 | That's when we discuss it.

00:22:49.240 | You have to do stuff like that.

00:22:50.840 | More overhead, more annoying, more delays.

00:22:53.680 | But it gets rid of the need to have to check an inbox

00:22:56.640 | or check a chat channel,

00:22:57.520 | look for an unscheduled message and reply.

00:22:59.340 | That is the key.

00:23:00.480 | That is the world we need.

00:23:01.780 | We have to get past this world where we just rock

00:23:04.380 | and roll with communication tools.

00:23:05.580 | We have to get more bespoke and more structured.

00:23:07.240 | But if we do, we're all gonna be much happier

00:23:09.720 | and we're gonna get a lot more done.

00:23:11.560 | All right, so that is my core idea.

00:23:15.580 | The last core idea from my original list

00:23:17.620 | of ideas I wanted to tackle.

00:23:19.760 | There's other core ideas I'll do

00:23:21.120 | and feel free to send in suggestions to me.

00:23:23.880 | You can send that in to interesting@calnewport.com.

00:23:26.080 | Other things you've heard me talk about,

00:23:27.500 | you think we should do a core ideas video on,

00:23:28.840 | I'm happy to hear it.

00:23:29.680 | But that was the original list.

00:23:31.480 | So our playlist will soon be completely up to date.

00:23:34.040 | All right, well, we got a lot of good questions

00:23:37.000 | to get through today.

00:23:38.560 | Before we do,

00:23:39.920 | talk about a couple of the sponsors

00:23:42.640 | that make this show possible.

00:23:45.260 | First is My Body Tutor.

00:23:49.640 | And My Body Tutor was founded by Adam Gilbert,

00:23:53.160 | who I have known for a long time.

00:23:55.640 | As I've mentioned before,

00:23:56.520 | he used to be the fitness advice guy

00:23:59.780 | back in the early days of my study hacks blog.

00:24:03.520 | His company, My Body Tutor,

00:24:05.260 | a brilliant idea, especially for our current moment,

00:24:07.820 | is a 100% online coaching program

00:24:10.800 | that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness,

00:24:13.100 | which is the lack of consistency.

00:24:16.120 | They do this by giving you

00:24:19.880 | an online coach

00:24:23.080 | who helps come up with your plans

00:24:24.600 | around eating and exercising.

00:24:26.000 | It makes sense for you and what you're trying to do

00:24:27.560 | and what's gonna be sustainable.

00:24:29.040 | And then you check in with that coach daily.

00:24:32.240 | See, that is the issue in health and fitness.

00:24:35.200 | It's not figuring out what to do.

00:24:37.440 | It is consistently doing it day after day

00:24:39.920 | and having a coach is the way to do that.

00:24:42.720 | Now, of course, if you had to actually hire a trainer

00:24:45.000 | or a nutritionist to come to your house,

00:24:46.520 | it'd be really expensive.

00:24:47.400 | But in the age of the internet, why do that?

00:24:49.240 | These coaches are online.

00:24:51.000 | So now almost anyone has access

00:24:53.160 | to that type of consistency.

00:24:56.220 | So anyways, I think it's a good idea.

00:24:58.340 | I know he's been killing it,

00:24:59.700 | especially during the pandemic

00:25:00.940 | when people stopped using gyms.

00:25:02.980 | Adam and his coaches are the best in the world

00:25:05.580 | at delivering highly personal accounting and coaching.

00:25:08.540 | So here's the good news,

00:25:10.300 | 'cause I know Adam and he's a good guy.

00:25:12.540 | He is going to give Deep Questions listeners $50

00:25:16.460 | off their first month.

00:25:17.380 | All you have to do is mention this podcast when you join.

00:25:22.380 | If you have any questions,

00:25:24.980 | Adam wants you to call or text.

00:25:26.300 | You can actually find his personal cell phone number

00:25:28.580 | at the top of every page of mybodytutor.com.

00:25:30.980 | This is a highly personalized service.

00:25:32.660 | I think that emphasizes it.

00:25:34.360 | So go to mybodytutor, T-U-T-O-R,

00:25:38.380 | and mention Deep Questions when you sign up

00:25:39.860 | to get $50 off your first month.

00:25:43.540 | But I also wanna talk about Blinkist,

00:25:47.100 | long-time sponsor of the show.

00:25:49.500 | Now, Jesse, when we were last doing an ad for Blinkist,

00:25:53.980 | I had asked you to look up something

00:25:57.100 | on the Blinkist website and all hell broke loose.

00:26:01.060 | Like, for one, your computer restarted,

00:26:03.460 | some weird capture thing happened,

00:26:05.800 | your browser overloaded,

00:26:07.740 | your smoke started coming out of the disk drive.

00:26:11.180 | But the moral of that story is that

00:26:14.620 | the reason why that all started was

00:26:16.180 | you weren't seeing the Blinkist homepage

00:26:18.500 | 'cause you were already logged in

00:26:19.960 | because you are a Blinkist user.

00:26:23.380 | - Yeah, I am.

00:26:24.660 | - And so let me ask you, I'll tell you how I use Blinkist.

00:26:27.700 | How do you use, what's your Blinkist strategy these days?

00:26:31.340 | - Well, just this morning, I tried something new.

00:26:33.300 | I went on to check out one of their audio books.

00:26:36.980 | So for the sports gene with David Epstein.

00:26:40.100 | - Oh, interesting.

00:26:41.140 | - Before that, I was reading some of the blinks

00:26:43.040 | on the Ukraine crisis.

00:26:45.060 | So I get a lot of those now.

00:26:46.460 | - Well, so you're a more advanced user than I've been.

00:26:49.700 | So like, I mainly read blinks of books.

00:26:53.400 | But 15 minutes, you listen to it.

00:26:55.720 | I like that you can listen to it now.

00:26:57.060 | I think that's critical.

00:26:57.900 | You can read them, of course,

00:26:58.720 | but you listen to these 10 to 15 minute summaries

00:27:00.700 | and I use it whenever I hear of a book where I think,

00:27:04.400 | huh, should I read that?

00:27:06.840 | I go to the blink first and it actually really helps.

00:27:09.760 | You can really get a sense.

00:27:11.920 | I mean, it's not a good sign for the authors when I say no,

00:27:14.600 | but you can really get a sense from these short blinks of,

00:27:17.040 | oh, I see what this is about.

00:27:18.200 | Okay, I get the idea, good enough.

00:27:20.160 | And sometimes it's no, no, no.

00:27:22.080 | I really want to go deeper on this.

00:27:24.120 | And we should probably explain for the listener,

00:27:25.560 | what are we talking about here?

00:27:27.240 | Blinkist is a subscription service.

00:27:29.320 | What it gives you access to is these brief

00:27:31.680 | 10 to 15 minute summaries of some of the best-selling,

00:27:36.040 | most important nonfiction books of all time,

00:27:37.860 | but also other things as well.

00:27:39.520 | They have blink summarizing podcasts.

00:27:41.880 | They have blinks you're talking about now,

00:27:44.080 | dealing with some breaking news even.

00:27:47.000 | So, I mean, it's more than just nonfiction books,

00:27:49.120 | but that's how they got started.

00:27:50.040 | These high quality 10 to 15 minute summaries

00:27:53.200 | of important information.

00:27:55.360 | So right now Blinkist has a special offer

00:27:58.800 | just for our audience.

00:27:59.960 | If you go to blinkist.com/deep,

00:28:03.000 | the start a free seven day trial,

00:28:05.200 | you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

00:28:10.060 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T,

00:28:15.560 | blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off

00:28:19.280 | and a seven day free trial, blinkist.com/deep.

00:28:23.860 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:28:30.200 | Now I've gotten a couple of emails

00:28:31.280 | where people are asking how to submit questions.

00:28:33.080 | So I'll briefly review,

00:28:34.920 | and all this information is at calnewport.com/podcast.

00:28:38.640 | For the written questions, like we're gonna answer today,

00:28:41.960 | I send out every few months a survey

00:28:44.540 | to my email newsletter subscriber

00:28:47.200 | saying submit your questions.

00:28:48.760 | You can submit as many questions as you want.

00:28:51.440 | So if you wanna contribute written questions,

00:28:53.880 | you have to sign up for my email newsletter

00:28:56.040 | at calnewport.com and wait until the next time

00:28:59.280 | I send out that survey.

00:29:01.520 | We probably have one coming up pretty soon, right Jesse?

00:29:03.600 | You look at the questions,

00:29:04.620 | we're probably getting to that point

00:29:05.840 | where we're gonna ask for new questions soon.

00:29:07.960 | - Yeah, it'd be a good time to ask for some more

00:29:09.520 | in the spring time.

00:29:10.360 | - So now's a good time to sign up for that newsletter

00:29:11.880 | if you wanna contribute.

00:29:13.000 | The reason why I do that, by the way,

00:29:14.640 | is I figure people who subscribe to my newsletter

00:29:17.800 | and they're getting my weekly essay,

00:29:21.000 | they know what I'm all about, they know my big ideas,

00:29:24.880 | they know my take on things,

00:29:27.160 | they know the common vocabulary that I use.

00:29:29.720 | So the questions they ask are way more on point

00:29:33.520 | for me and the show than if I just had a link

00:29:36.480 | for anyone in the world to send questions,

00:29:38.120 | we're gonna have, I don't know, a lot of questions about,

00:29:41.500 | I don't know what's popular these days, but K-pop bands.

00:29:45.200 | - Crypto.

00:29:46.040 | - Crypto, yeah, NFTs are K-pop bands.

00:29:48.000 | So we do it that way.

00:29:51.560 | The audio questions uses a completely different service

00:29:53.960 | called Speakpipe, but again, there's an easy link to it

00:29:57.480 | you can get at calnewport.com/podcast.

00:29:59.640 | It allows you to record those audio questions

00:30:01.320 | straight from your browser.

00:30:03.420 | All right, so speaking of which, let's get to some questions.

00:30:08.320 | Our first one here is from K-pop crypto lover.

00:30:12.760 | Oh no, I think we spoke too soon, Jesse.

00:30:15.560 | We spoke too soon.

00:30:17.080 | No, none of that.

00:30:18.320 | These are newsletter subscribers.

00:30:19.600 | They know what we're all about.

00:30:20.560 | Our first question comes from Ryan.

00:30:23.080 | Ryan says, "I'm a university professor and a comic artist.

00:30:29.040 | "I'm getting ready to launch my upcoming book

00:30:31.160 | "on Kickstarter on New Year's Day."

00:30:33.960 | All right, so that's a little bit of a reveal

00:30:36.700 | that this question was submitted a little while ago

00:30:38.880 | because we were recording this in March

00:30:40.440 | and he's talking about New Year's Day.

00:30:42.340 | Moving on though.

00:30:45.240 | Ryan says, "In an effort to get the word out,

00:30:48.200 | "I'm planning a big online tour

00:30:50.200 | "in which I'm talking with a different media outlet

00:30:52.560 | "every day of my month long campaign.

00:30:55.980 | "My question is, I fear that I may be devoting

00:30:57.820 | "too much time to promoting the release

00:31:00.160 | "rather than finishing the book.

00:31:01.800 | "My comic is almost complete, only two more pages to go,

00:31:06.940 | "but I'd really like to have it done by the launch.

00:31:09.160 | "Any tips for prioritizing that deep cartooning work

00:31:11.480 | "in the face of trying to make a big noise

00:31:13.040 | "about my upcoming project?"

00:31:15.840 | Well, Ryan, it's a good question

00:31:17.320 | because I want you to be very wary

00:31:19.720 | of the publicity marketing.

00:31:22.060 | It is an easy trap, a seductive trap

00:31:28.040 | for those that are producing commercial creative products

00:31:31.640 | to allow your energy to be increasingly drawn

00:31:35.760 | towards strategies for getting the word out.

00:31:38.040 | Now, the reason why it's so seductive

00:31:39.460 | is because it presents a completely different

00:31:42.240 | type of challenge than actually producing creative output.

00:31:46.160 | It's a challenge that is not trivial,

00:31:50.240 | but it's very tractable.

00:31:52.920 | It's what I used to call checklist productivity,

00:31:55.640 | where you can go online and take an internet marketing

00:31:58.440 | course and follow some podcast of internet marketers

00:32:01.200 | and figure out a checklist, do this, this, this, and this,

00:32:03.840 | and feel like you have some insider knowledge

00:32:05.780 | that the normal person won't do,

00:32:07.240 | but it's also consistently executable steps.

00:32:11.240 | Make these calls, do this with your website,

00:32:13.300 | set up a funnel this way.

00:32:14.360 | So it's very fulfilling.

00:32:15.480 | It takes effort and it feels like it's insider information,

00:32:17.900 | but you know for a fact you can get it done.

00:32:20.040 | Checklist productivity is incredibly seductive

00:32:22.240 | because there's never this moment of,

00:32:24.640 | "I'm just stuck.

00:32:25.740 | "I'm trying to produce something new.

00:32:27.120 | "I don't know if it's good or not.

00:32:28.460 | "I could fail.

00:32:29.300 | "I could produce something and it's bad.

00:32:30.460 | "I couldn't have an idea."

00:32:31.360 | Checklist productivity, you can always get through.

00:32:33.860 | Writers, cartoonists, artists get very seduced by this

00:32:38.360 | because, man, that's so much more appealing

00:32:40.520 | than actually producing writing or producing cartoons

00:32:44.080 | or producing art because it's tractable.

00:32:47.840 | Check, check, check.

00:32:48.880 | You check off the check boxes as you go.

00:32:50.880 | So I want you to be careful, Ryan,

00:32:54.200 | that you're not allowing your time

00:32:55.720 | to be increasingly consumed

00:32:56.860 | by these marketing publicity plans because it's fun,

00:33:01.580 | because it's better, it's easier,

00:33:04.660 | more fulfilling in the moment

00:33:05.720 | than actually trying to draw cartoons.

00:33:07.680 | Now, it's not to say that stuff doesn't matter,

00:33:09.080 | but what I typically talk about

00:33:10.400 | is that when it comes to creative output,

00:33:11.680 | the number one thing you have to do is be so good

00:33:14.800 | you can't be ignored.

00:33:15.800 | You have to produce stuff that is of really high quality.

00:33:19.600 | You gotta do that.

00:33:20.480 | That's the core.

00:33:21.320 | Without that, with a few exceptions

00:33:23.360 | of internet influencer weirdness,

00:33:25.040 | you're never gonna get somewhere that far.

00:33:27.200 | That's where your attention has to be.

00:33:29.360 | And then you want some sort

00:33:30.320 | of reasonable publicity marketing plan

00:33:32.840 | based on what you have available

00:33:34.700 | that helps try to spread the word,

00:33:37.180 | but if you don't have something to spread the word about,

00:33:38.440 | it doesn't matter.

00:33:39.280 | You almost wanna confine the marketing publicity

00:33:42.080 | to like here are reasonable, tested things to do.

00:33:44.480 | Here's when I'm gonna do this work.

00:33:45.720 | I put it in a box.

00:33:46.560 | I'll execute that.

00:33:47.520 | It's a three-week period.

00:33:49.120 | But what I really care about is the production.

00:33:52.120 | So in your case, I would say you need

00:33:55.640 | some cartoonish equivalent of the John McPhee method.

00:34:00.100 | And by the John McPhee method,

00:34:02.040 | I'm referring to an essay I published

00:34:04.660 | on my blog and newsletter recently

00:34:08.260 | where I talked about on the occasion

00:34:10.460 | of John McPhee's birthday, his method of writing,

00:34:12.740 | which is 500 words a day.

00:34:14.160 | And that's not a lot of words for a particular day,

00:34:17.400 | but as he says, you keep doing that

00:34:20.620 | and over time you're gonna produce quite a bit of work.

00:34:23.420 | And he has 29 books, a Pulitzer,

00:34:26.180 | two National Book Awards nominations.

00:34:28.340 | So you need whatever your equivalent is as a cartoonist

00:34:30.540 | is what I'd recommend of 500 words a day.

00:34:32.580 | And the reason why I'm going

00:34:33.420 | for that tractable amount of words

00:34:35.680 | is because you're a university professor.

00:34:37.100 | This is not the only thing you're doing.

00:34:38.420 | And I would do it first thing in the morning.

00:34:40.780 | And I don't know what that's gonna take for cartooning.

00:34:42.800 | Is it a panel a day, three panels a day?

00:34:44.980 | I don't know the pacing,

00:34:45.860 | but basically like 60 to 90 minutes of work.

00:34:48.420 | And I would just make that an unviolatable core of your day.

00:34:53.420 | You just do that every single day.

00:34:56.100 | The marketing publicity stuff,

00:34:57.800 | that has to compete

00:34:58.700 | with all of your other university responsibilities.

00:35:00.740 | You try to fit it in where you can

00:35:02.760 | and you have to use some weekend and evenings maybe.

00:35:04.700 | Like that has to compete with your syllabuses

00:35:07.460 | and faculty meetings and everything else you're doing.

00:35:10.140 | But the core is my 500 words a day.

00:35:12.740 | My creative production at my creative peak,

00:35:15.600 | not a ton every day,

00:35:16.480 | but enough that you look back over a month,

00:35:18.300 | hey, I produced a good amount.

00:35:19.460 | You look back over a year,

00:35:20.420 | you say, I'm very impressed by what I did.

00:35:22.340 | You look back over a career and you say,

00:35:23.860 | I've been a pretty productive artist.

00:35:25.660 | So that's what I would recommend.

00:35:28.100 | Go to this core of deep creative work

00:35:30.500 | that you don't violate.

00:35:32.540 | The publicity marketing stuff,

00:35:34.520 | get that done as you can,

00:35:35.980 | have a plan, but keep it reasonable.

00:35:38.240 | No one ever made themselves a long-term sustainable career

00:35:41.380 | as a respected creative,

00:35:42.780 | due solely or primarily to publicity.

00:35:45.860 | It's always, always come down to producing stuff

00:35:48.200 | that people can't ignore.

00:35:49.660 | The publicity marketing is all just about

00:35:52.480 | a delta on how long it takes people

00:35:54.220 | to actually discover it.

00:35:55.420 | All right, so we have another question here from Mel.

00:36:01.860 | Mel says, how do I get out of the urgent quadrant

00:36:06.240 | for long enough to hire or outsource work

00:36:09.240 | and implement productivity systems?

00:36:10.940 | All right, so she elaborates,

00:36:14.340 | I manage my husband's medical practice.

00:36:16.820 | I am burnt out and cognitively depleted

00:36:18.620 | by the volume time sensitivity

00:36:20.360 | and unrelenting nature of incoming work.

00:36:22.220 | I spend all my time in the urgent quadrant

00:36:24.340 | and in hyperactive hive mind.

00:36:26.240 | I don't have the option to leave the job.

00:36:27.920 | I can hire and outsource to some extent

00:36:29.800 | when I'm able to make time for it,

00:36:30.980 | but how do I get out of the urgent quadrant

00:36:32.400 | for long enough to recruit and train staff

00:36:33.960 | and to implement sustainable productivity systems?

00:36:37.480 | Mel, I talk about exactly this problem in my book,

00:36:41.960 | "A World Without Email."

00:36:44.320 | It is, I describe as a insidious negative feedback loop.

00:36:49.080 | And here's what happens,

00:36:49.940 | and here's what's happening to you, but it's very common.

00:36:52.740 | When you become too hyperactive

00:36:57.300 | with the hyperactive hive mind,

00:36:59.120 | so that the sheer quantity of work

00:37:02.000 | that you're trying to organize

00:37:03.200 | in this very inefficient way with ad hoc,

00:37:05.520 | unscheduled back and forth messaging,

00:37:07.220 | when that gets to a certain point,

00:37:08.980 | you have so little breathing room,

00:37:12.840 | just trying to keep up

00:37:13.760 | with all these unscheduled back and forth messages,

00:37:16.440 | that there's no free time or energy

00:37:18.220 | to actually put in place the alternative systems

00:37:20.800 | that could reduce all of these unscheduled messages,

00:37:25.680 | these unscheduled ad hoc messages.

00:37:26.920 | So when it gets too bad,

00:37:28.680 | you strip yourself of the time and energy required

00:37:31.080 | to make it better.

00:37:33.180 | So it's an insidious negative feedback cycle.

00:37:35.160 | And Mel, that's what you're in right now.

00:37:37.880 | So what's the solution here?

00:37:40.160 | You have to temporarily, but drastically,

00:37:42.180 | give yourself some breathing room

00:37:43.480 | by dramatically reducing the amount of things

00:37:46.800 | that you're trying to coordinate in this inefficient manner.

00:37:51.300 | So you do these drastic emergency reductions

00:37:53.680 | of what's on your plate.

00:37:54.940 | That gives you breathing room to look at what remains

00:37:58.120 | and figure out sustainable systems.

00:38:00.360 | It don't require you just constantly being on email,

00:38:02.320 | constantly being on Slack, constantly checking your phone.

00:38:06.160 | And then once these systems are in place,

00:38:08.620 | then your breathing room gets much bigger

00:38:10.640 | because the things that remain have now been,

00:38:12.920 | from a cognitive perspective, made much more tractable.

00:38:15.800 | You're able to add stuff back

00:38:18.020 | 'cause now the systems are there.

00:38:19.020 | But you have to pull things away

00:38:20.520 | and it's gonna feel painful.

00:38:21.880 | It's gonna feel weird.

00:38:22.920 | It's gonna feel like you're leaving money on the table.

00:38:25.560 | You have to do that.

00:38:27.680 | And then things come back

00:38:28.920 | once you have the actual systems in place.

00:38:31.360 | Now, the added benefit of this approach

00:38:33.040 | is when you add things back,

00:38:34.200 | you maybe don't add back everything.

00:38:36.220 | Maybe when you're trying to add things back,

00:38:38.640 | you say this one type of business we do

00:38:41.540 | is not easily tameable by systems

00:38:45.480 | to get rid of unscheduled messages.

00:38:46.720 | It's this particular client or type of work

00:38:49.080 | that requires and demands

00:38:51.040 | this berating constant communication.

00:38:53.200 | And now it's really clear,

00:38:54.820 | well, that type of work is not compatible

00:38:56.440 | with the type of way we wanna work.

00:38:58.400 | Let's not add it back.

00:39:00.320 | Let's get rid of that type of business.

00:39:02.080 | So it also gives you a chance to clean house

00:39:05.000 | as you're thinking about

00:39:07.080 | all the different type of business you do.

00:39:08.040 | So what this means for your husband's medical practice,

00:39:10.440 | for example, is cut back on clients, cut back on surgeries.

00:39:15.440 | Like there's gonna be a period where you say,

00:39:16.760 | we're cutting back.

00:39:18.220 | You're not stepping away from existing things,

00:39:20.200 | but you're gonna put a hold

00:39:21.480 | on bringing on new things for a while.

00:39:22.520 | You're gonna have a six-month period

00:39:24.440 | where you fall back towards a baseline

00:39:26.340 | and make less money and miss out opportunities,

00:39:29.800 | but allows you to actually build in better systems,

00:39:33.820 | hire new staff, train that staff,

00:39:35.520 | figure out how to make sure

00:39:36.520 | that you are not context shifting every two to three minutes,

00:39:39.060 | that you're not constantly in email,

00:39:40.160 | that you're not constantly on text messaging.

00:39:41.640 | And here's the thing,

00:39:42.480 | who cares about six months worth of money?

00:39:44.040 | What's the point?

00:39:44.880 | That's a miserable existence you're talking about.

00:39:46.680 | And your husband's probably burnt out too

00:39:48.240 | because he has too much work,

00:39:50.440 | it bleeds over to his practice.

00:39:52.120 | That's the way you have to do it.

00:39:54.320 | You have to make a dramatic temporary reduction

00:39:56.460 | if you're gonna get the breathing room required

00:39:57.960 | to build up systems that will be sustainable going forward.

00:40:01.280 | The money will come back, but with much less stress

00:40:03.700 | once those systems are in place.

00:40:04.920 | So that's what I recommend.

00:40:06.480 | It's time, Mel, to do something radical.

00:40:09.760 | All right, moving on here, we have a question from Orpheus.

00:40:18.480 | Appreciate the Greek mythology reference there.

00:40:24.480 | How can you increase the intensity

00:40:26.720 | of your deep work sessions

00:40:28.720 | if you're already focused and free of distractions?

00:40:32.940 | Orpheus goes on to say, I'm a music composer.

00:40:36.700 | I can say, by the way, as an aside, I love,

00:40:39.640 | maybe this is why you chose the name,

00:40:40.800 | but obviously the character of Orpheus in Greek mythology

00:40:43.760 | is, has this beautiful singing voice

00:40:45.680 | and can write these, this beautiful music

00:40:49.520 | with which he woos Persephone.

00:40:51.880 | So I like the fact that the person describing himself

00:40:54.160 | as Orpheus is a music composer, so well done, sir.

00:40:56.840 | So anyways, Orpheus says, I'm a music composer

00:41:00.180 | who finds it takes me far too long to write music.

00:41:02.780 | Following your book, "Deep Work," I have time blocked,

00:41:06.680 | gotten away from distractions, set timers, and am focused.

00:41:09.420 | Is there a way to continually increase intensity

00:41:11.520 | work produced in a certain timeframe

00:41:13.000 | once all tenets of deep work are in place,

00:41:16.000 | or should I just accept that this is a process

00:41:17.800 | that will always take a long time?

00:41:21.160 | All right, so Orpheus, I have three things to tell you,

00:41:24.360 | three additional things I want you to introduce.

00:41:27.560 | One is ritual.

00:41:28.980 | Where you do the work, what you do before the work occurs,

00:41:34.200 | especially for highly creative endeavors

00:41:36.600 | that require spontaneous creative production

00:41:39.320 | like music writing, music composing,

00:41:42.640 | this type of stuff matters,

00:41:44.120 | and it's probably worth investing money in.

00:41:48.640 | You know, let me build out a space just for my composing,

00:41:52.440 | a special office I just go to, an outbuilding,

00:41:54.880 | or a really nice-looking building.

00:41:58.600 | I remember at some point seeing the composing room

00:42:01.200 | that the movie composer, I believe it was James Horner,

00:42:05.560 | used, and it was this over-the-top,

00:42:07.240 | decorated, really interesting room.

00:42:09.040 | It matters for this type of thing.

00:42:11.180 | What's your ritual before you write?

00:42:12.400 | When do you write? It's, you know,

00:42:13.720 | you walk through the forest,

00:42:15.160 | you have a certain type of, you know,

00:42:17.080 | herb-a-mata tea just before you sit down.

00:42:20.000 | There's a certain type of music playing

00:42:22.120 | on a vintage record player

00:42:24.240 | through really high-end speakers.

00:42:25.960 | You want to lean on ritual for doing something

00:42:29.080 | that is as demanding as spontaneous creative production.

00:42:32.680 | Don't think about this as wasting money.

00:42:34.080 | Think about this as necessary investments

00:42:36.180 | to actually make creative work at this level,

00:42:39.060 | have a maximum chance of succeeding.

00:42:41.080 | So that's my first suggestion.

00:42:43.280 | My second is peers,

00:42:45.560 | by which I mean the people you spend time with.

00:42:49.880 | Spend more time with people

00:42:51.080 | who do high-level creative work for their job.

00:42:53.880 | Just being around people, artists and writers,

00:42:57.440 | other composers, other musicians

00:43:00.400 | that really take their work seriously

00:43:01.760 | and do it at a really high level,

00:43:03.620 | preferably at a level where you want to get.

00:43:05.820 | It just affects the way that you approach it.

00:43:08.320 | You're more likely to be locked in and focused

00:43:10.040 | because your mind adjusts to the norms

00:43:14.040 | and habits of those around you.

00:43:15.520 | And when the norms and habits of those around you

00:43:17.400 | is very much focused on valuing of creative production,

00:43:20.320 | your mind's going to be more on board

00:43:22.680 | when you sit down at that piano and say, "Let's go for it."

00:43:25.680 | So that could also help too.

00:43:26.680 | So those are two things you might not have thought about.

00:43:29.400 | The third is acceptance.

00:43:32.120 | So after you've done those things and the other things,

00:43:35.360 | the time blocking and the timers

00:43:36.760 | and the training and everything else,

00:43:39.200 | then just accept, "I'm doing creative work.

00:43:43.200 | I've set the conditions to be as good as possible.

00:43:45.700 | Where I end up at this point,

00:43:48.080 | this might just be what it feels like

00:43:49.880 | to do this creative work."

00:43:51.520 | You know, we sometimes create storylines

00:43:53.360 | about how it should feel.

00:43:54.760 | We think like it should be the scene from "Amadeus"

00:43:59.680 | where Salieri has the entrance march

00:44:02.360 | and Mozart comes in and it's like, "Oh, I like that.

00:44:05.400 | And can I try it?"

00:44:06.560 | And Salieri is like, "Do you want to see the music?"

00:44:08.280 | And Mozart says, "No, I think I got it."

00:44:10.040 | And he starts playing it from memory completely.

00:44:12.000 | He's like, "Yeah, that's just it, right?"

00:44:13.240 | And then he stops for a second and says,

00:44:14.600 | "Wouldn't it be better if..."

00:44:15.920 | And he makes some changes and it becomes

00:44:18.160 | a beautiful, famous piece of Mozart music.

00:44:21.240 | And Salieri is cursing the gods,

00:44:22.560 | like how can he just do this in his head?

00:44:24.440 | Sometimes we think this is what creative work

00:44:26.800 | should feel like.

00:44:27.640 | We have these storylines about we should sit at the piano

00:44:30.400 | and beautiful music just comes out

00:44:33.120 | and everyone's really impressed.

00:44:35.120 | And the Salieri's in our life are really jealous.

00:44:37.560 | But that's often not what it's like.

00:44:39.360 | Creative production is often painful.

00:44:42.960 | So much of it happens in revision.

00:44:44.800 | Now, I talked about last week, Brandon Sanderson

00:44:48.280 | and his process of writing super productively like he does.

00:44:52.560 | But one of the things I picked up from the speech

00:44:55.600 | I watched of Brandon Sanderson

00:44:56.960 | talking about his writing process

00:44:58.280 | is how many revision processes go

00:45:00.920 | into actually getting one of his novels right.

00:45:03.160 | So that means there's a whole part of his production

00:45:05.960 | where he's writing and it's painful and it's not very good.

00:45:09.880 | But it's laying the foundation that's eventually

00:45:11.960 | on which he's gonna build a book that he is proud of.

00:45:13.920 | So that's like my final point is acceptance.

00:45:15.720 | If you're doing the stuff you're already doing

00:45:17.600 | and you add in the things I suggested

00:45:19.080 | you might be missing, ritual, peer group, alterations,

00:45:22.880 | doing the whole thing.

00:45:23.960 | So now whatever it feels like,

00:45:26.360 | that's how it's supposed to feel.

00:45:28.680 | And don't tell yourself stories

00:45:30.200 | that it should feel different.

00:45:31.040 | That's probably what it's supposed to feel like.

00:45:33.160 | Keep producing, keep being deep.

00:45:35.880 | All right, we have a question here from Graham.

00:45:41.480 | Graham says, how would you recommend

00:45:45.400 | structuring deep work sessions

00:45:46.720 | that require both reading and writing?

00:45:48.360 | For instance, would you find more value

00:45:49.880 | in reading an article or two and then writing

00:45:52.400 | or writing first to find out

00:45:53.640 | which articles you need to read?

00:45:56.280 | Well, Graham, the way I normally do this

00:45:59.200 | is write first, read second.

00:46:03.360 | The reading is for the next day.

00:46:04.960 | So I think the hard thing in writing

00:46:08.440 | is the actual writing itself.

00:46:10.280 | That's where you should start.

00:46:12.360 | You know, the first deep creative endeavor you do

00:46:14.600 | is the writing.

00:46:15.800 | And then the reading can be later in the day

00:46:18.520 | because that's more flexible.

00:46:20.480 | It can be over lunch break, you can read in the evening.

00:46:23.240 | You know, you can sit by the fire, you can sit outside.

00:46:27.320 | Like there's all sorts of different places you can read.

00:46:29.040 | It's less cognitively demanding.

00:46:31.280 | Give yourself more breathing room to have insights

00:46:33.320 | and to write things down.

00:46:34.160 | So that's what I would suggest.

00:46:35.080 | Other people do it different.

00:46:36.000 | Write first, read second.

00:46:37.840 | And when you're reading, you're reading for writing

00:46:39.320 | that's gonna come in the future,

00:46:41.120 | not for the writing you're doing right then.

00:46:44.440 | All right, so we have a few more questions I wanna do,

00:46:47.920 | but first I wanna talk about another sponsor

00:46:51.040 | that makes this podcast possible.

00:46:55.240 | And that is our good friends at Grammarly.

00:47:00.720 | Grammarly being one of the actual very first sponsors

00:47:03.200 | of the Deep Questions podcast.

00:47:04.720 | And for good reason, I think they align

00:47:07.080 | with a lot of what we're thinking here.

00:47:08.360 | Now, here's the thing about Grammarly.

00:47:10.880 | It is not like those old fashioned grammar checkers

00:47:15.880 | that you remember from Word Perfect in the early 1990s

00:47:20.480 | where it can find a couple of common grammar mistakes.

00:47:23.320 | Oh, you said it's with an apostrophe

00:47:25.640 | and you mean it's without it,

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00:47:30.960 | Grammarly today is an all-in-one writing tool

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00:47:45.880 | I mean, it makes us feel like we already live

00:47:48.240 | in the world of artificial intelligence and cyborgs

00:47:51.760 | because the power of the new Grammarly tool

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00:47:55.840 | It can, for example, if you have their premium product,

00:47:58.640 | Grammarly Premium, help you adjust your tone.

00:48:02.080 | Here is the tone of your writing.

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00:48:10.000 | It can help you do full sentence rewrites

00:48:14.520 | so that you can convey your ideas more clearly.

00:48:18.280 | It'll give you clarity suggestions.

00:48:19.680 | It'll give you a tone detector.

00:48:20.800 | It'll look back at your writing and say,

00:48:21.880 | "Here is the tone this writing is coming across as."

00:48:25.800 | I've been playing around with Grammarly Premium

00:48:27.760 | because you can use it on almost any device,

00:48:30.040 | on almost any app where you're going to do writing.

00:48:32.120 | And I am consistently amazed by how perceptive

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00:48:38.320 | And this type of thing matters because, look,

00:48:40.040 | we're in a world of communication, typed communication.

00:48:43.000 | It's emails, it's Slack, it's blog posts.

00:48:45.680 | There's so much we just write today.

00:48:47.440 | We communicate through writing.

00:48:49.900 | And all this stuff matters.

00:48:51.760 | If your tone is good, your word choice is clear,

00:48:54.240 | it makes a huge difference compared

00:48:55.520 | to if it's not.

00:48:57.200 | And having Grammarly Premium running on your devices

00:48:59.560 | and looking at the apps you do your writing

00:49:01.240 | is a way to make sure that you are ahead of the pack there.

00:49:04.140 | Clear communication with the right tone, it really matters.

00:49:06.960 | I have a whole chapter in my book, "A World Without Email"

00:49:09.160 | about how easy it is to misinterpret

00:49:13.000 | what people are trying to convey in written communication,

00:49:15.880 | how that's harder than we think and people think it's easy.

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00:49:21.480 | that you don't fall into that trap.

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00:49:52.960 | I also wanna talk about Workable,

00:49:56.480 | a service that makes it much easier to hire people.

00:50:00.520 | Now, Jesse, we've talked about before

00:50:03.120 | the ineffective method I used to hire you, right?

00:50:07.360 | Which involved me putting a net on the floor

00:50:09.460 | in Barnes & Noble near the business advice section,

00:50:13.400 | and then essentially cinching it up

00:50:15.240 | to capture and kidnap you.

00:50:17.160 | Not a scalable solution.

00:50:18.660 | If you want a scalable solution,

00:50:20.160 | I would suggest going instead to our sponsor, Workable,

00:50:25.160 | which is gonna make that hiring a lot easier.

00:50:27.800 | It helps you find the right candidates and hire them fast.

00:50:32.520 | So one of the things it does,

00:50:33.840 | what is gonna help you,

00:50:35.480 | and this literally is their wording,

00:50:37.180 | cast the widest net possible.

00:50:39.640 | And again, I have to caveat this,

00:50:41.760 | they do not mean literally putting out a net

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00:50:46.400 | By posting your job to all of the top job boards,

00:50:48.900 | more than 200 total with just one click.

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00:51:02.840 | with modern tools like video interviews and e-signatures.

00:51:06.160 | It also has tools to help you automate repetitive tasks

00:51:08.840 | like scheduling interviews.

00:51:10.460 | So you can focus your time on actually talking to candidates

00:51:13.680 | and seeing who is right for your business,

00:51:15.340 | and not on the shallow logistical administrative work

00:51:18.480 | that really makes hiring much harder than what realizes.

00:51:23.480 | Like right now, Jesse, you're helping,

00:51:25.280 | we're hiring someone to help with some of the audio.

00:51:28.240 | It's a pain, right?

00:51:29.080 | There's like a lot of admini...

00:51:30.040 | It's just, there's a lot more logistical

00:51:31.680 | and administrative back and forth, right?

00:51:33.400 | - Yeah, for sure.

00:51:34.680 | - And so if you're trying to do this for a lot of positions

00:51:36.840 | and you're hiring a lot of people,

00:51:38.960 | your day can get lost to the administrative details.

00:51:41.360 | So Workable helps make that easy as well.

00:51:44.320 | I mean, I have Jesse out there setting net traps

00:51:48.180 | all over the place to try to find this audio engineer.

00:51:50.680 | I mean, we're hanging out next to like nightclubs

00:51:53.960 | and at conferences backed by the sound panels.

00:51:56.200 | It's a pain to get all those nets set

00:51:58.320 | and to go see who we've captured.

00:52:00.640 | We need Workable, Jesse.

00:52:01.580 | I think that's what I've learned.

00:52:04.240 | We need to stop spending most of our ad budget on nets

00:52:09.240 | and instead get Workable.

00:52:11.360 | - Yeah, the nets take up a lot of space too.

00:52:13.240 | - Yeah, we have a whole room full of nets.

00:52:15.040 | So Workable is our future.

00:52:18.120 | So anyways, start hiring today

00:52:20.280 | with a risk-free 15 day trial.

00:52:22.300 | And if you hire during this trial, which many do,

00:52:25.080 | it won't cost you a thing.

00:52:25.920 | So it's not gonna charge you if during the free trial,

00:52:27.660 | you end up hiring someone.

00:52:29.140 | So go to workable.com/podcast to try it out for free

00:52:34.140 | for 15 days starting today.

00:52:37.640 | Workable is hiring made easy.

00:52:40.740 | I don't know, one day we're gonna look up

00:52:44.040 | and have no sponsors left, Jesse.

00:52:46.360 | - We gotta tighten up the ship here.

00:52:48.460 | We can't tell them about our nets.

00:52:50.340 | Oh, well, we tried.

00:52:52.400 | Let's do a few more questions here.

00:52:55.280 | I have one from Katie.

00:52:57.820 | Katie says, "I know thinking deep is a thought

00:53:03.880 | or work process of younger adults,

00:53:05.320 | but how about addressing the older population?

00:53:08.220 | Retirees like myself have lots of time on their hands.

00:53:12.500 | And really, after you've worked so long in one profession,

00:53:14.480 | you don't know what to do with so much time.

00:53:17.300 | I'd like to learn Spanish or be more productive,

00:53:19.300 | but who knows in what, who knows in what?

00:53:22.060 | And how does deep thinking become a process in our life?"

00:53:25.100 | Well, Katie, earlier in this show,

00:53:27.700 | we did this question a few times.

00:53:30.380 | And what I would often come back to is for people

00:53:33.380 | who are later in life, who are retiring or have retired,

00:53:36.540 | the deep life bucket method becomes very important.

00:53:43.540 | Now go watch my video on the deep life core idea,

00:53:48.540 | youtube.com/CalNewportMedia.

00:53:50.140 | Watch that video to get brought up to speed

00:53:51.620 | on what the deep life bucket method is.

00:53:53.560 | But there is fewer circumstances

00:53:55.720 | where this method is more effective

00:53:59.260 | than for people who are retired.

00:54:00.560 | Because what it's gonna force you to do

00:54:01.760 | is look at the different elements of your life

00:54:03.480 | that are important.

00:54:04.400 | And then for each of those,

00:54:06.280 | get rid of the noise and boost the signal.

00:54:08.280 | Get rid of the junk that's not returning you much

00:54:11.600 | and put in place habits and endeavors

00:54:14.160 | that are really giving you a high return on time investment.

00:54:17.360 | Now, when you're retired,

00:54:18.200 | you have a lot more time to invest.

00:54:19.680 | So this process becomes more exciting.

00:54:21.740 | But the bucket method where you're breaking up your life

00:54:23.560 | into these different parts prevents you from having capture

00:54:27.120 | in just one element of your life,

00:54:28.780 | or from getting too lost in minutia.

00:54:30.520 | It gives you some structure to this whole process.

00:54:32.440 | So I think it's one of the exciting things about retirement

00:54:35.700 | is you can re-engineer your life in the systematic way,

00:54:39.560 | and you have so much more levers to pull

00:54:41.800 | and knobs to turn than say someone who is up to their ears

00:54:45.440 | midlife at a peak of their career trajectory,

00:54:49.080 | which is eating up all their time,

00:54:50.320 | and every minute that remains is wrangling kids.

00:54:52.680 | I mean, you now have the promised land, Katie,

00:54:55.140 | which is some room to actually do some cool things

00:54:57.960 | with your life.

00:54:58.800 | So go listen to that.

00:55:00.360 | Watch that video.

00:55:01.200 | I'd say not listen,

00:55:02.020 | but watch that video on the deep life.

00:55:04.080 | The bucket method will help organize

00:55:06.880 | your efforts going forward.

00:55:09.140 | All right, so we have another question here

00:55:12.540 | speaking of careers.

00:55:13.380 | This one is from Jeff.

00:55:14.720 | Jeff says, "Hi, Cal.

00:55:17.100 | Earlier this year, you were talking about

00:55:19.600 | how the principles of your book,

00:55:21.060 | 'So Good They Can't Ignore You'

00:55:22.780 | don't really apply to lawyers

00:55:24.360 | because the more career capital they get,

00:55:28.380 | the more work they get,

00:55:30.060 | which leads to less freedom and less autonomy.

00:55:33.940 | My question is what should we lawyers in the audience do?"

00:55:37.900 | And he goes on to say that he is a six-year associate.

00:55:41.900 | Well, Jeff, what you can do is leave the big law firm job.

00:55:48.620 | And not to be stark about it,

00:55:52.980 | but career capital theory is pretty clear.

00:55:55.840 | You build leverage by doing rare and valuable things,

00:55:59.160 | but that's only really useful

00:56:00.460 | if you can then apply that leverage

00:56:02.500 | to shape your career towards things that resonate

00:56:05.900 | and away from things that don't.

00:56:08.060 | Big city law firm jobs,

00:56:09.640 | where you work your way up the associate ladder,

00:56:11.180 | you're a six-year associate,

00:56:12.220 | which means you're about to go up for partnership.

00:56:14.020 | And then after partnership,

00:56:15.040 | you go up for equity partnership.

00:56:16.360 | And then you work up a ladder of equity partnership

00:56:18.260 | until the very highest you could possibly get

00:56:21.020 | is named a partner.

00:56:22.320 | And the money goes up with each of those levels.

00:56:26.820 | And the money is good if you're in DC,

00:56:30.060 | let's say, big city with one of these big firms.

00:56:33.460 | These numbers really vary,

00:56:34.540 | but we're talking about you're starting

00:56:37.180 | as a younger associate,

00:56:38.540 | you're already at three or $400,000 a year.

00:56:40.860 | As a junior partner,

00:56:41.780 | you're probably talking six, 700,000.

00:56:45.940 | Equity partner, you're gonna break at a big firm,

00:56:49.140 | you got like a Skaggan,

00:56:50.300 | you're gonna break a Wilmer,

00:56:53.300 | you'll break seven figures.

00:56:55.060 | And then these more senior equity partners

00:56:57.220 | in a big city, the big firm,

00:56:58.580 | one five, one six, something like that.

00:57:00.780 | So like you make a lot of money,

00:57:03.180 | but it's incredibly time demanding.

00:57:05.620 | And it demands more and more of your time.

00:57:07.140 | There's almost nothing you can invest your career capital

00:57:09.540 | in other than getting more money

00:57:11.220 | and maybe some influence on what your practice is.

00:57:13.460 | You can kind of carve out your own practices,

00:57:15.260 | but you're not gonna get more autonomy.

00:57:17.440 | The other buckets, the non-craft buckets of the deep life,

00:57:19.980 | you're gonna have a really hard time doing much of anything

00:57:22.000 | in any of those buckets

00:57:22.940 | if you're gonna work up that ladder.

00:57:24.740 | Now, for some, I don't know,

00:57:27.180 | they value the money, they value the prestige.

00:57:29.660 | For some, it's this money is going to allow a lifestyle

00:57:32.120 | that's good for the rest of my family

00:57:34.300 | and that's my contribution and that's fine.

00:57:36.020 | But if it's not fine for you,

00:57:37.420 | if you feel overwhelmed by work,

00:57:39.300 | if it's stressing you out, it's making you anxious,

00:57:41.380 | you feel hemmed in, you feel miserable.

00:57:44.380 | And a lot of lawyers do in those situations.

00:57:47.940 | The answer is to leave the big law firm.

00:57:50.500 | Do something else with your law degree.

00:57:52.340 | And it'll be a lot less money, but so what?

00:57:55.860 | I don't know, what's the good of the one six

00:58:00.420 | if you only have six hours a week

00:58:02.480 | that you're seeing your family, right?

00:58:03.560 | So I usually am pretty radical about that.

00:58:06.080 | You have to go into a big firm law career

00:58:09.200 | with your eyes open.

00:58:10.040 | This is what it's gonna be and it's not gonna get better.

00:58:11.960 | And so many people stumble into it

00:58:13.200 | because it's just, this is the next step up,

00:58:16.020 | this is more prestigious than this.

00:58:17.760 | And it's not that there's not value

00:58:19.160 | in doing something competitive, there is.

00:58:20.560 | And it's not that it will make you feel better

00:58:21.800 | because it does.

00:58:22.620 | And it's not that you don't get pride

00:58:24.800 | out of having such a hard elite job, you should.

00:58:26.800 | It's very difficult to give you someone

00:58:28.320 | to pay you seven figures for anything, right?

00:58:30.200 | That's hard to do.

00:58:31.180 | And there is some pride there,

00:58:32.480 | but if it is making you miserable, there's no way.

00:58:35.760 | There's no way to reconfigure your job

00:58:37.560 | at a big law firm that's gonna get rid of that misery.

00:58:39.420 | So I just like to put that option on the table

00:58:41.420 | of the proverbial big city lawyers.

00:58:44.400 | Know what you're getting into.

00:58:48.200 | And if that's not working, I can't give you a way out

00:58:52.220 | that's gonna preserve that salary,

00:58:53.640 | that's gonna preserve the house in Chevy Chase

00:58:55.880 | and the private school in the second house on the beach.

00:58:58.760 | I can't give you a way out

00:58:59.580 | that's gonna preserve all of that.

00:59:00.560 | It's gonna be a pretty radical lifestyle change,

00:59:02.400 | a different type of law, something your own firm,

00:59:05.500 | something that you can control

00:59:06.900 | how many clients you take on or off.

00:59:08.760 | And that's basically what you're gonna have to do, Jeff.

00:59:11.400 | So look, this is probably the time to think about that

00:59:13.680 | before you go up for partnership.

00:59:15.880 | I hope I'm not the bearer of bad news,

00:59:17.220 | but I just think it's important to be clear.

00:59:19.200 | This is the reality of that job.

00:59:20.680 | And let's not pretend like it's not

00:59:22.040 | or like it's gonna be different somehow,

00:59:24.540 | different somehow for you.

00:59:25.840 | You know, Jesse, I went down,

00:59:29.180 | the reason why I had those salary numbers on hand

00:59:30.760 | is for some reason I went down a rabbit hole

00:59:33.160 | of lawyer compensation,

00:59:35.320 | because I know a lot of lawyers who are very stressed out

00:59:38.480 | and I was trying to compare, I was like,

00:59:40.240 | well, how much like do I make as a writer

00:59:42.040 | versus what they're doing

00:59:43.040 | and how much more flexible is my job?

00:59:44.800 | And I went down this rabbit hole

00:59:45.960 | and you can like find a lot of these numbers.

00:59:47.440 | It's a big topic of discussion in the DC area.

00:59:51.560 | But I never know,

00:59:52.540 | I never know how people think about those jobs.

00:59:55.360 | Like when you hear those numbers, those salary numbers,

00:59:57.520 | did that surprise you as more than you thought,

01:00:00.780 | less than you thought

01:00:01.740 | or about what you would have thought

01:00:02.740 | lawyers were making around here?

01:00:04.340 | - About what I thought, I would say.

01:00:07.820 | - I find that people who live in the cities,

01:00:09.460 | like, yeah, that's what I'd expect.

01:00:10.900 | And people who don't, like what?

01:00:13.140 | You get a million dollars a year

01:00:15.740 | to be a junior equity partner, what is that?

01:00:18.480 | - Yeah, it's also a weird perspective for me

01:00:22.100 | 'cause I have a couple,

01:00:22.940 | like a few like really good friends

01:00:24.140 | who kill it on the internet.

01:00:25.420 | So then you, when I see those numbers,

01:00:27.060 | I mean, I'm nothing like any of that,

01:00:28.220 | but I see those numbers and I'm like, that's nothing.

01:00:30.940 | - Here's the hierarchy,

01:00:33.260 | the elite job hierarchy in terms of salaries, right?

01:00:39.140 | So you have lawyers and like investment bankers,

01:00:44.140 | lawyers at big firms and investment bankers

01:00:47.920 | for firms like Goldman, right?

01:00:49.340 | So lawyers, you hit seven figures

01:00:52.740 | when you get to the partner level,

01:00:54.560 | again, big firm, big company.

01:00:55.840 | If you're at something like Goldman Sachs,

01:00:58.000 | when you get to the managing director level,

01:01:00.040 | you're gonna hit seven figures plus with bonuses, right?

01:01:02.440 | So that's, and the elite jobs,

01:01:04.180 | actually this is gonna be at the bottom of our platform.

01:01:07.040 | Then the next thing you have above that is,

01:01:11.480 | all right, so then the more elite jobs are,

01:01:14.600 | I'm trying to see how I order this.

01:01:17.000 | I guess I would order it next,

01:01:18.780 | maybe like venture capitalists.

01:01:20.240 | If you had a really big venture capital firm

01:01:21.680 | where you can get a cut of the returns,

01:01:24.000 | now you can jump above that low seven figures

01:01:26.920 | and get that good healthy mid seven figure type payouts.

01:01:30.840 | And then you have this big leap

01:01:32.840 | where you get to the tech sector, like your friends.

01:01:36.400 | And in the tech sector,

01:01:37.400 | because you can have businesses that are bought,

01:01:40.600 | that's where you start to get eight figure

01:01:43.560 | or low nine figure paydays.

01:01:45.440 | So now it's okay, I've started a tech company

01:01:47.660 | and I netted 30 million in the sale.

01:01:52.480 | So now we're at that like eight figure level.

01:01:54.840 | And then the people who lord over it all

01:01:57.280 | is the hedge fund managers.

01:01:59.280 | 'Cause now when you're a hedge fund manager,

01:02:02.040 | they laugh at everyone else

01:02:03.600 | because they can do eight or nine figure income

01:02:08.600 | every single year,

01:02:09.980 | because they're getting their carry cost

01:02:12.860 | of these really big hedge funds.

01:02:14.280 | And so then they look at the tech people and say like,

01:02:15.920 | look, you're laughing at the Goldman guy

01:02:18.160 | who makes one five a year

01:02:19.280 | because you sold your company for 30 million.

01:02:22.240 | So that took you five years

01:02:23.200 | to sell your company for 30 million.

01:02:24.600 | And I pull in 150 million a year every year for my hedge fund

01:02:27.960 | and then the very top hedge fund people

01:02:29.960 | will bring in a billion dollars a year plus.

01:02:34.380 | So there's your hierarchy of like crazy amounts of money

01:02:37.800 | that elite jobs.

01:02:39.860 | Notice nowhere in that hierarchy that I say,

01:02:41.820 | author podcasters,

01:02:45.000 | they don't land, we don't land on that hierarchy,

01:02:47.720 | unfortunately,

01:02:49.120 | professor podcasters don't land on that hierarchy.

01:02:52.160 | But that's a whole interesting world,

01:02:53.320 | like the super big money job world.

01:02:55.760 | CEOs are in there too.

01:02:56.880 | CEOs of big companies land like where the tech people are,

01:03:01.880 | seven, eight figure salaries.

01:03:04.720 | - Have you seen the new show on Showtime,

01:03:08.800 | super pumped or read the book?

01:03:10.280 | - It's about Uber?

01:03:12.920 | - Yeah.

01:03:13.880 | It's about Travis Kalanick.

01:03:16.240 | There's a episode two just was released this week

01:03:20.000 | and there's a good scene in there

01:03:22.000 | where the VC brings him to the airfield

01:03:26.640 | where there's all the private jets.

01:03:27.760 | And he's like, what do you need to say to me?

01:03:28.960 | He goes, are we going somewhere?

01:03:30.840 | And then he was like, so-and-so.

01:03:33.320 | And then Travis is pretty brash, pretty confident guy.

01:03:36.560 | And he was like,

01:03:38.040 | I started to have a couple of lines about like Elon Musk

01:03:40.640 | and Bezos and stuff like owning like 40 of those planes.

01:03:43.840 | And like, what do you really want to do?

01:03:46.120 | - What I really want to do is own all of those planes.

01:03:47.600 | - Not go on that jets.

01:03:48.760 | - Yeah.

01:03:49.840 | Oh my God.

01:03:51.200 | Yeah.

01:03:52.120 | We're getting there.

01:03:53.640 | We have a couple more steps

01:03:54.880 | before we're buying the Deep Questions private plane.

01:03:57.720 | Like, so we are-

01:03:58.960 | - You gotta get it before the 200th episode

01:04:01.440 | so we can go to South Africa.

01:04:03.240 | - To go to that, yeah, for that main episode.

01:04:05.000 | Yeah, so we're almost there.

01:04:06.720 | We want to get like a boom arm for our computer monitor

01:04:09.160 | so we can move it.

01:04:10.000 | So that's first.

01:04:11.240 | I want to get longer cables for our video switcher

01:04:16.360 | so that when we have guests,

01:04:17.200 | we can bring the video switcher

01:04:18.680 | so you can switch video for us.

01:04:19.920 | That's two.

01:04:21.000 | So boom arm for the computer monitor.

01:04:23.320 | That's number one.

01:04:24.640 | Longer cables for the video switcher.

01:04:27.320 | That's number two.

01:04:28.280 | Private jet.

01:04:30.240 | That's number three.

01:04:32.520 | Number four, I'm thinking we should have our own coffee maker

01:04:36.000 | because, you know, we buy a lot of coffee.

01:04:37.800 | And so those are the things we're working on.

01:04:41.960 | I think with that sweet workable money

01:04:43.640 | and grammarly money,

01:04:45.280 | we'll have that private jet

01:04:46.840 | right after we get those longer cables.

01:04:49.280 | Oh, that's depressing thinking about big money people.

01:04:51.720 | But I got to say,

01:04:52.560 | those people must all be incredibly stressed out.

01:04:54.920 | Right?

01:04:55.760 | That's all stressed out.

01:04:56.600 | I think the sweet spot I still think is genre novelist.

01:05:01.000 | Right?

01:05:01.840 | So you produce one thing a year,

01:05:04.200 | but you don't have to win book.

01:05:05.360 | It doesn't have to be literature

01:05:06.360 | because there's too much stress if you're a literary novelist

01:05:08.040 | because you live and die by the reviews.

01:05:10.240 | But no, you're writing like a Jack Reacher book.

01:05:14.120 | It doesn't have to be literature.

01:05:15.480 | You have your formula, one book a year.

01:05:17.720 | No one expects you to do anything else.

01:05:19.880 | They don't, you know,

01:05:21.200 | Lee Child doesn't have a big social media presence.

01:05:23.840 | He doesn't podcast.

01:05:24.680 | You just have to write a book.

01:05:25.520 | They don't expect you to do anything else

01:05:26.480 | because people are just used to buying your book.

01:05:29.080 | You make a good amount of money.

01:05:30.440 | Like Lee Child,

01:05:31.440 | he bought the apartment above their apartment for writing.

01:05:36.280 | So he could get there pretty quickly,

01:05:37.520 | but it's not, you know, Travis was his name money.

01:05:39.760 | He's not flying around in private jets.

01:05:41.240 | And, but they, you know,

01:05:42.080 | they have like a writing house by the beach

01:05:44.040 | and they're very little is expected from them.

01:05:45.720 | That's the sweet spot.

01:05:46.800 | Like you have a lot of money,

01:05:47.760 | but not a crazy amount of money,

01:05:49.040 | but it's the money to anxiety ratio.

01:05:51.200 | I think that's gotta be the,

01:05:52.840 | if we put the other way, anxiety, the money ratio,

01:05:54.520 | that must be the lowest anxiety,

01:05:55.760 | the money ratio you can find, in my opinion,

01:05:58.440 | is successful genre novelist that produces one novel a year

01:06:02.480 | in a successful series.

01:06:04.200 | That's the sweet spot.

01:06:05.280 | - Like it.

01:06:07.160 | - Yeah. So I gotta start writing.

01:06:08.560 | So I'm gonna announce my new detective series

01:06:11.520 | about a suave computer scientist

01:06:14.480 | who by day solves theorems

01:06:17.760 | and by night fights international terrorist rings.

01:06:22.040 | Well, you know, fighting off the women

01:06:23.680 | who fall in love with them.

01:06:24.840 | - And then when you do the audio version,

01:06:26.280 | you need to have some character in there

01:06:28.000 | with the voice that you used last week.

01:06:29.720 | That was classic.

01:06:30.560 | - You know, that French character.

01:06:31.960 | Yeah, that French character will be in there.

01:06:33.560 | You know, we got a note from Tim Ferriss,

01:06:36.960 | his chief of staff, who like runs all this podcast.

01:06:39.360 | And he sent us a note saying

01:06:41.200 | that he really appreciated the accent.

01:06:42.880 | - Oh, it was great. I was dying.

01:06:44.560 | - So that character will be in there.

01:06:47.040 | And the character will obviously be me.

01:06:48.440 | Like we'll call him like, you know, Kevin Newhouse,

01:06:51.040 | but like, it'll clearly be me, you know,

01:06:52.920 | but I'm gonna have David Goggins voice him.

01:06:54.880 | So he's gonna have this like really like aggressive,

01:06:57.720 | deep, awesome voice.

01:06:59.640 | And the audio books are gonna have

01:07:01.200 | a lot of musical interludes,

01:07:02.760 | like action musical interludes while I fight.

01:07:05.760 | And then I'll buy the house next to mine

01:07:07.880 | to be a writing house.

01:07:08.800 | And well, there we go.

01:07:10.760 | So it's all mapped out.

01:07:12.920 | - Oh man. All right.

01:07:14.160 | Nonsense. It's all nonsense.

01:07:15.640 | All right. Let's try to do two quick ones

01:07:19.040 | because I know we're running a little late here.

01:07:21.600 | All right. We got one here from Jeff.

01:07:23.640 | Jeff says, "Does context switching

01:07:25.520 | affect reading comprehension?"

01:07:29.080 | Yeah, it does.

01:07:30.600 | If you're trying to read a book,

01:07:32.320 | but you keep initiating context shifts,

01:07:33.800 | like you have to keep checking your text messages

01:07:35.480 | because there's like a conversation going on

01:07:37.160 | or you keep checking your inboxes.

01:07:39.520 | Or if you're like me the last few days,

01:07:41.880 | you're constantly checking updates

01:07:43.720 | on the baseball collective bargaining agreement

01:07:46.520 | coming together.

01:07:47.880 | You're gonna remember much less from the book.

01:07:49.480 | Your mind is gonna have unrelated networks

01:07:52.800 | that are activated and some relevant networks inhibited.

01:07:57.400 | You won't understand that as well.

01:07:58.960 | So if you're reading something you care about, just read.

01:08:01.800 | And if you wanna communicate, go off and communicate.

01:08:04.240 | Separate those two things.

01:08:05.520 | All right. One more question.

01:08:08.160 | Matt says, "What do you think of the critique

01:08:10.880 | of hyperlinks expressed in the writings of Nicholas Carr?"

01:08:14.840 | Well, Matt, I think that critique quickly aged.

01:08:18.480 | It quickly aged and the specific content of that critique

01:08:23.840 | is not that relevant,

01:08:25.360 | but the spirit of that critique is really relevant.

01:08:28.040 | So just briefly, I think Matt is talking about the book,

01:08:31.840 | "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, which is now pretty old.

01:08:36.400 | It's from the first decade of the 2000s.

01:08:38.040 | And it was one of the first books to look at the impact

01:08:40.520 | of content consumption online

01:08:43.000 | on our ability to think deeply or think clearly.

01:08:45.040 | And back then, the studies he was citing

01:08:48.560 | had to do with the impact of comprehension

01:08:50.840 | of reading websites that have hyperlinks

01:08:52.920 | because you read for a little bit

01:08:54.640 | and then you follow a hyperlink

01:08:55.840 | and you follow that hyperlink

01:08:56.840 | as opposed to linearly consuming information

01:09:00.000 | as carefully structured and written by the author.

01:09:02.720 | Now, it's less relevant today

01:09:05.400 | because people don't read long articles

01:09:07.000 | with hyperlinks anymore.

01:09:07.920 | The technology went past that.

01:09:09.200 | That's an out of date technology,

01:09:11.080 | but things are even worse.

01:09:12.800 | So instead of now making it easy for you to escape

01:09:17.360 | from a carefully structured piece of long form content,

01:09:19.560 | we just got rid of the carefully structured

01:09:20.960 | long form content.

01:09:22.360 | And we just read 250 characters for Twitter

01:09:25.200 | or captions on Instagram,

01:09:27.840 | or we shortened that down to memes.

01:09:30.400 | Let's just have a picture with a couple of sentences on it

01:09:33.640 | or videos that are incredibly tightly edited,

01:09:37.400 | boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:09:38.880 | And so we got rid of the option

01:09:41.120 | of even not following rabbit holes

01:09:43.000 | by just making everything just quick rabbit holes.

01:09:45.840 | And I'm sure that is amplifying the issues

01:09:48.920 | Carr talked about, reducing attention,

01:09:51.040 | reducing the comfort when it does come time

01:09:53.240 | to read something like a book,

01:09:54.240 | reducing our comfort with doing that,

01:09:55.760 | our mind wanders, we can't sustain attention.

01:09:58.000 | So yes, the hyperlink critique quickly got aged,

01:10:03.000 | but the underlying spirit of the medium

01:10:06.680 | of internet communication,

01:10:08.280 | pushing us towards a more fragmented mind,

01:10:11.440 | those issues have amplified to a point

01:10:13.360 | that I think even Carr wouldn't have predicted

01:10:15.400 | in his most pessimistic moments

01:10:16.760 | back when he was writing that book.

01:10:19.320 | All right, well, that's all the time we have for today.

01:10:24.040 | Thank you everyone who sent in their questions.

01:10:27.000 | As I always say, if you like what you heard,

01:10:28.720 | you will like what you read on my weekly newsletter

01:10:30.880 | at calnewport.com.

01:10:32.640 | You'll also like what you see.

01:10:34.880 | Video of this full episode and every segment

01:10:36.760 | and question answered today can be found

01:10:38.480 | at youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

01:10:43.240 | I'll be back on Thursday with a new episode

01:10:46.280 | of the podcast and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:10:49.680 | (upbeat music)

01:10:53.200 | (upbeat music)

Full Length Episode | #181 | March 14, 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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